Bullish Exchange Review 2025

Eric Huffman

Verified by Ilija Rankovic

Last updated

October 7, 2025 04:59 EDT

20min read

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Bullish is a fast-growing crypto exchange and derivatives trading platform. It has made waves in the crypto industry thanks to ultra-low fees and a regulation-first approach that recently enabled it to launch in the United States.

Is Bullish the best crypto exchange for you? In our Bullish review, we’ll dive deep into everything this exchange offers and highlight its pros and cons for different types of crypto traders.

What is Bullish Exchange?

Bullish is a global crypto exchange developed by Block.one and first launched in 2021. It initially differed from other major centralized crypto exchanges by catering exclusively to institutional clients. However, in the past few years, Bullish opened its platform to retail traders, making it a direct competitor to exchanges like Binance and Coinbase.

Bullish launched on the New York Stock Exchange in August 2025, marking a key milestone and earning the company a valuation exceeding $13 billion. In October, Bullish launched crypto spot trading in 20 U.S. states after receiving regulatory approval from the New York Department of Financial Services (NYDFS).

Bullish currently processes roughly $2 billion in average daily cryptocurrency trading volume, placing it among the 50 largest exchanges by volume.

Is Bullish Exchange Safe and Trustworthy?

Bullish is one of the most highly regulated crypto exchanges in the world. The platform has taken a regulation-first approach, working with financial authorities in various countries (including the U.S.) to receive approval before launching trading. For example, Bullish launched in the U.S. only after obtaining a BitLicense from the NYDFS in October 2025.

Bullish is regulated in several other jurisdictions, including:

• The European Union, under a license from the German Federal Financial Supervisory Authority (BaFin)
• Hong Kong, under a license from the country’s Securities and Futures Commission (SFC)
• Gibraltar, under a Distributed Ledger Technology license from the Gibraltar Financial Services Commission (GFSC)

Bullish has a number of security measures in place to protect customer funds, including fully segregated wallets that aren’t used by the platform for lending or trading. All customer funds are backed 1:1 by reserves and reserves are reconciled daily.

The company also undergoes annual third-party audits by Deloitte and, as a publicly traded company in the U.S., must publicly report earnings and other financial details on a quarterly basis.

To protect individual customer accounts, Bullish requires mandatory multi-factor authentication. The company has never suffered a hack and has a bug bounty program to catch potential vulnerabilities early.

Bullish Exchange Trading and Investing Features

Bullish is a full-service crypto exchange that supports spot, margin, futures, and options trading. We’ll dive into the full range of features available for each type of trading.

Spot and Margin Trading

Bullish offers spot crypto trading on 50 large market cap tokens, including a small selection of meme coins, stablecoins, and Layer-2 tokens. This is a relatively small selection compared to other U.S.-based crypto exchanges, but the number of tokens may expand as the U.S. eases regulatory restrictions on a wider range of cryptocurrency projects.

All tokens are available to trade with margin, although the maximum leverage varies by token and is generally less than 5x. Bullish automatically uses cross-margin and automated loan repayment to enable the most efficient use of your trading capital.

Perpetuals and Dated Futures

Bullish offers perpetual crypto futures for most of the tokens available for spot trading. Leverage available for futures trading varies by pair, but is limited to 7x for BTC and ETH.

Dated (expiry) futures are only available for BTC. Dated futures are available with weekly expirations, whereas many competing crypto futures trading platforms only offer monthly or quarterly expiration contracts.

Importantly, all futures contracts on Bullish are traded in pairs with USDC. USDT-settled and token delivery contracts are not available at this time.

If you’re looking for more leverage and more flexibility to trade futures, you may want to consider CoinFutures. It offers up to 1,000x leverage and supports trading around 13 popular cryptos. In addition, CoinFutures requires no Know Your Customer (KYC) checks, enabling you to trade futures completely anonymously.

Options

Bullish recently announced plans to launch crypto options trading in partnership with 13 major options trading firms around the world. Options trading is expected to begin on October 8, 2025.

