The Crypto IPO Race Is On: From Mining Companies to Exchanges

What is an IPO exactly, and which crypto-related companies have chosen to go public?

Normally, ICOs allow investors to pay with crypto - usually Ethereum - hence remaining somewhat anonymous, while IPO investors are limited to fiat money.

Beside the traditional IPOs described in the section above, there are some alternative ways for a company to go public - namely the reverse IPO and Dutch IPO. A reverse IPO, or a reverse takeover, is a way to bypass at least some of bureaucratic scrutiny involved in the process and go public with less hassle.

Perhaps the largest company at least remotely related to crypto that has gone public through a Dutch IPO is Patrick Byrne's Overstock.com.

The biggest player to join the IPO race might be Bitmain, an extremely successful Chinese mining company with around $3.5 billion in profit generated in 2017 - arguably one of the most influential businesses in the industry.

Later in July, a research unit for crypto exchange BitMEX analyzed leaked data on Bitmain's potential IPO and stated that the mining giant had conducted a pre-IPO round that allegedly raised around $14 billion, leading them to believe that it could raise no less than $20 billion at the IPO stage.

If Bitmain IPO ever does happen, it's likely to affect the crypto industry simply due to the scale of the operation.

The reverse IPO: Simpler, but not necessarily a successful way for crypto companies.

The reverse IPO way, despite being cheaper and faster, has not proven to be fruitful for crypto companies: On Aug. 1, when crypto evangelist Mike Novogratz's crypto-focused merchant bank Galaxy Digital made its trading debut on Toronto's TSX Venture Exchange, the largest stock exchange in Canada, it shares plunged 20 percent.

Another major America-based crypto exchange, Coinbase, which has a reputation for being fully compliant with regulators, has also been flirting with the idea of holding an IPO since December 2017, but is yet to disclose any concrete details on going public.