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Tom Farley
What the hell's blockchain? And he came and sat on my porch and he told me all about it. It'll disintermediate entities like the New York Stock Exchange. And I was like, I don't know what the hell he's talking about, but I want in. Fast forward. CZ's in jail. Sam's going to jail. Do Kwon's going to jail. You couldn't say crypto in public. I remember my father at one point was like, hey, what are you doing? I'm like, I'm talking to these bullish guys. He's like, wait, you were the president CEO of the New York Stock Exchange and now you're going to double down in crypto? Crypto at this moment, what does fire me up is exactly the stuff we're talking about. Can we create a new model for global financial markets? US equity, global equities, global fixed income mortgages. Run it on the blockchain and reduce the cost, increase the access, bring more liquidity and capital formation into business building. Yeah, it's going to disintermediate finance as we know it. And it feels like we're on the cusp.
Raoul Pal
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Tom Farley
Good to see you. Thanks for having me.
Raoul Pal
Yeah. We were just talking off camera that we both. Well, I live in the Cayman Islands. You guys are based there, and we don't get to see each other, which is crazy. So we have to rectify that somehow.
Tom Farley
I may even be coming more because I go for business three or four times a year, but I brought my wife and one of my daughters last year and they loved it. So we may have to spend more time down there.
Raoul Pal
Yeah, exactly. Particularly this time of year. It's kind of that November to March in New York is just not the place.
Tom Farley
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Raoul Pal
So, Tom, as ever, I'd love to get your story beforehand because you got a very interesting story and how the hell you ended up in crypto doing what you're doing now. So take us back to the beginning. What was your career?
Tom Farley
Yeah, sure, I'll do it. Warp speed. I was born in Bowie, Maryland, just outside of Washington, D.C. went to grade school and high school and college in that area, in D.C. in particular for a high school, school and college, and then moved out to San Francisco and did a few things. Really loved everything I did. I. I love business. I'm a business junkie. I did investment banking for two years and I was the, you know, finance nerdler. Staying up till two in the morning making pitchbooks. I even love that. I didn't like the lack of sleep, but just the learning and, you know, the getting the, the finance underpinning. Did two years of private equity and then I, I shifted to a far more engaging part of my career, which was being an entrepreneur. Started a risk management software company, was cloud based before that was a thing, and that was really fun. And through that process met a guy named Jeff Sprecher who was starting exchanges. And that's a name that I suspect you'll hear more and more regularly now in crypto. He recently put 2 billion into polymarket and did an equity investment into OkX. But I was just a young man when I met Jeff, and he's a bit of a swashbuckler and allowed me to take a lot of risk. Threw me in as the president and chief executive of the New York Board of Trade, the world's futures exchange. Exchange for sugar, coffee, cocoa, cotton, orange juice, bunch of other products when I was in my 20s, and then threw me in to run the New York Stock Exchange when I was in my 30s. It was all kind of bananas and fun, but I tried to stay sane. And you had to go through massive
Raoul Pal
transformations at that point as everything was becoming more electronic and different user base, high frequency traders become a much larger part of the exchanges. All of this stuff.
Tom Farley
Well, yes, I mean, it was even more dramatic. And I'll come back to this because I see some corollaries now perhaps with this coming tokenization wave in digital assets, but when I got to the New York Board of Trade, Raul, like, there was no electronic trading. I'm outing myself as granddad here. So when I, when I showed up, it was, you know, McGillicuddy and Veto were down on the floor and they were, they were trading with hand signs and gang signs. And I walked out, I walked down onto the floor. By the way, I love these guys. The feeling was not always mutual because, you know, imagine me, I'm 20, I'm 29, and this business is 140 years old. There's 500 employees, 400 employees, something like that. There's a thousand floor traders. And I come up, I come show up and they say, who are you? I said, I'm the boss. And they were like, wait, what, what's your job? And I'm like, oh, I'm going to introduce this thing. It's awesome. It's called electronic trading. And Cliff, your customer can now trade directly with your customer, Johnny. And, and, and you won't even realize it. And they were like, ah,
Raoul Pal
yeah, I like that.
Tom Farley
So that was, that was so. Yes, absolutely. It was cool and it was scary at times and it was sad at times because I'll tell you what, like, there's a lot of people that came out of those floors. Paul Tudor Jones was a cotton trader. Vinnie Viola, who, who owns the Florida Panthers and Virtu, he was an oil trader. And so these are super smart. All of them are very high iq. They didn't necessarily graduate college, some cases high school, but they were smart as. And it was a little sad because I'd say 70, 80% of that community really got eviscerated. There wasn't a, there wasn't kind of a next step for them. Now, a handful of them went on to be wildly successful, but a lot of them, you know, ended up in the trades. Yeah, construction or plumbing or what, or what have you. So. So there were times where it was tough just, just seeing how people adjusted. So, yeah, Nybot, that was my job, introduced electronic trading at the New York Stock Exchange. That was a different thing. Old labyrinthian systems like Mainframey Cobalt, IBM mainframes. And the job was Go in and just make this thing look like an actual, you know, modern exchange, which was a privilege every single day. Loved working there. And to stay sane, I would go up to Cape Cod, where my wife is from. My wife's parents live year round, a little town called Falmouth. Great town, one of the first towns when you go across Cape Cod. And I grew up there, across the street from these four boys that are always roughhousing and fighting and this kind of thing. But one of them was always carrying like Java Coding for Dummies. And so I said to him, hey, Danny, are you going back to Duke? And he said, no, no, I graduated. I'm moving out to California. I'm going to help start a blockchain company. And I was like, that's amazing. What the hell's blockchain? And he came and sat on my porch and he told me all about it. And he was like, yeah, it's going to disintermediate, like finance as we know it, and it'll disintermediate entities like the New York Stock Exchange. They're going to create this layer of programmable finance, this immutable ledger. Just make everything more efficient. And I was like, I don't know what the hell he's talking about, but I know he's a lot smarter than I am and I want in. And so we ended up, I don't know, a week or two later, agreeing to put maybe 10 million bucks, it was either 10 or 11 million bucks, into what was pre revenue or early revenue coinbase. And that's what really got me into digital assets, negotiated board information, right? So we could kind of watch this sucker grow and see how Brian and Fred operated. My neighbor, Danny Romero was there for a long time. He's done a lot of cool stuff. He subsequently built Farcaster. He's now at Tempo. He's the one who introduced me to blockchain and always wanted to get back into it. I. I suppose I was 12 years too early on the investment because the thesis was, institutions are going to come. This is going to be disintermediation at DTC or Broadridge or transfer agents or exchanges, whatever. It didn't happen. Obviously, it was a good investment. Some of that was just dumb luck, but it does feel like it's coming back around. And I don't know, I was like a 10 minute filibuster. Sorry about that, Rob. I'll be more concise.