Bullish will initially offer options for Bitcoin only, limiting its flexibility compared to other top crypto options trading platforms. However, the exchange plans to add trading on ETH options and options on crypto indices in the near future.

Indices

Bullish offers trading on four indices that track different compilations of tokens:

• CoinDesk 20
• CoinDesk 80
• CoinDesk 100
• CoinDesk Meme

All of these indices are maintained by crypto news outlet CoinDesk, which is owned by Bullish. This is a relatively unique offering that isn’t available at other crypto exchanges.

OTC Trading

Bullish offers an over-the-counter (OTC) market for direct trading with other exchange users. You can trade any of the perpetual or dated futures or options contracts that Bullish supports. However, you cannot trade spot cryptocurrencies using the OTC marketplace.

This is the opposite of most OTC trading desks, which support spot cryptocurrency trades but not derivative trades.

Bullish’s trade builder allows you to construct multi-leg OTC trades with up to 25 component trades.

Bullish Risk Management

Bullish offers a wide variety of risk management tools for traders, including both features common at other major exchanges and some tools that are unique to Bullish.

Common features you’ll find at Bullish include support for limit and stop orders as well as execution controls such as “good ‘til cancelled” (GTC), “immediate or cancel” (IOC) , and “fill or kill” (FOK).

The exchange provides access to its order book, allowing you to monitor liquidity pools and calculate spreads for your trades easily.

All margin on Bullish uses cross-margin, which is riskier than isolated margin since it could potentially lead to liquidation of all your open positions. However, Bullish manages margin trading risk with automated loan repayment, which uses available balance from your account to repay margin early. This reduces your exposure to market shifts and helps reduce borrowing costs.

One of the most unique risk management features on Bullish is that the exchange gives you full access to its automated market maker (AMM) platform.

You can send custom instructions to the AMM to create liquidity and get paid for it or manage your trading risk for specific positions. You can take full control over spreads as well as control lower and upper price boundaries for all of your trades.

Bullish Exchange Fees

Bullish stands out as one of the lowest fee crypto exchanges in the world. In fact, many retail traders will pay zero fees for spot, futures, or options trades.

Bullish uses a maker/taker fee structure, which is common in the crypto industry. Makers pay no fee across all of Bullish’s markets and can receive a 0.005% rebate when trading futures or options. Takers pay no fee for most spot crypto markets, but a fee of 0.01%-0.02% for futures markets and a fee of 0.015% for options markets.

There’s no fee for deposits at Bullish, but the exchange does charge withdrawal fees. These vary by payment method. As a few examples, you’ll pay $30 for fiat wire transfers, 0.00006 BTC for Bitcoin withdrawals, and 5 USDT or USDC for withdrawals in these stablecoins.

Here’s a summary of Bullish fees:

Where Can Bullish Exchange Improve?

While Bullish has impressed with its low fees and willingness to engage in regulatory oversight, the exchange could improve in a few key areas.

• More tradable assets: Bullish currently offers only 50 cryptocurrencies for spot trading and a similar number of futures trading pairs. This is significantly fewer than competing exchanges and can limit Bullish’s usefulness for investors interested in buying new and emerging tokens.
• Offer USDT-settled futures: Many of Bullish’s competitors offer crypto futures settled in USDT and USDC, while Bullish only offers futures settled in USDC.
• Offer delivery futures: Bullish currently doesn’t offer any delivery futures (e.g., Bitcoin futures that are settled in Bitcoin). While these aren’t as popular as stablecoin-settled futures, many traders prefer them.
• Launch in the rest of the U.S.: Bullish is currently available in only 20 U.S. states, while competing U.S. exchanges are available nationwide.

Best Bullish Exchange Alternatives

Bullish is up against a lot of other crypto exchanges, so it’s worth comparing how it stacks up against major competitors. We’ll compare Bullish to four popular exchanges in the U.S. and abroad.

