Peter Thiel, Alan Howard join $10 billion funding round for Block.one's new crypto exchange subsidiary

Block.one, the developer of the EOSIO blockchain, has unveiled a new crypto exchange subsidiary that has raised nearly $10 billion in funding.

The subsidiary, Bullish Global, is developing a crypto exchange named Bullish, which is scheduled to launch sometime this year.

Bullish Global is backed by a number of notable investors, including billionaires Peter Thiel, Alan Howard, Mike Novogratz, Louis Bacon of Moore Capital, Richard Li of Hong Kong-based Pacific Century Group, and Christian Angermayer of Germany-based Apeiron Investment Group. Japanese banking giant Nomura is also an investor.

These backers collectively participated in a $300 million round for Bullish Global. The rest was injected by Block.one in the form of $100 million cash, 164,000 bitcoin (worth over $9 billion at current prices), and 20 million EOS tokens (worth about $227 million at current prices). The EOS token has gone up by about 15% in the last 24 hours, according to CoinGecko.

Thiel, Howard, Li, and Angermayer have also joined Bullish Global as senior advisors.

Block.one said Bullish would be based on the EOSIO blockchain and will provide benefits of both centralized and decentralized exchanges.

"The Bullish exchange will offer new automated market making, lending, and portfolio management tools to its users to deliver functionality that has previously been monopolized by incumbent players in traditional finance, while driving deeper liquidity to digital assets," Block.one said in a statement.