Raoul Pal
It was perfect. So talk to me about joining Bullish, because I remember you joined and there was the opportunity to go public and then it wasn't. And then eventually you got it across the line, so.
Tom Farley
Oh, it was a nightmare.
Raoul Pal
Talk about the bullish journey.
Tom Farley
Yeah, that whole thing was a nightmare. So I left the New York Stock Exchange after five or six years, had a blast every single day. Loved working with my colleagues there, loved working with my ICE colleagues, Jeff Sprecher, Ben Jackson, many others. I just needed a change. I have three daughters, I had basically forgotten their names and it was time to be a dad. So I kind of stepped back a little bit and then started doing these SPACs and this before they were a thing and acquired a company called Global Blue VAT Tax Refund in the airports. You've probably seen it with all the travel you do, Raul. So I was the chairman of that business for six years, but then did another spa. Wanted to do crypto with that first spac, but it was just too early. Did another SPAC really want to do crypto. In fact, I called Brian and pitched the idea, which he rejected out of hand. This is well before Coinbase being public, but then met the bullish guys. And the bullish guys had this idea which was really all it was. It was an idea of, hey, let's use automated market maker technology and embed it in a central limit order book. So traditional exchange, like a New York Stock Exchange, but with automated market maker technology, so customers can rock up and they can have the market making technology that heretofore was just the sophisticated sort of province of the citadels or virtues of the world. And the second concept was, and let's do it in a really adult, compliant way, perhaps a la Coinbase, but do it globally, outside the United States. So have funny things like an audit, which even today many of the biggest name exchanges don't have. Most, I would say have a headquarters, for example, and actually seek out regulatory approvals so that when this wave of institutional adoption comes, you'll be there kind of with a catcher's mitt for that, for that type of business. Well, that reverberated with me because. Or landed well with me because it was the exact same reason I invested in Coinbase in the first place, was, oh, this wave is coming yet again. I was a little early, that's fine. But agreed to merge my SPAC with Bullish. Go to this guy, Gary Gensler, who had been my regulator in futures when he was at the CFTC and equities at the sec. And we just got smoked. You know, we got a lot of obfuscation, we got outright Extra jurisdictional behavior, illegal behavior, I would argue. And it was a tough time because, you know, my father's a federal servant. He worked for the federal government his whole career, in fact, still does. I admire that the hell out of people who devote their careers and go every day to. To work as part of the federal government. And many, many of them have options to go make millions elsewhere. And to see upfront the shambolic way that that SEC was run was, was, was, was painful. So anyway, that deal never happened. And what happened, Raul? So you can imagine, I'm running this spac. These Bullish guys are stitching together business, but they had never built an exchange. And, and, and so the deal falls apart and they go, wait a minute. Not only did we want to do a deal with this spac, but we were actually looking for you, Tom, who spent your whole career in exchanges, to come in and run the thing. Would you mind joining? And so, like, fast forward to that moment. CZ's in jail, Sam's going to jail. Do Kwon's like, going to jail.
Raoul Pal
The.
Tom Farley
The three. Three arrows guys are literally on the run. Crypto. You couldn't say crypto in public company, right? It was like, I remember my father at one point was like, hey, what are you doing? I'm like, I'm talking to these bullish guys. Maybe I'll go work there. And he's like, wait, so you were running the new. You were the president, CEO of the New York Stock Exchange, and now you're going to double down in crypto at this moment? And I'm like, you know what? If ever you're going to double down, now's the moment. That's what doubling down is all about. And I still believed in this institutional layer, in this financial. This programmable finance layer for institutions. And so my colleague Dave and I, who's been my partner since 2018, we doubled down. We joined Bullish. We said to the Bullish board, we don't need a huge balance sheet. We would like a billion dollars so that we're credible when we rock up to, you know, soc gen, and we say we want to be your institutional home. And so we started with a billion dollars, mostly in Bitcoin, May 1, 2023, and it's gone great. We now run a global exchange for spot futures, perps, options. We run a news business, CoinDesk. If you've read an article about crypto today, we probably wrote it. And we run a conference, business Consensus, which we kind of have two tentpole events, a Hong Kong event, And then a Miami event which is coming up. And I think the timing of it is absolutely perfect. But we can get into that.
Raoul Pal
I think I'm speaking at it as well.
Tom Farley
Yeah, thank God.
Raoul Pal
Appreciate that as well. So a lot of people don't see Bullish because it's institutionally based. So talk us through who it serves and in what way. Currently.
