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Investor releaseQuarter not tagged2026-08-14Bullish (BLSH) Q2 2026 Earnings Call Transcript
Motley Fool
Bullish (BLSH) Q2 2026 Earnings Call Transcript
Image source: The Motley Fool. Thursday, Aug. 13, 2026 at 8:30 a.m. ET Vice President of Finance - Michael Fedele Chief Executive Officer - Tom Farley Chief Financial Officer - David Bonanno Director of Corporate Development - Liam Foley Operator: Thank you for standing by, and welcome to Bullish Second Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] I would now like to hand the call over to Michael Fedele, Vice President of Finance. Please go ahead. Michael Fedele: Good morning, and welcome to our second quarter earnings call. I'm Michael Fedele, and I'm joined on today's call by our Chief Executive Officer, Tom Farley; Chief Financial Officer, David Bonanno; and Director of Corporate Development, Liam Foley. This call will contain forward-looking statements, including those relating to our expected performance and business opportunities, our proposed acquisition of Equiniti Group, the anticipated benefits and strategic rationale of the transaction, expected timing and closing conditions and business opportunities following the transaction. These statements are not assurances of future performance and are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. Such risks include, among others, the possibility that the Equiniti transaction may not be completed, failure to obtain required regulatory approvals, the possibility that anticipated benefits may not be realized and the risks related to the integration of Equiniti's business. For more details on these and other risks, please refer to today's earnings press release and our SEC filings, including our 20-F dated March 9, 2026. We undertake no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements. This call will also include a discussion of non-IFRS financial measures. A reconciliation to the most directly comparable IFRS metrics can be found in our earnings press release and presentation, which also contain additional information regarding non-IFRS financial measures and key performance indicators. I'll now turn the call over to Tom. Thomas Farley: Thanks, Mike. Good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining. I'm Tom Farley, Chairman and CEO of Bullish. A year ago today, Bullish went public on the New York Stock Exchange. Thank you for following us and supporting us as a public company. A year ago today, our old school certificated shares began changin…Read full documentShow less
Image source: The Motley Fool. Thursday, Aug. 13, 2026 at 8:30 a.m. ET Vice President of Finance - Michael Fedele Chief Executive Officer - Tom Farley Chief Financial Officer - David Bonanno Director of Corporate Development - Liam Foley Operator: Thank you for standing by, and welcome to Bullish Second Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] I would now like to hand the call over to Michael Fedele, Vice President of Finance. Please go ahead. Michael Fedele: Good morning, and welcome to our second quarter earnings call. I'm Michael Fedele, and I'm joined on today's call by our Chief Executive Officer, Tom Farley; Chief Financial Officer, David Bonanno; and Director of Corporate Development, Liam Foley. This call will contain forward-looking statements, including those relating to our expected performance and business opportunities, our proposed acquisition of Equiniti Group, the anticipated benefits and strategic rationale of the transaction, expected timing and closing conditions and business opportunities following the transaction. These statements are not assurances of future performance and are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. Such risks include, among others, the possibility that the Equiniti transaction may not be completed, failure to obtain required regulatory approvals, the possibility that anticipated benefits may not be realized and the risks related to the integration of Equiniti's business. For more details on these and other risks, please refer to today's earnings press release and our SEC filings, including our 20-F dated March 9, 2026. We undertake no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements. This call will also include a discussion of non-IFRS financial measures. A reconciliation to the most directly comparable IFRS metrics can be found in our earnings press release and presentation, which also contain additional information regarding non-IFRS financial measures and key performance indicators. I'll now turn the call over to Tom. Thomas Farley: Thanks, Mike. Good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining. I'm Tom Farley, Chairman and CEO of Bullish. A year ago today, Bullish went public on the New York Stock Exchange. Thank you for following us and supporting us as a public company. A year ago today, our old school certificated shares began changing hands. A year later, I'm pleased to share with you that beginning yesterday, Bullish's tokenized shares are trading on our own regulated venue for the first time. This also marks Bullish's first trades of any tokenized security. This is just the beginning. We are building the infrastructure for tokenized securities. And this quarter, we turned that from a blueprint into something real. Our business has remained diversified and resilient against a soft quarter for crypto with prices and volatility down across the market. Our diversified largely recurring revenue base and mission-critical product offerings have helped carry us through, and our pending acquisition of Equiniti will be another step towards further business model resilience. Regarding Equiniti, we're on track to close in January 2027. We have all of the antitrust clearances secured and other regulatory approvals are advancing. Both companies are already building today for the future combined business. What excites me most is the demand from public companies, Layer 1 and Layer 2 blockchains and other market participants who want to get started in earnest on issuing tokenized securities. The build of this ecosystem will take time, but the interest and demand are already there. I'm pleased to share that on October 27, we'll be headed to the New York Stock Exchange for a showcase where we'll share a first look at the tokenization platform. We will introduce new issuer and Layer 1 partners and demonstrate live tokenized equity issuance and trading. Tokenization of security sits at the heart of our strategy and is the central theme in the modernization of market structure. Tokenization is the process of turning static traditional financial assets into active programmable blockchain-based assets. In May, we announced our agreement to acquire Equiniti, the second largest transfer agent in the world. Tokenized real-world assets on chain have grown more than 20-fold since around 2024 to roughly $37 billion. Tokenized cash in the form of stablecoins is now around $290 billion. Securities are the largest wave still to come, a roughly $270 trillion market that Citi sees reaching about $5.5 trillion tokenized by 2030. I believe this is quite conservative. Not all tokenization is the same, and that distinction is the basis of our strategy. We are focused on issuer-sponsored tokenization, where the company itself chooses to tokenize its actual shares and its transfer agent records the token as the real legal share on the official register. That is very different from a synthetic token where a third party wraps a claim on a share it holds elsewhere or maybe doesn't even hold it elsewhere at all, and the issuer sees none of the benefits of this tokenization. When the issuer, on the other hand, creates the token, the token is the actual share, true legal title, the issuer can finally see who owns its stock. Corporate actions and voting can be programmed into the instrument and a greater share of the economics can flow back to the issuer. Investors gain too. They benefit from smoother collateralization of their holdings, around-the-clock trading, instant and atomic settlement, fractional access and access to shareholder rewards and a more direct relationship with public company issuers, a facet that issuers are also very excited about. I'd like to spend a few moments telling you a little more about Equiniti because the stand-alone business deserves to be better known. Equiniti maintains the share register, the legal record of ownership for nearly 3,000 corporate issuers, including roughly half of the FTSE 100 and 30% of the S&P 500. It serves more than 20 million shareholders and moves over $0.5 trillion of payments each year. We believe it is 1 of only 2 players of real scale in its markets with high barriers to entry, over 95% client retention rates and relationships that average well over a decade. And Equiniti is far more than a register. It runs 5 connected services as laid out on Page 24 of the slide deck that are at the center of how public companies and their shareholders interact. Each service is mission-critical, sticky and recurring. And together, they make Equiniti indispensable to how thousands of public companies operate. I'll now turn to how the Bullish business performed this quarter, starting with the exchange. On spot, our core market, trading volumes moderated with the broader crypto market, but we kept deepening our institutional footprint. One of the largest global wealth managers in the world selected Bullish as the exclusive crypto trading provider for their Asia business, and we began relationships with many new customers such as SoFi, Berenberg, Bit2Me, and BitGo Prime and others. We keep winning the institutions that value a regulated venue. On options and derivatives, in a positive development, we now believe we will gain access to the U.S. market for our perps, dated futures and options markets in the next several months, nearly a year earlier than we previously anticipated. We believe that the United States is by far the largest global market for derivatives and represents a huge opportunity for Bullish to be amongst the first to offer onshore crypto derivatives. While industry volumes have contracted this year as volatility came down, we still believe that the digital assets derivatives markets will grow more quickly than spot volumes in the years to come. In the second quarter, we reduced trading incentives, prepared our U.S. readiness plan and started putting in place partnerships with retail broker-dealers and also went live with other key market participants such as market access provider Paradigm. While our volumes and market share declined in the second quarter, we are excited about our new strategic positioning and the long-term opportunity. Beyond the exchange, our media and events business continues to generate business opportunities throughout the Bullish business. Consensus, our flagship conference, drew more than 16,000 people from over 100 countries to Miami, where we tokenized our own cap table live on stage, a first for an NYSE-listed company. CoinDesk and Consensus power our whole franchise. We are able to gather the industry together in a way that consistently generates new business opportunities. coindesk.com, our media arm, continues to experience strong growth with page views up by 10 million in Q2 2026, a 38% year-over-year increase. Unique visitors increased 83% against the same period prior year, and our market share continues to consolidate. Our CoinDesk indices continue to power institutional products. In April, Morgan Stanley chose CoinDesk as the benchmark index for their flagship Bitcoin ETP, which has already reached roughly $400 million in assets. We continue to win repeat business with our licensees. For example, Grayscale launched their hyper-liquid ETP with our indices in June and Morgan Stanley launched with Ethereum and Solana ETPs with us in late July. We're putting wins on the board, but index revenue scales with the value of assets in each product. So a softer price environment has held total index revenue back even as we gained share and our mandates add up. Liquidity services delivers sticky recurring revenue from our delivery of the listing, liquidity and visibility that every asset needs to come to market and trade well. In Q2, we continued adding great new clients, including the first exchange to list SoFi's new stablecoin, SoFiUSD. Finally, on the topic of regulation and legislation here in the United States, the CLARITY Act did not advance this session. While clear market structure legislation would help the entire industry, our strategy does not depend on it. Per reporting by Bloomberg, the SEC is expected to publish a so-called innovation exemption potentially in the weeks ahead, which would provide some rules of the road for tokenized securities. We have advocated for this innovation exemption and would welcome this as great progress. We and issuers are hopeful that this announcement will include provisions that provide control to the issuer of the token issuance process. If indeed, the SEC does provide a role for the issuer, we believe this will further cement the importance of the issuer-sponsored token and provide further validation that our acquisition of Equiniti was the right partnership at the right time. And practically speaking, this innovation exemption will prompt a dialogue among all of our issuer customers about tokenization on an accelerated time line. Thank you again for your support over the last year. I'll hand it to Dave. David Bonanno: Thank you, Tom, and good morning, everyone. This morning, we published our second quarter 2026 financial results alongside the 6-K filed with the SEC as well as our earnings press release and investor presentation available on our IR website. As a reminder, reconciliations of our non-IFRS metrics are included in today's earnings presentation and 6-K. Now turning to our second quarter adjusted financial results and KPIs as shown on Page 14 of today's presentation. Total adjusted revenue was $92.6 million, essentially flat with the first quarter and up 62% year-over-year. Subscription services and other revenue reached a record $62.7 million during the second quarter and adjusted transaction revenue came in at $29.9 million. Adjusted operating expenses for the second quarter were $63.1 million, reflecting our previously provided guidance that 2Q would represent our peak level of quarterly adjusted operating expenses in 2026. Our increased operating expenses were driven by Consensus related costs and approximately $2.5 million in onetime compensation expenses tied to our broader business transformation. This investment in our human capital included signing bonuses for incoming senior talent and retention and relocation bonuses for some of our existing leaders. These onetime compensation expenses will be offset in the second half of the year by efficiencies already realized in Q3 as we continue to optimize our spending across the entire cost base. Second quarter adjusted EBITDA was $29.5 million at an approximately 32% margin, and adjusted net income was $14.3 million after finance expense of $14.5 million. Turning to our balance sheet, as shown on Page 17, we ended the quarter with net liquid assets of $2.1 billion. Looking forward for the remainder of the year, we've updated Bullish's 2026 full year guidance as shown on Page 22, narrowing our previously provided guidance due to increased full year visibility. SS&O revenue is now expected to be between $225 million to $245 million. Based on our current outlook, we expect the second half SS&O revenue implied by our guidance will be split roughly 45% in the third quarter and 55% in the fourth quarter with new partnerships already signed and coming online this quarter driving that expected sequential growth. Adjusted operating expenses are expected to be between $225 million to $230 million, roughly equally split between the third and fourth quarter. We continue to expect full year finance expenses of $52 million to $60 million. And as a reminder, we do not guide on adjusted transaction revenue, and we encourage everyone to review our monthly trading metrics posted on our IR website. Finally, we are maintaining our full year 2026 financial outlook for Equiniti as well as our medium-term combined outlook as previously discussed during our May announcement and first quarter earnings calls and as covered on Pages 26 and 27 of today's presentation. With that, I'll turn it back to Tom for closing remarks. Thomas Farley: Thanks, Dave. And now we'll open it up for Q&A. Operator: [Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from the line of Brian Bedell of Deutsche Bank. Brian Bedell: Maybe just to start on the tokenization theme for equities. Tom, maybe if you could just talk about how you see the 2 ecosystems evolving. When I say that, I mean the synthetic versus the actual. Clearly, your model is based on the actual, but we're seeing early progress certainly on the synthetic side. And I guess the question would be, to what extent do you see those 2 forms of trading tokenized stocks coexisting in the future? Or do you think the share of tokenized versions will move really to the actual -- your model? Thomas Farley: Brian, thanks so much. Great question. And it underscores the nature of the questions we're getting on tokenization. I remember just 3 months ago when we announced the deal, the questions were of the flavor, will tokenization ever happen? And they've moved to how quickly will tokenization happen? And even -- well, when it happens, how much will you win by, which is great as we derisk the thesis of the acquisition. To answer your question directly, I have no doubt that both models will survive and maybe even thrive. And it's not dissimilar from the traditional equity markets today. Think the actual share versus an ETF or the actual share versus an ADR or even an actual share versus, in some cases, a fund structure or a derivative structure or a structured product. So too, in tokenized world, will you see evolve multiple different models. So for example, the synthetic model may well be sufficient for a small offshore retail customer who doesn't understand credit risk, doesn't care to understand credit risk is flipping in and out of a share at midnight time Turkey. A institutional New York, London, Hong Kong-based firm that manages customer money is certainly not going to hold some IOU or derivative that goes through a credit chain that involves, for example, multiple brokers. So I suspect you will see both evolve. The issuers will insist upon it because only the issuer-sponsored token is the actual share and only the issuer-sponsored token really offers a considerable benefit to the issuer themselves. Brian Bedell: Yes, that's great perspective. And then just my second follow-up question on the revenue synergies on the trading side that you're seeing evolving and then combined with the comments that you made about the traction with retail broker-dealers and advancing derivatives crypto trading, to what extent do you see that enhancing your trading volumes coming into the second half? Of course, you don't guide to that to the trading volumes, but just trying to get a sense of the organic component of that in the second half and into '27 potentially. David Bonanno: Thanks, Brian. We don't expect a major uplift to transaction revenues during 2026 from tokenized equities, but we certainly expect that during 2027, that will be a contributor to our business. As Tom mentioned, we already trade securities today. Bullish stock is trading live on our own platform. We expect the number of stocks and issuers to come on platform with issuer native tokens to increase throughout the back half of the year. We also believe that the development of additional regulated trading venues kind of throughout the globe that will be trading tokenized stocks will help increase the broader liquidity profile of the asset class, and we do expect in 2027 to see some benefits to our trading activities from tokenized stocks. Thomas Farley: Yes. And Brian, just to kind of reflect on this moment that we're in, we were on this call a year ago or a year ago today was our IPO. And if I can kind of frame that moment, Bitcoin was round numbers $120,000. The market cap of digital assets was around about $4 trillion. Fast forward to today, the price of Bitcoin is around about $60,000. The market cap of crypto is round numbers, $2 trillion. And as you and we both know in this industry, because it is still relatively nascent, as price goes, so goes volatility, so go trading volumes. And so we don't want to get on this call in mid-August and cheerlead for trading volumes, not having a clear crystal ball in terms of what will happen for prices -- to prices and volatility throughout the year. What I will tell you is -- and you saw this in some of the comments in our prepared remarks, but you'll continue to see it in the months and quarters ahead. We're doing everything to grow market share. And we're doing well, and we're winning across the board, meaning if you look at the portfolio of products that we offer, adding new institutional customers, adding new partners, adding new regulated venues. As Dave just said, as of yesterday, for the very first time, we traded and are now able to trade tokenized securities. So we are there ready to capture the growth when it ultimately comes back to digital assets. But we don't want to overpromise because we don't know exactly what's going to happen. On the other hand, we do know that tokenized securities trading is going to be a huge wave. Again, it's a $270 trillion market. And so any small slice of that comes on board in the back half of 2026 and certainly 2027, that's an opportunity that ultimately, I'm not saying immediately, but ultimately will dwarf the trading opportunity of true crypto assets and that $2 trillion market cap that I referenced at the outset. Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Joseph Vafi of Canaccord Genuity. Joseph Vafi: Nice to see all the progress along the evolution here of market structure and the like. I wanted to drill down on potentially being able to open up the U.S. market for options and derivatives potentially a year earlier. If you could kind of double-click on that comment, where that's coming from? Obviously, maybe the regulatory environment is favorable, but just a little more color there would be great. Thomas Farley: Yes. No, I appreciate the question. And I'm kind of a closet derivatives regulation nerdler. So I appreciate the nuance here. Spent the formative part of my career managing futures, exchanges and clearinghouses. And there was kind of a path that was a quite painful path for getting access for certain marketplaces, and it involved the full approval of the full complement of a futures trading platform, a futures clearinghouse as well as an FCM in order to access the U.S. market. But a new pathway has opened up where if you operate an adult compliant, responsible overseas platform as we do and have for many years, as you know, we're regulated by the toughest regulators on planet Earth, including the Germans at BaFin, and the Hong Kongers and New York with a BitLicense and so on and so forth, that you're able to access the U.S. should you get the necessary approvals with an approved FCM, which is the -- that's futures parlance for broker-dealer. So if you have an approved FCM, you can leverage that adult regulated overseas trading platform. And so that was -- perhaps it was a lack of imagination on our part or my part personally. But that new pathway, we believe, has become available. And should we go through the kind of right hoops and steps here over the next couple of months, we believe we'll be able to access in an unfettered way, the U.S. markets for derivatives. Joseph Vafi: That's great and good luck with that, Tom. And then kind of on, I guess, a related note on the regulatory front, if you've got any additional comments on that, I guess, what was that innovators carve-out or something like that relative to tokenized equities and favoring the underlying versus the synthetic and what we might expect there and market reaction and issuer reaction to that kind of rule coming out of the SEC, I guess? Thomas Farley: Sure. Yes. And I'll share a few breadcrumbs, but some of our conversations will keep confidential just out of respect for our regulator in D.C. The CLARITY Act would provide a fair amount of certainty. But at a high level, the certainty that the CLARITY Act was providing was by and large around traditional crypto assets. So in other words, you have coins that fall into a little bit of an ambiguous world that's part commodity, part security, and it gets difficult to figure out, in some cases, should I be working under the auspices of the CFTC or the SEC. In addition, imagine somebody holds a portfolio with something that's slightly more commodity and something that's slightly more security. Are the -- do the rules exist and the laws exist where I can hold them in a single portfolio. So that was the kind of thing that the CLARITY Act was really clearing up, along with some clarity -- sorry to use that word, around DeFi and what was and wasn't allowed in the DeFi world. What it was doing less of was providing a whole lot of certainty around tokenization. And you might view that as a negative, I actually view it as a positive. The reason being you don't really need a ton of certainty around tokenization. When you're -- the market we're going after is the tokenization of the global securities market. You hear Dave and I talk about that all the time. That's the $270 trillion market. Well, good news, we have 100 years of legislation and regulation underpinning the global securities market. It's actually abundantly clear. Nonetheless, there are some elements of ambiguity. And I applaud the SEC for saying, "Hey, look, we want there to be perfect clarity here because we're not going to engage in regulation by enforcement. We're not going to catch you with the rearview mirror when it wasn't abundantly clear exactly how you would approach this market". And so the SEC has set out to say, "Hey, we're going to provide this innovation exemption". The intent is to help this market develop with some, I'll call it, safe harbors that may not be the right legal term. And so that people like us, people like the issuers, broker-dealers, exchanges would understand exactly how to go about tokenization. So that's kind of the backdrop of that. And they're taking their time rolling it out. And there were news reports this week that we could see it as soon as this week. I don't think we will see it this week. This is the kind of thing I'd rather come out and be good than come out and be quick. Now to go to this core issue that you're talking about of issuer-sponsored versus non-issuer sponsored, I don't know exactly what the text is going to say, so this isn't inside information. But I do know there was a great hue and cry from the issuer industry around tokenization as it started to take hold around about 4 or 5 months ago. Look no further than our CFO sitting to our left to see a frustrated public market issuer, where all of a sudden, your stock is so-called stock. It wasn't even your stock, but investors think they're holding your stock because they're holding your token on some platform you've never heard of. Meanwhile, it's not your stock. It's a derivative or some sort of warehouse receipt that may or may not be backed by your stock. And when something goes wrong, all of a sudden, you're getting calls from these investors or their intermediaries blaming you even though you have nothing to do with it. It makes no sense. The issuers want control of this process. They want to be able to say, "Hey, if we're going to issue this thing, we want it to be our stock, not some derivative transaction or a minimum, you can't use our name or you can't call it our stock, you need to do the appropriate disclosures around it, just like the existing rules and legislation say". And I think -- and I'm putting that in quotes because look, I don't know this all with certainty. I think the SEC hears that. And I think the SEC wants to celebrate the role of the issuer. In other words, enshrine the role of the issuer. And just as a dollars and cents matter, that's great for us because at Equiniti, we've been having these conversations with issuers. And I'll just tell you, like I'd love to get on this call and tell you every issuer wants to tokenize tomorrow. There are some issuers who don't know what tokenization is. Well, good news, this innovation exemption talking about the role of the issuer in the tokenization process, guess what that does? It provides a mandate for us to go and talk to every single one of our issuer -- every one of our issuer customers about tokenizing their shares, and we think has the possibility of accelerating the time line for us to provide all sorts of tokenization services to this group of issuer customers. And I want to say one thing, this is for my lawyers as much as anything. I'm saying we, we, we, issuers, issuers, please understand when I say that, I'm talking about a pro forma world where we have successfully closed the Equiniti deal. And as Mike said at the outset, there are, of course, risks, and I just wanted to highlight that comment. Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Dan Fannon of Jefferies. Daniel Fannon: Tom, you talked about a lot of momentum in terms of new firms signing up for crypto trading, I think both -- mainly on the spot side. But can you talk about the backdrop of -- or I should say, the backlog of firms that are -- that you are in conversations with and how to think about the evolution of both spot trading adoption from an institutional perspective as well as derivative trading? Thomas Farley: Sure. I'll let Dave chime in as well, Dan. Look, because I'm an optimist, I'll start with the positive. Pipeline is as large as it's ever been, and it continues to include more and more institutional names as time passed. And the logos that we're adding are among the most credible that we've ever added in our company's history. And the benefit of adding a credible logo, perhaps obvious, these are durable companies that don't change their mind about their strategies on a quarterly or semiannual basis. All of that is great. And so I feel really good about consolidating market share. And take a step back, Dan, I would argue we are among the very, very top. I won't put a number on it, but among the very, very top exchanges when it comes to credibility. We can walk into the German regulator and we can get approval. We can walk into the New York State regulator, look them across the table and get full paper blessing to operate in their locale. You can just look around and you can see there are very few like that. And that's why we win institutions. We have great liquidity at a low cost. We have a feature-rich platform. We're known for running a reliable platform that's highly compliant and super credible. All of that's great. I'm not going to mince words. Crypto is a lousy environment for trading right now, Dan. And I don't think that the CLARITY Act not passing this session is helpful. And I'd love to be able to tell you, it doesn't matter at all. I think around the trading of pure crypto assets. So I think Bitcoin, I'll call that a pure crypto asset, some of these Layer 1 blockchains, I was looking forward to the CLARITY Act because I do think there's another wave of institutions that would have rolled in. Some of the obvious guys, some of you on the call work for them that still don't hold Bitcoin, let's say, for private wealth clients here in the United States. So feel really good about the pipeline. We continue to build features and regulatory approvals and build out our jurisdictional footprint all around the world. But -- and this -- I'm responding to how you framed the question. And now I'm kind of pivoting to tell you, I'm even more excited about the trading of tokenized securities on this mousetrap that we've built. And it may well turn out to be that, that was the giant growth opportunity that none of us saw coming as opposed to the traditional crypto assets. Daniel Fannon: That's helpful. I appreciate the clarity there. And then just in the context of SS&O, obviously, took the guidance up. The momentum in that side of the business actually seems quite good. Maybe, Dave, unpack a little bit of what's happening versus what you thought at the beginning of the year when you initially gave the guidance and kind of where things sit today? David Bonanno: Yes. Thanks, Dan. To be clear, we've maintained the midpoint of the guide. We've just narrowed it here today. But given the environment we've seen over the last 6, 9, 12 months where Bitcoin has been down 50%, alts down 50% to 75%, interest rates from a year ago down almost 20%, we're extremely pleased with the resiliency of our SS&O line item. Tom touched on it a little bit, and there's a slide in the deck. We continue to use the Consensus event as an acquisition channel and also as a cross-sell vehicle to create stickier and stickier revenue. Over half of our Consensus sponsorship revenue came from customers with multiple different products. We are beginning to see renewed momentum in our pipeline of SS&O, particularly around tokenization. It's not just because of the Equiniti transaction. In general, that is becoming the fastest-growing part of the crypto marketplace, and it's just a bigger TAM. And so we're excited about this new position of our business and the new developments in the market, and we think the business we've built is perfectly positioned to ride those tailwinds across all of our different line items, but especially in SS&O and liquidity services. Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Pete Christiansen of Citi. Peter Christiansen: Tom and Dave, question on capturing economics, tokenized equities. So I guess when you think about the issuer-sponsored model, is the objective here for the shares to trade primarily on Bullish? Or do you envision the token, I guess, being interoperable across multiple chains, venues with Equiniti serving as the authoritative registry? And I guess in this open architecture kind of framework, where do you expect Bullish to capture the majority of economics? Thomas Farley: Yes. Great question. There's really kind of 2 insightful embedded questions in what you're asking, Pete. One is kind of walled garden versus interoperable. And the second is around the economic model. So if you don't mind, I'll dissect it in that fashion. Let me just start with walled garden versus interoperable. We are absolutely building our token to be interoperable. In fact, on October 27th, we'll give you some more information and in the months and quarters ahead. As I said earlier, we'll drop a few breadcrumbs, but not revealing the whole strategy. But we're very much engaged with trading venues -- regulated trading venues, less regulated trading venues, traditional crypto venues, TradFi firms about the interoperability of issuer-sponsored tokens with those platforms, number one. Number two, I even see that interoperability working with so-called CSDs, central securities depositories, in the jurisdictions that we operate. And in the U.S., the most notable is DTCC or NSCC, but same thing abroad. One of the models that works well for those central securities depositories is they'll hold the actual share for safekeeping and they'll issue a synthetic token on top of that. Sometimes you may have heard that referred to as an entitlement. But it wouldn't surprise me at all to see that model really stay in place in various forms, in various locales, and they'll just hold the issuer-sponsored token as opposed to the old school, less beneficial book entry share. And in addition, with respect to Layer 1 blockchain, I don't think in the early days, you will see a single blockchain gain 90-plus percent market share. I think early days, there's going to be 1,000 flowers that bloom, and then there's going to be a consolidation as the market kind of realizes what is the best blockchain or two to support the issuer-sponsored token. And so that's how we're looking at that as well. In terms of the economic model, Pete, we -- and I'll let Dave chime in. We offer the following services for tokenization. And apologies for giving you an exhaustive list, but I really just want to give you a sense of the areas that we can provide value, and we can charge for that value because customers will appreciate it. Number one, we can sit down with the customer and discuss exactly what they want their token to look like. Number two, we can actually generate that token using our tokenization factory, the kind of thing we've been doing now for the life of our company. And one of the ways we helped this tokenized cash or stablecoin market come to life. Number three, we can list it on our own regulated venue. Number four, we can provide liquidity on our venue or other venues. And those could be regulated venues, they can be DeFi venues. Number five, we can provide visibility for that token via our CoinDesk portfolio of assets like think Consensus or the CoinDesk site itself. Number six, we can be a transfer agent as we are today. And today, the transfer agent actually earns a quite low fee on a per customer basis. And this new service is clearly a value-added service. So quick query what that will look like. And then finally, number seven, we have a set that I'll put in kind of a group of other, but really doesn't deserve to be in the other bucket. We have a meaningful Newswire business, GlobeNewswire in the combined company. We have investor tools that we provide through Notified and Equiniti. And all of these are the sorts of things that a CFO is going to be thirsty for, as their stock goes tokenized, they're going to need to understand it. They're going to need to understand who's trading it, why they're trading it, who are the holders, how can they reward those holders. Some of these consumer goods companies are going to want to reward their holders, not just with dividends and greater voting rights perhaps for their loyalty, but maybe even discounts or tickets or award points or frequent flyer miles or what have you. So the number of things that we have in our quiver to provide the tokenization and charge for are many. And therefore, for me to give you kind of an exhaustive answer on the exact economics is a bit difficult. David Bonanno: Yes. And Pete, I think I'd frame it for you this way. Our focus is going to be on the issuer and the success of every issuer customer and delivering great value for money to that customer via tokenizing their stock and other services. We do expect the Bullish Exchange to be a beneficiary of our success and our issuer success. We do expect liquidity services to be a core product for us going forward. But the focus is on the issuers first, and we believe the transaction revenue will follow. Peter Christiansen: That's really helpful. I do want to ask, though, about some of the carve-outs from the Equiniti deal, particularly like retirement solutions and customer resolutions, those sorts of things. I know those are faster-growing parts of Equiniti's competitor. I'm just curious, does that create a client retention issue by separating those components of the deal? David Bonanno: No, Pete, those are largely independent businesses from the issuers, particularly the resolution business and the pension business. And they are not related to tokenization and issuer success. Again, that is what we're focused on is issuer success. We're happy to part with those assets. We don't believe they're going to fit our growth profile going forward or margin profile, again, distinct from our tokenization and issuer-centric focus. And so we're happy to not be taking those assets with us. Thomas Farley: Yes. Just to give you an example, Pete, one of those businesses is a business that sets up temporary call centers during a crisis. So go back to my childhood, Gerber baby food, it comes out, there's glass in the baby food and all of a sudden, they're getting 1 million calls a day. This company shows up and sets up a call center and deals with that influx of very angry customers. Interesting business, entirely unrelated to what we're building here. So no, the short answer is no. I appreciate the thrust of the question. But I want to say completely unrelated. There may be some tether that I'm forgetting. So I'll hedge and say almost entirely unrelated at a minimum. Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Ken Worthington of JPMorgan. Kenneth Worthington: I know you don't break it out, but maybe you can help us directionally on what happened to liquidity services revenue in 2Q relative to 1Q. Did it shrink? Did it grow? Was it largely unchanged from last quarter? And are there any sort of puts and takes to call out in this quarter? David Bonanno: Thanks for the question, Ken. We don't give that level of detail, as you'll know. I'd say, in general, liquidity services in the second quarter was again resilient. There were definitely headwinds versus the first quarter with overall lower prices in the environment. We had new bookings during the quarter, but not as many as we're experiencing today. And so ex Consensus, we're happy with the stability of liquidity services and the SS&O revenue, excluding Consensus during the second quarter. It was broadly in line with the underlying business previously in the first quarter, a couple of different puts and takes, but steady, and we're proud of that resilience that we displayed in the second quarter and what we're going to do in the second half. Kenneth Worthington: Okay. And maybe bigger picture, David, you and I have talked about this a bunch, but can you talk to what's happening with dematerialization in the U.K. and the potential impact on Equiniti's U.K. profit? If the business moves away from shareholder accounts to more omnibus structures, how does that sort of impact the number and types of services offered by Equiniti? And how does that impact revenue? And just talk about time frames here for dematerialization. David Bonanno: Yes. Thanks, Ken. Taking a step back, dematerialization, and this became really clear in the July report from the decommissioned -- the dematerialization task force that was published mid-July of this year. It's simply the process for the removal of paper shares from the U.K. market, says so on the cover of the report. Furthermore, the report begins and ends with the acknowledgment that tokenization should be developed not just in parallel, but is likely to come before any of these further steps that had previously been contemplated by the dematerialization task force, such as the so-called step 3, which is the intermediate model. Even in that world, we believe Equiniti is a beneficiary of this process to remove paper shares from the market. We have a broker-dealer. Some of our competitors do not. We believe there will be customers who are going to be up for grabs, and we'll be well positioned to get those customers in the future. The removal of paper shares is currently scheduled for the end of next year. And as we put -- there's a page in the appendices of the deck only less than 2% of Equiniti revenue is directly related to paper certificates and mail revenue. It's de minimis to their financial profile, even more de minimis to the combined financial profile. And we believe the convergence of tokenization and dematerialization is a tailwind to Equiniti that will more than offset that less than 2% revenue exposure that we have today. Thomas Farley: I'm glad you asked this question, Ken. As you would imagine, we diligence their businesses on both sides of the pond because they really have a nexus of business in the U.S., a nexus business in the U.K., dematerialization, the big piece of legislation in the U.S. is the CLARITY Act, a big piece of legislation in the U.K. was this kind of dematerialization piece that you brought up. And the net of our diligence is that it was kind of puts and takes where the transfer agent would have a tail of customers that it would have to really hold on to. And on the flip side, it was pushing hard towards broker-dealer activity, and we're the only guys that have a captive broker-dealer and a really well-run broker-dealer. And so we kind of looked at it as, okay, there's puts and takes, probably a net neutral to the business or something of that -- they have since come out and said, I just want to reiterate what Dave said, hey, tokenization kind of obviates this whole conversation, and we really should pivot to exactly how tokenization is going to work. And that's where, as you know, we've repositioned our entire business as of early May of this year. And so now undoubtedly, we see this entire thing as a big opportunity for us. And similar to potentially this innovation exemption, accelerating conversations that may have otherwise taken place, let's say, in the back half of 2027 to a much earlier time frame. So too, does this dematerialization/tokenization conversation in the U.K. accelerate those conversations and give us a mandate and an open door to go in and talk to customers, educate them, work with them, be their consigliere as they move to a tokenized world. Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Owen Lau of Clear Street. Owen Lau: So I hear that you're going to have a tokenization showcase in October, and you may be limited to what you can say. But could you please give us an update on the pipeline of the issuers wanting to tokenize their shares, profile of these companies? What are they excited about the tokenization opportunity? And maybe talk about what you expect to get out from this event in October? Thomas Farley: Owen, thanks a lot. It's good to hear from you again. The -- if I can just start with some contextual comments. We announced the Equiniti acquisition in May. As you would imagine, we are deep in planning the actual integration post close. We're actually collaborating with the company on various and sundry solutions, including around tokenization. We bought this beautiful old antique home up on a hill in Newport at the corner of Main and Main. We knew we would go in and it would have beautiful millwork and old growth timber, but it was a fixer upper. And we knew that going in. We just didn't know exactly what we would find when we got in the inside. And what we're finding is that there are a lot of upside. There's a lot of -- to continue the metaphor, there are a lot of rooms that have been renovated. There are great managers and leaders there that I'm learning from every day, but perhaps the most exciting part of it is the direct relationship with the issuer where they pick up the phone, and it is the quality of the issuer list and relationships that Equiniti have that are even deeper than we expected, and we knew that they had high-quality relationships. So the issuer pipeline in terms of those sort of conversations in the process there is filling up. Still early days. We'll have more opportunities this quarter than we did in Q2, and we'll have more opportunities in Q4. If I reflect on it and kind of have to handicap it, it feels more like, yes, there's going to be activity here in the latter half of 2026. And then this is a 2027 in earnest growth trajectory, in part because the ecosystem needs to develop. For example, the trading solutions for trading of these tokens are nascent. You heard Dave say, and I said in my opening remarks, we just started trading tokenized securities literally yesterday. And so we feel great about the pipeline, a little bit less certain about the time line, but you'll learn a lot more about that on October 27. With respect to October 27, we want you to have a more holistic perspective of this ecosystem. So it's not just about issuers, although they're important, it's about other partners. So for example, Layer 1s, Layer 2s, the blockchains are champing at the bit to be the blockchains that these issuers choose to tokenize their product. As I said in my comments, there's $37 billion of tokenized assets. To be clear, that is a rounding error. We have companies that we're talking to about tokenization that would be a multiple of that $37 billion. So you can imagine if you're a Layer 1 and also broker-dealers who want to make sure they, too, are part of the solution and they're offering services to their customers. And then finally -- you gave a lot for us to answer there. So apologies if this is long-winded, but I wanted to get to everything you asked in your question. In terms of why the issuers are interested, the answer to that is turning out to be more multivaried than we expected. I'll give you an example. When we talk to consumer goods companies, they are very eager to have a direct relationship with their customers. And anything we can provide to them through this tokenization process that gives them more of a direct relationship from their customers. They can learn from their customers. They can reward their customers. Like I said in my prepared remarks, the ability to provide, I don't know, frequent flyer miles or hotel points or a discount on a subscription or even just a thank you for their shareholding. That sort of thing is very appealing. And then depending on the company, being able to provide accelerated dividends for longer-term more loyal holders or additional voting rights or the 24/7 trading. So it's not a one size fits all, but there's a number of things that we're hearing. Owen Lau: And then my follow-up on a modeling question. Your second quarter adjusted OpEx seems a little bit higher than expected, but you only raised the low end of your full year OpEx guidance a bit. So the implied second half expense runway was much lower. So on a Bullish stand-alone basis, is the second half run rate a good exit rate for us to think about going into 2027? Is there any Equiniti-related investment we should be aware of for later this year? David Bonanno: Thanks, Owen. Appreciate the question. I'll take that one. As I mentioned in my prepared remarks, the second quarter featured higher expenses than we expect from any other quarter this year. That's in part driven by variable expenses associated with our Consensus Miami event as well as the $2.5 million of onetime compensation expenses that I detailed related to our broader business transformation, signing bonuses for new hires, retention and relocation bonuses for certain existing key executives. We maintain a very tight grip on the costs. We have already realized additional synergies and further headcount reductions in the third quarter to keep us in line with that guide. I would not say that the back half of the year is representative of the run rate for '27 because that would be excluding the variable Consensus related expenses we have in the first and second quarter. We expect that, that baseline in the second half of the year, which excludes the Consensus related events is roughly good. We'll probably expand over time as we invest in the platform, but we intend to hit our guidance there, and we maintain a tight cost control. And the second quarter, as I mentioned, was definitely a bit anomalous with regard to the wages and compensation expenses with that additional $2.5 million that will not recur and be offset in the back half of the year by those synergies we've already realized. Operator: [Operator Instructions] Our next question comes from the line of Ed Engel of Compass Point. Edward Engel: As you think about competing with some of these synthetic issuers, is there anything you can do to kind of jump-start distribution of your issuer sponsored shares? I saw you mentioned the onboarding of market makers like Wintermute. I just kind of wondering how you're thinking about solving the cold start problem relative to the synthetic assets, which kind of already achieved pretty strong distribution pretty quickly. Thomas Farley: Yes. No, great question. That's why we did the Equiniti acquisition is we have 3,000 issuers that we can go to with a product out of the box. At the same time, the issuer is in control. And so this isn't the kind of thing where all 3,000 will start on the same day. But the difference between us and the more -- and our more durable model and the synthetic model is once you've created it, it's there forever as long as that company is a public company. It's not the kind of thing that can just turn around and disappear the next day or you put in the hands of an investor and they think they're getting IPO proceeds and they get none, which you probably read about in the press. So we don't think it's a cold start problem. We actually think it will be an accelerated start, but it's not an every single thing happens at once as some of the other models may be, which I suspect will prove to be far less durable. Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Rayna Kumar of Oppenheimer & Company. Guru Sidaarth: This is Guru on for Rayna. A lot of my questions have already been asked, but if I can maybe switch to certain other aspects of the business. Much of the conversation pertaining to CoinDesk, right, over the past few quarters has revolved almost exclusively around some of the nice wins on the indices and data side and of course, on Consensus events. But if you can narrow in on the CoinDesk media segment, maybe comment on your outlook for this media portion of your business, excluding events, right? Metrics on Slide 14 highlight some strong growth. You called out 38%. So wondering if this will primarily remain focused on supporting broader ecosystem through visibility, cross-selling, et cetera, or if it could grow into a meaningful stand-alone piece as well? David Bonanno: Thanks for the question. Yes, we're happy with the recent success in our viewer counts at CoinDesk. That's certainly true. Those have improved dramatically, thanks to the new leadership from Jay Yarow that we brought into the building late last year. We are currently not monetizing per se all those extra eyeballs through banner ads or things of that nature, we want to keep the website premium. It is directed mainly at the benefit of our existing issuers and partners and broadening our reach. We're happy and pleased with that business and the resumed growth it's achieved in views, and we expect it to be a beneficiary of our broader business transformation towards tokenization at large. Thomas Farley: There are days when the market share of that business is actually a majority of crypto media, a majority. And there are lots and lots of competitors. And so we've carved out this role at the intersection of technology and finance. That's something we're going to be able to grow for years to come. And as Dave said, it's very helpful for us on occasion to be able to use that asset for, say, for example, advertising purposes for other opportunities that we have under the Bullish umbrella. Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Nathan Frankovitz of Cantor Fitzgerald. Nathan Frankovitz: Tom, on your comment that $5 trillion in tokenized equities by 2030 might be a bit conservative. Can you just kind of walk through what factors do you think might most influence whether that number plays out above or below that estimate? And then as a follow-up, do you have any thoughts on how that $5 trillion plus could be distributed between blockchains such as any L1s or categories in particular or newer, more permissioned ones like Canton? Thomas Farley: Yes. Really good question. Citi is on this call. So I'll start by saying the analysis is excellent. I'm just more anecdotal, and I want to say that right upfront. I had a conversation on Tuesday with the CEO of a $70 billion company about them tokenizing their stock. So I'm just looking at it and I'm saying, okay, it's $37 billion today. I just had a conversation -- a real conversation with a real CEO of a $70 billion company about them tokenizing their stock. It doesn't take a lot of math to math more than $5 trillion to $6 trillion by the year 2030. I actually see a world where it kind of starts slowly, almost a trickle. And then we have a catalytic event, either the wave accelerates or there's a onetime event. A big IPO only does a tokenized offering. And then once you have that, all the institutions are holding the tokenized assets, the broker-dealers are holding the tokenized assets and you flip the U.S. or the U.K. equity markets onto public blockchains, perhaps alongside traditional shares for a period of time, could be years, it could be a decade. But right there, you've just blown through $5 trillion, $6 trillion in terms of tokenized assets. So admittedly, I'm coming at it more anecdotally than quantitative, almost top down based on these experiences that we're having. But like I said in May, the question was, oh, geez, is tokenization going to happen? And if I'm honest, we had that question too, internally. Look, good teams fight. We spent $4.2 billion for this business. You think we don't look at the glass half full and the glass half empty. We do. And we asked that question. I can tell you, we haven't asked that question in 6 weeks. Like it's out -- the horse is out of the barn. It's just a question of how quickly is it going to happen? And to what extent are we going to be a leader. In terms of the public blockchains, we're going to be the ultimate winners out of this. I don't have a clear crystal ball. I think the most decentralized are working on privacy solutions. The least decentralized that have privacy solutions are looking at how can we do a better job of decentralizing. And it's going to be whichever of those blockchains meets the moment and meets those customer needs are ultimately going to be the big winners. And we're open to that being many. We're open to that being several, and that's fine with us. Operator: Thank you. I would now like to turn the conference back to Tom Farley for closing remarks. Sir? David Bonanno: Hi, everyone, it's Dave. Tom had to jump to a customer call here. But thank you, everyone, for attending this morning's call. We look forward to staying in touch with all of you on this journey as we build out the future of financial infrastructure. Please reach out to our IR team with any follow-up questions, and we look forward to seeing everyone next quarter. Operator: This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect. 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This article is a transcript of this conference call produced for The Motley Fool. While we strive for our Foolish Best, there may be errors, omissions, or inaccuracies in this transcript. As with all our articles, The Motley Fool does not assume any responsibility for your use of this content, and we strongly encourage you to do your own research, including listening to the call yourself and reading the company's SEC filings. Please see our Terms and Conditions for additional details, including our Obligatory Capitalized Disclaimers of Liability. The Motley Fool has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy. Bullish (BLSH) Q2 2026 Earnings Call Transcript was originally published by The Motley Fool
Investor releaseQuarter not tagged2026-08-13Bullish Q2 Earnings Call Highlights
MarketBeat
Bullish Q2 Earnings Call Highlights
Interested in Bullish? Here are five stocks we like better. Bullish reported solid second-quarter results, with adjusted revenue of $92.6 million, up 62% year over year, and adjusted EBITDA of $29.5 million, despite weaker crypto prices, volatility and trading volumes. The company made its first trades in tokenized shares and is positioning issuer-sponsored tokenized securities as a major growth opportunity, although management expects tokenization to become a more meaningful revenue driver primarily in 2027. Bullish remains on track to close its Equiniti acquisition in January 2027 and expects expanded access to U.S. derivatives markets, while maintaining 2026 revenue and expense guidance. Crypto Winter Is Here: 3 Stocks To Put On Ice This Summer Bullish (NYSE:BLSH) reported second-quarter results that showed revenue growth and positive adjusted EBITDA despite lower crypto prices and volatility, while executives emphasized tokenized securities and the pending Equiniti acquisition as central to the company’s longer-term strategy. Chief Executive Officer Tom Farley said Bullish began trading its own tokenized shares on its regulated venue during the quarter, marking the company’s first trades involving a tokenized security. He described the launch as an initial step in building infrastructure for issuer-sponsored tokenized securities, in which a company’s transfer agent records a token as the legal share on the official register. → AST SpaceMobile Earnings Just Reminded Investors How Risky Space Can Be Can Upwork Maintain Its Comeback? Reasons to Be Bullish and Bearish “This is just the beginning,” Farley said. “We are building the infrastructure for tokenized securities, and this quarter, we turn that from a blueprint into something real.” Chief Financial Officer David Bonanno said total adjusted revenue was $92.6 million, essentially unchanged from the first quarter and up 62% from a year earlier. Subscription, Services & Other revenue reached a quarterly record of $62.7 million, while adjusted transaction revenue totaled $29.9 million. Adjusted operating expenses were $63.1 million. Adjusted EBITDA was $29.5 million, representing an approximately 32% margin. Adjusted net income was $14.3 million after $14.5 million in finance expense. Net liquid assets totaled $2.1 billion at quarter-end. → Nebius’ Q2 Beat Shows the AI Bottleneck Is Capacity, Not Demand Ma…Read full documentShow less
Interested in Bullish? Here are five stocks we like better. Bullish reported solid second-quarter results, with adjusted revenue of $92.6 million, up 62% year over year, and adjusted EBITDA of $29.5 million, despite weaker crypto prices, volatility and trading volumes. The company made its first trades in tokenized shares and is positioning issuer-sponsored tokenized securities as a major growth opportunity, although management expects tokenization to become a more meaningful revenue driver primarily in 2027. Bullish remains on track to close its Equiniti acquisition in January 2027 and expects expanded access to U.S. derivatives markets, while maintaining 2026 revenue and expense guidance. Crypto Winter Is Here: 3 Stocks To Put On Ice This Summer Bullish (NYSE:BLSH) reported second-quarter results that showed revenue growth and positive adjusted EBITDA despite lower crypto prices and volatility, while executives emphasized tokenized securities and the pending Equiniti acquisition as central to the company’s longer-term strategy. Chief Executive Officer Tom Farley said Bullish began trading its own tokenized shares on its regulated venue during the quarter, marking the company’s first trades involving a tokenized security. He described the launch as an initial step in building infrastructure for issuer-sponsored tokenized securities, in which a company’s transfer agent records a token as the legal share on the official register. → AST SpaceMobile Earnings Just Reminded Investors How Risky Space Can Be Can Upwork Maintain Its Comeback? Reasons to Be Bullish and Bearish “This is just the beginning,” Farley said. “We are building the infrastructure for tokenized securities, and this quarter, we turn that from a blueprint into something real.” Chief Financial Officer David Bonanno said total adjusted revenue was $92.6 million, essentially unchanged from the first quarter and up 62% from a year earlier. Subscription, Services & Other revenue reached a quarterly record of $62.7 million, while adjusted transaction revenue totaled $29.9 million. Adjusted operating expenses were $63.1 million. Adjusted EBITDA was $29.5 million, representing an approximately 32% margin. Adjusted net income was $14.3 million after $14.5 million in finance expense. Net liquid assets totaled $2.1 billion at quarter-end. → Nebius’ Q2 Beat Shows the AI Bottleneck Is Capacity, Not Demand MarketBeat Week in Review – 08/11 - 08/15 Bonanno said second-quarter expenses represented the company’s expected peak quarterly adjusted operating expense level for 2026. Costs included Consensus-related expenses and approximately $2.5 million in one-time compensation costs associated with hiring, retention and relocation as part of a broader business transformation. For 2026, Bullish narrowed its guidance for Subscription, Services & Other revenue to $225 million to $245 million, while maintaining the midpoint of its prior outlook. Adjusted operating expenses are expected to total $225 million to $230 million, and finance expenses are still expected to range from $52 million to $60 million. The company does not provide guidance for adjusted transaction revenue. → On Holding's Price Stumble May Be an Opening for a Company Built to Run Bullish remains on track to close its proposed acquisition of Equiniti Group in January 2027, according to Farley. He said all antitrust clearances have been obtained and other regulatory approvals are progressing. The transaction is subject to closing conditions and regulatory risks. Equiniti maintains share registers for nearly 3,000 corporate issuers, including roughly half of the FTSE 100 and 30% of the S&P 500, Farley said. The company serves more than 20 million shareholders and processes more than $500 billion in payments annually. Farley highlighted Equiniti’s client retention rate of more than 95% and its long-standing issuer relationships. Management said its approach differs from synthetic token models because it focuses on issuer-sponsored tokens representing actual legal ownership of shares. Farley said synthetic and issuer-sponsored structures could coexist, but argued that issuers would favor a model that gives them control over issuance, ownership information, voting and corporate actions. Bullish plans to hold a tokenization showcase at the New York Stock Exchange on Oct. 27, where it expects to introduce issuer and blockchain partners and demonstrate live tokenized equity issuance and trading. Farley said the company is seeing an expanding pipeline of issuer discussions, although he characterized tokenization as likely becoming a more meaningful growth driver in 2027 rather than producing a major transaction-revenue lift in 2026. Bonanno said Bullish expects tokenized equities to contribute to trading activity in 2027. Management also said it intends for issuer-sponsored tokens to be interoperable across venues and blockchains, rather than confined to a closed ecosystem. Farley said crypto spot-market volumes moderated as prices and volatility declined across the broader market. Bullish’s volumes and market share also declined in the second quarter, though the company continued adding institutional clients. He said one of the world’s largest wealth managers selected Bullish as its exclusive crypto trading provider for its Asia business, and cited new relationships with SoFi, Berenberg, Bit2Me, BitGo Prime and others. The company also expects to gain access to the U.S. market for perpetual futures, dated futures and options in the coming months, nearly a year earlier than previously anticipated. Farley said Bullish believes it can use an approved futures commission merchant to access the U.S. market through its existing overseas regulated platform, subject to the necessary approvals. Within its media and events business, Bullish said Consensus drew more than 16,000 attendees from more than 100 countries in Miami. CoinDesk page views rose by 10 million during the second quarter, up 38% year over year, while unique visitors increased 83%. Bonanno said Bullish is not focused on monetizing higher CoinDesk traffic through banner advertising, instead positioning the media platform to support issuers, partners and the company’s wider tokenization strategy. CoinDesk Indices continued to add institutional mandates, including use as the benchmark for Morgan Stanley’s flagship Bitcoin exchange-traded product, which Farley said had reached roughly $400 million in assets. Farley said the U.S. CLARITY Act did not advance during the current session, which he said was not helpful for adoption of traditional crypto assets by some institutions. However, he said Bullish’s tokenization strategy does not depend on the legislation. He pointed to reports that the Securities and Exchange Commission could introduce an “innovation exemption” for tokenized securities. Farley said such a framework could provide guidance for issuers, broker-dealers and exchanges and potentially accelerate discussions with Equiniti’s issuer clients, particularly if the SEC recognizes the issuer’s role in the tokenization process. Bullish (NYSE: BLSH) is a company that develops and operates digital asset market infrastructure, including a cryptocurrency trading platform and related technology services. The firm's stated activities focus on providing exchange services, market structure and trading technology designed to support the listing, execution and clearing of digital assets. Bullish positions itself as a bridge between traditional capital markets practices and the evolving cryptocurrency ecosystem. The business was announced in connection with Block.one, the software developer known for its work on the EOS blockchain, and was formed with the intent of creating a regulated, institutional-grade marketplace for digital assets. This instant news alert was generated by narrative science technology and financial data from MarketBeat in order to provide readers with the fastest reporting and unbiased coverage. Please send any questions or comments about this story to [email protected]. The article "Bullish Q2 Earnings Call Highlights" was originally published by MarketBeat. View MarketBeat's top stocks for August 2026.
Investor releaseQuarter not tagged2026-08-13Bullish (BLSH) (Q2 2026) Earnings Call Highlights: Tokenization Milestone and Early U.S. ...
GuruFocus.com
Bullish (BLSH) (Q2 2026) Earnings Call Highlights: Tokenization Milestone and Early U.S. ...
