Wise fled London, Bullish bought a 190-year-old, sentiment hit a 74-year low
Wise rang the Nasdaq bell with 91% shareholder approval. Crypto exchange Bullish bought British registrar Equiniti for $4.2B. BlackRock and Apollo backed Circle's Arc blockchain. monday.com proved AI is moving SaaS revenue. CPI on Tuesday breaks the tie.
Wise rang the Nasdaq bell this morning, and 91% of its shareholders voted to leave London. The highest-profile fintech defection yet, and probably not the last.
Today:
- Wise told London goodbye
- A crypto exchange bought a 190-year-old registrar
- BlackRock and Apollo bought into a stablecoin chain
- monday.com proved AI is moving SaaS revenue
- Consumer sentiment at a 74-year low. S&P at a record high. CPI on Tuesday breaks the tie.
THE LISTING
Wise rang the Nasdaq bell today. 91% of shareholders voted to leave London.
Wise ($WSE) started trading on Nasdaq this morning at 9:30am ET. Opening print: $15.96. Stumbled out of the gate, down roughly 2% to $15.26 by midday — a muted welcome despite the strategic-listing narrative.
CEO Kristo Käärmann — the Estonian ex-Deloitte consultant who co-founded the company with Skype’s first employee, Taavet Hinrikus, after getting fleeced on cross-border GBP-to-EUR transfers in 2010 — picked Wall Street over the London Stock Exchange where Wise direct-listed in 2021.
The vote wasn’t close. 91% of shareholders approved.
What Nasdaq just got:
- $243B in cross-border volume last fiscal year (+31% YoY)
- $2.5B net revenue (+19%)
- ~19 million active customers
- 0.52% average fee vs. industry’s 3-5%
- 75% of transfers arriving in under 20 seconds
Why this is the next shoe to drop: Wise joins CRH, Flutter, Smurfit Westrock, ARM, and Birkenstock on the LSE-defection list — they all moved to New York (or skipped London entirely) between September 2023 and July 2024. London lost 88 companies from its market in 2024 and saw only 17 IPOs. The City has a problem and no one wants to say it out loud.
Why it matters: Wise is the rail under millions of cross-border payments — contractor payouts, Stripe transfers, expat banking, multi-currency cards. The same software business priced like a payments processor in London is being re-priced like software on Nasdaq. ARM ran this exact playbook in 2023 and traded up 60% in its first year. When boring infrastructure votes with its feet, the multiples follow.
Next dominoes: Revolut ($75B, dual-listing flagged), Monzo (£6B, JPMorgan + Goldman hired), Starling.
THE DEAL
A crypto exchange just bought a 190-year-old British registrar for $4.2B.
Bullish ($BLSH) — the crypto exchange that IPO’d last August at $37 and opened day-one at $90 — announced last week it’s acquiring Equiniti, the UK shareholder-services firm that’s been keeping registers since 1836, for $4.2 billion.
Structure: $1.85B assumed Equiniti debt + ~$2.35B in Bullish stock at the 30-day VWAP of $38.48. Siris Capital, which took Equiniti private in 2021, is the seller. Closes January 2027.
If you missed Bullish’s IPO: founded in 2020 by Brendan Blumer (the EOS.IO ICO guy who raised $4B in 2017). Now run by Tom Farley — yes, the former president of the NYSE.
What Bullish just bought:
- Registrar for ~50% of the FTSE 100
- ~3,000 issuer clients, 20M+ shareholders
- $500B in annual payment volume
- 190 years of being the database under every dividend, share split, and corporate action in UK public markets
Farley’s pitch, verbatim: “Tokenization is a once-in-a-generation shift in how capital markets operate, the defining infrastructure trend of the next 25 years.”
Pro forma 2026E: ~$1.3B revenue, ~$500M+ adjusted EBITDA-less-Capex, targeting 50%+ EBITDA margins by 2029.
Why it matters: The crypto-eats-TradFi narrative usually means exchanges buying brokerages — Robinhood bought Bitstamp, Kraken bought NinjaTrader. This deal is different. Bullish bought the system of record, the database that tracks who owns what share. Every stock grant, every dividend, every proxy vote touches a registrar like Equiniti. Bullish is betting the next version of that database runs on a blockchain.
Contrarian read: $BLSH dropped 8.5% pre-market on dilution fears, then rallied +12.76% intraday. Eight months until close. Shareholders eat $2.35B of dilution in the meantime. Not all reads are bullish.
THE RAISE
BlackRock, Apollo, and the NYSE itself just bought into Circle’s stablecoin chain.
Circle ($CRCL) — runs USDC, IPO’d on NYSE last June at $31 and popped to $83 — just disclosed a $222M token presale for its Arc blockchain at a $3 billion valuation.
This is the first time a US-listed public company has run a token presale. Five years ago, the SEC was suing ICOs into oblivion. Today, BlackRock is funding one.
The investor lineup:
- a16z crypto led with $75M
- BlackRock (already runs $2.5B in tokenized Treasuries via BUIDL)
- Apollo
- Intercontinental Exchange — the parent company of the NYSE where CRCL trades
- SBI, Janus Henderson, StanChart Ventures, General Catalyst, Marshall Wace, ARK Invest, IDG, Haun, Bullish
What Arc is: EVM-compatible Layer 1 with USDC as the native gas token. Sub-second deterministic finality. Opt-in privacy. Testnet went live last October with 100+ institutional participants including Visa, Goldman Sachs, HSBC, and AWS. Mainnet beta later this year.