Tom Farley
Yeah, yeah, it's interesting. We, we do like name brand recognition kind of. Kind of deals. And people really know CoinDesk. Oh, yeah, it punches above its weight. And I think that part of that is. It's been around over a decade. I think part of it is Lobe Award, Polk Award, broke the FTX story, candidly. I think part of it may be Coinbase, Coin Desk, very similar names, but that business is. Is super recognizable to the point where people will ask me, oh, what do you do? What's bullish? And I often will say, oh, bullish. It's crypto exchange. We own CoinDesk. You know, it reminds me of Jeff Sprecher at ICE. You know, he would always say, people say, what do you do? He said, I run ice. Nobody's ever heard of ice, the largest exchange group in the world. And then he would say, I'm the chairman of the New York Stock Exchange. Similar here. Similarly, a lot of people in the industry know consensus. And then I would say third, in terms of brand recognition is bullish. And that's for two reasons. One, we, to my knowledge, have never spent any consequential money ever on marketing the Bullish name. And that's something that's just part of my DNA. Having been in institutional exchanges my whole career, The New York Stock Exchange has exactly zero retail customers. Intercontinental Exchange has very, very few. And when you're dealing with institutions, you know who they are. You don't necessarily spend a lot of your money on marketing. You spend it on direct sales. And on the bullish side, we have a handful of retail customers. Like, literally a handful. I'd be shocked if it's more than 200 because we just don't cater to them. Our customers are by and large connecting to it via APIs. Our customers are doing a lot of volume. They care about things like determinism of the system, low latency, that kind of thing. I kind of think of them in three chunks. 1. And by the way, the numbers of customers of institutional customers in crypto are still quite small. There's. There's 100 or fewer that account for 95% of institutional volume on any given day would be my guess. Just you know, finger in the air. But I think of our customer sets in three different ways. One is the market makers. You know, those are the names you would, you would know. I'm not saying they're necessarily a customer, but like, think of like a win or mute or a virtu, you know, win or mute on the crypto native virtu on the, on the tradfi side. And then there's, there's the, there's the kind of retail customers, in other words, the people servicing retail. So whatever. Again, I'm not saying that they're, they're customers, but you know, internationally it would be like bit Panda, Etoro, you know, kind of, kind of firms domestically. You know, recently there's been a lot of new announcements of electronic brokers getting in. But you know, I'm trying to think who, who a good example, like e trader said they're going to get in or MOOMOO is growing quickly in the US or webull or people competing with Coinbase, let's say, in many cases. And then in the middle, the tweeners between the kind of pure market maker types and the pure retail serving types are the, I'll call it OTC desks. So that's the, you know, again, I'm not saying any of these are customers because I don't want to get into that. But you know, that's the Galaxies and Falcon Xs and those sorts of firms. And our whole thing is really great liquidity at a low cost, compliant, regulated, predictable.
Raoul Pal
And how do you create the liquidity? Because as you said, you've got your own sort of AMM within it, beg,
Tom Farley
borrow and steal to get going. So for example, we have perpetual futures and it's been frustrating to me because our liquidity is good, not great. And so we turn to the market makers and say, hey, we got to sit down with you and we got to figure out a deal to get really good liquidity here to get this thing going so that it's trusted and reliable. So in our perpetual futures markets, it's either organic, are almost exclusively either organic, or there's market makers, traditional market makers who are coming and we will at times have incentive programs running in order to get them to make really good prices. In, in options, it's exclusively market makers. Our options business has taken off. We've only been live for five months. I think we're now 12% of open interest. Don't hold me to that. Volume is now approaching double digits and
Raoul Pal
it's good because it was too dominated by deribit that whole business was too damaged.
Tom Farley
Yep. The market, absolutely. Yeah.
Raoul Pal
So yeah, it's good that you're getting traction then.
Tom Farley
Yeah, the market definitely wanted competition and that's accrued to our benefit. You know, deribit's not going away and a lot of credit to them and what they built and I think they've done a lot of things right. But the market wants a Pepsi to the Coke. It does and I saw that. I mean I ran the New York Stock Exchange. The market wanted a NASDAQ to the NYC and energy wants an ICE to a cme. These aren't this, this isn't coincidental that these markets have popped up this way these ways because order books tend towards monopoly unless acted upon but over and over they get acted upon by the market kind of acting and saying probably want some competition here which is. Which. Which is kind of the best, the best possible outcome. So. So option's going great on spot similar where we'll have the market makers and then we will enter ourselves automated market making instructions in especially crypto's biggest assets like Bitcoin and eth. At the top of the book we will actually contribute to the market making which has been really helpful to us. And then this leads to. And then a lot of the tail assets will have market makers that are make that are making prices there by tail. I mean you get outside of. Right, you get outside of Bitcoin, Solana Eth and you get down to the 30th token. We don't really have any edge or desire to deploy capital. But this gets to. Sorry again, it's another long winded answer. But one of the things that we've done Raoul, which has been a really great aspect of our business is in Q4, 2023 PayPal came in and said hey, we've got this Stablecoin. We're not having much luck getting it listed on all the right exchanges you can imagine. Right. Coinbase has a majority economic owner ownership interest in usdc. Will you guys list this thing? And oh by the way, by the way, I'm kind of amalgamating. PayPal and Ripple had a stablecoin in those early days. So these aren't word for word but can you also help us with some marketing? And we have the CoinDesk properties, we have consensus, we have all the sorts of things we can do. There's and can you help us with liquidity? And we said wow, we have this automated market making technology. Why don't we just wrap all that together and put in place a multi year subscription deal. We'll call it Liquidity as a service. That business has been excellent and we now most of the stablecoins that you've heard of, we're working with so Agora Coin which is vaneck and Soc Gen's forge USD1WLFI many. So if I'm forgetting, I'm not forgetting it. But if I'm leaving them out doesn't mean that we don't love them just as much. We do Fidelity actually Fidelity's new stablecoin. So the other thing we will do in, in many of these partner, we call them partner listings. We have a subscription service and we will be providing liquidity for those coins which is really cool because basically what happens imagine Raoul, you decide to start Cayman Coin tomorrow. How do you get that initial liquidity? You need the initial liquidity. You have to be able to buy and sell the Cayman Coin over and above minting and redeeming and you have to be able to buy and sell it against let's say Tether or USDC or even Bitcoin or eth. And you just need that initial kernel and then the market makers themselves will export that all around crypto land. So. So what we do at Bullish is we say we'll light that initial spark and now what you'll see all of a sudden, boom aave, there's a Lend Redeem market or Morpho or Uniswap, you'll see it get listed because people are leaning on the liquidity that we have. And so the value that we're providing is actually over and above the value we would otherwise receive at Bullish, if that makes sense because the fees may be on other platforms and that's why we've subscriptionized that and makes for a more predictable revenue stream.