This article first appeared on GuruFocus. Release Date: August 13, 2026 For the complete transcript of the earnings call, please refer to the full earnings call transcript. Bullish (NYSE:BLSH) successfully launched trading of its own tokenized shares on its regulated venue, marking a significant milestone in its tokenization strategy. The company reported record subscription services and other revenue of $62.7 million in Q2 2026, up 62% year-over-year, demonstrating strong business resilience. Bullish (NYSE:BLSH) expects to gain access to the U.S. derivatives market several months earlier than anticipated, opening a significant growth opportunity. The pending acquisition of Equinity is on track to close in January 2027, with all antitrust clearances secured and strong issuer demand for tokenization services. CoinDesk media continues to show strong growth, with page views up 38% year-over-year and unique visitors up 83%, consolidating market share. The company maintains a strong balance sheet with $2.1 billion in net liquid assets, providing financial flexibility for future investments. Crypto market trading volumes and volatility declined in Q2, leading to reduced trading volumes and market share in the spot exchange business. The Clarity Act did not advance in the U.S. legislative session, creating regulatory uncertainty for the broader crypto industry. Total index revenue was held back by softer crypto prices, despite gaining market share and adding new mandates. Adjusted operating expenses increased in Q2 due to consensus-related costs and $2.5 million in one-time compensation expenses, impacting profitability. The company does not expect a major uplift to transaction revenues from tokenized equities during 2026, with meaningful contributions only expected in 2027. The broader crypto environment remains challenging, with Bitcoin prices down significantly year-over-year, limiting near-term trading growth. Warning! GuruFocus has detected 8 Warning Signs with ANFGF. Is BLSH fairly valued? Test your thesis with our free DCF calculator. Q: How do you see the two ecosystems of tokenized equities evolvingthe synthetic model versus the actual issuer-sponsored modeland do you think the share of tokenized versions will move to your model? A: Tom Farley, CEO: Both models will survive and thrive, similar to how traditional equity markets have actual shares versus ETF…Read full documentShow less
This article first appeared on GuruFocus. Release Date: August 13, 2026 For the complete transcript of the earnings call, please refer to the full earnings call transcript. Bullish (NYSE:BLSH) successfully launched trading of its own tokenized shares on its regulated venue, marking a significant milestone in its tokenization strategy. The company reported record subscription services and other revenue of $62.7 million in Q2 2026, up 62% year-over-year, demonstrating strong business resilience. Bullish (NYSE:BLSH) expects to gain access to the U.S. derivatives market several months earlier than anticipated, opening a significant growth opportunity. The pending acquisition of Equinity is on track to close in January 2027, with all antitrust clearances secured and strong issuer demand for tokenization services. CoinDesk media continues to show strong growth, with page views up 38% year-over-year and unique visitors up 83%, consolidating market share. The company maintains a strong balance sheet with $2.1 billion in net liquid assets, providing financial flexibility for future investments. Crypto market trading volumes and volatility declined in Q2, leading to reduced trading volumes and market share in the spot exchange business. The Clarity Act did not advance in the U.S. legislative session, creating regulatory uncertainty for the broader crypto industry. Total index revenue was held back by softer crypto prices, despite gaining market share and adding new mandates. Adjusted operating expenses increased in Q2 due to consensus-related costs and $2.5 million in one-time compensation expenses, impacting profitability. The company does not expect a major uplift to transaction revenues from tokenized equities during 2026, with meaningful contributions only expected in 2027. The broader crypto environment remains challenging, with Bitcoin prices down significantly year-over-year, limiting near-term trading growth. Warning! GuruFocus has detected 8 Warning Signs with ANFGF. Is BLSH fairly valued? Test your thesis with our free DCF calculator. Q: How do you see the two ecosystems of tokenized equities evolvingthe synthetic model versus the actual issuer-sponsored modeland do you think the share of tokenized versions will move to your model? A: Tom Farley, CEO: Both models will survive and thrive, similar to how traditional equity markets have actual shares versus ETFs or ADRs. The synthetic model may suffice for small offshore retail customers, but institutional firms managing customer money will not hold an IOU or derivative with credit chain risks. Issuers will insist on the issuer-sponsored token because only that represents the actual legal share and offers considerable benefits to the issuer. Q: Can you provide more color on the potential to open up the U.S. market for options and derivatives nearly a year earlier than anticipated? A: Tom Farley, CEO: A new regulatory pathway has opened up. If you operate an adult, compliant, responsible overseas platform regulated by tough regulators (e.g., Germany, Hong Kong, New York), you can access the U.S. market with an approved FCM (Futures Commission Merchant). We believe we can gain unfettered access to the U.S. derivatives market in the next several months by leveraging this pathway. Q: What are your expectations for the SEC's innovation exemption regarding tokenized securities, and how will it impact the issuer-sponsored model? A: Tom Farley, CEO: The Clarity Act focused on traditional crypto assets, not tokenization. The SEC's innovation exemption aims to provide safe harbors and clarity for tokenization. We believe the SEC will enshrine the role of the issuer, which validates our issuer-sponsored approach. This will prompt a dialogue among all our issuer customers about tokenization on an accelerated timeline, providing a mandate for us to discuss tokenizing their shares. Q: Can you talk about the pipeline of firms you're in conversations with and the evolution of spot and derivative trading adoption? A: Tom Farley, CEO: The pipeline is as large as it's ever been, with more institutional names than ever. We're winning credible, durable logos. However, crypto is a lousy environment for trading right now, and the Clarity Act not passing is unhelpful. I'm even more excited about trading tokenized securities on our platform, which may turn out to be the giant growth opportunity. Dave Bonanno, CFO: We don't expect a major uplift to transaction revenues from tokenized equities in 2026, but we expect contributions in 2027 as more issuers come on platform. Q: In the issuer-sponsored model, will shares trade primarily on Bullish, or will the token be interoperable across multiple chains and venues? Where will Bullish capture the majority of economics? A: Tom Farley, CEO: We are building our token to be interoperable, engaging with regulated trading venues, traditional crypto venues, and TradFi firms. We also see interoperability with Central Securities Depositories. In terms of economics, we offer a full suite of services: token design, generation, listing, liquidity, visibility via CoinDesk, transfer agency, and investor tools. Dave Bonanno, CFO: Our focus is on the issuer first. We expect the Bullish exchange and liquidity services to be beneficiaries, and transaction revenue will follow. Q: What happened to liquidity services revenue in 2Q relative to 1Q, and are there any puts and takes to call out? A: Dave Bonanno, CFO: Liquidity services was resilient in the second quarter. There were headwinds from lower prices, but new bookings helped. Ex-consensus, the SS&O revenue was broadly in line with the first quarter. We're proud of the stability and resilience displayed. Q: Can you discuss the impact of dematerialization in the UK on Equinity's profit and the timeframe? A: Dave Bonanno, CFO: Dematerialization is the removal of paper shares from the UK market. The July report acknowledges tokenization should be developed in parallel and likely before further steps. We believe Equinity is a beneficiary as we have a broker-dealer, unlike some competitors. Only less than 2% of Equinity's revenue is related to paper certificates. The convergence of tokenization and dematerialization is a tailwind. Tom Farley, CEO: We see this as a big opportunity, accelerating conversations with customers and giving us a mandate to educate them on tokenization. Q: Can you give an update on the pipeline of issuers wanting to tokenize their shares and what you expect from the October showcase? A: Tom Farley, CEO: The issuer pipeline is filling up, with more opportunities each quarter. It feels like activity in late 2026, with 2027 being the year of earnest growth. The October 27th showcase will provide a holistic perspective of the ecosystem, including issuers, layer ones, and broker-dealers. Issuers are interested for various reasons, including direct customer relationships, rewards, and 24/7 trading. Q: Is the second-half expense runway a good exit rate for 2027, and are there any equity-related investments to be aware of? A: Dave Bonanno, CFO: The second quarter featured higher expenses due to Consensus-related costs and $2.5 million in one-time compensation expenses. We maintain tight cost control and have realized synergies in Q3. The back half of the year is not representative of the 2027 run rate because it excludes variable consensus-related expenses. We intend to hit our guidance and maintain tight cost control. Q: How are you solving the cold start problem for issuer-sponsored shares relative to synthetic assets that have achieved strong distribution? A: Tom Farley, CEO: The Equinity acquisition gives us 3,000 issuers to approach with a product out-of-the-box. The issuer is in control, so not all will start at once. However, our model is more durableonce created, it's there forever as long as the company is public. We don't think it's a cold start problem; it will be an accelerated start, but not everything happens at once like some less durable synthetic models. Q: What is the outlook for the media segment of CoinDesk, excluding events? A: Dave Bonanno, CFO: We're happy with the recent success in viewer counts, which have improved dramatically. We're not monetizing all extra eyeballs through banner ads to keep the site premium. It's directed at benefiting our issuers and For the complete transcript of the earnings call, please refer to the full earnings call transcript.
Investor releaseQuarter not tagged2026-08-13Bullish Q2 2026 Earnings Call Summary
Moby
Bullish Q2 2026 Earnings Call Summary
Our analysts just identified a stock with the potential to be the next Nvidia. Tell us how you invest and we'll show you why it's our #1 pick. Tap here. Management is shifting focus toward issuer-sponsored tokenization, where companies choose to tokenize actual shares on official registers rather than using synthetic third-party wrappers. The pending acquisition of Equiniti is central to this strategy, providing a direct relationship with nearly 3,000 corporate issuers and 20 million shareholders to drive adoption of tokenized securities. Second quarter performance was characterized by resilient recurring revenue from subscription services and other (SS&O) lines, which helped offset a moderation in crypto trading volumes and market volatility. The company successfully executed the first trades of tokenized Bullish shares on its own regulated venue, moving the tokenization strategy from a conceptual blueprint to operational reality. Institutional footprint expansion continued with a major global wealth manager selecting Bullish as an exclusive crypto provider, despite a broader contraction in industry-wide digital asset volumes. Management attributes the current soft trading environment to lower crypto prices and volatility, but emphasizes that their diversified model provides stability through market cycles. The company expects to gain access to the U.S. market for crypto derivatives in the next several months, nearly a year earlier than previously anticipated due to a new regulatory pathway via approved FCMs. Full year 2026 SS&O revenue guidance was narrowed to $225 million to $245 million, with an expected sequential growth split of 45% in Q3 and 55% in Q4 as new partnerships come online. Management anticipates a potential 'innovation exemption' from the SEC in the coming weeks, which they believe will provide a regulatory safe harbor and accelerate dialogue with issuers regarding tokenization. The Equiniti acquisition remains on track to close in January 2027, with all antitrust clearances secured and other regulatory approvals currently advancing. While 2026 revenue will be driven by core crypto and media services, management expects tokenized equities to become a meaningful contributor to transaction revenue starting in 2027. Q2 adjusted operating expenses reached a peak of $63.1 million, including $2.5 million in one-time compensation expenses for seni…Read full documentShow less
Our analysts just identified a stock with the potential to be the next Nvidia. Tell us how you invest and we'll show you why it's our #1 pick. Tap here. Management is shifting focus toward issuer-sponsored tokenization, where companies choose to tokenize actual shares on official registers rather than using synthetic third-party wrappers. The pending acquisition of Equiniti is central to this strategy, providing a direct relationship with nearly 3,000 corporate issuers and 20 million shareholders to drive adoption of tokenized securities. Second quarter performance was characterized by resilient recurring revenue from subscription services and other (SS&O) lines, which helped offset a moderation in crypto trading volumes and market volatility. The company successfully executed the first trades of tokenized Bullish shares on its own regulated venue, moving the tokenization strategy from a conceptual blueprint to operational reality. Institutional footprint expansion continued with a major global wealth manager selecting Bullish as an exclusive crypto provider, despite a broader contraction in industry-wide digital asset volumes. Management attributes the current soft trading environment to lower crypto prices and volatility, but emphasizes that their diversified model provides stability through market cycles. The company expects to gain access to the U.S. market for crypto derivatives in the next several months, nearly a year earlier than previously anticipated due to a new regulatory pathway via approved FCMs. Full year 2026 SS&O revenue guidance was narrowed to $225 million to $245 million, with an expected sequential growth split of 45% in Q3 and 55% in Q4 as new partnerships come online. Management anticipates a potential 'innovation exemption' from the SEC in the coming weeks, which they believe will provide a regulatory safe harbor and accelerate dialogue with issuers regarding tokenization. The Equiniti acquisition remains on track to close in January 2027, with all antitrust clearances secured and other regulatory approvals currently advancing. While 2026 revenue will be driven by core crypto and media services, management expects tokenized equities to become a meaningful contributor to transaction revenue starting in 2027. Q2 adjusted operating expenses reached a peak of $63.1 million, including $2.5 million in one-time compensation expenses for senior talent acquisition and business transformation. The company is divesting certain non-core Equiniti segments, such as retirement solutions and customer resolutions, to focus exclusively on the higher-margin issuer-centric tokenization business. Management noted that the failure of the CLARITY Act to advance this session is a headwind for pure crypto asset trading, though their tokenization strategy does not depend on its passage. Index revenue growth was tempered by softer digital asset prices, as revenue in this segment scales directly with the value of assets under management in licensed products. One stock. Nvidia-level potential. 30M+ investors trust Moby to find it first. Get the pick. Tap here. Management believes both models will coexist, but institutional investors will require issuer-sponsored tokens to avoid the credit risk and lack of transparency inherent in synthetic 'IOU' structures. Issuer-sponsored tokens allow for programmed corporate actions, voting, and direct shareholder rewards that synthetic models cannot provide. Bullish identified a pathway to leverage its regulated overseas platform through an approved U.S. Futures Commission Merchant (FCM) rather than building a full domestic clearinghouse from scratch. This approach is expected to allow the company to offer crypto perps, dated futures, and options to U.S. customers much sooner than the original 2027 timeline. Management views the U.K. move to remove paper shares as a net positive, as Equiniti's captive broker-dealer is well-positioned to capture customers during the transition. Less than 2% of Equiniti's revenue is tied to paper certificates, and management believes tokenization will likely leapfrog traditional dematerialization efforts. Revenue will be generated through a multi-layered stack: token generation fees, listing fees on the Bullish exchange, liquidity provision, and value-added transfer agent services. Additional economics are expected from investor tools and news dissemination services provided to the issuer's tokenized shareholder base.
Investor releaseQuarter not tagged2026-08-13Bullish (BLSH) Q2 Earnings and Revenues Top Estimates
Zacks
Bullish (BLSH) Q2 Earnings and Revenues Top Estimates
Bullish (BLSH) came out with quarterly earnings of $0.1 per share, beating the Zacks Consensus Estimate of $0.09 per share. This compares to a loss of $0.05 per share a year ago. These figures are adjusted for non-recurring items. This quarterly report represents an earnings surprise of +11.11%. A quarter ago, it was expected that this company would post earnings of $0.17 per share when it actually produced earnings of $0.13, delivering a surprise of -23.53%. Over the last four quarters, the company has surpassed consensus EPS estimates just once. Bullish, which belongs to the Zacks Internet - Software industry, posted revenues of $92.6 million for the quarter ended June 2026, surpassing the Zacks Consensus Estimate by 2.67%. This compares to year-ago revenues of $57 million. The company has topped consensus revenue estimates three times over the last four quarters. The sustainability of the stock's immediate price movement based on the recently-released numbers and future earnings expectations will mostly depend on management's commentary on the earnings call. Bullish shares have lost about 35% since the beginning of the year versus the S&P 500's gain of 13.2%. While Bullish has underperformed the market so far this year, the question that comes to investors' minds is: what's next for the stock? There are no easy answers to this key question, but one reliable measure that can help investors address this is the company's earnings outlook. Not only does this include current consensus earnings expectations for the coming quarter(s), but also how these expectations have changed lately. Empirical research shows a strong correlation between near-term stock movements and trends in earnings estimate revisions. Investors can track such revisions by themselves or rely on a tried-and-tested rating tool like the Zacks Rank, which has an impressive track record of harnessing the power of earnings estimate revisions. Ahead of this earnings release, the estimate revisions trend for Bullish was unfavorable. While the magnitude and direction of estimate revisions could change following the company's just-released earnings report, the current status translates into a Zacks Rank #4 (Sell) for the stock. So, the shares are expected to underperform the market in the near future. You can see the complete list of today's Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here. It will be interest…Read full documentShow less
Bullish (BLSH) came out with quarterly earnings of $0.1 per share, beating the Zacks Consensus Estimate of $0.09 per share. This compares to a loss of $0.05 per share a year ago. These figures are adjusted for non-recurring items. This quarterly report represents an earnings surprise of +11.11%. A quarter ago, it was expected that this company would post earnings of $0.17 per share when it actually produced earnings of $0.13, delivering a surprise of -23.53%. Over the last four quarters, the company has surpassed consensus EPS estimates just once. Bullish, which belongs to the Zacks Internet - Software industry, posted revenues of $92.6 million for the quarter ended June 2026, surpassing the Zacks Consensus Estimate by 2.67%. This compares to year-ago revenues of $57 million. The company has topped consensus revenue estimates three times over the last four quarters. The sustainability of the stock's immediate price movement based on the recently-released numbers and future earnings expectations will mostly depend on management's commentary on the earnings call. Bullish shares have lost about 35% since the beginning of the year versus the S&P 500's gain of 13.2%. While Bullish has underperformed the market so far this year, the question that comes to investors' minds is: what's next for the stock? There are no easy answers to this key question, but one reliable measure that can help investors address this is the company's earnings outlook. Not only does this include current consensus earnings expectations for the coming quarter(s), but also how these expectations have changed lately. Empirical research shows a strong correlation between near-term stock movements and trends in earnings estimate revisions. Investors can track such revisions by themselves or rely on a tried-and-tested rating tool like the Zacks Rank, which has an impressive track record of harnessing the power of earnings estimate revisions. Ahead of this earnings release, the estimate revisions trend for Bullish was unfavorable. While the magnitude and direction of estimate revisions could change following the company's just-released earnings report, the current status translates into a Zacks Rank #4 (Sell) for the stock. So, the shares are expected to underperform the market in the near future. You can see the complete list of today's Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here. It will be interesting to see how estimates for the coming quarters and the current fiscal year change in the days ahead. The current consensus EPS estimate is $0.12 on $87.78 million in revenues for the coming quarter and $0.52 on $368.14 million in revenues for the current fiscal year. Investors should be mindful of the fact that the outlook for the industry can have a material impact on the performance of the stock as well. In terms of the Zacks Industry Rank, Internet - Software is currently in the top 36% of the 250 plus Zacks industries. Our research shows that the top 50% of the Zacks-ranked industries outperform the bottom 50% by a factor of more than 2 to 1. VNET Group (VNET), another stock in the same industry, has yet to report results for the quarter ended June 2026. The results are expected to be released on August 18. This provider of carrier-neutral internet data center services is expected to post quarterly loss of $0.06 per share in its upcoming report, which represents a year-over-year change of -500%. The consensus EPS estimate for the quarter has remained unchanged over the last 30 days. VNET Group's revenues are expected to be $405.24 million, up 19.3% from the year-ago quarter. Want the latest recommendations from Zacks Investment Research? Today, you can download 7 Best Stocks for the Next 30 Days. Click to get this free report Bullish (BLSH) : Free Stock Analysis Report VNET Group, Inc. - Unsponsored ADR (VNET) : Free Stock Analysis Report This article originally published on Zacks Investment Research (zacks.com). Zacks Investment Research
TranscriptFY2026 Q22026-08-13FY2026 Q2 earnings call transcript
Earnings source - 98 paragraphs
FY2026 Q2 earnings call transcript
Thank you for standing by, and welcome to Bullish Second Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call. Currently, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star one one on your telephone. To remove yourself from the queue, you may press star one one again. I would now like to hand the call over to Michael Fedele, Vice President of Finance. Please go ahead.
