On Thursday, Bullish (NYSE:BLSH) discussed second-quarter financial results during its earnings call. The full transcript is provided below.
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Summary
Bullish reported a 62% year-over-year increase in adjusted financial results, with subscription services and other revenue reaching a record $62.7 million in Q2 2026.
The company is proceeding with its acquisition of Equiniti Group, expected to close in January 2027, to enhance its business model resilience and expand into the tokenization of securities.
Bullish's tokenized securities began trading on its regulated venue, marking a significant step in its strategy to modernize market structure through issuer-sponsored tokenization.
The company's media arm, CoinDesk, saw strong growth with a 38% year-over-year increase in page views, and its indices are supporting new institutional products like Morgan Stanley's Bitcoin ETP.
Bullish adjusted its full-year 2026 guidance, expecting SS&O revenue between $225 to $245 million, with adjusted operating expenses between $225 to $230 million.
Full Transcript
OPERATOR
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 11 on your telephone. To remove yourself from the queue, you may press star 11 again. I would now like to hand the call over to Michael Fideli, Vice President of Finance. Please go ahead.
Michael Fideli, Vice President of Finance
Good morning and welcome to our second quarter earnings call. I'm Michael Fideli, 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.
Tom Farley, Chairman and CEO
Thanks, Mike. Good morning everyone. Thanks for joining. Hi, 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 27th 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 securities 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, 30% of the S&P 500. It serves more than 20 million shareholders and moves over half a trillion dollars 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.
And 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'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, 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 in the 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 gain 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 create, come to market, and trade well. In Q2 we continued adding great new clients, including the first exchange to list SoFi's new stablecoin, SoFi USD.
Finally, on the topic of regulation and legislation here in the United States, 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. And 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'll hand it to Dave.
Michael Fideli, Vice President of Finance
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, 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 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'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 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 to 230 million, roughly equally split between the third and fourth quarter. We continue to expect full-year finance expenses of $52 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 Equinity 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.
Tom Farley, Chairman and CEO
Thanks, Dave. And now we'll open it up for Q&A.
OPERATOR
Thank you. As a reminder, to ask a question, you will need to press star-11 on your telephone. To remove yourself from the queue, you may press star-11 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.
Brian Bedell, Analyst at Deutsche Bank
Great, thanks. Good morning, guys. Thanks so much for taking the question. 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. And 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?
Tom Farley, Chairman and CEO
Hey, good morning.
Brian Bedell, Analyst at Deutsche Bank
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. And 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?
Tom Farley, Chairman and CEO
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? And they've moved to, you know, they've kind of moved to how quickly will tokenization happen? And 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. 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 structured product. So too, in a 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. 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. 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, Analyst at Deutsche Bank
Yep, 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 the trading volumes, but just trying to get a sense of the organic component of that in the second half and into '27 potentially.
Michael Fideli, Vice President of Finance
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.
Tom Farley, Chairman and CEO
Yeah, 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 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. 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 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 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
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Joseph Boffi of Canaccord Genuity. Please go ahead, Joseph.
Joseph Boffi, Analyst at Canaccord Genuity
Hey guys, good morning. Nice to see, you know, all the progress along the, you know, 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, you know, where that's coming from. Obviously maybe the regulatory environment is favorable, but just a little more color there would be great.
Tom Farley, Chairman and CEO
Yeah, no, I appreciate the question, and I'm kind of a closet derivatives regulation nerdler, so appreciate the nuance here. Spent the formative part of my career managing futures exchanges and clearing houses. And there was kind of a path that was quite painful—a 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, you know, the Germans at BaFin and the Hong Kongers; in New York with a 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, 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 months, we believe we'll be able to access, in an unfettered way, the U.S. markets for derivatives.
Joseph Boffi, Analyst at Canaccord Genuity
That's great. Thanks for that color and good luck with that, Tom. And 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 that innovators carve-out or something like that, relative to tokenized equities and, you know, favoring the underlying versus the synthetic and, you know, what we might expect there and, you know, market reaction and issuer reaction to, you know, that kind of rule coming out of the regular—out of the SEC, I guess.
Tom Farley, Chairman and CEO
Sure. Yes. And I'll share a few breadcrumbs, but some of our conversations we'll 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. 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. 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—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, you know, 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 it 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 round 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—so-called stock—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 at 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 issuers, every one of our issuer customers, about tokenizing their shares, and we think it has the possibility of accelerating the timeline 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, 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
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Dan Fannin of Jefferies. Please go ahead, Dan.
Dan Fannin, Analyst at Jefferies
Thanks. Good morning, Tom. You talked about, you know, 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 backlog of firms that are looking 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?
Tom Farley, Chairman and CEO
Sure. I'll let Dave chime in as well. Dan, look, because I'm an optimist, I'll start with the positive: the pipeline is as large as it's ever been, and it continues to include more and more institutional names as time passes, 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 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 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, 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 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.
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. 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.
