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If you want to know just how deeply Wall Street is delving into emerging trends in cryptocurrency, take a look at Bullish Global. The firm earlier this month secured a hefty $9 billion valuation on the promise of its digital asset trading platform...a platform that hadn't yet processed a single trade.

But Bullish Global is now giving investors a peek under the hood, on Tuesday launching a 7-week private pilot of its much-anticipated trading network, one of several developments in the decentralized finance space.

Bullish on DeFi

Decentralized finance, or DeFi, harnesses blockchain technology to enable financial services like crypto trading, loans, and more without the need for traditional market middlemen like exchanges and banks. Along with secure and transparent transactions, DeFi offers a flexible asset management alternative to heavily structured and restricted traditional institutions.

Backed by Peter Thiel and Alan Howard (among other billionaires), Bullish Global's new digital asset exchange will launch fully later this year after its pilot program, as the firm looks to capitalize on the rampant growth of decentralized finance:

  • Over $61 billion of trades have been executed in the DeFi market, up considerably from $15 billion at the start of 2021, according to data provider DeFi Pulse.
  • The world's leading digital asset manager Grayscale launched a fund last week linked to the top 10 networks in the DeFi space. And even the old money is paying attention — in an attempt to replicate profits generated by top DeFi firms, Goldman Sachs on Monday applied with market regulators to launch an ETF investing in digital assets and blockchain technology.

As for Bullish, its exchange promises to deliver "market making, lending, and portfolio management tools" to users, while also instilling digital assets with deeper liquidity and recording a blockchain-verifiable audit trail of transactions.

In Other Crypto News: Bitcoin's wild ride continues — after sneaking above the $40,000 mark, the coin tumbled 7% back down to the $36,000-range late Monday when Amazon nixed rumors that it was set to introduce payment options for a handful of cryptocurrencies.