Good morning, and welcome to our Second Quarter Earnings Call. I'm Michael Fedele, and I'm joined on today's call by our Chief Executive Officer, Tom Farley, Chief Financial Officer, David Bonanno, and Director of Corporate Development, Liam Foley. This call will contain forward-looking statements, including those relating to our expected performance and business opportunities, our proposed acquisition of Equiniti Group, the anticipated benefits and strategic rationale of the transaction, expected timing and closing conditions, and business opportunities following the transaction. These statements are not assurances of future performance and are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. Such risks include, among others, the possibility that the Equiniti transaction may not be completed, failure to obtain required regulatory approvals, the possibility that anticipated benefits may not be realized, and the risks related to the integration of Equiniti's business.
For more details on these and other risks, please refer to today's earnings press release and our SEC filings, including our 20-F dated March 9, 2026. We undertake no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements. This call will also include a discussion of non-IFRS financial measures. A reconciliation to the most directly comparable IFRS metrics can be found in our earnings press release and presentation, which also contain additional information regarding non-IFRS financial measures and key performance indicators. I'll now turn the call over to Tom.
Thanks, Mike. Good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining. I'm Tom Farley, Chairman and CEO of Bullish. A year ago today, Bullish went public on the New York Stock Exchange. Thank you for following us and supporting us as a public company. A year ago today, our old school certificated shares began changing hands. A year later, I'm pleased to share with you that beginning yesterday, Bullish's tokenized shares are trading on our own regulated venue for the first time. This also marks Bullish's first trades of any tokenized security. This is just the beginning. We are building the infrastructure for tokenized securities, and this quarter, we turn that from a blueprint into something real. Our business has remained diversified and resilient against a soft quarter for crypto, with prices and volatility down across the market.
Our diversified, largely recurring revenue base and mission-critical product offerings have helped carry us through, and our pending acquisition of Equiniti will be another step towards further business model resilience. Regarding Equiniti, we are on track to close in January 2027. We have all the antitrust clearances secured and other regulatory approvals are advancing. Both companies are already building today for the future combined business. What excites me most is the demand from public companies, layer one and layer two blockchains, and other market participants who want to get started in earnest on issuing tokenized securities. The build of this ecosystem will take time, but the interest and demand are already there. I am pleased to share that on October 27th, we will be headed to the New York Stock Exchange for a showcase where we will share a first look at the tokenization platform.
We will introduce new issuer and layer one partners and demonstrate live tokenized equity issuance and trading. Tokenization of security sits at the heart of our strategy and is the central theme in the modernization of market structure. Tokenization is the process of turning static, traditional financial assets into active, programmable, blockchain-based assets. In May, we announced our agreement to acquire Equiniti, the second largest transfer agent in the world. Tokenized real-world assets on chain have grown more than 20 fold since around 2024 to roughly $37 billion. Tokenized cash in the form of stablecoins is now around $290 billion. Securities are the largest wave still to come. A roughly $270 trillion market that Citi sees reaching about $5.5 trillion tokenized by 2030. I believe this is quite conservative. Not all tokenization is the same, and that distinction is the basis of our strategy.
We are focused on issuer-sponsored tokenization, where the company itself chooses to tokenize its actual shares, and its transfer agent records the token as the real legal share on the official register. That is very different from a synthetic token, where a third party wraps a claim on a share it holds elsewhere, or maybe doesn't even hold it elsewhere at all, and the issuer sees none of the benefits of this tokenization. When the issuer, on the other hand, creates the token, the token is the actual share. True legal title. The issuer can finally see who owns its stock. Corporate actions and voting can be programmed into the instrument, and a greater share of the economics can flow back to the issuer. Investors gain too.
They benefit from smoother collateralization of their holdings around the clock trading, instant and atomic settlement fractional access, and access to shareholder rewards and a more direct relationship with public company issuers, a facet that issuers are also very excited about. I would like to spend a few moments telling you a little more about Equiniti, because the standalone business deserves to be better known. Equiniti maintains the share register, the legal record of ownership, for nearly 3,000 corporate issuers, including roughly half of the FTSE 100 and 30% of the S&P 500. It serves more than 20 million shareholders and moves over $500 billion of payments each year. We believe it is one of only two players of real scale in its markets, with high barriers to entry, over 95% client retention rates, and relationships that average well over a decade.
Equiniti is far more than a register. It runs five connected services, as laid out on page 24 of the slide deck, that are at the center of how public companies and their shareholders interact. Each service is mission-critical, sticky, and recurring, and together they make Equiniti indispensable to how thousands of public companies operate. I will now turn to how the Bullish business performed this quarter, starting with the exchange. On spot, our core market, trading volumes moderated with the broader crypto market, but we kept deepening our institutional footprint. One of the largest global wealth managers in the world selected Bullish as the exclusive crypto trading provider for their Asia business, and we began relationships with many new customers such as SoFi, Berenberg, Bit2Me, BitGo Prime, and others. We keep winning the institutions that value a regulated venue.
On options and derivatives, in a positive development, we now believe we will gain access to the U.S. market for our perps, dated futures, and options markets in the next several months, nearly a year earlier than we previously anticipated. We believe that the United States is by far the largest global market for derivatives and represents a huge opportunity for Bullish to be amongst the first to offer onshore crypto derivatives. While industry volumes have contracted this year as volatility came down, we still believe that the digital assets derivatives markets will grow more quickly than spot volumes in the years to come. In the second quarter, we reduced trading incentives, prepared our U.S. readiness plan, and started putting in place partnerships with retail broker-dealers, and also went live with other key market participants, such as market access provider Paradigm.
While our volumes and market share declined in the second quarter, we are excited about our new strategic positioning and the long-term opportunity. Beyond the exchange, our media and events business continues to generate business opportunities throughout the Bullish business. Consensus, our flagship conference, drew more than 16,000 people from over 100 countries to Miami, where we tokenized our own cap table live on stage, a first for an NYSE-listed company. CoinDesk and Consensus power our whole franchise. We are able to gather the industry together in a way that consistently generates new business opportunities. coindesk.com, our media arm, continues to experience strong growth, with page views up by 10 million in Q2 2026, a 38% year-over-year increase. Unique visitors increased 83% against the same period prior-year, and our market share continues to consolidate. Our CoinDesk Indices continue to power institutional products.
In April, Morgan Stanley chose CoinDesk as the benchmark index for their flagship Bitcoin ETP, which has already reached roughly $400 million in assets. We continue to win repeat business with our licensees. For example, Grayscale launched their Grayscale Hyperliquid Staking ETF with our indices in June, and Morgan Stanley launched with Ethereum and Solana ETPs with us in late July. We are putting wins on the board, but index revenue scales with the value of assets in each product, so a softer price environment has held total index revenue back even as we gain share and our mandates add up. Liquidity services deliver sticky, recurring revenue from our delivery of the listing, liquidity, and visibility that every asset needs to come to market and trade well. In Q2, we continued adding great new clients, including the first exchange to list SoFi's new stablecoin, SoFiUSD.
Finally, on the topic of regulation and legislation, here in the U.S., the CLARITY Act did not advance this session. While clearer market structure legislation would help the entire industry, our strategy does not depend on it. Per reporting by Bloomberg, the SEC is expected to publish a so-called innovation exemption, potentially in the weeks ahead, which would provide some rules of the road for tokenized securities. We have advocated for this innovation exemption and would welcome this as great progress. We, and issuers, are hopeful that this announcement will include provisions that provide control to the issuer of the token issuance process. If indeed the SEC does provide a role for the issuer, we believe this will further cement the importance of the issuer-sponsored token and provide further validation that our acquisition of Equiniti was the right partnership at the right time.
Practically speaking, this innovation exemption will prompt a dialogue among all of our issuer customers about tokenization on an accelerated timeline. Thank you again for your support over the last year. I will hand it to Dave.
Thank you, Tom, and good morning, everyone. This morning, we published our second quarter 2026 financial results alongside the 6-K filed with the SEC as well as our earnings press release and investor presentation available on our IR website. As a reminder, reconciliations of our non-IFRS metrics are included in today's earnings presentation in 6-K. Now, turning to our second quarter adjusted financial results and KPIs as shown on page 14 of today's presentation. Total adjusted revenue was $92.6 million, essentially flat with the first quarter and up 62% year-over-year. Subscription, Services & Other revenue reached a record $62.7 million during the second quarter, and adjusted transaction revenue came in at $29.9 million. Adjusted operating expenses for the second quarter were $63.1 million, reflecting our previously provided guidance that 2Q would represent our peak level of quarterly adjusted operating expenses in 2026.
Our increased operating expenses were driven by Consensus-related costs and approximately $2.5 million in one-time compensation expenses tied to our broader business transformation. This investment in our human capital included signing bonuses for incoming senior talent and retention and relocation bonuses for some of our existing leaders. These one-time compensation expenses will be offset in the second half of the year by efficiencies already realized in Q3 as we continue to optimize our spending across the entire cost base. Second quarter adjusted EBITDA was $29.5 million at an approximately 32% margin, and adjusted net income was $14.3 million after finance expense of $14.5 million. Turning to our balance sheet, as shown on page 17, we ended the quarter with net liquid assets of $2.1 billion.
Looking forward for the remainder of the year, we have updated Bullish's 2026 full-year guidance as shown on page 22, narrowing our previously provided guidance due to increased full-year visibility. SSNO revenue is now expected to be between $225 million-$245 million. Based on our current outlook, we expect the second half SSNO revenue implied by our guidance will be split roughly 45% in the third quarter and 55% in the fourth quarter, with new partnerships already signed and coming online this quarter driving that expected sequential growth. Adjusted operating expenses are expected to be between $225 million-$230 million, roughly equally split between the third and fourth quarter. We continue to expect full-year finance expenses of $52 million-$60 million. As a reminder, we do not guide on adjusted transaction revenue, and we encourage everyone to review our monthly trading metrics posted on our IR website.
Finally, we are maintaining our full-year 2026 financial outlook for Equiniti, as well as our medium-term combined outlook as previously discussed during our May announcement and first quarter earnings calls, and as covered on pages 26 and 27 of today's presentation. With that, I will turn it back to Tom for closing remarks.
Thanks, Dave. Now we will open it up for Q&A.
Thank you. As a reminder, to ask a question, you will need to press star one one on your telephone. To remove yourself from the queue, you may press star one one again. You will be limited to one question and one follow-up to allow everyone the opportunity to participate. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. Our first question comes from the line of Brian Bedell of Deutsche Bank. Your line is open, Brian.
Great. Thanks. Good morning, guys. Thanks so much for.
Hey, Brian.
Taking the questions. Hey, good morning. Maybe just to start on the tokenization theme for equities. Tom, maybe if you could just talk about how you see the two ecosystems evolving. When I say that, I mean the synthetic versus the actual. Clearly, your model's based on the actual, but we're seeing early progress certainly on the synthetic side. I guess the question would be, to what extent do you see those two forms of trading tokenized stocks coexisting in the future? Or do you think the share of tokenized versions will move really to the actual, your model?
Hey, Brian, thanks so much. Great question, and it underscores the nature of the questions we're getting on tokenization. I remember just three months ago when we announced the deal, the questions were of the flavor, will tokenization ever happen? They've kind of moved to, how quickly will tokenization happen? Even, well, when it happens, how much will you win by? Which is great as we de-risk the thesis of the acquisition. To answer your question directly, I have no doubt that both models will survive and maybe even thrive. It's not dissimilar from the traditional equity markets today. Think the actual share versus an ETF, or the actual share versus an ADR, or even an actual share versus, in some cases, a fund structure or a derivative structure or a structured product. So too, in tokenized world, will you see evolve multiple different models.
For example, the synthetic model may well be sufficient for a small offshore retail customer who does not understand credit risk, does not care to understand credit risk, is flipping in and out of a share at midnight time Turkey. An institutional New York, London, Hong Kong-based firm that manages customer money is certainly not going to hold some IOU or derivative that goes through a credit chain that involves, for example, multiple brokers. I suspect you will see both evolve. The issuers will insist upon it because only the issuer-sponsored token is the actual share, and only the issuer-sponsored token really offers a considerable benefit to the issuer themselves.
Yep. That is great perspective. Then just my second follow-up question, on the revenue synergies on the trading side that you are seeing evolving, and then combined with the comments that you made about the traction with retail broker-dealers and in advancing derivatives crypto trading, to what extent do you see that enhancing your trading volumes coming into the second half? Of course, you do not guide to the trading volumes, but just trying to get a sense of the organic component of that in the second half and into 2027, potentially.
Thanks, Brian. We do not expect a major uplift to transaction revenues during 2026 from tokenized equities, but we certainly expect that during 2027, that will be a contributor to our business. As Tom mentioned, we already trade securities today. Bullish stock is trading live on our own platform. We expect the number of stocks and issuers to come on platform with issuer-native tokens to increase throughout the back half of the year. We also believe that the development of additional regulated trading venues throughout the globe that will be trading tokenized stocks will help increase the broader liquidity profile of the asset class. We do expect in 2027 to see some benefits to our trading activities from tokenized stocks.
Yeah, Brian, just to kind of reflect on this moment that we are in, we were on this call a year ago, or a year ago today was our IPO. If I can kind of frame that moment, Bitcoin was round numbers, $120,000. The market cap of digital assets was round about $4 trillion. Fast-forward to today, the price of Bitcoin is round about $60,000. The market cap of crypto is round numbers, $2 trillion. As you and we both know, in this industry, because it is still relatively nascent, as price goes, so goes volatility, so go trading volumes. We do not want to get on this call in mid-August and cheerlead for trading volumes, not having a clear crystal ball in terms of what will happen to prices and volatility throughout the year.
What I will tell you is, you saw this in some of the comments in our prepared remarks, but you will continue to see it in the months and quarters ahead, we are doing everything to grow market share. We are doing well, we are winning, across the board, meaning if you look at the portfolio of products that we offer, adding new institutional customers, adding new partners, adding new regulated venues. As Dave just said, as of yesterday, for the very first time, we traded and are now able to trade tokenized securities. We are there ready to capture the growth when it ultimately comes back to digital assets. We do not want to overpromise because we do not know exactly what is going to happen. On the other hand, we do know that tokenized securities trading is going to be a huge wave.
Again, it is a $270 trillion market, any small slice of that comes on board in the back half of 2026 and certainly 2027, that is an opportunity that ultimately, I am not saying immediately, but ultimately will dwarf the trading opportunity of true crypto assets and that $2 trillion market cap that I referenced at the outset.
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Joseph Vafi of Canaccord Genuity. Please go ahead, Joseph.
Hey, guys. Good morning. Nice to see all the progress along the evolution here of market structure and the like. I wanted to drill down on potentially being able to open up the U.S. market for options and derivatives potentially a year earlier. If you could double-click on that comment, where that is coming from. Obviously, maybe the regulatory environment is favorable, but just a little more color there would be great.
Yeah. I appreciate the question, and I'm kind of a closet derivatives regulation nerdler, so I appreciate the nuance here. I spent the formative part of my career managing futures exchanges and clearing houses, and there was kind of a path that was a quite painful path for getting access for certain marketplaces, and it involved the full approval of the full complement of a futures trading platform, a futures clearing house, as well as an FCM in order to access the U.S. market.
But a new pathway has opened up where if you operate an adult compliant, responsible overseas platform, as we do, and have for many years, as you know, we're regulated by the toughest regulators on planet Earth, including the Germans at BaFin, and the Hong Kongers, and New York with the BitLicense, so on and so forth, that you're able to access the U.S. should you get the necessary approvals with an approved FCM, that's futures parlance for broker-dealer. So if you have an approved FCM, you can leverage that adult regulated overseas trading platform. So perhaps it was a lack of imagination on our part, or my part personally, but that new pathway, we believe, has become available.
Should we go through the kind of right hoops and steps here over the next couple of months, we believe we'll be able to access, in an unfettered way, the U.S. markets for derivatives.
That's great. Thanks for that color, and good luck with that, Tom. Then kind of on a, I guess, a related note on the regulatory front, if you've got any additional comments on that, I guess, what was it, an innovation exemption or something like that, relative to tokenized equities and favoring the underlying versus the synthetic and what we might expect there, and market reaction, and issuer reaction to that kind of rule coming out of the SEC, I guess. Thanks.
Sure. Yes, I will share a few breadcrumbs, but some of our conversations we will keep confidential just out of respect for our regulator in D.C. The CLARITY Act would provide a fair amount of certainty, but at a high level, the certainty that the CLARITY Act was providing was by and large around traditional crypto assets. In other words, you have coins that fall into a little bit of an ambiguous world that is part commodity, part security, and it gets difficult to figure out, in some cases, should I be working under the auspices of the CFTC or the SEC? In addition, imagine somebody holds a portfolio with something that is slightly more commodity and something that is slightly more security. Do the rules exist, and the laws exist where I can hold them in a single portfolio?
That was the kind of thing that the CLARITY Act was really clearing up, along with some clarity, sorry to use that word, around DeFi, and what was and was not allowed in the DeFi world. What it was doing less of was providing a whole lot of certainty around tokenization. You might view that as a negative. I actually view it as a positive. The reason being, you do not really need a ton of certainty around tokenization. The market we are going after is the tokenization of the global securities market. You hear Dave and I talk about that all the time. That is the $270 trillion market. Well, good news, we have 100 years of legislation and regulation underpinning the global securities market. It is actually abundantly clear. Nonetheless, there are some elements of ambiguity.
