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MoneyConf 2018 - Day One
Anthony Pompliano (Harry Murphy/Getty Images)

Anthony Pompliano announces $1 billion SPAC deal to jumpstart ProCap Financial, a new bitcoin treasury firm

Sequans Communications also disclosed a $384 million investment to roll out its bitcoin treasury initiative today.

Sage D. Young

Entrepreneur Anthony Pompliano announced today a $1-billion deal with a special purpose acquisition company (that is, a SPAC) to establish ProCap Financial Inc. as a publicly-traded, bitcoin-native financial services company. 

Pompliano said on X, “The company will be a publicly traded entity on Nasdaq at the conclusion of the proposed business combination between my private company ProCap BTC, LLC and Columbus Circle Capital Corp I, a publicly traded SPAC.” 

According to the press release, the two entities raised $516.5 million in equity and $235 million in convertible notes to create the new firm, “the largest initial fundraise in history for a public bitcoin treasury company.”

Sequans Communications, a supplier of 5G semiconductors, also announced a bitcoin treasury initiative Monday. The firm is issuing and selling $195 million in equity securities and $189 million in a principal amount of convertible secured debentures, and will partner with US-based company Swan Bitcoin to help with its treasury strategy operations. 

The announcements of ProCap Financial and Sequans Communications come as more corporate firms initiate digital asset treasuries, such as Trump Media and GameStop.

Even though Michael Saylor’s Strategy, the pioneer in bitcoin treasuries, has seen extraordinary gains in the price of its shares, the pivot to bitcoin may be losing its luster.

“I don’t think it’s set to lose its appeal anytime soon. It’s still another risk asset which, if you believe price predictions, will benefit your balance sheet in the long-term,” Nicolai Søndergaard, a research analyst at blockchain analytics firm Nansen, told Sherwood News. 

However, Maksim Tkachuk, an analyst at on-chain data platform Santiment, expressed a cautionary skepticism. “There’s only so many failed companies and mattress salesmen that bitcoin can accommodate without toppling,” he told Sherwood.

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Solana ETFs listings delayed as JPMorgan predicts the funds to net $1.5 billion in first year

JPMorgan analysts noted that “solana is not perceived by investors the same way as ethereum as the main DeFi/smart contract cryptocurrency.”

crypto

BlackRock’s bitcoin ETF is on the cusp of $100 billion in assets, a milestone it will have achieved in less than two years

While VOO might be the largest ETF in the world, IBIT — BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF — is the fastest-growing. And the bitcoin-centered product is on the cusp of a major milestone, reporting that it now holds 802,257 BTC, putting it within a whisker of hitting $100 billion in assets (worth roughly $99 billion in good old-fashioned USD at the time of writing).

Considering that BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust launched only 636 days ago, that’s a remarkable speedrun, as individual and institutional investors have embraced cryptocurrency via the exchange-traded fund. For context, VOO took over 2,900 days to hit the same milestone (about eight years).

VOO vs. IBIT spead to $100 billion assets under management
Sherwood News

As noted in a great piece by Robin Wigglesworth in the Financial Times, IBIT is now a major money-spinner for one of the biggest stalwarts of TradFi. As the largest exchange-traded product in the crypto space, and with a not insignificant expense ratio of 0.25%, the ETF is pulling in somewhere in the region of $250 million of revenue for its asset manager parent company. As Wigglesworth puts it:

“Anyway, it’s heartwarming to see that one of the companies profiting the most from an anarchical, decentralised invention supposedly designed to reorder the global financial system is... BlackRock.”

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Sherwood Media, LLC produces fresh and unique perspectives on topical financial news and is a fully owned subsidiary of Robinhood Markets, Inc., and any views expressed here do not necessarily reflect the views of any other Robinhood affiliate, including Robinhood Markets, Inc., Robinhood Financial LLC, Robinhood Securities, LLC, Robinhood Crypto, LLC, or Robinhood Money, LLC.