Hi, I'm Vince Molinari and welcome to FinTech TV.
We're broadcasting from the iconic New York Stock Exchange, and it's a great pleasure today to have Chris Tyra, who is the president of Bullish Exchange here with us today.
And so much to talk about and the auspicious day of bullish going public here on the New York Stock Exchange.
Big congratulations.
Thank you very much.
Thank you for having me as well.
Well, absolutely delighted and what an exciting day.
The New York Stock Exchange, a little bit of a coming home for you.
Tom Farley, and just the whole epicenter of financing converging around bullish today, just a, just a beautiful day all around.
Yeah, I mean if you look back.
Um, you know, it's an incredible, I think, moment for the industry as well where we founded Bulls 2020, launched in 2021, and the original vision was really that we didn't have a place where institutions could really engage with this emerging asset class.
We had a very strong view that this was going to be a globally relevant asset class and that institutions would need and want a place that they could engage with this.
It didn't really exist, and that's just the Nature of how crypto had developed very retail first.
We saw a gap in the market and we looked to fill that gap.
And look, there were some, you know, there were some challenging periods on the journey here, the mildly stated, sir, but yes, but here we are, and I say, you know, the largest stock exchange in the world, and you know, the reception that we're getting from institutions I think is phenomenal.
Well, you know, I want to dive into a couple of things, you know, we joke a little bit about some of the challenges. of any business, any, any new venture, but in an entirely new sector we've gone through crypto winters, we've gone through many other unpleasantries with bad actors, but the test of time has proven the original thesis was well correct and very interesting to me is Historically, right, institutional engagement first and then we'll get down to retail.
This is kind of inverted, right?
We start on the retail side and hurry up and wait.
The institutions have to come.
They have to come, and you've proven it out, right?
So where do you see this engagement with institutional participants going?
Yeah, I think, look, it's, it's what institutions really need is certainly the more heavily regulated is regulatory clarity, and you know we've seen this time and time again.
If you look back, I mean, do you remember when, you know, the Swiss Crypto Valley was a thing, you know, back in 2018 and 2019, you know, and that was really because the Swiss were very much at the forefront of putting in place clear regulation to give guidance to local companies, local banks, local investment firms as to how they could engage with this asset. and we saw a flurry of activity thereafter.
We saw that again in Singapore with Mass.
We saw that, you know, in Europe with Mika, a flurry of activity, you know, since Mika came into force at the beginning of this year.
We've had Deutsche Bank launch custody.
We've had SocGen launch custody.
SocGen have launched both a Euro stablecoin and a dollar stablecoin.
We've had Commerzbank launch custody.
So we tend to see this, you know, time and time again that Once we have clear regulation in place, we have a huge uptick in institutional interests and participation.
That's why I'm really very excited about the US right now, because it seems that we're just on that journey here.
So I think there's phenomenal opportunity here in the US in the coming years.
Fantastic point, Chris, and I just want to touch on that, Ray.
The misnomer that the crypto.
I don't want say industry universe participants don't want regulation.
Everybody's been wanting regulatory clarity so that there can be adoption, right, and you get to scale.
So you know, thanks to the administration and any number of executive orders and the embracing of crypto and digital assets here in the US, I think we're really positioned to be a leader and that's stand clear here.
A and I don't want to jump ahead too far, but you know, is there a pathway for for bullish here in the US?
Yeah, look, every market that we've entered, we've always done so, you know, regulation first, like we've, we've been regulated our entire existence.
We've done KYC and AML on every single client that's ever onboarded.
Um, you know, and we've always sought out the hardest licenses from the toughest regulators, and that's because, look, this industry, you know, rightly or wrongly, you know, has had its challenges, it's had its bad actors, and I think it's important for us as an institutionally focused firm really to lean into regulation.
So when we went to Europe, we didn't go to Malta, we didn't go to Cyprus, and that's where a lot of You know, our peers went, you know, we went to Germany because the Germans are, you know, Bain is one of the toughest regulators in the world.
Certainly are we sought that out purposefully as a signal to the market that we run our business in the right way and that in the way that institutions would want us to run it.