I applaud the SEC for saying, "Hey, look, we want there to be perfect clarity here because we are not going to engage in regulation by enforcement. We are not going to catch you with the rearview mirror when it was not abundantly clear exactly how you would approach this market." The SEC has set out to say, "Hey, we are going to provide this innovation exemption." The intent is to help this market develop with some, I will call it safe harbors. That may not be the right legal term. So that people like us, people like the issuers, broker-dealers, exchanges, would understand exactly how to go about tokenization. So that is kind of the backdrop of that. They are taking their time rolling it out. There were news reports this week that we could see it as soon as this week.
I do not think we will see it this week. This is the kind of thing I would rather it come out and be good than come out and be quick. Now, to go to this core issue that you are talking about of issuer sponsored versus non-issuer sponsored. I do not know exactly what the text is going to say, so this is not inside information. But I do know there was a great hue and cry from the issuer industry around tokenization as it started to take hold around about four or five months ago. Look no further than our CFO sitting to our left to see a frustrated public market issuer, where all of a sudden your stock is so-called stock.
It was not even your stock, but investors think they are holding your stock because they are holding your token on some platform you have never heard of. Meanwhile, it is not your stock. It is a derivative or some sort of warehouse receipt that may or may not be backed by your stock. When something goes wrong, all of a sudden you are getting calls from these investors, or their intermediaries, blaming you, even though you had nothing to do with it. It makes no sense. The issuers want control of this process. They want to be able to say, "Hey, if we are going to issue this thing, we want it to be our stock, not some derivative transaction. Or at minimum, you cannot use our name, or you cannot call it our stock. You need to do the appropriate disclosures around it."
Just like the existing rules and legislation say. I think, and I am putting that in quotes because, look, I do not know this all with certainty. I think the SEC hears that, and I think the SEC wants to celebrate the role of the issuer. In other words, enshrine the role of the issuer. Just as a dollars and cents matter, that is great for us because at Equiniti, we have been having these conversations with issuers. I will just tell you, I would love to get on this call and tell you every issuer wants to tokenize tomorrow. There are some issuers who do not know what tokenization is. Good news. This innovation exemption, talking about the role of the issuer in the tokenization process, guess what that does?
It provides a mandate for us to go and talk to every one of our issuer customers about tokenizing their shares, and we think has the possibility of accelerating the timeline for us to provide all sorts of tokenization services to this group of issuer customers. I want to say one thing, this is for my lawyers as much as anything. I am saying, "We, we, we, issuers." Please understand when I say that, I am talking about a pro forma world where we have successfully closed the Equiniti deal. As Mike said at the outset, there are of course, risks, and I just wanted to highlight that comment.
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Dan Fannon of Jefferies. Please go ahead, Dan.
Thanks. Good morning. Tom, you talked about a lot of momentum in terms of new firms signing up for crypto trading, I think both mainly on the spot side. Can you talk about the backdrop of, or I should say, the backlog of firms that you are in conversations with, and how to think about the evolution of both spot trading adoption from an institutional perspective as well as derivative trading?
Sure. I'll let Dave chime in as well, Dan. Look, because I'm an optimist, I'll start with the positive. Pipeline's as large as it's ever been, and it continues to include more and more institutional names as time passes. The logos that we're adding are among the most credible that we've ever added in our company's history. The benefit of adding a credible logo, perhaps obvious, these are durable companies that don't change their mind about their strategies on a quarterly or semi-annual basis. All of that is great. I feel really good about consolidating market share. Take a step back, Dan. I would argue we are among the very, very top. I won't put a number on it, but among the very, very top exchanges when it comes to credibility. We can walk into the German regulator, and we can get approval.
We can walk into the New York State regulator, look them across the table and get full papal blessing to operate in their locale. You can just look around and you can see there are very few like that, and that's why we win institutions. We have great liquidity at a low cost. We have a feature-rich platform. We're known for running a reliable platform that's highly compliant and super credible. All of that's great. I'm not going to mince words. Crypto is a lousy environment for trading right now, Dan. I don't think that the CLARITY Act not passing this session is helpful. I'd love to be able to tell you, "Oh, it doesn't matter at all." I think around the trading of pure crypto assets, so think Bitcoin, I'll call that a pure crypto asset, some of these layer one blockchains.
I was looking forward to the CLARITY Act because I do think there's another wave of institutions that would've rolled in. Some of the obvious guys, some of you on the call work for them, that still don't hold Bitcoin, let's say, for private wealth clients here in the United States. So, feel really good about the pipeline. We continue to build features and regulatory approvals and build out our jurisdictional footprint all around the world. I'm responding to how you framed the question, and now I'm kind of pivoting to tell you I'm even more excited about the trading of tokenized securities on this mousetrap that we built. It may well turn out to be that that was the giant growth opportunity that none of us saw coming, as opposed to the traditional crypto assets.
Thank you. That is helpful, and appreciate the clarity there. Then just in the context of SSNO, obviously took the guidance up. The momentum in that side of the business actually seems quite good. Maybe Dave unpack a little bit of what is happening versus what you thought at the beginning of the year when you initially gave the guidance and kind of where things sit today.
Yeah. Thanks, Dan. To be clear, we have maintained the midpoint of the guide. We have just narrowed it here today. But given the environment we have seen over the last 6, 9, 12 months, where Bitcoin has been down 50%, alts down 50%-75%, interest rates from a year ago down almost 20%, we are extremely pleased with the resiliency of our SSNO line item. Tom touched on it a little bit, and there is a slide in the deck. We continue to use the Consensus event as an acquisition channel and also as a cross-sell vehicle to create stickier and stickier revenue. Over half of our Consensus sponsorship revenue came from customers with multiple different products. We are beginning to see renewed momentum in our pipeline of SSNO, particularly around tokenization. It is not just because of the Equiniti transaction.
In general, that is becoming the fastest-growing part of the crypto marketplace. It is just a bigger TAM. We are excited about this new position of our business and the new developments in the market, and we think the business we have built is perfectly positioned to ride those tailwinds across all of our different line items, but especially in SS&O and liquidity services.
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Pete Christiansen of Citi. Please go ahead, Pete.
Thank you. Good morning, Tom and Dave. Question on capturing economics, tokenized equities. I guess when you think about the issuer-sponsored model, is the objective here for the shares to trade primarily on Bullish, or do you envision the token, I guess, being interoperable across multiple chains, venues, with Equiniti serving as the authoritative registry? I guess in this open architecture kind of framework, where do you expect Bullish to capture the majority of economics?
Yeah, great question. There's really kind of two insightful embedded questions in what you're asking, Pete. One is kind of walled garden versus interoperable, and the second is around the economic model. If you don't mind, I'll dissect it in that fashion. Let me just start with walled garden versus interoperable. We are absolutely building our token to be interoperable. In fact, on October 27th, we'll give you some more information, and in the months and quarters ahead. As I said earlier, we'll drop a few breadcrumbs, but not revealing the whole strategy. We're very much engaged with trading venues, regulated trading venues, less regulated trading venues, traditional crypto venues, TradFi firms, about the interoperability of issuer-sponsored tokens with those platforms, number one. Number two, I even see that interoperability working with so-called CSDs, central securities depositories, in the jurisdictions that we operate.
In the U.S., the most notable is DTCC or NSCC, but same thing abroad. One of the models that works well for those central securities depositories is they'll hold the actual share for safekeeping, and they'll issue a synthetic token on top of that. Sometimes you may have heard that referred to as an entitlement. It wouldn't surprise me at all to see that model really stay in place in various forms, in various locales, and they'll just hold the issuer-sponsored token as opposed to the old school, less beneficial book entry share. In addition, with respect to layer one blockchains, I don't think in the early days you will see a single blockchain gain 90%+ market share.
I think in the early days, there's going to be a thousand flowers that bloom, and then there's going to be a consolidation as the market kind of realizes what is the best blockchain or two to support the issuer-sponsored token. That's how we're looking at that as well. In terms of the economic model, Pete, and I'll let Dave chime in. We offer the following services for tokenization, and apologies for giving you an exhaustive list, but I really just want to give you a sense of the areas that we can provide value, and we can charge for that value because customers will appreciate it. Number one, we can sit down with the customer and discuss exactly what they want their token to look like.
Number two, we can actually generate that token using our tokenization factory, the kind of thing we have been doing now for the life of our company, and one of the ways we helped this tokenized cash or stablecoin market come to life. Number three, we can list it on our own regulated venue. Number four, we can provide liquidity on our venue or other venues. Those could be regulated venues, they could be DeFi venues. Number five, we can provide visibility for that token via our CoinDesk portfolio of assets, like think Consensus or the coindesk.com site itself. Number six, we can be a transfer agent, as we are today. Today, the transfer agent actually earns a quite low fee on a per customer basis. This new service is clearly a value-added service. So quick query what that will look like.
Finally, number seven, we have a set that I will put in kind of a group of other, but really does not deserve to be in the other bucket. We have a meaningful newswire business, GlobeNewswire, in the combined company. We have investor tools that we provide through Notified and Equiniti. All of these are the sorts of things that a CFO is going to be thirsty for as their stock goes tokenized. They are going to need to understand it. They are going to need to understand who is trading it, why they are trading it, who are the holders, how can they reward those holders. Some of these consumer goods companies are going to want to reward their holders, not just with dividends and greater voting rights, perhaps, for their loyalty, but maybe even discounts or tickets or award points or frequent flyer miles or what have you.
The number of things that we have in our quiver to provide the tokenization and charge for are many. Therefore, for me to give you kind of an exhaustive answer on the exact economics is a bit difficult.
Yeah, Pete, I think I would frame it for you this way. Our focus is going to be on the issuer and the success of every issuer customer in delivering great value for money to that customer via tokenizing their stock and other services. We do expect the Bullish exchange to be a beneficiary of our success and our issuer success. We do expect liquidity services to be a core product for us going forward. But the focus is on the issuers first, and we believe the transaction revenue will follow.
That's really helpful. I do want to ask, though, about some of the carve-outs from the Equiniti deal, particularly like retirement solutions and customer resolutions, those sorts of things. I know those are faster-growing parts of Equiniti's competitor. I'm just curious, does that create a client retention issue by separating those components of the deal?
No, Pete, those are largely independent businesses from the issuers too, the resolution business and the pension business, and they are not related to tokenization and issuer success. Again, that is what we're focused on, is issuer success. We're happy to part with those assets. We don't believe they're going to fit our growth profile going forward or margin profile, again, distinct from our tokenization and issuer-centric focus, and so we're happy to not be taking those assets with us.
Just to give you an example, Pete, one of those businesses is a business that sets up temporary call centers during a crisis. So go back to my childhood, Gerber baby food, it comes out, there's glass in the baby food, and all of a sudden they're getting 1 million calls a day. This company shows up and sets up a call center, and deals with that influx of very angry customers. Interesting business, entirely unrelated to what we're building here. So no, the short answer is no. Appreciate the thrust of the question, but I want to say completely unrelated. There may be some tether that I'm forgetting, so I'll hedge and say, almost entirely unrelated at a minimum.
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Ken Worthington of JPMorgan. Your line is open, Ken.
Hi, good morning, and thanks for taking the question. I know you do not break it out, but maybe you can help us directionally, on what happened to liquidity services revenue in 2Q relative to 1Q. Did it shrink? Did it grow? Was it largely unchanged from last quarter? Are there any puts and takes to call out in this quarter?
Thanks for the question, Ken. We do not give that level of detail, as you will know. I would say in general, liquidity services in the second quarter was again resilient. There were definitely headwinds versus the first quarter with overall lower prices in the environment. We had new bookings during the quarter, but not as many as we are experiencing today. So ex Consensus, we are happy with the stability of liquidity services and the SS&O revenue excluding Consensus during the second quarter. It was broadly in line with the underlying business previously in the first quarter. A couple of different puts and takes, but steady and we are proud of that resilience that we displayed in the second quarter and what we are going to do in the second half.
Okay, thank you. Maybe bigger picture, David, you and I have talked about this a bunch, but can you talk to what is happening with de-materialisation in the U.K. and the potential impact on Equiniti's U.K. profit if the business moves away from shareholder accounts to more omnibus structures? How does that impact the number and types of services offered by Equiniti, and how does that impact revenue? Just talk about timeframes here for de-materialisation.
Yeah, thanks, Ken. Taking a step back, de-materialisation, and this became really clear in the July report from the De-materialisation Taskforce that was published mid-July of this year. It is simply the process for the removal of paper shares from the U.K. market. Says so on the cover of the report. Furthermore, the report begins and ends with the acknowledgement that tokenization should be developed not just in parallel, but is likely to come before any of these further steps that had previously been contemplated by the Dematerialisation Taskforce, such as the so-called step three, which is the intermediate model. Even in that world, we believe Equiniti is a beneficiary of this process to remove paper shares from the market. We have a broker-dealer. Some of our competitors do not.
We believe there will be customers who are going to be up for grabs, and we'll be well-positioned to get those customers in the future. The removal of paper shares is currently scheduled for the end of next year. As we've put, there's a page in the appendices of the deck. Only less than 2% of Equiniti revenue is directly related to paper certificates and mail revenue. It's de minimis to their financial profile, even more de minimis to the combined financial profile, and we believe the convergence of tokenization and dematerialization is a tailwind to Equiniti that will more than offset that less than 2% revenue exposure that we have today.
I'm glad you asked this question, Ken. As you would imagine, we diligence their businesses on both sides of the pond because they really have a nexus of business in the U.S., a nexus of business in the U.K. De-materialization, the big piece of legislation in the U.S. was the CLARITY Act. A big piece of legislation in the U.K. was this kind of dematerialization piece that you brought up. The net of our diligence is that it was kind of puts and takes where the transfer agent would have a tail of customers that it would have to really hold onto. On the flip side, it was pushing hard towards broker-dealer activity, and we're the only guys that have a captive broker-dealer, and a really well-run broker-dealer.
We kind of looked at it as, okay, there's puts and takes, probably a net neutral to the business or something of that ilk. They have since come out and said, I just want to reiterate what Dave said, "Hey, tokenization kind of obviates this whole conversation, and we really should pivot to exactly how tokenization is going to work." That's where, as you know, we've repositioned our entire business as of early May of this year. Now, undoubtedly, we see this entire thing as a big opportunity for us. Similar to potentially this innovation exemption, accelerating conversations that may have otherwise taken place, let's say, in the back half of 2027 to a much earlier timeframe.
So too, does this dematerialization/tokenization conversation in the U.K. accelerate those conversations and give us a mandate and an open door to go in and talk to customers, educate them, work with them, be their consigliere as they move to a tokenized world?
Our next question comes from the line of Owen Lau of Clear Street. Your line is open, Owen.
Good morning. Thank you for taking my question. I hear that you are going to have a tokenization showcase in October, and you may be limited to what you can say. But could you please give us an update on the pipeline of the issuers wanting to tokenize their shares, profile of these companies? What are they excited about, the tokenization opportunity? And maybe talk about what you expect to get out from this event in October. Thank you.
Owen, thanks a lot. It is good to hear from you again. If I can just start with some contextual comments. We announced the Equiniti acquisition in May. As you would imagine, we are deep in planning the actual integration post-close. We are actually collaborating with the company on various and sundry solutions, including around tokenization. In fact, we bought this beautiful old antique home up on a hill in Newport at the corner of Main and Main. We knew we would go in, and it would have beautiful millwork and old-growth timber, but it was a fixer-upper. And we knew that going in. We just did not know exactly what we would find when we got in the inside. And what we are finding is that there are a lot of upside. To continue the metaphor, there are a lot of rooms that have been renovated.
There are great managers and leaders there that I am learning from every day. But perhaps the most exciting part of it is the direct relationship with the issuer, where they pick up the phone, and it is the quality of the issuer list, and relationships that Equiniti have that are even deeper than we expected, and we knew that they had high-quality relationships. So the issuer pipeline, in terms of those sort of conversations in the process there, is filling up. Still early days. We will have more opportunities this quarter than we did in Q2, and we will have more opportunities in Q4.
If I reflect on it and kind of have to handicap it feels more like, yes, there is going to be activity here in the latter half of 2026, and then this is a 2027 in earnest growth trajectory, in part because the ecosystem needs to develop. For example, the trading solutions for trading of these tokens are nascent. You heard Dave say, and I said in my opening remarks, we just started trading tokenized securities literally yesterday. We feel great about the pipeline, a little bit less certain about the timeline, but you will learn a lot more about that on October 27th. With respect to October 27th, we want you to have a more holistic perspective of this ecosystem. So it is not just about issuers, although they are important. It is about other partners.
For example, layer ones, the layer twos, the blockchains are chomping at the bit to be the blockchains that these issuers choose to tokenize their product. As I said in my comments, there is $37 billion of tokenized assets. To be clear, that is a rounding error. We have companies that we are talking to about tokenization that would be a multiple of that $37 billion. So you can imagine if you are a layer one. Also broker-dealers who want to make sure they too are part of this solution, and they are offering services to their customers. Then finally, you gave a lot for us to answer there, so apologies if this is long-winded, but I wanted to get to everything you asked in your question. In terms of why the issuers are interested, the answer to that is turning out to be more multivariate than we expected.
I will give you an example. When we talk to consumer goods companies, they are very eager to have a direct relationship with their customers. Anything we can provide to them through this tokenization process that gives them more of a direct relationship from their customers. They can learn from their customers. They can reward their customers. Like I said in my prepared remarks, the ability to provide, I do not know, frequent flyer miles or hotel points or a discount on a subscription, or even just a thank you for their shareholding. That sort of thing is very appealing. Then depending on the company, being able to provide accelerated dividends for longer-term, more loyal holders or additional voting rights or the 24/7 trading. So it is not a one-size-fits-all, but there is a number of things that we are hearing.
Got it. That is super helpful. Then, my follow-up on a modeling question. Your second quarter adjusted OpEx seems a little bit higher than expected, but you only raised the low end of your full-year OpEx guidance a bit. So the implied second half expense runway was much lower. So on a Bullish standalone basis, it is the second half runway, a good exit way for us to think about going into 2027. Is there any Equiniti-related investment we should be aware of for later this year? Thank you.
