By
Mayowa Adebajo
April 15th, 2024
Following the examples of its main rivals, Bitcoin mining chip maker Ebang Communication intends to go public and offer its stock on the HKEX.
As it has become known, one of the largest bitcoin mining chip makers in China Ebang Communication is planning to start offering its stock to the public on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange (HKEX).
The application for an initial public offering with the HKEX is already filed. Nevertheless, there is no information on the valuation of the company and on the amount that it is aiming to raise. In May, the company held some talks with advisors on this issue and at that time Ebang Communication arrived at $1 billion, which sounded like the largest IPO in the crypto industry.
As was previously reported by CoinSpeaker, in May, Ebang’s competitor Canaan Creative already filed an IPO application to the HKEX looking to raise $2 billion.
As also was reported, in June, the Beijing-based bitcoin mining giant Bitmain was also considering going public in the nearest future. And a little bit later, the Chinese arm of venture capital giant Sequoia Capital already invested $400 million in its pre-IPO.
As it is clear from Ebang’s financial statement that is included into the company’s IPO filing, in 2017 it received $141 million in revenue which is 17 times more if compared to the previous year.
According to the document, last year the firm got $60 million in net profit which means that the company showed a 34-time year-on-year growth compared with 2016.
Ebang Communication was founded in 2010 starting its business with production of hardware products for the telecommunication industry. In 2016, the firm went into the cryptocurrency mining business and launched its own Ebit miners. In 2017, Ebang received 94.6 percent of its revenue from the sales of bitcoin miners.
Nevertheless, the issues related to the electricity consumed by miners all over the world still remain rather pressing. A number of countries today are seeking to ban mining or at least to impose some limits on it.
For example, Quebec’s public power utility has proposed plans to create a new framework through which the local authorities should work with cryptocurrency miners.
Recently, Hydro-Quebec informed that it would not be able to support all the demand for mining that is observed nowadays. Area’s low-cost energy supply has attracted crypto-miners from around the globe causing unprecedented demand for crypto mining activities. Given this, Quebec wanted its officials to develop new restrictions and rules concerning increasing the cost of power consumption. Hydro-Quebec asked its province to limit the total power usage for crypto miners. If the proposed plan is approved, Hydro-Quebec will parcel out 500 megawatts worth of power for mining activities.
Meanwhile, Bitcoin is experiencing quite hard times. On Sunday, the lowest mark of Bitcoin price in 2018 could be observe, when the coin was traded at $5826,41. At press time, according to CoinMarketCap, it makes $6,173.60, showing the gain of 4.73% over the recent 24 hours.