Raoul Pal
Yeah, feels that you've come at this with a very different angle because of where you came from. So if you think of most of the existing exchanges, it's all retail based first. Then they built an institutional business. You've gone the opposite way around, which is we'll build an institutional business and think of it as a services business as well, which I think is a whole different model and is interesting and it makes it a lot easier for people who are coming into the business to then go somewhere where they can get kind of help getting set up in whatever it is they need to do. I guess the next extension of that is going to be listing other types of assets on chain now because we're going to see all the asset Management firms because even in your list you didn't have asset managers because they're not huge players outside of the ETFs yet. I mean, they're not really there. Yeah, the hedge funds are there, but they're being serviced by Galaxy and others. Okay, great. But the whole institutional business, they're going to come on chain and they're going to look for the same liquidity as a service idea from real world assets.
Tom Farley
Two things on that before we get to the meat of it. The most interesting part. Yeah, the asset managers also are a little bit present with ETFs. And as ETFs move into in kind where you just, you take the bitcoin and you hand that in for a share, the asset managers are getting more involved. But I totally agree with you, they don't really exist in a meaningful way. The other thing I will say is you're absolutely right about how it came to be and it wasn't always comfortable. Because first of all, the original libertarian ethos of crypto looks at someone like me who's been in regulated land my whole career talking about running a compliant exchange and they're like, gtfo, like, do we really, do we really need this guy? I get it. You know, I get it, number one. Number two, the retail exchanges were the ones going to the moon, right? 20, 20, 2021, 2022. So it was painful and there were some tough conversations at the board, like, have we just planted the flag wrong? It does feel like it's swung back in the sense that first of all, the retail competition in crypto is crazy. Like, as if it wasn't enough, now it's, you know, Schwab is coming in and E Trade is coming in and Revolut is really good at competing. And even this FUTU company, this company has a frigging $20 billion market cap, I think, and nobody, you know, nobody's heard of them yet. They run moomoo here in the US people, so on and so forth. So I do think retail is going to be a tough spot and I do think institutions are going to continue to come in, in big ways, especially if, and now we get to the point of your question, especially if we see more and more asset classes move, move online. And so let's, let's talk about this tokenization thing. So is the blockchain. The blockchain. Is blockchain technology going to be helpful and additive for the market writ large for some of these asset classes? I'm pretty sure the answer is yes. And it certainly is, yes, in specific cases, but I think the ability to have 24 by 7 trading, I think the ability to more easily lend borrow these assets, I think the ability to give issuers more transparency about their holders and the patterns of buying and selling of their holders and I think the ability to rewrite certain corners of market infrastructure to cut costs. When you package all those together, I think they're worthwhile. And so I tend not to think this is a hype cycle, but I'm also monitoring it closely because there have been some hype cycles, let's be clear. I mean, it was way back in the year 2025 when people were hyping up creator coins. So, so I, I, you know, we're circumspect about it, but my sense is it's a big deal. And in that world you have a perfectly established financial infrastructure for trading equities or bonds or mortgages or whatever with liquidity. And now you move that onto blockchain technology. Whatever. Blockchain wins. We work a lot with Salana, but clearly Ethereum, Cardano Ripple, I, I don't know. I really, I think, I think there's room for several winners and permission chains, midnight, so on and so forth. So now this stuff moves there you're going to have a gap in liquidity because the, because you're fragmenting it. Yeah, it's just not going to move right away. I've seen this before, I've seen it a million times. And nobody likes to trade on illiquid platforms. And so we believe there's a role for us to play. Much like today we're providing liquidity between Fidelity, stablecoin and usdc. Tomorrow we can provide liquidity between Nvidia's certificated share and their tokenized share and a million other examples. So, yeah, that's definitely something we're keeping an eye on.
Raoul Pal
And do you not find that you're sort of a technology plus balance sheet business in the end? Because if you're providing liquidity, you're more of a balance sheet business than, let's say Coinbase would be. So this is again, a different model.
Tom Farley
Yes, yes. However, we've got several billion of net cash and all in, in terms of liquidity deployment. Don't hold me to this number. Maybe we're deploying 150 million, 200 million something. We disclose it, we disclose it in our financials. It's really, again, Raul, we're not trying to be the market. We're just, hey, when the markets get crazy and market makers pull out hey, we're there with small, you know, small order size to, to main, to maintain a reasonable price. And we don't do any of the liquidity provision in options. We don't do any of it. Well, don't hold me. We may do a little bit in perpetual futures, but I don't think so. We don't do any in dated futures. And so it's not a huge part of what we do. And I think investors kind of like it that way. If we were punting around big values, they wouldn't love that.
Raoul Pal
So a quick break in your regular programming. If you're serious about your future, grab my free report called prepare for 2030. I think you've got five years to make as much money as possible, and this guide will help you navigate what's coming. The link is in the description. Download it now. And you know, when I look at the kind of institutional landscape, it's still very nascent because there's one dominant player, Coinbase, who built a great institutional business under Brett. Then we've got Kraken, who are trying to build stuff, and there's you guys. I mean, that's it. I mean, Robin Hood are making some headway into this as well, but it's still very early stage, considering. If we look at the asset pool that is off chain, that's likely to come on chain just because it's more efficient, it's faster, it's a better way of doing it. Well, we have to move that on chain and we really only have three service providers to do that now. Yes, there'll be new entrants and other people try and build consortia and all of that stuff that we've seen in the past. But it feels like the opportunity set is still very big.