Bullish vs. CoinFutures

CoinFutures is a crypto futures betting game from the renowned crypto gambling platform CoinPoker. While Bullish offers real perpetual crypto futures contracts, CoinFutures lets you make simple up-or-down bets on simulated price action. You can place bets on more than a dozen popular cryptocurrencies, including several meme coins.

CoinFutures has a few key advantages over Bullish, including no KYC checks and support for up to 1,000x leverage. However, it doesn’t support crypto spot trading and lacks technical analysis tools. So, CoinFutures is best for traders who want to keep futures trading simple and prefer fast-paced action.

Check out our full CoinFutures review to learn more.

Bullish vs. MEXC

MEXC is a global crypto exchange that competes directly with Bullish on spot, futures, and options trading. It offers a significantly wider range of assets to trade, including over 1,800 spot cryptocurrencies and 2,800 crypto derivative trading pairs. MEXC also supports very high leverage, up to 500x on USDT-settled perpetual futures.

MEXC has taken a much different approach to regulators than Bullish and has faced regulatory challenges in several countries. It isn’t currently available in the U.S. at all. One benefit of this is that MEXC doesn’t require KYC checks for all traders. So, it can be a good choice if you want to trade crypto or crypto futures anonymously.

Learn more in our full MEXC review.

Bullish vs. OKX

OKX is a Tier-1 cryptocurrency exchange offering over 350 cryptocurrencies for trading and more than 500 derivative trading pairs. It stands out for its wide range of trading tools, including demo accounts, copy trading, algorithmic trading bots, and technical analysis features. OKX also offers staking and yield-generation tools, making it much more flexible for long-term crypto investors.

OKX can’t compete closely with Bullish on trading fees, but it has the advantage of being available in 160+ countries – including the U.S.. It also offers a native crypto wallet to give you more control over your tokens and access to the wider world of Web3.

Check out our full OKX review to learn more.

Bullish vs. Binance

Binance is the world’s largest crypto exchange and offers a much wider range of tradable assets and trading features compared to Bullish. At Binance, you’ll find more than 500 cryptocurrencies and 1,500 trading pairs. There’s also Binance Alpha, which offers access to emerging cryptocurrencies before they list on the main exchange.

Binance supports USDT, USDC, and coin-settled futures and options contracts with up to 125x leverage. It also has algorithmic trading bots, copy trading, and a hub for staking and earning on cryptocurrencies you own. BNB asset holders get a 25% discount on trading fees, making Binance’s costs competitive with Bullish.

Learn more in our full Binance review.

Bullish Payment Methods

Bullish supports deposits in both cryptocurrency and fiat currencies. For crypto deposits, you can pay using any of the tokens that Bullish supports for spot trading in your jurisdiction. For fiat deposits, the only payment methods are bank transfers and wire transfers. Debit/credit cards and e-wallets are not supported.

Bullish doesn’t have any minimum deposit requirements or maximum deposit limits. There’s no minimum withdrawal (as long as you meet the withdrawal fee). The maximum withdrawal is $10,000 per 24 hours.

Is Bullish User-Friendly?

The Bullish trading platform is fairly user-friendly, but lacks some features that other crypto exchanges offer.

First, it’s important to note that Know Your Customer (KYC) checks are required during sign-up, which can slow down the process of getting started with Bullish.

Depending on your deposit method, it can also take up to a few hours for your funds to appear on Bullish. Most crypto deposits are available within a few minutes.

Once you’re on the platform, the charting and order entry panels look similar to what you’d find at other exchanges. We appreciated the breadth of built-in technical indicators and drawing tools. However, it’s essential to note that Bullish doesn’t offer demo accounts, copy trading, or algorithmic trading bots to help you develop your trading strategy.

The interface is also not very customizable, which can be problematic for more advanced traders or those using multiple screens for trading.

We liked how Bullish organizes the platform’s features in a navigation panel. For example, there are dedicated tabs for the automated market maker, the OTC order panel, portfolio management tools, and alerts.

All of these were straightforward to use, and Bullish’s online knowledge base offers a clear explanation of how to use the platform’s more advanced features.