Thanks, Owen. I appreciate the question. I will take that one. As I mentioned in my prepared remarks, the second quarter featured higher expenses than we expect from any other quarter this year. That is in part driven by variable expenses associated with our Consensus Miami event, as well as the $2.5 million of one-time compensation expenses that I detailed related to our broader business transformation. Signing bonuses for new hires, retention, and relocation bonuses for certain existing key executives. We maintain a very tight grip on the costs. We have already realized additional synergies and further headcount reductions in the third quarter to keep us in line with that guide. I would not say that the back half of the year is representative of the run-rate for 2027, because that would be excluding the variable Consensus-related expenses we have in the first and second quarter.
We expect that that baseline in the second half of the year, which excludes the Consensus-related events, is roughly good. We will probably expand over time as we invest in the platform. We intend to hit our guidance there, and we maintain a tight cost control. The second quarter, as I mentioned, was definitely a bit anomalous with regard to the wages and compensation expenses with that additional $2.5 million that will not recur, and be offset in the back half of the year by those synergies we have already realized.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, due to the time, we ask that you limit yourself to one question. Our next question comes from the line of Ed Engel of Compass Point. Your line is open, Ed.
Hi, thanks for taking my question. As you think about competing with some of these synthetic issuers, is there anything you can do to kind of jumpstart distribution of your issuer-sponsored shares? I saw you mention the onboarding of market makers like Wintermute, so just kind of wondering how you're thinking about solving the cold start problem relative to the synthetic assets, which kind of already achieved pretty strong distribution pretty quickly. Thanks.
Yeah, no, great question. That's why we did the Equiniti acquisition, is we have 3,000 issuers that we can go to with a product out of the box. At the same time, the issuer is in control. This isn't the kind of thing where all 3,000 will start on the same day. But the difference between us and our more durable model and the synthetic model is once you've created it's there forever, as long as that company is a public company. It's not the kind of thing that can just turn around and disappear the next day, or you put it in the hands of an investor, and they think they're getting IPO proceeds, and they get none, which you probably read about in the press. So we don't think it's a cold start problem. We actually think it'll be an accelerated start.
But it's not an every single thing happens at once, as some of the other models may be, which I suspect will prove to be far less durable.
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Rayna Kumar of Oppenheimer & Co.. Please go ahead, Raina.
This is Guru on for Rayna, and thanks a lot for taking our question. A lot of the questions have already been asked, but if I can maybe switch to certain other aspects of the business. Most of the conversation pertaining to CoinDesk, right, over the past few quarters has revolved almost exclusively around some of the nice wins on the indices and data side, and of course, on Consensus events. If you can narrow in on the CoinDesk media segment, maybe comment on your outlook for this media portion of your business, excluding events, right? Metrics on slide 14 highlight some strong growth. You called out 38%. Wondering if this will primarily remain focused on supporting broader ecosystem through visibility, cross-selling, or if it could grow into a meaningful standalone piece as well. Thank you.
Thanks for the question. We are happy with the recent success in our viewer counts at CoinDesk. That is certainly true. Those have improved dramatically, thanks to the new leadership from JRO that we brought into the building late last year. We are currently not monetizing, per se, all those extra eyeballs through banner ads or things of that nature. We want to keep the website premium. It is directed mainly at the benefit of our existing issuers and partners in broadening our reach. We are happy and pleased with that business and the resumed growth it has achieved in views, and we expect it to be a beneficiary of our broader business transformation towards tokenization writ large.
There are days when the market share of that business is actually a majority of crypto media, a majority. There are lots and lots of competitors. We have carved out this role at the intersection of technology and finance. That is something we are going to be able to grow for years to come. As Dave said, it is very helpful for us, on occasion, to be able to use that asset for, say, for example, advertising purposes for other opportunities that we have under the Bullish umbrella.
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Nathan Frankovitz of Cantor Fitzgerald. Your question, please, Nathan.
Hey, good morning, guys. Thanks for taking my question. Tom, on your comment that $5 trillion in tokenized equities by 2030 might be a bit conservative, can you just kind of walk through what factors do you think might most influence whether that number plays out above or below that estimate? As a follow-up, do you have any thoughts on how that $5 trillion+ could be distributed between blockchains? Such as any L1s or categories in particular, or newer, more permissioned ones like Canton? Thank you.
Yeah, really good question. Citi's on this call, so I will start by saying the analysis is excellent. I am just more anecdotal, and I want to say that right up front. I had a conversation on Tuesday with the CEO of a $70 billion company about them tokenizing their stock. I am just looking at it, I am saying, "Okay, it is $37 billion today." I just had a conversation, a real conversation, with a real CEO of a $70 billion company about them tokenizing their stock. It does not take a lot of math to math more than $5 trillion, $6 trillion by the year 2030. I actually see a world where it kind of starts slowly, almost a trickle, and then we have a catalytic event. Either the wave accelerates or there is a one-time event. A big IPO only does a tokenized offering.
Once you have that, all the institutions are holding the tokenized assets, the broker-dealers are holding the tokenized assets, and you flip the U.S. or the U.K. equity markets onto public blockchains, perhaps alongside traditional shares for a period of time, could be years, could be a decade. But right there, you have just blown through $5 trillion, $6 trillion in terms of tokenized assets. So admittedly, I am coming at it more anecdotally than quantitative. Almost top-down based on these experiences that we are having. But like I said in May, the question was, "Oh, geez, is tokenization going to happen?" If I am honest, we had that question too internally. Look, good teams fight. We spent $4.2 billion for this business. You think we do not look at the glass half full and the glass half empty? We do. We ask that question.
I can tell you, we have not asked that question in six weeks. The horse is out of the barn. It is just a question of how quickly is it going to happen, and to what extent are we going to be a leader? In terms of the public blockchains who are going to be the ultimate winners out of this, I do not have a clear crystal ball. I think the most decentralized are working on privacy solutions. The least decentralized that have privacy solutions are looking at how can we do a better job of decentralizing. It is going to be whichever of those blockchains meets the moment and meets those customer needs are ultimately going to be the big winners, and we are open to that being many. We are open to that being several, and that is fine with us.
Thank you. I would now like to turn the conference back to Tom Farley for closing remarks. Sir?
Hi, everyone. It's Dave. Tom had to jump to a customer call here. Thank you everyone for attending this morning's call. We look forward to staying in touch with all of you on this journey as we build out the future of financial infrastructure. Please reach out to our IR team with any follow-up questions, and we look forward to seeing everyone next quarter.
This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now.
Investor releaseQuarter not tagged2026-08-12Bullish (BLSH) Q2 2026 Earnings Report Preview: What To Look For
GuruFocus.com
Bullish (BLSH) Q2 2026 Earnings Report Preview: What To Look For
This article first appeared on GuruFocus. Bullish (NYSE:BLSH) is set to release its Q2 2026 earnings on Aug 13, 2026. The consensus estimate for Q2 2026 revenue is 88.44 million, and the earnings are expected to come in at 1.13 per share. The full year 2026's revenue is expected to be $367.41 million and the earnings are expected to be $1.29 per share. More detailed estimate data can be found on the Forecast page Warning! GuruFocus has detected 10 Warning Signs with BSP:AZZA3. Is BLSH fairly valued? Test your thesis with our free DCF calculator. Revenue estimates for Bullish (NYSE:BLSH) have declined from $384.28 million to $367.41 million for the full year 2026 and declined from $447.38 million to $425.10 million for 2027 over the past 90 days. Earnings estimates for Bullish (NYSE:BLSH) have increased from $0.52 per share to $1.29 per share for the full year 2026 and increased from $2.02 per share to $2.53 per share for 2027 over the past 90 days. In the previous quarter of 2026-03-31, Bullish's (NYSE:BLSH) actual revenue was $92.80 million, which missed analysts' revenue expectations of $93.56 million by -0.81%. Bullish's (NYSE:BLSH) actual earnings were $-3.85 per share, which missed analysts' earnings expectations of $0.12 per share by -3230.08%. After releasing the results, Bullish (NYSE:BLSH) was down by -5.62% in one day. Based on the one-year price targets offered by 10 analysts, the average target price for Bullish (NYSE:BLSH) is $44.70 with a high estimate of $55.00 and a low estimate of $27.00. The average target implies an upside of 82.30% from the current price of $24.52. Based on the consensus recommendation from 12 brokerage firms, Bullish's (NYSE:BLSH) average brokerage recommendation is currently 2.50, indicating an "Outperform" status. The rating scale ranges from 1 to 5, where 1 signifies Strong Buy, and 5 denotes Sell.
Investor releaseQuarter not tagged2026-08-12Bullish (BLSH) Heads Into Earnings With A Pricey Valuation In Focus
Simply Wall St.
Bullish (BLSH) Heads Into Earnings With A Pricey Valuation In Focus
Track your investments for FREE with Simply Wall St, the portfolio command center trusted by over 7 million individual investors worldwide. Bullish (BLSH) is drawing attention ahead of its second quarter earnings report on August 13, one year after its stock market debut, as investors assess expectations for profits and revenue. See our latest analysis for Bullish. The Bullish share price closed at US$24.52 on August 11, with a 7 day share price return of 3.03% but a 90 day share price return that has declined 41.35%. This points to fading momentum ahead of earnings after a strong stock market debut and a tougher period for crypto trading businesses. If you are watching Bullish around earnings and want to see what else is moving in digital assets, it could be a good moment to scan 19 cryptocurrency and blockchain stocks After Bullish slid over the past quarter yet still trades above its first day levels, some investors will consider buying the dip while others wait for more clarity. The next step is to see what the current valuation actually implies. Bullish currently trades on a P/S ratio of 13.9x, which is high relative to several reference points and sits against a backdrop of continued losses. The price to sales multiple compares the company’s market value to its revenue. For a business like Bullish that is unprofitable on net income and reported a loss of $1,002.4m on revenue of $267.9m, investors are effectively paying a premium based on sales alone rather than current earnings. According to Simply Wall St, Bullish is considered expensive relative to several benchmarks. Its 13.9x P/S ratio is higher than the estimated fair P/S ratio of 3.6x that the SWS fair ratio model suggests the market could move toward. It is also higher than the US Capital Markets industry average P/S of 3.4x and above the peer average P/S of 4.1x. These gaps indicate that the stock trades at a materially richer sales multiple than both its sector and closer peers, while it is also forecast to remain unprofitable and has a forecast return on equity of 3.4% in three years. Explore the SWS fair ratio for Bullish Result: Price-to-sales of 13.9x (OVERVALUED) However, Bullish still faces clear risks if losses persist or crypto trading volumes remain subdued, which could pressure both the rich P/S multiple and sentiment. Find out about the key risks to this Bullish narrative. With sent…Read full documentShow less
Track your investments for FREE with Simply Wall St, the portfolio command center trusted by over 7 million individual investors worldwide. Bullish (BLSH) is drawing attention ahead of its second quarter earnings report on August 13, one year after its stock market debut, as investors assess expectations for profits and revenue. See our latest analysis for Bullish. The Bullish share price closed at US$24.52 on August 11, with a 7 day share price return of 3.03% but a 90 day share price return that has declined 41.35%. This points to fading momentum ahead of earnings after a strong stock market debut and a tougher period for crypto trading businesses. If you are watching Bullish around earnings and want to see what else is moving in digital assets, it could be a good moment to scan 19 cryptocurrency and blockchain stocks After Bullish slid over the past quarter yet still trades above its first day levels, some investors will consider buying the dip while others wait for more clarity. The next step is to see what the current valuation actually implies. Bullish currently trades on a P/S ratio of 13.9x, which is high relative to several reference points and sits against a backdrop of continued losses. The price to sales multiple compares the company’s market value to its revenue. For a business like Bullish that is unprofitable on net income and reported a loss of $1,002.4m on revenue of $267.9m, investors are effectively paying a premium based on sales alone rather than current earnings. According to Simply Wall St, Bullish is considered expensive relative to several benchmarks. Its 13.9x P/S ratio is higher than the estimated fair P/S ratio of 3.6x that the SWS fair ratio model suggests the market could move toward. It is also higher than the US Capital Markets industry average P/S of 3.4x and above the peer average P/S of 4.1x. These gaps indicate that the stock trades at a materially richer sales multiple than both its sector and closer peers, while it is also forecast to remain unprofitable and has a forecast return on equity of 3.4% in three years. Explore the SWS fair ratio for Bullish Result: Price-to-sales of 13.9x (OVERVALUED) However, Bullish still faces clear risks if losses persist or crypto trading volumes remain subdued, which could pressure both the rich P/S multiple and sentiment. Find out about the key risks to this Bullish narrative. With sentiment around Bullish clearly mixed, it helps to move quickly and weigh the upside against the downside using the 1 key reward and 1 important warning sign. If Bullish has your attention but you want a broader watchlist, now is the time to look across other opportunities before the market moves past you. Spot potential bargains that combine quality with attractive pricing by scanning 49 high quality undervalued stocks. Build a watchlist around companies that prioritize resilience by checking out 85 resilient stocks with low risk scores. Hunt for lesser known opportunities with strong fundamentals through the screener containing 20 high quality undiscovered gems. This article by Simply Wall St is general in nature. We provide commentary based on historical data and analyst forecasts only using an unbiased methodology and our articles are not intended to be financial advice. It does not constitute a recommendation to buy or sell any stock, and does not take account of your objectives, or your financial situation. We aim to bring you long-term focused analysis driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis may not factor in the latest price-sensitive company announcements or qualitative material. Simply Wall St has no position in any stocks mentioned. Companies discussed in this article include BLSH. Have feedback on this article? Concerned about the content? Get in touch with us directly. Alternatively, email [email protected]
Investor releaseQuarter not tagged2026-08-11Peter Thiel-backed company faces Q2 reality check before earnings
TheStreet
Peter Thiel-backed company faces Q2 reality check before earnings
Bullish, the institutional-focused cryptocurrency exchange backed by billionaire investor Peter Thiel, heads into its second-quarter earnings report with Wall Street seeing significant upside despite a difficult quarter for crypto trading businesses. The company is scheduled to report results before the U.S. market opens on Aug. 13, exactly one year after its blockbuster stock-market debut. Wall Street analysts expect Bullish to report adjusted earnings of $0.09 per share and roughly $87.4 million in revenue, according to Yahoo Finance data. Revenue is projected to rise about 53% from a year earlier, though the consensus earnings estimate has slipped from $0.15 about three months ago. Related: MoneyGram brings cash-to-crypto service to Solana FactSet data cited by The Wall Street Journal shows five analysts with "Buy" ratings and six at "Hold," with an average price target of $40.75, roughly 66% above the recent share price of about $24.60. Citi's Peter Christiansen reiterated a "Buy" on July 28, though he cut his target to $50 from $65. Clear Street's Owen Lau initiated coverage with a "Buy" and a $40 target on July 24, and Deutsche Bank's Brian Bedell holds the most bullish target among recent calls, maintaining a "Buy" on May 15 while trimming his to $61 from $63. Supporters point to Bullish's institutional client base, its fast-growing derivatives business, and an early push into tokenization and stablecoins. However, JPMorgan has stayed on the sidelines with a "Neutral" rating and cut its price target this year. For context, Bullish is a digital-asset exchange aimed largely at institutional traders, offering both spot and derivatives trading. It is led by CEO Tom Farley, a former president of the New York Stock Exchange, and is backed by Thiel's venture firm Founders Fund, BlackRock and Cathie Wood's ARK Investment Management also bought into its IPO. It also owns CoinDesk, the long-running crypto news publication. Bullish acquired CoinDesk in November 2023 from Digital Currency Group — which had put the publication up for sale after the bear market battered its parent — in an all-cash deal reported at around $75 million. CoinDesk continues to operate as an independent subsidiary. Bullish's Aug. 13, 2025 IPO was one of the year's hottest. It priced at $37 a share — above its expected range, then opened at $90, spiked as high as $118 (triggering a volati…Read full documentShow less
Bullish, the institutional-focused cryptocurrency exchange backed by billionaire investor Peter Thiel, heads into its second-quarter earnings report with Wall Street seeing significant upside despite a difficult quarter for crypto trading businesses. The company is scheduled to report results before the U.S. market opens on Aug. 13, exactly one year after its blockbuster stock-market debut. Wall Street analysts expect Bullish to report adjusted earnings of $0.09 per share and roughly $87.4 million in revenue, according to Yahoo Finance data. Revenue is projected to rise about 53% from a year earlier, though the consensus earnings estimate has slipped from $0.15 about three months ago. Related: MoneyGram brings cash-to-crypto service to Solana FactSet data cited by The Wall Street Journal shows five analysts with "Buy" ratings and six at "Hold," with an average price target of $40.75, roughly 66% above the recent share price of about $24.60. Citi's Peter Christiansen reiterated a "Buy" on July 28, though he cut his target to $50 from $65. Clear Street's Owen Lau initiated coverage with a "Buy" and a $40 target on July 24, and Deutsche Bank's Brian Bedell holds the most bullish target among recent calls, maintaining a "Buy" on May 15 while trimming his to $61 from $63. Supporters point to Bullish's institutional client base, its fast-growing derivatives business, and an early push into tokenization and stablecoins. However, JPMorgan has stayed on the sidelines with a "Neutral" rating and cut its price target this year. For context, Bullish is a digital-asset exchange aimed largely at institutional traders, offering both spot and derivatives trading. It is led by CEO Tom Farley, a former president of the New York Stock Exchange, and is backed by Thiel's venture firm Founders Fund, BlackRock and Cathie Wood's ARK Investment Management also bought into its IPO. It also owns CoinDesk, the long-running crypto news publication. Bullish acquired CoinDesk in November 2023 from Digital Currency Group — which had put the publication up for sale after the bear market battered its parent — in an all-cash deal reported at around $75 million. CoinDesk continues to operate as an independent subsidiary. Bullish's Aug. 13, 2025 IPO was one of the year's hottest. It priced at $37 a share — above its expected range, then opened at $90, spiked as high as $118 (triggering a volatility halt), and closed its first day up more than 80% near $68. A year later, the stock sits around $24.60, well below both its IPO price and its debut close, as the crypto downturn cooled the frenzy around newly public digital-asset names. Kevin O'Leary bets millions on rare sports cards over gold and crypto Top economist says Bitcoin has one flaw gold will never have Ondo's USDY crosses $2.1B market cap in 3 years Bullish reports after a punishing stretch for the industry, as falling digital-asset prices squeezed both trading activity and balance sheets. The exchange handled $130.7 billion in total spot and derivatives volume in the quarter ended June 30, down 33% from the prior quarter. Coinbase reported a $359.5 million net loss for the second quarter as softer markets weighed on its business. And Strategy, the world's largest corporate Bitcoin holder, booked an $8.32 billion unrealized loss on its Bitcoin as prices fell, driving an $8.22 billion net loss for the quarter. Bullish itself entered Q2 on the back foot, having missed Wall Street expectations in the first quarter: its adjusted earnings of $0.13 per share came in below the $0.17 estimate. Bullish shares were trading around $24.47 at the time of writing, down roughly 0.5% on the day. Related: Analyst predicts 55% rally for surging stock on $9B Anthropic deal This story was originally published by TheStreet on Aug 11, 2026, where it first appeared in the MARKETS section. Add TheStreet as a Preferred Source by clicking here.
