Bitcoin Forum

Bitcoin Mining Firm Canaan Slashes IPO Target — and May Not Go Public Anytime Soon

Canaan, one of the world’s largest bitcoin mining firms, may be having second thoughts about its plan to go public in one of the cryptocurrency industry’s highest-grossing initial public offerings (IPO) to date.

Chinese Bitcoin Mining Firm Delays IPO
The Hangzhou-based Canaan had been one of at least three Chinese bitcoin mining firms planning to go public on the Stock Exchange of Hong Kong (HKEX), along with Ebang and Bitmain — the crypto industry’s most valuable company.

However, Reuters reports that Canaan’s filing documents lapsed on Thursday, which marked the six months after the firm had initially submitted them to HKEX. According to unnamed sources close to the deal, both HKEX and local regulators were concerned about the firm’s business model and had not yet received satisfactory answers.

Significantly, Canaan had also reportedly slashed its IPO target by a full 80 percent, to $400 million from an initial goal of as much as $2 billion.

The sources cited in the report said that while Canaan can refile its listing application with updated financials, it’s not likely that the IPO would occur before the turn of the year. Ebang, similarly, is no longer expected to list its shares until at least 2019.

“With the bitcoin price dropping so much this year, there’s a lot of uncertainties over their business. If we cannot forecast their financials, how can we sell their IPOs?” commented one senior banker.

CCN | https://www.ccn.com/bitcoin-mining-firm-canaan-slashes-ipo-target-and-may-not-go-public-anytime-soon/

An IPO is only another way to scam and collect money from the investors hehehe. Corrupt regulators can be bribed by companies to approve false filings of cash flow, assets and liabilities, and other information.

This is the same as an ICO, however in a regulated environment.

This is one of the reasons Bitmain rushed its IPO filings. There's only so much potential investment capital that will flow into mining company IPOs. Between competing with Bitmain for the same pool of money, and the declining price of Bitcoin, it's not looking good for Canaan.


There are plenty of legitimate IPOs. I wouldn't liken them to scams. The whole point of investing (for seed investors and such) is to eventually exit with good profits, whether through an IPO or a private share sale.

@squatter. Agreed,however there are IPOs created to scam some people. Remember the technology bubble? There were many internet startups that did not have positive earnings that were approved in filing for IPOs. Most of those IPOs are similar in the cryptospace's ICOs. They are all promises but no product.

You don’t need positive earnings to justify an IPO. In the tech bubble, the prevailing attitude among startups and investors was “branding and market share now, profit will come later.” That doesn’t make them all scams. It was just a time of reckless investment. There’s nothing inherently wrong with raising capital to fund an operation — even one built on a shaky business model. Investment always carries risk. Caveat emptor.

Agreed. However many of them were also scams. I use the word scam in this example, similar to the way the altcoin community uses it for ICOs hehehe. A project that has no chance to succeed because of unreachable promises made by a development team that did not have the skills.