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Traders in the stock market can decide next week if they feel bullish about Bullish, as the cryptocurrency exchange announced today it plans to raise as much as $629.3 million in its U.S. initial public offering. The Cayman Islands-based company plans to offer 20.3 million shares for $28 to $31 each when it lists on the New York Stock Exchange. That would mean the company is valued at as much as $4.2 billion, making it the latest digital asset firm to court investors in the stock market. Bullish has applied for the ticker symbol BLSH, and the IPO is expected to price on Aug. 12. The company launched in 2021 as a spin-off of Block.one, with an initial investment of $10 billion from backers that included Peter Thiel. In 2023, Bullish acquired the crypto media brand CoinDesk. Crypto goes IPO Crypto companies have been a hot spot in whats been a pretty slow IPO market this yearand investors have been more than eager to snatch up shares. Circle Internet Group went public in June, and its shares surged nearly 750% above its IPO price in less than a month. And theres already robust demand for Bullish shares: Funds and accounts managed by BlackRock and ARK Investment Management are separately interested in buying as much as $200 million of shares in aggregate at the IPO price, according to the companys filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Bullish offers an interesting read on how far Wall Street has come to embrace crypto assets. The company, which offers crypto spot trading, margin trading, and derivatives trading, notes in its SEC paperwork that institutional investors account for a significant portion of its customer base. Tom Farley, who joined Bullish as CEO in 2023, wrote a letter in the SEC filing documenting his own introduction to digital assets, which began while he was president of the New York Stock Exchange. He recalled that his first lesson in crypto happened on a sunny summer day in 2014 while sitting on his porch with a neighbor who was enthusiastic about joining Coinbase, then a blockchain technology startup. Bullish banks on Trump-era momentum The continued growth of digital assets, which Bullish says have become established as a mainstream component of the global financial system, will be a major driver of business growth, along with other positive trends that include greater adoption by traditional financial institutions and increasing regulatory clarity. Various steps taken by Donald Trumps administration have helped to invigorate the crypto market, and the president is name-dropped a handful of times in the filing paperwork. While the successful debut of Circle could bode well for Bullish, investors have already cooled on eToro, which went public in May. While eToro shares are still trading above the $52-per-share IPO price, they have fallen nearly 13% from where the stock began trading. Of note, the SEC filing shows that Bullish reported a net loss of nearly $349 million in the three months ended March, compared with a profit of almost $105 million in 2024. And in 2022, the company scrapped an attempt to go public through a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC).
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From Hollywood to Big Tech, major industries across the U.S. are increasingly going all-in on AI workflow tools, and theyre expecting employees to follow suit. Late last month, Business Insider reported that Microsoft has started evaluating some employees on their AI fluency, factoring their competency with AI tools into metrics like performance reviews. But in spite of the growing workplace incentive to adopt AI tools, some employees are actively resisting AI uptakeand their reasons make more sense than you might think. According to a new study conducted by a team of researchers at Peking University and The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, an emerging phenomenon is actively deterring employees from picking up AI tools, even at companies where doing so is strongly encouraged. Dubbed the competence penalty, this bias leads to AI users being seen as less competent by their peersregardless of actual performance. Its a perception gap thats especially damaging for women in technical roles. The background The researchers study was conducted at an unnamed leading tech company. In an article written for the Harvard Business Review (HBR), the studys authors explain that this company had previously rolled out a state-of-the-art AI coding assistant to its developers, which was promised to boost productivity significantly. Still, 12 months later, only 41% of the nearly 30,000 surveyed engineers had even tried the coding assistant. Adoption also varied based on employees identities. Just 39% of engineers 40 and older were using the tool, alongside a meager 31% of female engineers. Thats not for lack of trying on the companys part, either: Rather than throwing their employees into the AI deep end without guidance (a prevalent issue as AI workflow tools become more common), this company offered dedicated AI teams, adoption incentives, and free training. So, researchers set out to understand what was going wrong. The competence penalty To get to the bottom of this lackluster adoption pattern, the studys authors established an experiment with 1,026 engineers from the same company. The engineers were given a snippet of Python code to evaluate. While the code was the exact same for every participant, each was told that it was created under different conditionsincluding with or without AI and by a male or female engineer. The results showed that, when participants believed a