Tom Farley
Yeah, yeah, I agree with that. I agree with all of it, including that there will be more competition. And I never shy away from that, from investors because I've just been in markets long enough and I know how big this opportunity is. And when there's a big opportunity, others will come in. Now, I, I think, in point of fact, if you look at the largest exchanges of the world in the world, Hong Kong Exchange, lsc, Sebo, nasdaq, nyc, Ice, Deutsch, Bourza. By and large, that group, I don't know how many I rattled off, seven did very, very little in crypto. Very little. Georgia Burz has done a few acquisitions. CME launched the Bitcoin Futures Intercontinental Exchange built back. But if you go back for 10 years after our original Coinbase investment Those firms didn't do anything and they're not dumb. There was just a lot of fear. You didn't want to catch a lawsuit from Gary Gensler. You didn't want to get on the wrong side of Elizabeth Warren. And so those of us who were going after institutions got a little more of a head start than we might have otherwise. But I have no doubt those firms are going to look to continue to build out businesses in that regard. And perhaps a couple others of these other exchanges out there that aren't quite legitimate or legitimized will figure out how to tread a path there. So the competition will increase. Because I think this has a potential of being a 25, 30 year trend here to reshape all financial markets. So we're definitely not betting on being the only ones.
Raoul Pal
Because, you know, I was around when Goldman, when I was still working at Goldman, when Goldman bought Hull Trading, everybody started buying electronic market making firms electronic option and everything changed. And your career's seen that entire thing and this is just an extension of that. Technology is always the path and there may be some reticence, but in the end, because it's faster, cheaper, more effective, shareholders at that end push it as well. So it always goes this way.
Tom Farley
And also the technology by and large is fixed cost, by and large. In other words, you put two of these fixed costs of 100 million here and fixed cost of 100 million here and you put it together and maybe the fixed cost of the combined business is 120. So the industrial logic I think will be strong just like it was when Goldman bought Hull and then the New York Stock Exchange bought ARCA and ICE bought IPE and CME bought Nymex. And I think you're going to see some consolidation. We want to be a consolidator. But I do think that day is coming.
Raoul Pal
So what gets you excited? What part of the business are you focused on apart from just building the business as getting more customers, getting more thing. But where's your real focus here?
Tom Farley
So thank you for asking that. I, I didn't do, you know, between the, between the time I spoke to you Raul, on, on a podcast years ago and now I, I've honestly done maybe three and this is after living in somewhat of a spotlight with that New York Stock Exchange role, doing a lot of, you know, kind of out there talks or what have you because there was, there were things going on I just wasn't excited about in crypto. And I don't want to be specific because I don't. I Don't want to be a jerk. And I'm not even against it. I tend, I tend towards libertarian ideas and if people want to do certain things and trade certain things, have at it. It just doesn't get me fired up to get out of bed. What does get me fired up because I'm an I'm afraid, friggin nerd and maybe because I've spent my whole career in it is this whole free enterprise system. Can we do it more efficiently? Because a rising tide lifts all boats like there is no more powerful force in the history of the world than free enterprise. And it's lifted in, in our, in our lifetimes. And we're both super young guys in our lifetime.
Raoul Pal
Extremely young and good looking. We'll give ourselves that as well.
Tom Farley
Yeah, the whole deal. Global poverty has declined something like 70%. It's all part of free enterprise. And to me you're not going to get that by some of the practices that were in crypto. You're not going to get that by charging just massive fees for trading puppy coins. You're not going to get that by offering 100x margin and ADL again. And I'm not against it. I'm not against it. It's just not what gets me excited, never has been. And so I didn't want to go out publicly because everything will come off negative. What does fire me up is exactly the stuff we're talking about. Can we create, can we improve, can we create a new model for global financial markets? US equities, global equities, global fixed income mortgages. Run it on the blockchain and reduce the cost, increase the access, bring more liquidity and capital formation into business building which will only be a great thing in the free enterprise system. And it feels like we're on the cusp and I think we had to go through this period. And by the way, I don't think frog coins were a bad thing. I think they brought people to the, to the yard. I think they brought attention, they brought investment dollars and then they allowed blockchains to break. They allowed the world to find their vulnerabilities.
Raoul Pal
I think meme coins are really important because a we hypertest everything at speed and break everything and understand what business models work. We're really good at that because we have the speculation layer that actually allows us to do this really fast. I think what we got out of it most importantly was instant capital formation. That's the future of vc. That's the future of how agents will raise capital in a agentic World. That's what meme coins were. So, yeah, it might not matter now, but there's signal in the noise, I think.
Tom Farley
I agree, I didn't always love it in the middle of it and I agree with you. But my colleagues have said over the last year, like, hey Tom, you, you seem more fired up than ever. And it was so true. I remember one seminal moment we have. We have a Wednesday morning management call. It's how we manage a company. And we have a crew of us, we get on and we talk about the good, the bad and the ugly, mostly the bad and the ugly. And we don't take a lot of time to celebrate. Maybe we should do more. But somebody after the call called me and said, hey, you seem really fired up. Like are you really excited about things? And I was like, oh my God, he's right. I am really fired up. I do think that this is to me the most interesting time in digital assets.
Raoul Pal
I was first going to Bitcoin in 2013 and I think I wrote a paper back in 2015 before I even knew about smart contracts. And I said the obvious thing is the entire financial industry is going to go into blockchain rails because of a number of things. Obviously it's cheaper and everything else. The other is the trust layer of when somebody goes bust on blockchain, it's immutable. You kind of know who owns what asset. And we have so much issue with collateral where the collateral is this big and the amount of rehypothecation and lending is that big, that when somebody goes bust like Lehman Brothers, you suddenly realize that nobody's got any of the collateral that they thought they had. And so I looked at this for a long time. Well, blockchain sells 90% of this. And the big one for me, that it's still surprising nobody's gone after fully is when you think of a smart contract, where is the greatest example of smart contract use? It's OTC derivatives. It's a multi quadrillion dollar marketplace of which when I was at Goldman and other firms, there would be boxes of ISDA docs of which nobody knew the fuck what was in them because the industry was growing too fast.
Tom Farley
Everyone had different conditions and an amendment
Raoul Pal
A and then nobody knows what happens if something goes wrong. They literally can't because nobody knows what's and what is the docs. And that came out of Lehman too. And yes, some of that's gone on exchange now, but it's so obviously a smart contract where it just instantly settles. I just don't know why that hasn't happened yet.