I think that we're, you know, in the US, we've been in process with the New York Department of Financial Services for, I think, about 2 years now.
And we have high hopes that we will be granted regulatory approval in the not too distant future, and we would very much welcome the ability to be able to provide our services here in the US.
Well, when that happens, we have to have you back and we'll have a celebratory and a deeper conversation on that.
So anxious to await that, you know, so much talk about stablecoin these days.
Can you give me, you know, from your lens, what are you seeing?
What are you thinking?
Are we there in terms of institutional adoption?
Clearly we're seeing some A great IPOs aside from what's happening with Bullish today going to a circle.
Give us a little insight if you wouldn't mind.
Yeah, so we actually do quite a lot in we are with stablecoins.
I think that we are really now primed for that market really to take.
Of like we're $250 billion in market cap right now, but we're really starting to see those corporate and institutional use cases come to the fore.
I spent 17 years trading commodities, and you know, I understand very well the pains of cross-border commodity trade settlement.
You know, in from two countries, not in the US that are trying to sell several dollars with each other, it's painful.
And if you have a, you know, let's say an Algerian refiner trying to sell to a an Algerian producer trying to sell to a Vietnamese refiner, that process, that transaction could take weeks to settle and costly and costly and with stablecoins you have total settlement finality within a matter of seconds.
So there are clear benefits in use cases and we're just starting to see those take off.
So you know.
Excuse the pun, we're very bullish on stable coins.
Well, you know, and you bring up a term that is so tradvi settlement finality, right, and how important that really is and the and the speed at which you can have your settlement finality deal closed is almost instantaneous so the time and the efficiency, you really can't compete with a stablecoin with anything else that's that's in the current market system, am I correct?
I think cross border, I think that's absolutely correct.
I think, you know, intra jurisdiction, I think, you know, you have like, you know, we now have Fed now, we have FPS in the UK.
It's really when you get cross border that the benefits really kick in.
Tore.
Talk to me a little bit more.
I've heard one of the great things that bullish and the exchange mechanism helps with is liquidity, and we talked about exchanges and access to liquidity and how powerful liquidity is, but that's an awesome.
I don't want to say service or benefit that you seem to be providing.
Yeah, so we're one of the only exchanges in the world that combines a traditional central limit order book with AMM technologies, so AMM being automated market maker.
So this is a concept from DeFi.
It was actually proposed by Metallic Butterin in 2016, and it was really a means by which you could create on-chain liquidity.
When you're limited as they were back then, they've subsequently solved a lot of these technical limitations, but you know, with 7 transactions per second, as we see with Ethereum is an EO, the hundreds of thousands of transactions that you and I know go through a central order book wouldn't be possible if each of those were unchained transactions.
And so it proposes a very simple model. of two pools of assets that would rebalance, but it's, it's a very powerful tool in terms of being able to, you know, generate liquidity and provide liquidity into a marketplace.
So we have actually combined the two.
So this is an off-chain AMM or we run off chain AMMs and we apply those into a traditional central limit order book and that provides a really unique source of liquidity.
It means that, you know, during periods of high market volatility our spreads don't widen as would typically happen with with normal OTC market maker provided liquids.
Well, I have to apologize.
I didn't realize the depth of what you were doing and the liquidity providing, but massively powerful when you think about that stabilization of price and not having widening spreads at the worst times, right?
So well done.
Any anything else that you can share with us that Not, not getting into the secret script or playbook yet.
What's what's coming up for the exchange?
Yeah, so one of the big things that we're working on is launch of options.
So when we set out, we had a design goal in North Star, if you will, a building an exchange where you could trade spot, perpetual futures, dated futures and options all out of one account and then have a hyper focus on capital efficiency within that account.
So cross asset collateralization, cross product margin.
Um, with the launch of options, that'll be the last of those 4 big building blocks in terms of product development that we'll have achieved, and we're looking to launch that next month, possibly in October, depending on regulatory approval.
So that's one of the major things that we're looking at and we're very excited.
Yeah, well, congratulations on that.
The listing today and I'm sure so much that's about to unfold for Bullish and Bullish Exchange.
Thanks for joining it, Chris.
What a pleasure.
Thank you very much.
