The British Columbia Supreme Court has approved plans to merge Bitcoin miners Hut 8 and US Bitcoin Corp into one company, but the deal is not yet finalized.
As initially announced in February, Canadian company Hut 8 Mining (which trades on the Toronto Stock Exchange and Nasdaq under the symbol HUT) and US company Bitcoin Corp are seeking a business combination under the name “Hut 8 Corp” , which will be domiciled in the United States. . The transaction is now expected to be completed by the end of the year.
HUT shares rose 2.82% on Monday following the Supreme Court of Canada’s approval. Shares of the new HUT will continue to be traded on the TSX as well as Nasdaq.
“The closing of the transaction remains subject to certain conditions, including the effectiveness of the USBTC registration statement, the approval of USBTC shareholders and other closing conditions customary in transactions of this nature ” Hut 8 wrote in a press release on Monday.
Hut 8 was unable to respond to Decrypt’s request for comment, stating that it was entering a “period of silence” until the transaction was completed.
Shareholders of the Canadian Bitcoin miner voted overwhelmingly in favor of the combination deal last week. As the company’s CEO Jaime Leverton said at the time, the company plans to “move forward as a new Hut 8 focused on economic mining and highly diversified revenue streams.” , including high-performance computing and hosting.
The resulting company will make Hut 8 Corp one of the largest Bitcoin miners in North America in terms of hashrate, and also one of the healthiest. “Hut 8 is financially healthier than many others with almost 10,000 BTC on its balance sheet and very minimal debt,” said MinerMag analyst Wolfie Zhao. Decrypt in June.
Hosting is when mining companies let individuals rent out their machines to mine BTC on their behalf. At the same time, high-performance computing is attracting growing interest among public mining companies like Iris Energy, which are riding the AI wave by leveraging existing capacity in mining companies’ data centers.
It will also extend to managed infrastructure operations – described as “the maintenance and management of third-party mining sites using purpose-built software”.
Hut faced a sharp year-over-year decline in profit in its latest earnings report, falling from $43.8 million in the second quarter of 2022 to $19.2 million in the second quarter of 2023 The company attributed its declining profits to legal issues and equipment failures at its North Bay and Drumheller facilities, respectively, alongside the increasing difficulty of the Bitcoin network.