Tom Farley
Yeah, I bet it will. Metallogic's too persuasive.
Raoul Pal
Yeah I mean options are so obvious for this.
Tom Farley
I mean the big, you know this the big players here are the big banks and they're just scared to death. I mean Raoul, it was ugly. Like they, if they had a meeting with a crypto company they had to provide it to the regulator. They had to do a write up provide it to the regulator. They had to go in front of the PCAOB to justify why they were doing business. Oh no, this the audit firms. If the audit firms took on a crypto company but the banks would have to go in front of the regulator with everything crypto related they would get threats and calls and I think that's your answer but they're coming in and that example you gave is a perfect one. But you can just enshrine all that logic in the smart contract which is your point.
Raoul Pal
That's right. So how do you focus your time then? Because you can see the opportunity set but it's a slow laborious process to get financial institutions to move. How do you do that? Do you think about build it they will come or do you spend more time with them? The relationship?
Tom Farley
Yeah I mean just to lay in the inside a bullish. So we have a handful of priorities and so when I roll in in the morning I'm just kind of looking at. We have, we have a list of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 goals for, for the business for, for this year really building out our options platform. As I said that's going well. The decision we've made is to put all of our trading globally. So, so if you're anywhere in the world even if we have a reg, even if you're trading under Hong Kong regulatory license or maybe it could be a German regulatory license, you're interacting in the same central limit order book and you can trade any product that we offer spot perps options and we can provide portfolio margining so making sure we continue the momentum in options a big one make sure we continue the momentum in this liquidity services make sure we're ready for this tokenization wave. On the coindesk side it's making sure this consensus Miami conference is a home run and it is going to be a home run. Timing is perfect because everybody's kind of woken up to the institutional opportunity and that's, that's a really strong pillar of what, what of what consensus does. So there's gonna be tons of great conversation about stablecoins, this clarity act bill and tokenization in Miami. May, May 7th and 8th, I think or maybe 5th, 6th, 7th. The news business, we're on a roll. So we now have 55% market share as of last month of of all the, what we track as kind of crypto news sites. That's up dramatically, I want to say from like 30% a year ago. So that's going well. We have a data business. We've just licensed our indices to Morgan Stanley. You may have seen Morgan Stanley is doing a suite of ETFs. They're all going to be based on the CoinDesk data indices. And then the other goals are kind of internal goals I'd rather not share too much about. But obviously making sure that we're husbanding our cash wisely and our balance sheet wisely and then any. Anything else. Oh, and last the. I, I missed the eighth one which is just expanding our regulatory access all around the world. That is a forever game. A forever game, truly, because new jurisdiction, you know, the UK is going to come out with regulatory approval and you know, we need the MiFID uplift in Europe if we want to have options in Europe and hey, do we want to operate a clearinghouse for options, in which case you have to be. So that's another kind of just day to day grinding initiative.
Raoul Pal
How about bringing the traditional market makers into this new world because they come with a lot of capital and huge amounts of experience and risk management skills. Just getting people of the scale of virtue and Citadel and all of those guys to be more active participants in this overall new market. It'll make a massive difference. I mean they're there, but not in the same size. Some of the capital constraints and the margining issues and stuff like that.
Tom Farley
Yeah, it's happening. Citadel, for example, and Virtu has been a customer of ours for many years. But they were similar to the banks. Like if you're Ken Griffin and you're running Citadel and you're killing it, Citadel is terrific on both sides of their business. The Citadel securities, which is kind of the, I'll call it the broker, but there are a lot more than that. And then the hedge fund, if you're Ken Griffin and the regulators are telling you, hey, don't get involved in crypto. Why are you going to fight town hall when you have a business making all this money over? You're just not. You're just not. It's not like he's going to take on some religious cause when they have that business over There. Or if you're virtu. Hey, you're only going to do it out of your Singapore entity, let's say, just to have this thing outside the United States. The first thing we needed was a new regime in Washington. We got that. The second thing we need is a market structure. Bill, I don't know if we're going to get that, candidly. What.
Raoul Pal
Yeah, what is your. What are your odds? Everyone's odds are shifting around all the time.
Tom Farley
It's so hard because it's so binary. Yeah, it's so binary. It doesn't feel close to me. But I'm paranoid. Only the paranoid survive. I think the stablecoin issue is a real issue, and I'm empathetic to this view of, like, wait, why are we. The stablecoins are fully reserved and they're federally regulated. Why can't I pay, yield? They're fully reserved, so we'll see. Feels like a fairly important issue. And I'm not sure it just goes away, but it may. There may be a reasonable compromise. We can live in either world, but just on behalf of our stablecoin customers, I'm kind of empathetic with that view, number one. Number two, honestly, Raoul, maybe you're a better place than I am on this. I'm not sure how the defi conversation ends up that has yet to be resolved. So, in other words, we're going to put in place this whole rubric about regulating exchanges and brokers in crypto. And what's a. What's a crypto commodity? And what's a crypto security? We're going to have this whole law and we're going to say you can do this, and you need a papal blessing for that, and you need a different type of blessing for this other thing. Unless you call yourself defi. Yeah.
Raoul Pal
And then you can do what you
Tom Farley
want, in which case you don't have any of that. Obviously, that's not sustainable. So then you have to get into, well, okay, what is defi? Maybe we can all agree that uniswap's main protocol is indeed de decentralized. What about all the other applications? What about the ones where the guy who wrote it just can publish new code? What about the one where the guy who wrote it owns 80%? What about the one where the guy who wrote it is the biggest trader on it and has access to the code? What are those defi? What is defi? And I'm not. I don't yet know what the zone of agreement is on that or if the Answer will be, let's just punt it and let's punch it to the regulators and they can figure it out for a year and a year and a half.
