RE: Is this a true reflection of the sp21 Aug 2018 20:00
FT News report last saturday
Argo Blockchain
Argo listed on the London Stock Exchange at the beginning of August, raising £25m in a placing that it said was “significantly oversubscribed”.
The Quebec-based company aims to “democratise” crypto-mining, the process of creating digital currency using extensive computing power. Its business model involves renting out its specialist computing capacity for a monthly fee — but as yet it only has around 20 staff and, as of June, zero revenue.
Argo priced its offering of 156m shares — 53 per cent of its issued share capital — at 16p a share, valuing the company at £47m. But the stock sank to 12.9p on its first day and has since lost more than 40 per cent to stand at around 9p.
The rapid drop comes as more mature rivals wobble. Genesis Mining, an Icelandic company with a similar “cloud mining” business and 2m users, said this week that the falling bitcoin price had “reduced mining outputs”, meaning some of its clients had not been able to pay their fees. It has told its customers to sign up to a five-year contract with no termination — or lose its services altogether.
Still, Argo’s flotation attracted several mainstream investors, including Miton Asset Management, Janus Henderson and Jupiter, according to its website.
The company has said it is hunting out cheap renewable power in Iceland and China. Several days after listing, it announced a multiyear agreement to lease two data centres in Quebec for at least three years, adding to an existing data centre in the city which it says “supports 407 subscribers”.
Https://www.ft.com/content/4121b068-a1fd-11e8-85da-eeb7a9ce36e4
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