Bitmain’s IPO has expired six months after it launched on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange (HKEX) and will now be delisted. The attempted fundraiser valued the company at $40 billion at the time, which proved too much for investors to stomach and they stayed away, causing the IPO to drift into obscurity before finally being put out of its misery.
A Rocky Road for Bitmain
Bitmain’s IPO didn’t get off to the best of starts – just a few weeks after its launch in late September 2018, the IPO HKEX announced that they would not guarantee to process IPO applications for organizations involved in distributed ledger technology due to its infancy. This uncertainty rippled through the corridors of crypto and almost single-handedly set the seal on the application before it had got its running shoes on. Added to this was the news of massive operating losses in 2018, the liquidating of their BCH holdings which cost them some $500 million in losses, the firing of an entire department, and the departure of CEO Jihan Wu. Taken as a whole, Bitmain really didn’t present an enticing business opportunity, and so it has proved.
Where Now for Bitmain?
Where Bitmain goes from here no one quite knows. Mining chips remain their bread and butter, and they continue to roll them out. Should it want to resurrect the IPO they will have to release figures for the second half of 2018 which, it’s fair to say, will likely do little to stem the tide of negativity that washed out this IPO.
Bitmain’s position in the Bitcoin mining pecking order has slipped dramatically and it now operates under a third of the Bitcoin hashrate. It will seemingly have to diversify if it is to maintain a meaningful presence in the crypto world, but how it plans to do this remains to be seen.
