Swan Bitcoin Drops IPO Plan, Cuts Staff, Will Shut Down Managed Mining Unit

Bitcoin financial services firm Swan Bitcoin has scrapped its plan to go public, discontinued its managed mining unit and cut staff across multiple units.

Swan CEO Cory Klippsten said in a social media post that the company will still offer bitcoin financial services {{BTC}} and free bitcoin education. “Without the expectation of significant near-term revenue from our Managed Mining unit, we are withdrawing our IPO plans in the near future,” Klippsten wrote in the post.

“Consequently, Swan is stepping back from our accelerated spending plan for our core financial services business. Unfortunately, this includes headcount cuts across many functions,” he added.

The move comes at a time when the mining landscape has become more competitive following the recent Bitcoin Halvingwhich cut block rewards in half. The availability of spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) has also driven many investors away from the mining industry, closing some avenues of capital for miners. As a result, many miners are struggling to maintain their profitable businesses as pure mining operations and pivoting part of their infrastructure to serve artificial intelligence and cloud computing services.

Despite Bitcoin’s halving making the mining ecosystem more difficult and less profitable to navigate, several private miners are still racing to go public following Bitcoin’s record-breaking surge earlier this year. Genesis Digital Assetspreviously backed by FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried, and two of Northern Data Units were among other companies reportedly planning IPOs.

Earlier this year, Swan said it will go public in the next 12 months and the mining unit had 160 megawatts (MW), or 4.5 exahash per second (EH/s), of computing power installed and running.

At the time, the company also said that the mining business has been funded by institutional investors with more than $100 million and it hopes to raise more capital to expand its operations. Tether was among supporters of Swan’s managed mining service, with an undisclosed amount of investment in its business.

The story continues

Read more: Bitcoin Halving Set to Unleash Darwinism in Miners

UPDATE (July 22, 18:29 UTC): Adds additional context in the last paragraph about the $100 million funding and Swan’s investors.

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