Raoul Pal
And the issue is, is there's too many smart people moving too fast for the regulators to actually deal with anyway. It's like trying to regulate AI. It's literally impossible because it's moving too fast. However, if you think of the density of intellectual capital, because this is around capital markets, it attracts a lot of people. The moment you regulate this way, somebody finds a new answer that way. I mean, you know, it's almost impossible to deal with. Well, that was the point, I guess, of crypto in the first place.
Tom Farley
Well, yeah, and with Defi, you could you, you can simply say, hey, look, you can do whatever you want outside the U.S. but you can't have access to the U.S. right? That, that's one answer. But if so, then that raises a question. But we know people just easily download a VPN and they evade it going on a vpn. But maybe we're okay with that. And in fact, I think we probably are. So it's not incumbent upon the DEFI protocol to make sure that people aren't lying and using a VPN login. I think that's. I think that's all fine. But if you say, hey, you can do whatever you want outside the US but if you want to come in the US then you have to do full KYC aml, then it begs the question, okay, cool, but the person who I've KYC AML'd in the US can they interact with the non KYC AML ex US person? I think if the answer to that
Raoul Pal
is cool,
Tom Farley
I still am not 100% sure what the path is for DEFI in the future, because I think the way DEFI gets super duper exciting to me is institutions feel comfortable using Defi, and I'm not sure it gets there with that pattern. So I'm hoping that there is a definition that comes out, hey, this counts as defi. It's perfectly okay to use that within the United States. And then over time, I think innovation could go up like that. I don't know. Is that a bit of gobbledygook to you, or did you follow what I was saying?
Raoul Pal
No, your answer is right. We don't know. My general view is if there's money and it can be solved by technology, people find a solution. And whether that's using some sort of passport ID that allows you to operate within spaces, stuff like that, I think we have to go towards that anyway. We need some sort of ID system anyway because of AI, and we're going to need it for some of these kind of things because some countries want to regulate more than others and capital is freer in other countries than others and it's just the way of the world and you don't want to go and fight every single nation state for their regulatory terms. So I think it's like all of the above. I think that's the sort of lazy answer but usually works is like, no,
Tom Farley
I'm at my wits end. I actually put a tweet out. I've done two tweets just looking for answers out there in the sort of exosphere. I don't know where defi. That's where I started. I just don't. In terms of the bill, the two big issues, I think the conflicts, issues around Trump and the Trump family, those are, those are solvable. Those will be solved. The Dems want a bill, Raul. The Dems want a bill. They don't want to run against crypto in the midterms, so they're looking for a bill. So if the industry can come to an agreement on stablecoins, the two industries, and if there's a reasonable solution on defi, then we have a bill.
Raoul Pal
So what else are you most excited about? Next 18 months? What thing now is like, okay, I can feel this. I could taste it. I'm getting excited.
Tom Farley
I think we've hit on it. I'd just be repeating myself. I'm not shocked.
Raoul Pal
Let me give you another one then. I think the TAM of crypto has just gone to infinity because before there's like X billion people, there's X amount of capital. I just think this agentic thing is bigger than people understand. I think it's the destruction and rebuilding of the entire asset management industry from scratch.
Tom Farley
Well, so yes, I would add to that. I agree. I would add to that. And it's happening at the same time as tokenization of major global asset classes. So you put those two together, and I've said this publicly and privately, that up to now crypto's really been a hobby. It's small, it's tiny. What's the aggregate market cap of crypto right now? I haven't looked at myself.
Raoul Pal
2.7 billion or something. A trillion? Yeah.
Tom Farley
So it's smaller than a couple listed companies. It's a hobby. And you're absolutely right. I think those two trends, potentially equal in sizing, could take this little teeny box of crypto and Say no. The TAM is all of financial markets globally. We do have a debate, though. I'm curious to see what your reaction is to this, Raul. We have a debate internally. There's a. There's a reasonable view by smart people that stablecoins actually will not be the primary way of paying and receiving in agentic finance. And that agentic finance will actually rely on the existing Fiat Rails or new Fiat Rails as opposed to, you know, whipping around stablecoins. Do you have a view on that?
Raoul Pal
Yeah, I do, actually. Generally speaking, you can't reduce the denominator of a dollar down to less than a cent. Right. A lot of these payments are micro payments, right? So that's one, yeah. The other one is the speed required for some of these things is it rules out some of the ecosystems and not others. I think an agent is wildly indifferent, whether it's an underlying protocol token or a dollar token, as long as it's faster, efficient, cheaper. But I do get to the stage where if somebody needs to do something in Solana World, SWI World, Ethereum World, an agent is going to end up managing his own treasury. That's an interesting world that nobody's thinking about, but they will rebalance and optimize based on profit maximization, if that's what they're there to do. That becomes really interesting. I also get to. I'm a very visual person. I think about a firm like Millennium, gigantic hedge fund firm. What does Millennium actually do? Well, it has a bunch of traders in house pods that in the old world would have been separate hedge funds, but it's not so easy to raise capital now. So they become pods within Millennium. So that's a group of managers who allocate capital. All of that can basically be done on chain by agents. You've got your relative value bond agent, your equity arbitrage agent, your long short agent, all of that. That's all coming. So that gets rid of 90% of the costs of Millennium allocating capital. But then you look at the Millennium mothership. What does it do? Well, it does asset allocation, risk management, regulatory compliance and capital raising. All of that can also disappear via AI. And then you're like, okay, then you can apply it to every asset management business and you realize, okay, the entire industry is about to go through massive change. Not today, not this week. Defi. Where does it fit in? Obviously that's how it'll work. And so you get to a world seven, eight years where we're going to be building agentic gigantic finance operations of which you and I won't even see. Well, you'll see them because it will be running through the liquidity layer and other stuff, but nobody's even going to see this. It's like an invisible economy. Because the front page of the Financial Times is not some hedge fund Guy got paid $500 million this year because it's an agent.
