By
Mayowa Adebajo
April 15th, 2024
Few days after SoftBank and Tencent disputed their involvement in a widely reported pre-IPO investment round of Bitmain, DST Global denied investment in the giant’s IPO as well.
Big investors are denying involvement with the prospective initial public offering (IPO) of cryptocurrency mining giant Bitmain. Among them are investment firms DST Global, SoftBank Group, and Tencent Holdings.
Bitmain Technologies is a Beijing-based bitcoin miner and designer of ASIC chips with offices in Shenzhen, Shanghai, Chengdu, Hong Kong, Fuzhou, US, Israel, Netherlands and Switzerland. Founded in 2013 by Jihan Wu and Micree Zhan, Bitmain controls approximately 70 percent of the mining chip market and is also responsible for a substantial chunk of Bitcoin’s computing power through its mega-mining pools Antpool and BTC.com.
In early August, Bitmain Technologies announced its plan to go public in the last quarter of 2018, which would be the highest IPO in the history and bring a lot of traditional market players to the crypto space. The announcement came after Bitmain Technologies successfully closed a Series B round funding which valued the firm at nearly $12 billion. On August 10, it was reported that the company got major backing surfaced in Chinese media around, and the IPO could gain vast momentum despite widespread criticism from within the cryptocurrency industry. However, some investors see Bitmain IPO as risky.
Popular crypto Twitter pundit WhalePanda put his concerns over Bitmain’s IPO in a specific light, saying that “they purposely didn’t include the Q2 numbers for Pre-IPO buyers since they were a disaster… They told Pre-IPO buyers they would use some of the money to buy more BCH.”
Such outstanding investors have already denied their involvement in Bitmain IPO. Last week, financial giant SoftBank said it had no connection to the Bitmain round.
“Neither the SoftBank Group Corp. nor the SoftBank Vision Fund were in any way involved in the deal,” a spokesperson of SoftBank commented. When asked about any previous or subsequent investment interest in the mining giant, the SoftBank representative further replied with “nothing so far.”
Another corporation Tencent Holdings has said that it “did not take part in the investment of Bitmain Technologies.”
Few days after Tencent Holdings and SoftBank Group disputed their involvement in a pre-IPO investment round for Bitmain, DST Global, an investment fund which focuses on late-stage, global ventures, confirmed that it “has never invested” into the giant’s pre-IPO as well. After being asked to confirm the rumour, John Lindfors, a managing partner at DST Global, said:
“I can confirm that DST has never invested in Bitmain.”
However, reports said otherwise.
Allegedly Bitmain used DST in some pre-IPO decks and told investors that DST had invested in Bitmain… As is mentioned on crunchbase but also in articles on for example TechCrunch (among others). If they did this while it wasn't the case, that's fraud. https://t.co/Um6uJjYnzA
— WhalePanda (@WhalePanda) August 22, 2018
The IPO has already stumbled into controversy related to the crypto mining firm’s massive holding of Bitcoin Cash. According to popular Twitter threads by Samson Mow, Parabolic Trav and WhalePanda, as well as the analysis of Crypto Herpes Cat on Medium, Bitmain hemorrhaged itself by selling most of its BTC holdings for BCH. They are now believed to hold around 1 million BCH.
“They purposely didn’t include the Q2 numbers for Pre-IPO buyers since they were a disaster… They told Pre-IPO buyers they would use some of the money to buy more BCH,” WhalePanda wrote.
So Bitmain and some media outlets were spreading lies about the IPO in an attempt to create hype for an obviously shady and disastrous investment round. 🤔 https://t.co/Y9hZL7Ze1P
— WhalePanda (@WhalePanda) August 21, 2018