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Australia-headquartered Iris Energy has become the latest energy company-turned Bitcoin mining firm seeking to list in the U.S via an initial public offering (IPO).
The firm filed an F-1 form to the Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday with a placeholder goal of raising $100 million and plans to list on the Nasdaq stock exchange under the ticker IREN.
The IPO prospectus comes two months after the firm initially submitted a confidential filing for a direct listing in August but it appears to have revised the plan since then.
Earlier this month, Pennsylvania-based Stronghold Digital — similarly an energy company-turned Bitcoin mining firm — raised $127 million in an IPO with the final pricing exceeding the initial target range.
Iris Energy said it had an operating hash rate of about 0.7 exahashes per second as of October 1, accounting for about 0.4% of Bitcoin’s total network hash rate. This is powered up by the 30-megawatts facility it acquired in British Columbia in early 2020.
No bitcoin holdings
But different from other publicly listed Bitcoin mining firms in North America, Iris Energy does not hoard its bitcoin, instead liquidating its newly mined coins on a daily basis.
“We have been mining Bitcoin since 2019. We liquidate all the Bitcoin we have mined and therefore do not have any Bitcoin held on our balance sheet as of September 30, 2021,” the firm said in the prospectus.
Iris Energy said it plans to use the net proceeds from the IPO to increase its working capital and expand its hardware and mining facilities.
Apart from its first site in Canada, it is pursuing additional facilities in British Columbia, Texas and Asia in its bid to have enough capacity to host the mining hardware it has already ordered.
“As of September 30, 2021, we have entered into binding hardware purchase contracts with Bitmain … to acquire the latest-generation miners, Antminer S19j and Antminer S19j Pro, with an aggregate nameplate hashrate capacity of 14.5 EH/s and deliveries commencing in October 2021 and ending in September 2023, which is expected to increase our operating and contracted nameplate hashrate capacity to 15.2 EH/s,” the firm added.
That means the firm needs to have an operating power capacity of about 530 megawatts by September 2023 for its entire planned mining fleet.
© 2021 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.
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