Dan Fannin, Analyst at Jefferies
Thank you, that's helpful and 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.
Dave Bonanno, CFO
Yeah, thanks, Dan. To be clear, we've maintained the midpoint of the guide; we've just narrowed it year-to-date. 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
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Pete Christiansen of Citi. Please go ahead, Pete.
Pete Christiansen, Analyst at Citi
Thank you. Good morning, Tom and Dave. Question on capturing economics of 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 authority of registry? And I guess in this open-architecture kind of framework, where do you expect Bullish to capture majority of economics?
Tom Farley, Chairman and CEO
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. 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.
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-one 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 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. 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. Those can be regulated venues; they can be DeFi venues. Number five, we can provide visibility for that token via our CoinDesk portfolio of assets like 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, Globe Newswire. 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.
Dave Bonanno, CFO
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 in delivering great value for money to that customer via tokenizing their stock and other services. We do expect Bullish 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.
Pete Christiansen, Analyst at Citi
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?
Dave Bonanno, CFO
No, Pete, those are largely independent businesses from the issuers to 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. So we're happy to not be taking those assets with us.
Tom Farley, Chairman and CEO
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—you know, Gerber baby food. It comes out, there's glass in the baby food and all of a sudden they're getting a 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 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.
OPERATOR
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Ken Worthington of J.P. Morgan. Your line is open.
Ken Worthington, Analyst at J.P. Morgan
Hi, good morning, and thanks for taking the question. 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?
Dave Bonanno, CFO
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.
Ken Worthington, Analyst at J.P. Morgan
Okay, thank you. 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 UK and the potential impact on Equiniti's UK 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 timeframes here for dematerialization.
Dave Bonanno, CFO
Yeah, thanks, Ken. Taking a step back, dematerialization—and this became really clear in the July report from the Dematerialization Task Force that was published mid-July of this year—is simply the process for the removal of paper shares from the UK market; it 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 Three, which is the intermediated model.
Even in that world we believe liquidity 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.
Tom Farley, Chairman and CEO
I'm glad you asked this question, Ken. You know, as you would imagine, we diligenced 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. Dematerialization—you know, 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. 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 onto, 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 of 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. 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 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.
OPERATOR
Our next question comes from the line of Owen Lau of Clear Street. Your line is open.
Tom Farley, Chairman and CEO
Owen, good morning.
Owen Lau, Analyst at Clear Street
Thank you for taking my question. 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. Thank you.
Tom Farley, Chairman and CEO
Oh, and thanks a lot. It's 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'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 is a lot of upside. There's a lot of room 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 and 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 timeline, but you'll 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's not just about issuers, although they're important; it's about other partners. So, for example, layer 1s, the layer 2s — 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'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 this 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 multivariate 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 with 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, Analyst at Clear Street
Got it. That's super helpful. 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 standalone basis, is the second-half runway a good exit way for us to think about going into 2027? Is there any equity-related investment we should be aware of for later this year?
Thank you.
Dave Bonanno, CFO
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 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've 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; it will probably expand over time as we invest in the platform, but we intend to hit our guidance there and we maintain 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 will be offset in the back half of the year by those synergies we've already realized.
OPERATOR
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 Engel, Analyst at Compass Point
Hi, thanks for taking that question. 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, 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.
Tom Farley, Chairman and CEO
Thanks. Yeah, no, great question. That's why we did the Equiniti acquisition — 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 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 it in the hands of an investor and they think they're getting IPO proceeds and they get none, which you've 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
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Raina Kumar of Oppenheimer & Co. Please go ahead, Raina.
Guru, Analyst at Oppenheimer
This is Guru on for Raina. Thanks a lot for taking our question. A lot of our 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 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.
Metrics on slide 14 highlight some strong growth — you called out 38%. So wondering if this will primarily remain focused on supporting the broader ecosystem through visibility, cross-selling, etc., or if it could grow into a meaningful standalone piece as well. Thank you.
Dave Bonanno, CFO
Thanks for the question. Yeah, 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 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 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 writ large.
Tom Farley, Chairman and CEO
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
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Nathan Frankovitz of Cantor Fitzgerald. Your question, please. Nathan.
Nathan Frankovitz, Analyst at Cantor Fitzgerald
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 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?
Tom Farley, Chairman and CEO
Thank you. Yeah, really good question. Citi's 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 up front. 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. 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 get to more than 5-6 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 one-time event. You know, a big IPO that 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 US or the UK 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've just blown through 5-6 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 ask that question. I can tell you we haven't asked that question in six weeks. 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 who are going to be the ultimate winners out of this? I don't have a clear crystal ball. I think that 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.
Dave Bonanno, CFO
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 up 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.
Disclaimer: This transcript is provided for informational purposes only. While we strive for accuracy, there may be errors or omissions in this automated transcription. For official company statements and financial information, please refer to the company's SEC filings and official press releases. Corporate participants' and analysts' statements reflect their views as of the date of this call and are subject to change without notice.
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