North American mining company Iris Energy is preparing for its IPO, and unveils ambitious development plans to mine ever more bitcoins.
Iris Energy and IPO: a new Bitcoin mining company on Nasdaq
Iris Energy has filed a Form F-1 with the U.S. SEC, to raise $100 million, and outline its plans to list on Nasdaq under the ticker IREN. Iris Energy was historically an energy provider, and has since converted to a Bitcoin mining specialist. It had submitted an application for a direct listing in August 2021, but the company seems to have changed its plans since then.
Iris Energy has a slightly different business model than North American mining operations. The company is not a HODler, as it systematically sells all the bitcoins it mines:
“We’ve been mining bitcoins since 2019. We liquidate all of those bitcoins, as soon as we mine them, and so we don’t hold any bitcoin.”
Mining more Bitcoin: Iris Energy’s development plans
As of Oct. 1, 2021, Iris Energy said it has an operational hash rate of about 0.7 exahash per second, or about 0.4 percent of Bitcoin’s overall hashrate. The company wants to use the net proceeds from the IPO to increase its working capital, acquire new equipment, and expand its mining farms. It wants to set up additional facilities in British Columbia, Texas, and Asia to complement its first site in Canada:
“As of September 30, 2021, we have finalized new equipment purchases with Bitmain (…) to acquire the latest generation miners, Antminer S19j and Antminer S19j Pro, with a total design capacity of 14.5 EH/s and deliveries beginning in October 2021 and ending in September 2023, which should bring our operational and contractual design capacity to 15.2 EH/s.”
Given these development plans, the company should therefore theoretically soon have an impressive operating capacity to say the least.
Iris Energy could therefore soon join controversial bitcoin miner Greenidge on the Nasdaq. The 2 mining companies are using their respective IPOs to develop their operational capacity… in the long term, even if we can’t call them extreme HODLers!
