As bitcoin, ethereum and other cryptocurrencies get increasing attention from investors, Wall Street and its traditional banks continue to adjust to the shift. Catch up on this week's top stories highlighting the intersection of these old guard and new school areas of finance with this recap compiled by The Fly.
BITDEER TO GO PUBLIC: Bitdeer and Blue Safari Group Acquisition (BSGA) announced Thursday that they have entered into a definitive merger agreement for a business combination of Blue Safari and the company. As a result of the transaction, the combined company is expected to be renamed Bitdeer Technologies and remain a publicly listed company on Nasdaq. Bitdeer is a technology company for the cryptocurrency mining community. Headquartered in Singapore, Bitdeer currently operates five proprietary mining datacenters in the United States and Norway. Following the close of the transaction, the combined company will continue to be led by Jihan Wu as chairman and founder of Bitdeer. The transaction values Bitdeer at an implied enterprise value of approximately $4B. The Bitdeer and Blue Safari boards of directors have unanimously approved the proposed transaction, which is expected to be completed in the first quarter of 2022, subject to, among other things, regulatory approvals, the approval by Blue Safari's shareholders of the transaction and satisfaction or waiver of other customary closing conditions.
MARATHON RECEIVES SEC SUBPOENA: In a Monday regulatory filing, Marathon Digital (MARA) noted that on October 6, 2020, the company entered into a series of agreements with multiple parties to design and build a data center for up to 100-megawatts in Hardin, MT. In conjunction with the agreements, the company filed a current report on Form 8-K on October 13, 2020, disclosing that the company issued 6,000,000 shares of restricted common stock, in transactions exempt from registration under Section 4(a)(2) of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended. Marathon said , “During the quarter ended September 30, 2021, the company and certain of its executives received a subpoena to produce documents and communications concerning the Hardin, Montana data center facility described in our Form 8-K dated October 13, 2020. We understand that the SEC may be investigating whether or not there may have been any violations of the federal securities law. We are cooperating with the SEC."
TWITTER NOT CRYPTO INVESTING ‘RIGHT NOW’: Twitter's (TWTR) Chief Financial Officer Ned Segal said that investing the company's corporate cash in crypto assets "doesn't make sense right now," The Wall Street Journal’s Nina Trentmann reported Monday. "We (would) have to change our investment policy and choose to own assets that are more volatile," Segal said, adding that the company prefers less volatile, more predictable assets. The remarks come after Twitter announced last week it was forming a Twitter Crypto team to evaluate ways to help creators earn money and accept cryptocurrency. Segal said he expects the recent launch of subscription services, such as Twitter Blue and Super Followers, as a "predictable and new open space for us to generation additional revenue." The majority of the company's revenue will still come from advertisements.
COINBASE OPENING TECH HUBS IN BRAZIL, SINGAPORE: In a Monday company blog post, Coinbase (COIN) EVP of engineering Manish Gupta said the company is opening up tech hubs and actively building out Engineering teams in Brazil and Singapore. He said, “Like India, each has an incredible talent pool of engineers, and we look forward to connecting with world-class talent that can help us achieve our mission. We have already hired senior engineering leaders in both Brazil and Singapore who will act as engineering site leads in these countries, and we are now opening up engineering hiring in both these countries...As a remote-first company, our ambition is to be able to hire anywhere in the world where talent resides. Yet, we also recognize the challenges facing distributed teams, and we work hard at maximizing efficiencies across communications, collaboration, and execution. That's why we recently established three distinct regions of work for our Product and Engineering teams - Americas, EMEA and APAC. This regional framework allows us to think about allocating work and creating communities within similar time zones. Our goal is to have team members all work within a single region, meaning one product team may have members in Brazil, the US and Canada...We plan to continue building hubs in various countries across each region, of various sizes, to help us attract top talent from around the world."
CLEANSPARK BUYS ADDITIONAL ANTMINERS: CleanSpark (CLSK) announced Friday the purchase of an additional 2,597 units of the Antminer S19 bitcoin mining machines. Delivery of the machines is scheduled to be immediate, adding to the 2,711 rigs already purchased and scheduled for delivery this month. These orders are expected to substantially add to the company's hashrate over the coming weeks and the company currently operates more than 12,800 miners, providing a hashrate of 1.3 EH/s.
CRYPTO STOCK PLAYS: Cryptocurrency revenues have been pointed to as reasons to be bullish on Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and Nvidia (NVDA) in select research. Overstock (OSTK), Ideanomics (IDEX), Riot Blockchain (RIOT), Pareteum (TEUM) and SRAX (SRAX) are other stocks that have been touted, or promoted themselves, as a way to play the crypto theme.
PRICE ACTION: As of time of writing, bitcoin dropped roughly 9% this week at $57,965 in U.S. dollars, according to TradeBlock.
