By
Steve Muchoki
April 4th, 2024
Shares of Galaxy Digital Holdings Ltd. plummeted by more than 20% soon after the listing owing to poor Q1 results this year.
On Wednesday, August 1, Mike Novogratz‘s merchant bank Galaxy Digital’s shares were publicly traded on Toronto’s TSX Venture Exchange (TSX-V) as reported by CoinSpeaker. Although Novogratz had declared his cryptocurrency merchant bank going public earlier this year in January, the billionaire investor and bitcoin-bull had a pretty rough time with the Canadian regulators to get through the listing process.
Galaxy Digital finally started trading on the Toronto Stock exchange at C$2.75 and witnessed a pretty rough start as the stock price plummeted by more than 20 percent just during the first half an hour of the trading. By 12:45 PM ET, the stock was seen trading below C$2, and finally went to hit a lot of C$1.92 before recovering later that day.
The listing itself took place at a 45 percent discounted price to which the investors had bought for C$5 during a private placement in January this year. Of course, after a stunning end of 2017, the crypto market had created huge euphoria among investors to swallow any offerings being made then.
The stock market listing was expected to take a hit as the crypto-based merchant bank booked a loss of a whopping $134 million during the first quarter of 2018, the company announced in its financial disclosure last week. Novogratz also disclosed the process of listing on the TSX Venture Exchange which was unusual in a way as the company initially bought a Canadian crypto-startup Coin Capital later merging it through a reverse takeover of a Canada-based shell company Bradmer Pharmaceuticals. Currently, the company is listed as Galaxy Digital Holdings Ltd. with 70 employees on-board.
In his latest interview, however, Novogratz noted that the process to get listed was quite “frustrating” owing to the demands of the Canadian regulators that had dragged the listing process for months. He said:
“If I knew what I know now, knew the crypto markets were going to swoon as much, and it was going to take so long, I might have stayed private for another year or so and then gone public. But I don’t think it’s a mistake.”
However, Novogratz has already stated that he is here to stay long and expressed complete confidence in his team and the progress they have made so far since the beginning of this year. His long-term plans hold to strategically institutionalize the blockchain industry and the digital currency sector.
In one of his Twitter announcement, Novogratz said:
“I’m excited to close our transaction in Canada. Our mission is to institutionalize the space, and promote the advancement of the underlying ecosystem and technology behind digital assets and blockchain. I am proud of our team and grateful for the support we’ve received. Onward!”
So far this year, Galaxy Digital has made six acquisitions and eleven different investments for $86 million. By the end of March 2018, the company had a total of $281.7 million in total assets. Novogratz has personally contributed around $302 million of his own assets to the company.