chaintimes.com
Austria-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.
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.
Iris Energy does not hoard its bitcoin.
Unlike other publicly listed Bitcoin mining firms in North America, Iris Energy does not hoard its bitcoin; instead, it liquidates 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.