Bitcoin financial services firm Swan Bitcoin pulled its plan to take the company public, discontinued its managed mining unit and cut staff across several units.
Swan CEO Cory Klippsten said in a social media post that the company will still offer bitcoin (BTC) financial services and free bitcoin education. “Without the expectation of significant near-term revenue from our Managed Mining unit, we are pulling our plans to IPO in the near future,” Klippsten wrote in the X post.
“Accordingly, Swan is pulling back from our accelerated spending plan for our core financial services business. Unfortunately, this includes staff cuts across many functions,” he added.
The move comes at a time when the mining landscape has become more competitive after the recent Bitcoin halving, which cut the block rewards by half. The availability of spot bitcoin exchange traded-funds (ETFs) have also deterred many investors from the mining industry, shutting some doors to capital for miners. As a result, many miners are struggling to keep their business profitable by being pure-play mining operations and pivoting some of their infrastructure to serve artificial intelligence and cloud computing-related services.
Despite the Bitcoin halving making the mining ecosystem tougher and less profitable to navigate, several private miners are still vying to go public following bitcoin’s record high earlier this year. Genesis Digital Assets, formerly backed by FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried, and two of Northern Data’s units were among other firms reportedly planning IPOs.
Earlier this year, Swan said it will go public within the next 12 months and the mining unit had 160 megawatts (MW), or 4.5 exahash per second (EH/s), worth of computing power up and running.
At the time, the firm also said that the mining business has been funded by institutional investors, with more than $100 million and hopes to raise more capital to expand its operations. Tether was among the backers of Swan’s managed mining service, with as undisclosed amount of investment into its business.
UPDATE (July 22, 18:29 UTC): Adds additional context in the last paragraph about Swan’s $100 million funding and investors.