fellow engineer had used AI to write their code, they rated that engineers competence 9% lower on average. The competence penaltys severity was also dependent on the reported gender of the engineer. If they were described as male, there was only a 6% competence reduction, compared to 13% for those described as female. Further, the reviewers own identity and stance on AI had an impact on how they rated others. Engineers who hadnt adopted AI themselves were most critical of AI-users, and male non-adopters penalized female AI-users 26% more harshly than their male AI-using counterparts. Through a follow-up study of 919 engineers, the researchers found that many employees were actually innately aware of this competence penalty, and were avoiding AI usage as a result. Those who most feared competence penalties in the tech industrydisproportionately women and older engineerswere precisely those who adopted AI least, the studys authors write. The very groups who might benefit most from productivity-enhancing tools felt they couldnt afford to use them. Women often face extra scrutiny The studys findings offer a strong counterpoint to the oft-repeated sentiment that AI tools might even the proverbial playing field at work, presenting a one-size-fits-all solution by making everyone more productive. Our results suggest that this is not guaranteed and in fact the opposite could be true, the authors write. In our context, which is dominated by young males, making AI equally available increased bias against female engineers. These results could help explain patterns that have already been observed in AI uptake. According to recent research conducted by Harvard Business School associate professor Rembrand Koning, women are adopting AI tools at a 25% lower rate than men, on average. In an article for Fast Company earlier this month, Kamales Lardi, author of the book Artificial Intelligence For Business, noted that, In my experience, women often face extra scrutiny over their skills, capabilities, and technical prowess. There may be a deep-rooted concern that leveraging AI tools may be perceived as cutting corners or reflect poorly on the users skill level. How leaders should prepare for the competence penalty Companies like the one in the study shouldn’t give up on implementing new AI tools, especially given that agentic AI is predicted to play a huge role in the future of work. Instead, leaders should use this data to put more AI adoption guardrails in place. In their analysis for HBR, the studys authors offer several main steps for managers to consider: Map your organizations penalty hotspots. Leaders should focus on identifying teams where the AI competence penalty might be highest, including those with more women and older engineers reporting to male non-adopters. Monitoring these teams might help to understand where and how the competence penalty is playing out. Convert the influential skeptics. Because non-dopters are the harshest critics of AI users, influential skeptics can have a major impact on the whole team. The studys authors suggest that breaking this cycle requires the skeptics to see respected colleagues successfully using AI without professional consequence. Redesign evaluations to remove the signal. Based on the study’s results, flagging a product as made with AI can negatively impact performance reviews. The solution is straightforward: Stop signalling AI use in performance evaluations until your culture is ready, the authors write.
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The U.S. could require bonds of up to $15,000 for some tourist and business visas under a pilot program launching in two weeks, a government notice said on Monday, an effort that aims to crack down on visitors who overstay their visas. The program gives U.S. consular officers the discretion to impose bonds on visitors from countries with high rates of visa overstays, according to a Federal Register notice. Bonds could also be applied to people coming from countries where screening and vetting information is deemed insufficient, the notice said. President Donald Trump has made cracking down on illegal immigration a focus of his presidency, boosting resources to secure the border and arresting people in the U.S. illegally. He issued a travel ban in June that fully or partially blocks citizens of 19 nations from entering the U.S. on national security grounds. Trump’s immigration policies have led some visitors to skip travel to the United States. Transatlantic airfares dropped to rates last seen before the COVID-19 pandemic in May and travel from Canada and Mexico to the U.S. fell by 20% year-over-year. Effective August 20, the new visa program will last for approximately a year, the government notice said. Consular officers will have three options for visa applicants subjected to the bonds: $5,000, $10,000 or $15,000, but will generally be expected to require at least $10,000, it said. A similar pilot program was launched in November 2020 during the last months of Trump’s first term in office, but it was not fully implemented due to the drop in global travel associated with the pandemic, the notice said. The State Department was unable to estimate the number of visa applicants who could be affected by the change. Many of the countries targeted by Trump’s travel ban also have high rates of visa overstays, including Chad, Eritrea, Haiti, Myanmar and Yemen. Numerous countries in Africa, including Burundi, Djibouti and Togo also had high overstay rates, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection data from fiscal year 2023. Ted Hesson, Reuters
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