‘The Institutional Wave Has Begun’ – Bullish CEO Says Large Players Think Crypto’s Big Moment Could Be Here

The chief executive of the crypto exchange Bullish says the digital asset industry’s big moment is finally here as blue-chip investors start piling in.

In a new interview on CNBC Television, former NYSE president Tom Farley says that the crypto industry’s growth over the last decade was largely due to retail traders – a trend that appears to be changing in favor of institutional investors.

“We just wake up every day saying, ‘How can we service institutions throughout our organization?’ We have over a thousand customers, which is quite a number in the crypto space, which is still growing.

And, you know, it feels like this may be a good time for crypto because you see the Genius Act coming out of Congress, the Clarity Act that came out of the House are providing an easy on-ramp for institutions to drive into crypto. The last leg of growth in crypto the last ten years was basically all retail.

And if you look now, the institutional wave has begun. It’s here. It’s a question of how big it will be. But just based on the reception we’ve gotten thus far as part of our IPO (initial public offering), it feels like institutional investors think this could be the moment.”

Bullish – which purchased the crypto media outlet CoinDesk in 2023 from the Digital Currency Group (DCG) – launched its IPO today and raised over $1.1 billion.

According to Farley, financial markets are on the cusp of traditional assets being launched directly on blockchains rather than companies creating tokenized proxies.

“Up to this point, there’s been tokenization that hasn’t really been much of anything to speak of. You keep the traditional finance stock and you create a token that’s sort of a contractual right to what already exists. And then you put out a press release.

But Congress has really created a path with this establishment of a mature blockchain in the Clarity Act, where you can imagine regulators saying, ‘You can just issue your stock on a public blockchain, You can just issue your treasury on a public blockchain.

The title to your house can be on a public blockchain, as long as that blockchain is trustworthy and free from attack, and isn’t under the control of one or multiple parties, that opportunity is the financial markets…’

What the market is telling us is that potential isn’t so crazy anymore. We may see major, major markets and major institutional players move massive, massive asset classes on the blockchain.”