SoftBank's alleged association in Bitmain’s reported initial public offering (IPO) has been denied by an official.
SoftBank, a major Japanese tech player, and Uber shareholder, as well as Tencent, a Chinese tech giant, were supposedly to have made a pre-IPO deal with, one of the biggest crypto companies on the market, Bitmain.
An official from SoftBank denied any involvement of such nature, claiming “Neither the SoftBank Group Corp. nor the SoftBank Vision Fund were in any way involved in the deal.” No insight regarding the deal has been given by Tencent.
The information that the two prominent tech companies were involved in the pre-IPO deal came from the Chinese QQ News, which was later picked up by mainstream western media such as Business Insider and Yahoo! Finance. As word began to spread, the valuation of the company was reported to have grown to $15 billion.
Speculation began to appear regarding the supposed amount of bitcoin cash (BCH) that they had. Samson Mow CSO of Blockstream tweeted:
Later Mow questioned Bitmain's Q2 results:
Crypto Herpes Cat attempted to answer these issues by exploring a few ways how Bitmain might have acquired the reported amount of BCH, and how come they are flourishing with their hardware in today's decreasing market.
“How do you realize the value of this monolith crypto business and your holdings? You IPO and pass the bag on in one huge lumped stock offering and hope investors don’t realize all of your current assets are very, very illiquid.”
WHY IS THIS IMPORTANT?
- As Bitmain is one of the biggest crypto players on the market, misleading information regarding its current situation can lead to serious consequences for the company and hence the crypto community.
- With this rather controversial information, Bitmain's anticipated IPO could be much less successful than it was initially hoped to be.