Investor releaseQuarter not tagged2026-08-07DoubleVerify Holdings (DV) Q2 Earnings and Revenues Miss Estimates
Zacks
DoubleVerify Holdings (DV) Q2 Earnings and Revenues Miss Estimates
DoubleVerify Holdings (DV) came out with quarterly earnings of $0.22 per share, missing the Zacks Consensus Estimate of $0.25 per share. This compares to earnings of $0.05 per share a year ago. These figures are adjusted for non-recurring items. This quarterly report represents an earnings surprise of -12.00%. A quarter ago, it was expected that this software platform for digital media measurement and analytics would post earnings of $0.18 per share when it actually produced earnings of $0.17, delivering a surprise of -5.56%. Over the last four quarters, the company has surpassed consensus EPS estimates just once. DoubleVerify, which belongs to the Zacks Internet - Software industry, posted revenues of $193.79 million for the quarter ended June 2026, missing the Zacks Consensus Estimate by 3.85%. This compares to year-ago revenues of $189.02 million. The company has topped consensus revenue estimates just once over the last four quarters. The sustainability of the stock's immediate price movement based on the recently-released numbers and future earnings expectations will mostly depend on management's commentary on the earnings call. DoubleVerify shares have added about 4.8% since the beginning of the year versus the S&P 500's gain of 12.8%. While DoubleVerify has underperformed the market so far this year, the question that comes to investors' minds is: what's next for the stock? There are no easy answers to this key question, but one reliable measure that can help investors address this is the company's earnings outlook. Not only does this include current consensus earnings expectations for the coming quarter(s), but also how these expectations have changed lately. Empirical research shows a strong correlation between near-term stock movements and trends in earnings estimate revisions. Investors can track such revisions by themselves or rely on a tried-and-tested rating tool like the Zacks Rank, which has an impressive track record of harnessing the power of earnings estimate revisions. Ahead of this earnings release, the estimate revisions trend for DoubleVerify was mixed. While the magnitude and direction of estimate revisions could change following the company's just-released earnings report, the current status translates into a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold) for the stock. So, the shares are expected to perform in line with the market in the near future. You can…Read full documentShow less
DoubleVerify Holdings (DV) came out with quarterly earnings of $0.22 per share, missing the Zacks Consensus Estimate of $0.25 per share. This compares to earnings of $0.05 per share a year ago. These figures are adjusted for non-recurring items. This quarterly report represents an earnings surprise of -12.00%. A quarter ago, it was expected that this software platform for digital media measurement and analytics would post earnings of $0.18 per share when it actually produced earnings of $0.17, delivering a surprise of -5.56%. Over the last four quarters, the company has surpassed consensus EPS estimates just once. DoubleVerify, which belongs to the Zacks Internet - Software industry, posted revenues of $193.79 million for the quarter ended June 2026, missing the Zacks Consensus Estimate by 3.85%. This compares to year-ago revenues of $189.02 million. The company has topped consensus revenue estimates just once over the last four quarters. The sustainability of the stock's immediate price movement based on the recently-released numbers and future earnings expectations will mostly depend on management's commentary on the earnings call. DoubleVerify shares have added about 4.8% since the beginning of the year versus the S&P 500's gain of 12.8%. While DoubleVerify has underperformed the market so far this year, the question that comes to investors' minds is: what's next for the stock? There are no easy answers to this key question, but one reliable measure that can help investors address this is the company's earnings outlook. Not only does this include current consensus earnings expectations for the coming quarter(s), but also how these expectations have changed lately. Empirical research shows a strong correlation between near-term stock movements and trends in earnings estimate revisions. Investors can track such revisions by themselves or rely on a tried-and-tested rating tool like the Zacks Rank, which has an impressive track record of harnessing the power of earnings estimate revisions. Ahead of this earnings release, the estimate revisions trend for DoubleVerify was mixed. While the magnitude and direction of estimate revisions could change following the company's just-released earnings report, the current status translates into a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold) for the stock. So, the shares are expected to perform in line with the market in the near future. You can see the complete list of today's Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here. It will be interesting to see how estimates for the coming quarters and the current fiscal year change in the days ahead. The current consensus EPS estimate is $0.29 on $207.05 million in revenues for the coming quarter and $1.09 on $817.29 million in revenues for the current fiscal year. Investors should be mindful of the fact that the outlook for the industry can have a material impact on the performance of the stock as well. In terms of the Zacks Industry Rank, Internet - Software is currently in the top 44% of the 250 plus Zacks industries. Our research shows that the top 50% of the Zacks-ranked industries outperform the bottom 50% by a factor of more than 2 to 1. Another stock from the same industry, Bullish (BLSH), has yet to report results for the quarter ended June 2026. The results are expected to be released on August 13. This company is expected to post quarterly earnings of $0.09 per share in its upcoming report, which represents a year-over-year change of +280%. The consensus EPS estimate for the quarter has been revised 16.7% lower over the last 30 days to the current level. Bullish's revenues are expected to be $90.02 million, up 57.9% from the year-ago quarter. Want the latest recommendations from Zacks Investment Research? Today, you can download 7 Best Stocks for the Next 30 Days. Click to get this free report DoubleVerify Holdings, Inc. (DV) : Free Stock Analysis Report Bullish (BLSH) : Free Stock Analysis Report This article originally published on Zacks Investment Research (zacks.com). Zacks Investment Research
Investor releaseQuarter not tagged2026-08-06Bullish (BLSH) Earnings Expected to Grow: Should You Buy?
Zacks
Bullish (BLSH) Earnings Expected to Grow: Should You Buy?
The market expects Bullish (BLSH) to deliver a year-over-year increase in earnings on higher revenues when it reports results for the quarter ended June 2026. This widely-known consensus outlook is important in assessing the company's earnings picture, but a powerful factor that might influence its near-term stock price is how the actual results compare to these estimates. The stock might move higher if these key numbers top expectations in the upcoming earnings report, which is expected to be released on August 13. On the other hand, if they miss, the stock may move lower. While the sustainability of the immediate price change and future earnings expectations will mostly depend on management's discussion of business conditions on the earnings call, it's worth handicapping the probability of a positive EPS surprise. This company is expected to post quarterly earnings of $0.09 per share in its upcoming report, which represents a year-over-year change of +280%. Revenues are expected to be $90.02 million, up 57.9% from the year-ago quarter. The consensus EPS estimate for the quarter has been revised 16.68% lower over the last 30 days to the current level. This is essentially a reflection of how the covering analysts have collectively reassessed their initial estimates over this period. Investors should keep in mind that an aggregate change may not always reflect the direction of estimate revisions by each of the covering analysts. Price, Consensus and EPS Surprise Estimate revisions ahead of a company's earnings release offer clues to the business conditions for the period whose results are coming out. This insight is at the core of our proprietary surprise prediction model -- the Zacks Earnings ESP (Expected Surprise Prediction). The Zacks Earnings ESP compares the Most Accurate Estimate to the Zacks Consensus Estimate for the quarter; the Most Accurate Estimate is a more recent version of the Zacks Consensus EPS estimate. The idea here is that analysts revising their estimates right before an earnings release have the latest information, which could potentially be more accurate than what they and others contributing to the consensus had predicted earlier. Thus, a positive or negative Earnings ESP reading theoretically indicates the likely deviation of the actual earnings from the consensus estimate. However, the model's predictive power is significant for pos…Read full documentShow less
The market expects Bullish (BLSH) to deliver a year-over-year increase in earnings on higher revenues when it reports results for the quarter ended June 2026. This widely-known consensus outlook is important in assessing the company's earnings picture, but a powerful factor that might influence its near-term stock price is how the actual results compare to these estimates. The stock might move higher if these key numbers top expectations in the upcoming earnings report, which is expected to be released on August 13. On the other hand, if they miss, the stock may move lower. While the sustainability of the immediate price change and future earnings expectations will mostly depend on management's discussion of business conditions on the earnings call, it's worth handicapping the probability of a positive EPS surprise. This company is expected to post quarterly earnings of $0.09 per share in its upcoming report, which represents a year-over-year change of +280%. Revenues are expected to be $90.02 million, up 57.9% from the year-ago quarter. The consensus EPS estimate for the quarter has been revised 16.68% lower over the last 30 days to the current level. This is essentially a reflection of how the covering analysts have collectively reassessed their initial estimates over this period. Investors should keep in mind that an aggregate change may not always reflect the direction of estimate revisions by each of the covering analysts. Price, Consensus and EPS Surprise Estimate revisions ahead of a company's earnings release offer clues to the business conditions for the period whose results are coming out. This insight is at the core of our proprietary surprise prediction model -- the Zacks Earnings ESP (Expected Surprise Prediction). The Zacks Earnings ESP compares the Most Accurate Estimate to the Zacks Consensus Estimate for the quarter; the Most Accurate Estimate is a more recent version of the Zacks Consensus EPS estimate. The idea here is that analysts revising their estimates right before an earnings release have the latest information, which could potentially be more accurate than what they and others contributing to the consensus had predicted earlier. Thus, a positive or negative Earnings ESP reading theoretically indicates the likely deviation of the actual earnings from the consensus estimate. However, the model's predictive power is significant for positive ESP readings only. A positive Earnings ESP is a strong predictor of an earnings beat, particularly when combined with a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy), 2 (Buy) or 3 (Hold). Our research shows that stocks with this combination produce a positive surprise nearly 70% of the time, and a solid Zacks Rank actually increases the predictive power of Earnings ESP. Please note that a negative Earnings ESP reading is not indicative of an earnings miss. Our research shows that it is difficult to predict an earnings beat with any degree of confidence for stocks with negative Earnings ESP readings and/or Zacks Rank of 4 (Sell) or 5 (Strong Sell). For Bullish, the Most Accurate Estimate is lower than the Zacks Consensus Estimate, suggesting that analysts have recently become bearish on the company's earnings prospects. This has resulted in an Earnings ESP of -5.35%. On the other hand, the stock currently carries a Zacks Rank of #4. So, this combination makes it difficult to conclusively predict that Bullish will beat the consensus EPS estimate. While calculating estimates for a company's future earnings, analysts often consider to what extent it has been able to match past consensus estimates. So, it's worth taking a look at the surprise history for gauging its influence on the upcoming number. For the last reported quarter, it was expected that Bullish would post earnings of $0.17 per share when it actually produced earnings of $0.13, delivering a surprise of -23.53%. The company has not been able to beat consensus EPS estimates in any of the last four quarters. An earnings beat or miss may not be the sole basis for a stock moving higher or lower. Many stocks end up losing ground despite an earnings beat due to other factors that disappoint investors. Similarly, unforeseen catalysts help a number of stocks gain despite an earnings miss. That said, betting on stocks that are expected to beat earnings expectations does increase the odds of success. This is why it's worth checking a company's Earnings ESP and Zacks Rank ahead of its quarterly release. Make sure to utilize our Earnings ESP Filter to uncover the best stocks to buy or sell before they've reported. Bullish doesn't appear a compelling earnings-beat candidate. However, investors should pay attention to other factors too for betting on this stock or staying away from it ahead of its earnings release. CI&T Inc. (CINT), another stock in the Zacks Internet - Software industry, is expected to report earnings per share of $0.1 for the quarter ended June 2026. This estimate points to a year-over-year change of +42.9%. Revenues for the quarter are expected to be $138.66 million, up 18.3% from the year-ago quarter. Over the last 30 days, the consensus EPS estimate for CI&T has remained unchanged. Nevertheless, the company now has an Earnings ESP of -15.79%, reflecting a lower Most Accurate Estimate. This Earnings ESP, combined with its Zacks Rank #4 (Sell), makes it difficult to conclusively predict that CI&T will beat the consensus EPS estimate. Over the last four quarters, the company surpassed consensus EPS estimates two times. Stay on top of upcoming earnings announcements with the Zacks Earnings Calendar. Want the latest recommendations from Zacks Investment Research? Today, you can download 7 Best Stocks for the Next 30 Days. Click to get this free report Bullish (BLSH) : Free Stock Analysis Report CI&T Inc. (CINT) : Free Stock Analysis Report This article originally published on Zacks Investment Research (zacks.com). Zacks Investment Research
Investor releaseQuarter not tagged2026-08-06Klaviyo, Inc. (KVYO) Meets Q2 Earnings Estimates
Zacks
Klaviyo, Inc. (KVYO) Meets Q2 Earnings Estimates
Klaviyo, Inc. (KVYO) came out with quarterly earnings of $0.19 per share, in line with the Zacks Consensus Estimate . This compares to earnings of $0.16 per share a year ago. These figures are adjusted for non-recurring items. A quarter ago, it was expected that this company would post earnings of $0.19 per share when it actually produced earnings of $0.22, delivering a surprise of +15.79%. Over the last four quarters, the company has surpassed consensus EPS estimates three times. Klaviyo, Inc., which belongs to the Zacks Internet - Software industry, posted revenues of $370.58 million for the quarter ended June 2026, surpassing the Zacks Consensus Estimate by 2.50%. This compares to year-ago revenues of $293.12 million. The company has topped consensus revenue estimates four times over the last four quarters. The sustainability of the stock's immediate price movement based on the recently-released numbers and future earnings expectations will mostly depend on management's commentary on the earnings call. Klaviyo, Inc. shares have lost about 41.2% since the beginning of the year versus the S&P 500's gain of 13%. While Klaviyo, Inc. has underperformed the market so far this year, the question that comes to investors' minds is: what's next for the stock? There are no easy answers to this key question, but one reliable measure that can help investors address this is the company's earnings outlook. Not only does this include current consensus earnings expectations for the coming quarter(s), but also how these expectations have changed lately. Empirical research shows a strong correlation between near-term stock movements and trends in earnings estimate revisions. Investors can track such revisions by themselves or rely on a tried-and-tested rating tool like the Zacks Rank, which has an impressive track record of harnessing the power of earnings estimate revisions. Ahead of this earnings release, the estimate revisions trend for Klaviyo, Inc. was mixed. While the magnitude and direction of estimate revisions could change following the company's just-released earnings report, the current status translates into a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold) for the stock. So, the shares are expected to perform in line with the market in the near future. You can see the complete list of today's Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here. It will be interesting to see how estimates for the comi…Read full documentShow less
Klaviyo, Inc. (KVYO) came out with quarterly earnings of $0.19 per share, in line with the Zacks Consensus Estimate . This compares to earnings of $0.16 per share a year ago. These figures are adjusted for non-recurring items. A quarter ago, it was expected that this company would post earnings of $0.19 per share when it actually produced earnings of $0.22, delivering a surprise of +15.79%. Over the last four quarters, the company has surpassed consensus EPS estimates three times. Klaviyo, Inc., which belongs to the Zacks Internet - Software industry, posted revenues of $370.58 million for the quarter ended June 2026, surpassing the Zacks Consensus Estimate by 2.50%. This compares to year-ago revenues of $293.12 million. The company has topped consensus revenue estimates four times over the last four quarters. The sustainability of the stock's immediate price movement based on the recently-released numbers and future earnings expectations will mostly depend on management's commentary on the earnings call. Klaviyo, Inc. shares have lost about 41.2% since the beginning of the year versus the S&P 500's gain of 13%. While Klaviyo, Inc. has underperformed the market so far this year, the question that comes to investors' minds is: what's next for the stock? There are no easy answers to this key question, but one reliable measure that can help investors address this is the company's earnings outlook. Not only does this include current consensus earnings expectations for the coming quarter(s), but also how these expectations have changed lately. Empirical research shows a strong correlation between near-term stock movements and trends in earnings estimate revisions. Investors can track such revisions by themselves or rely on a tried-and-tested rating tool like the Zacks Rank, which has an impressive track record of harnessing the power of earnings estimate revisions. Ahead of this earnings release, the estimate revisions trend for Klaviyo, Inc. was mixed. While the magnitude and direction of estimate revisions could change following the company's just-released earnings report, the current status translates into a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold) for the stock. So, the shares are expected to perform in line with the market in the near future. You can see the complete list of today's Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here. It will be interesting to see how estimates for the coming quarters and the current fiscal year change in the days ahead. The current consensus EPS estimate is $0.21 on $378.44 million in revenues for the coming quarter and $0.86 on $1.52 billion in revenues for the current fiscal year. Investors should be mindful of the fact that the outlook for the industry can have a material impact on the performance of the stock as well. In terms of the Zacks Industry Rank, Internet - Software is currently in the top 44% of the 250 plus Zacks industries. Our research shows that the top 50% of the Zacks-ranked industries outperform the bottom 50% by a factor of more than 2 to 1. Bullish (BLSH), another stock in the same industry, has yet to report results for the quarter ended June 2026. The results are expected to be released on August 13. This company is expected to post quarterly earnings of $0.09 per share in its upcoming report, which represents a year-over-year change of +280%. The consensus EPS estimate for the quarter has been revised 16.7% lower over the last 30 days to the current level. Bullish's revenues are expected to be $90.02 million, up 57.9% from the year-ago quarter. Want the latest recommendations from Zacks Investment Research? Today, you can download 7 Best Stocks for the Next 30 Days. Click to get this free report Klaviyo, Inc. (KVYO) : Free Stock Analysis Report Bullish (BLSH) : Free Stock Analysis Report This article originally published on Zacks Investment Research (zacks.com). Zacks Investment Research