Overall, we liked Bullish’s web platform and think it’s fairly approachable for beginners. However, advanced traders might find the platform limiting.

Crucially, Bullish is currently available only on the web and does not have mobile apps at this time. That’s a major disadvantage for traders on the go, since virtually all other major exchanges offer comprehensive mobile apps for iOS and Android.

Where is Bullish Available?

Bullish is available in a growing number of countries. It’s now available in 20 states in the U.S., across the EU, and in most of the rest of the world. Major excluded countries include Canada, China, Japan, Israel, Russia, and the UK.

Note that Bullish has four regulated entities in the U.S., the EU, Gibraltar, and Hong Kong. Depending on your country, you’ll automatically be routed to one of these entities, which will impact what assets you can trade.

For example, only five cryptocurrencies are available for customers of Bullish Hong Kong to trade. U.S. customers can trade 20 out of Bullish’s total of 50 supported cryptocurrencies.

Bullish Customer Support

Bullish offers customer support by email only. We contacted the exchange and got a helpful response within a few hours.

That said, a few hours can feel like an eternity when you have open crypto positions. Most major exchanges offer 24/7 live chat and phone support, so this is a major shortcoming to be aware of when considering Bullish.

On the plus side, Bullish has a very helpful online knowledge base. You’ll find articles about payments, trading features, account settings, and more. There are dedicated articles for customers in different jurisdictions, so there’s no confusion about what fees or platform limitations apply to your account.

How to Get Started With Bullish

Interested in trading with Bullish? We’ll walk you through how to get started with this crypto exchange in a few easy steps.

Step 1: Create an Account

To get started, head to Bullish.com and click Sign Up in the upper-right corner of the homepage. Enter your email address and click Sign Up.

Bullish will send a verification code to your email, which you must enter on the next screen. Then you can select a password and a security question for your account.

Step 2: Complete KYC Checks

Once your account is set up, Bullish will prompt you to complete KYC checks. These are required for all Bullish customers before you can deposit funds or begin trading. If you choose to skip this step for the time being, you can return to the verification process later by navigating to your account settings in Bullish and selecting Complete Account Verification.

Click Complete Verification to get started. Select your country, then choose the verification document you want to upload. Upload the required photos for your ID.

Next, you must take a selfie using your device’s camera. Click I Am Ready when you’re ready to take a photo and give Bullish access to your webcam if prompted. Follow the on-screen directions to complete this step.

Finally, Bullish requires you to confirm your address. You can either confirm the address shown (which is determined from the ID you uploaded) or enter your current address.

Step 3: Activate Two-factor Authentication

Bullish requires you to have two-factor authentication enabled before you can make a deposit. To activate this, go to your account settings and select the Security tab, then choose Add Authenticator.

Follow the prompts to connect Bullish to your authenticator app. When finished, be sure to write down your recovery seed and keep it somewhere safe.

Step 4: Make a Deposit

Now you’re ready to deposit funds into your Bullish account. Click the Deposit button at the top right of the Bullish dashboard. Select whether you want to deposit cash (bank transfer) or choose the cryptocurrency you wish to deposit.

For cash deposits, select the currency you want to deposit and choose your transfer method. Bullish will display the deposit account details and a unique deposit memo. Navigate to your bank and initiate the transfer there using the details Bullish provided.

For cryptocurrency deposits, Bullish will display a QR code or wallet address and deposit memo depending on the token you’re using. Scan the QR code withyour crypto wallet or enter the deposit details to initiate your transfer.

Step 5: Begin Trading

Once your deposit arrives in your Bullish account, you can begin trading. Navigate to the trading panel and select the asset you want to trade. Enter your order details and click Buy or Sell to enter your trade.

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Eric Huffman

Eric Huffman's background includes a decade plus in business management as well as personal finance industry experience in insurance and lending. A strong understanding of consumer finance combined with a consumer advocate stance brought Eric to the crypto industry, where he writes articles and guides aimed at making crypto easier to understand.

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