A crypto-mining company Bitfury is considering several strategic options for further developing its business, including the possibility of an initial public offering (IPO), which may be the largest for the digital currencies industry in Europe, Bloomberg writes citing familiar sources.
Bitfury has established contacts with global investment banks and may place its securities in Amsterdam, London, or Hong Kong next year. The sources have asked not to give their names because the details have not yet been disclosed to the general public.
At the same time, the company takes into account various scenarios, including attracting debt financing or selling a minority stake, they added. According to their information, the final decision to date has not been made. If Bitfury wants to gain public status in the next 2 years, it can expect an evaluation from $3 up to $5 billion. Although these are only early estimates, which can change depending on the situation on the market or the industry, they say.
Bitfury revenues account for a fraction of what Bitmain Technologies Ltd., a mining unit, brings. A Beijing-based company filed an application for an IPO in Hong Kong last month and can expect to raise up to $3 billion, sources said earlier. This is six times less than the amount that was previously announced by the company.
Bitfury, like Bitmain, is a manufacturer of cryptocurrency mining equipment. The company was founded in 2011. For 12 months till March of this year, it earned $450 million, according to its CEO Valery Vavilov.
The decline in cryptocurrency prices may be one of the reasons that force mining companies to sell their shares now, so that their current owners can “capture some of the gains they’ve made from growing the business to this point”, said Gil Luria, Director of Institutional Equity Research at D.A. Davidson & Co.
The proposal might be interesting for the capital managers who believe in cryptocurrency, but prefer to avoid the risks associated with the direct investment, he thinks.
“It's like buying shovels and Levis jeans during the gold rush. These are real companies generating a decent amount of revenue”, he said.
Recently it became known that the American crypto giant Coinbase could hold its own IPO, and earlier in September the team of a mobile crypto-trading application Robinhood has also announced its plans to run a public offering. Representatives of the company explained that obtaining the status of a public company corresponded very accurately to the mission of the project.
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