CEO Jeremy Allaire on CNBC today: “We’re entering the operating system business, doing it by building this multi-stakeholder distributed model with a token, with a distributed network… and we’re also getting into the apps business.”
He calls blockchain infrastructure “as important as mobile operating systems or cloud platforms.”
Q1 backdrop: USDC onchain volume hit $21.5 trillion (+260% YoY). Supply $77B (+28%). Still #2 behind Tether — but the regulated one institutions can actually touch.
Why it matters: USDC is the regulated dollar of crypto. Arc makes it the gas of crypto too — fast, dollar-denominated settlement without ETH price swings or bridge risk. The presence of BlackRock, Visa, Goldman, HSBC, and AWS on testnet means this rail is being built for institutional flows: payroll, tokenized treasuries, real money movement. Not crypto-natives speculating on the next thing.
The surprising bit: ICE just bought tokens in a settlement network being built by one of its own listed companies. That’s vertical integration most people aren’t pricing in.
THE EARNINGS
monday.com proved AI is actually moving SaaS revenue. Stock jumped ~21% on the print.
monday.com ($MNDY) reported Q1 earnings before the bell: revenue $351.3M, up 24% YoY. Non-GAAP EPS $1.15 beat $0.95 consensus by 23%.
The headline: co-CEOs Eran Zinman and Roy Mann disclosed that AI products drove 10% of net new ARR in Q1. That figure excludes the agent products they just launched.
Customer cohorts (YoY growth):
- $50K+ ARR: 4,547 customers (+32%)
- $100K+ ARR: 1,844 (+39%)
- $500K+ ARR: 99 (+74%) — a record net-add quarter
- Net retention: 110% overall, 116% for $50K+ cohort
monday.com renamed itself the “monday AI Work Platform” the week before reporting. Zinman, on the call: “We have rearchitected the core of our platform around the single belief that work should be orchestrated between humans and AI agents at scale from a single system of records.”
Internal flywheel, per Mann: “AI has driven a 32% increase in our output per developer and a 38% reduction in product time to market.”
They also acquired OneAI (voice-agent specialist, terms undisclosed) to bolt native voice onto the platform.
Why it matters: Cleanest data point yet that AI is actually moving SaaS revenue, not just SaaS narratives. The seats-plus-AI-credits monetization model is the same one Salesforce is running with Agentforce — $800M ARR, +169% YoY at FY26 Q4. The “AI eats software” bear case for SaaS multiples keeps running into earnings reports like this.
Reality check: 10% of net new ARR is not 10% of total ARR. The headline AI revenue currently comes from simpler features (AI Blocks, Sidekick), not the agent demos. And monday.com is structurally a seat-license business selling AI tools that automate the exact knowledge workers it bills per seat. Self-disruption hedge or self-disruption fuel — TBD.
WEEK AHEAD
Consumer sentiment hit a 74-year low Friday. The S&P hit a record high. CPI on Tuesday breaks the tie.
University of Michigan preliminary May consumer sentiment came in at 48.2 on Friday — the lowest reading in the survey’s 74-year history. Lower than 2008. Lower than COVID. Lower than the Volcker recession.
Same Friday, the S&P 500 closed at 7,398.93, a record. Sixth consecutive weekly gain — longest streak since 2024.
Director Joanne Hsu (UMich) noted the reading sits roughly tied with the June 2022 trough — the survey’s record low across 74 years.
The K-shape is back. The S&P at a record, sentiment at a record low, and very different households living in each one.
The tiebreaker prints Tuesday May 12 at 8:30am ET: April CPI. Consensus +0.6% MoM / +3.7% YoY headline. Core +0.3% MoM / +2.7% YoY.
March ran hot already — 3.3% YoY headline, highest since May 2024, driven by a 21.2% gasoline jump. April CPI is the print that shows whether that gas pulse has rolled off into core.
Fed positioning: Fed funds 3.50%-3.75%. The April 29 meeting had four dissents — the most since 1992 (Miran dovish; Hammack, Kashkari, Logan hawkish). CME FedWatch: June cut odds ~6%, July ~11%.
Also reporting this week:
- Wed: Cisco ($CSCO), consensus EPS $1.04 (+8.3% YoY) — cleanest read on AI data-center capex
- Thu: Applied Materials ($AMAT), semis read. Walmart ($WMT) reports the following week (May 21)
Why it matters: If you have meaningful exposure to equities — RSUs, brokerage, retirement — you’re on the long end of the K. The rate path is what props it up. A hot CPI Tuesday pushes the first cut from June to September, compresses growth multiples on Cisco and AMAT, and re-rates every private valuation. The wealth-effect trade is implicitly a bet that asset prices stay propped up while real wages for the bottom half don’t recover.
The Fed-dissent angle: Last time the FOMC had four dissents, George H.W. Bush was president. The Fed is more fractured on the inflation/labor tradeoff than at any point in 34 years. Hot CPI Tuesday discredits the dovish dissent (Miran), and the bond market — not equities — re-prices first.
That’s the brief.
Tomorrow we do it again.
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Not financial advice. Just the news.