Crypto Rumor: Bitcoin Mining Giant Bitmain ‘Might' be Going Public via IPO Because they ‘are' Going Broke

Bitmain Technologies, the cryptocurrency mining company, is filing for an initial public offering (IPO) potentially as high as $18 billion this September at a market capitalization of $40 to $50 billion.

As one of the most valuable crypto companies, Bitmain closed a $1 billion pre-IPO financing round on July 23 at a $15 billion valuation, nearly two times cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase's $8 billion valuation. A possible $18 billion IPO sticker price positions Bitmain to displace social media giant Facebook as one of the largest public offerings in history.

However, it’s Bitmain’s fairy tale rise to the top has had some consequences on the company’s business model which should send red flags to its investors. Samson Mow, the CSO of Blockstream in a Tweet points the risk for any investor to participate in Bitmain’s IPO.

According to the Bitmain pre-IPO investor deck, they sold most of their #Bitcoin for #Bcash. At $900/BCH, they've bled half a billion in the last 3 months. If Bitcoin Core devs didn't disclose the Bcash vulnerability, it could've wiped a billion dollars off their balance sheets. pic.twitter.com/9BMywdvvby

— Samson Mow (@Excellion) August 11, 2018

Samson adds to this by saying,

“The Bitmain IPO is incredibly risky for any investor to buy into. The potential for massive losses is just around the corner as they have no idea how to maintain BCH, but are all-in. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.”

A Twitter user points out

“Since they can't unload BCHbags because of low order books, maybe they planning selling company to shareholders with IPO to get rid of BCH bags.” If true, this might be “An exit scam that will go down in history.”

Looking at Bitmain’s stats that Mow shared, and considering that selling just 30k of BCH will destroy the whole order book on Bitfinex, there are very little chances for Bitmain to sell it. This might be the reason why they want IPO, they can’t sell their assets, however, if they can sell stocks, they won’t need to. They have to do their IPO before the next quarterly report to get a higher valuation, as BCH was down over 80% from March 2018. He also brought up the Bitcoin Cash vulnerability that was recently making headlines that is worth reading into.

Twitter user Vortex and the founder of CryptoCastNet weighed in on this by saying “Looks like we know why Bitmain wants to IPO. They are going broke, fast.”

He pointed to the following thread to make his case.

The first column, BTC quantity from EOY 2016 to 2017 drops from 70k coins to 35k coins. Doesn’t reveal mined BTC additions from 2017 because they sold off BTC by end of year. What this says to me is they sold entire 2017 mined inventory + 35k 2016 coins to support Bcash peg. Rekt https://t.co/ZZasSuwSri

— Parabolic Trav (@parabolictrav) August 12, 2018

Bitmain seems to have cornered themselves into a stalemate here. If Bitmain decides to switch the majority of its hashing power to BCH, they risk losing bunch of miner support that are pooling in and BCH rates will certainly plummet. Looks like BCH might have slayed the dragon.

Here are a few more interesting takes from Twitter worth reading into and researching more about:

Oh thats Bitmain did the dump Dec 22. Likely a massive hedged BTC dump alongside Bcash peg on Coinbase launch… so they could make 2017 profits look massive for 2018 IPO and financial disclosure. HODL until then was not considered revenue. I bet they tipped off Charlie Lee Dec20

— Parabolic Trav (@parabolictrav) August 11, 2018

the giant of cryptocurrency mining, bitmain, is planning to go public and is targeting a valuation – $40-50b – that would make it worth more than all but two of the tech unicorns of the last decade, and as much as wework and spacex put together @1024YB https://t.co/CeObeaZkm5

— Nathaniel Popper (@nathanielpopper) August 10, 2018

This should be very interesting to see how it unfolds. What do you guys think about the analysis of these ‘crypto experts' within the community?

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