Bankers eagerly await the Hong Kong IPO of Bitmain, the dominant provider of computer hardware for cryptocurrency miners which had $2.8 billion of revenue in the first half of 2018. But as they wonder what valuation public investors will eventually put on a company that has already raised $872 million in private funding – with a $422 million venture round completed in August that drew in Temasek Holding among others – let’s not forget Argo Blockchain.
Crypto analysts have at various times in recent months talked up a valuation for Bitmain, which was founded in 2013 and is headquartered in Beijing, of anywhere from $15 billion to $50 billion.
Founded in December 2017, headquartered in London but with most operations in Canada, Argo is a much smaller company, with a market cap a mere fraction of that. But it has already listed on the London Stock Exchange main market, raising £25 million through a placement in August 2018, to build out a new platform.
We’ve had software-as-a-service, banking-as-a-service and blockchain-as-a-service.
Argo now offers mining-as-a-service.
Subscription packages
It is in the process of leasing state-of-the-art blockchain mining hardware to build up racks of servers while selling subscription packages for retail users to rent this industrial-scale mining capacity and gain payment in mined cryptocurrencies.
