Peter Thiel, who backs Bullish, once gave Mark Zuckerberg $500,000 and later turned it into $400 million jackpot

Bullish, the cryptocurrency exchange backed by investor Peter Thiel, made s stunning debut on the stock market as its initial public offering (IPO) was priced above its indicated range at $37 per share. The offering raised $1.11 billion for Bullish based on 30 million shares sold and valued the company at $5.41 billion. Bullish was earlier aiming to price its offering between $32 and $33 per share. JPMorgan, Jefferies, and Citigroup are the lead underwriters for the IPO.

The Bullish group, led by former New York Stock Exchange president Tom Farley, consists of technology and investment businesses, focused on developing financial services for the digital assets sector. With its listing, Bullish joins a burgeoning list of crypto players that have tapped public markets this year, buoyed mainly by crypto-friendly regulations under the Trump administration.

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What is Bullish?

Founded in 2021, Bullish is a cryptocurrency exchange that focuses on spot and derivatives trading. Its CEO is Thomas Farley, who was previously the president of the NYSE Group, which operates the New York Stock Exchange. Bullish also received an early investment from VC heavyweight Peter Thiel.


Bullish, for its most recent quarter, said it had $647 billion in total spot volume, according to its Form F-1 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Additionally, Bullish says it had $111 billion in total perpetual futures volume for the quarter.

Bullish reported that its average daily trading volume is roughly $2.6 billion, with Q1 2025 trading activity surging 78% compared to the same period last year.

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But Bullish isn’t just in the exchange business. In 2023, it acquired crypto news platform CoinDesk from Digital Currency Group. According to Bullish, CoinDesk now attracts 48 million unique visitors each year and handles over 600 million monthly API requests for its CoinDesk Data services.

Bullish offers cryptocurrency spot trading, margin trading, and derivatives trading, with a focus on institutional investors.

Who is Peter Thiel and what is his net worth?

Bullish is backed by billionaire investor Peter Thiel, German-American entrepreneur, a hedge fund manager and former CEO of PayPal. After earning degrees in philosophy and law from Stanford University, Thiel briefly worked in law and finance before launching the hedge fund Thiel Capital and later co-founding Confinity in 1998.

Confinity merged with Elon Musk's X.com to become PayPal, which was sold to eBay in 2002 for $1.5 billion. Thiel walked away with $60 million and used that windfall to build what became one of Silicon Valley's most powerful investment networks.

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The entrepreneur has a net worth of $23 billion, according to Celebrity Net Worth. He made another major fortune several years later when he became the first outside investor in a company that was then called TheFaceBook.com.

In 2004, Thiel gave Mark Zuckerberg $500,000 in exchange for a 10.2% stake in the nascent social network company. Peter offloaded most of his shares during the company’s IPO, turning a $500,000 investment into $1 billion. Just months after the tech company’s IPO, he sold millions of shares for $20 each for a sum of $400 million.

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However, if he had held onto his full 10% stake, that position would be worth around $180 billion today. Despite cashing out the bulk of his holdings, Peter remained on the company’s Board of Directors until 2022.

Peter is also the founder of a venture capital firm called Founders Fund, which invested in companies like SpaceX, Airbnb, and Palantir Technologies, a data analytics company he co-founded and led for years. Palantir went public in 2020 and is a key contractor for the U.S. government and military.