Tom Farley
Not surprisingly. You're way ahead of me in seeing this vision. I'm looking at it. I'm wondering, as you're saying that will the winners be the millenniums of the world who can disrupt themselves or will the winner be some new millennium, you know, some, some new millennium competitor that a current, you know, 16 year old is going to start when they, it's.
Raoul Pal
I think it's both. Again, same answer. It's both. But you know, I, I was just, just before you, I was chatting to Yoni ASO as a friend, you know, from Etoro. Yeah, Yoni's basically on the side, has rebuilt all of Etoro himself with agents.
Tom Farley
Oh my God.
Raoul Pal
Separate from the rest of his 400 person tech team. And you're like, okay, wow, you know, he's doing this. He hasn't, you know, he hasn't yet got the balls to kind of launch it and kind of nuke himself, but he can. So I think it's going to come from every angle because there's a lot of smart kids with AI and agents who can build businesses really fast that can get traction. And there's a bunch of businesses who see it and will, will replace themselves and there's a bunch that won't.
Tom Farley
It's much easier. So I haven't gone into the New York Board of Trade or haven't gone into the New York Stock Exchange or having acquired the idc, the bond data company. It's hard to take businesses with old technology and migrate them to new technology. What's far easier is doing it from scratch. I actually think the skills to build from scratch are going to be plentiful and the more difficult skill will be, hey, I have millennium. I need the right team. Because I don't think you're going to be able to do this with AI to say, what are all these processes and procedures and decisions and functions that we're making? How do we build them in AI and then how do we make the leap? Because humans are involved, feelings, emotions. This person is an employee and they're not going to be interested in helping you do that. Why? Because they have health issues at home and their, and their health care is paying for, you know, A surgery or something. I mean, real world issues get. Get in the way. Like how do you. How do you take these businesses and make the leap? And that skill is not. That is not so common.
Raoul Pal
Not when we have seen the crypto was the fastest rate of adoption of a new technology ever. And it's dwarfed by AI now. Yeah, it's dwarfed. It's Metcalfe's law squared, it's Reed's law, It's the fastest thing we've ever seen. And now agents are building agents and it just keeps going. So I don't know how easy it is to disrupt yourself unless you're really brave, but I just think. I just go back to our conversation. I just feel like all of that is such a gigantic opportunity because it all has to run on crypto rails. There's no way around it. And whether it's stable coins or underlying tokens, nobody cares as long as you build the infrastructure for this and plan for the future and not the past. I think too many people are focused on building out the past and replicating what you already built. New York Stock exchange or what ICE have built 10 years ago. Yes, but that is not the answer. The answer is where do they need to be in 10 years time? You need to plant that flag. It's not easy, but it has to be done. Because if not, we're going to end up bringing the financial system into new Rails, which have been already superseded by technology.
Tom Farley
Yeah, it's not easy. We're all reading about all these examples of companies doing it. Well, what you're not reading about is, you know, the 10% of the developers who still are saying, oh, you know, I'm using it, but I'm using in a token way. In other words, they don't really get it and you have to, you have to find who those people are and you need to say, this isn't the place for you or, you know, every single function in our company. You have some Luddites that just. I don't believe it. You really need the human aspect, let alone we need a whole new frigging mindset. And we need to be building for 10 years from now. So that's the challenge.
Raoul Pal
Yeah, well, it's the fun part of it. The fun part is building the future. Tom, fantastic to see you. And hopefully I'll see you somewhere in the Cayman Islands at some point soon as well.
Tom Farley
Good to see you again. I really appreciate you having me on. I appreciate everything you do for the industry and it's an honor to have you on and I'll buy you, I don't know, some sort of tropical rum drink or something when I see you in Cayman. Perfect.
Raoul Pal
And I'll see you at Consensus as well.
Tom Farley
Excellent. Good to see you.
Raoul Pal
Good to see you. So great conversation with Tom and you can see where this is all going. We can see that the institutions are coming and people like Bullish and many others in the market are putting together the foundations for them to be able to be active within the markets in the same kind of way that they were on the NASDAQ or the New York Stock Exchange or some of these mega exchanges. I've always talked about this, this convergence of traditional finance and crypto. It's all coming together in one place and everything is being rebuilt. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed it. See you next time. Today's episode is brought to you by Abra. Abra aims to provide individuals and institutions with a secure way to control, manage and grow digital asset wealth from a separately managed account. If you're looking to gain access to additional liquidity, Abra has one of the most competitive loan products on the market. You can borrow against Bitcoin, ETH and Solana at up to 50% loan to value. Rates are in the 4 to 6% APY range and are open term. You can continuously draw down against your collateral as the price appreciates. Abra's hosting a webinar on April 9th. Whether you're a professional crypto investor or just learning the basics, Abra's CEO Bill Barheit and Managing Director Marissa Kim will provide insights on digital asset portfolio positioning, custody and management. The session will bring valuable considerations for those managing substantial portfolio allocations. Learn the fundamental benefits of holding assets in a separately managed account and close out with a live Q and A sign up@realvision.com Abrawebinar. You obviously enjoyed the episode because you're here with me at the end. But listen, don't forget to go to realvision.com join and grab a free membership. It's an incredible community packed with alpha, great investment ideas and the research that you need to help you unfuck your future. So get started now. Go to realvision.com join.
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Episode: From NYSE to Crypto: The Next Financial Revolution
Guest: Tom Farley (CEO, Bullish; Former President, NYSE)
Date: April 9, 2026
This episode explores the seismic shift underway as traditional finance and capital markets move onto crypto and blockchain rails. Host Raoul Pal sits down with Tom Farley – the former President of the NYSE and now CEO of the crypto exchange Bullish – to examine how financial exchanges are evolving, the opportunities and challenges of institutional crypto adoption, the role of tokenization, and how technology will catalyze the next financial revolution.
“If ever you’re going to double down, now’s the moment. That’s what doubling down is all about.” – Tom Farley (16:01)
This conversation provides a front-row view for anyone interested in the future of exchanges, capital formation, crypto’s “institutional moment,” and the deep technological and societal change unleashed by blockchain and agentic finance.