London-listed crypto miner Argo raises $32M on first trading day

Cryptocurrency mining company Argo Blockchain PLC is now listed on the London Stock Exchange (LSE). And on its first trading day, the company already sold 156.25 million shares at 16 pence each for a total of $32 million, which means Argo Blockchain now has a baseline valuation of $61 million.

Listing Argo Blockchain represents a sea of change for the LSE, which has so far proved one of the more conservative exchanges when it comes to cryptocurrency businesses. Argo Blockchain co-founder Jonathan Bixby told The Telegraph that his company intends to “take the pain and heartache out of participating in the biggest new technology breakthrough since the launch of the internet.”

Founded in 2017, Argo Blockchain aims to build an international data center management business that will assist in crypto mining as a service (MaaS). This would be available to anyone in the world. Although the company’s platform itself has only been around for a little over two months, the subscriptions are currently sold out. The company was without profits until May of this year, yet it still set its sights on being the first crypto-related firm to have a seat on the LSE. Argo Blockchain’s website promises clients that it will make it easy to mine altcoins like BTC Gold, ETH “from home.”

In an interview with the Financial Times, Bixby said: “More than 90 percent of crypto-mining is done by elites on industrial scale because it is technically very difficult to do. It is incredibly expensive to buy, up front, the hardware you need at $5,000 a machine. We want to be the Amazon Web Services of crypto.”

The bulk of Argo Blockchain’s business model appears to come from success stories such as Iceland’s Genesis Mining. After three years, Genesis currently has 2 million customers who pay as much as $4,000 for multi-year contracts.