Crypto stocks are getting hammered. Bitcoin has lost close to four-tenths of its value since topping out last fall.
Three of the biggest U.S. stock benchmarks fell into correction last week, with the Iran war now grinding through its second month. And CoinShares picked this exact moment to ring the opening bell.
The European crypto asset manager finished its merger with Vine Hill Capital - a blank-check company - late Tuesday night and hit Nasdaq on Wednesday morning.
The combined company, now called CoinShares PLC, carries a price tag of about $1.2 billion. The deal included $50 million in backing from hedge fund Alyeska, which picked up shares at $10 a pop.
CEO Jean-Marie Mognetti leaned into the ugly backdrop instead of dodging it. His take: companies built on real revenue don't need a bull market to justify going public.
"We are not listing because the market is easy," he told CNBC. "We are listing because the business is ready for it."
Most crypto companies that went public over the past year - Circle, BitGo, Gemini, Bullish - make their money from trading fees. When volume dries up, so does revenue.
CoinShares works on a fee-based model. Investors pay the company to hold and manage their crypto - and those fees keep rolling in whether prices are up or down.
Think of it like a gym membership that keeps paying whether or not anyone shows up to work out.
Only three firms manage more crypto fund money worldwide: BlackRock, Grayscale, and Fidelity. In Europe alone, CoinShares controls about a third of the crypto ETP - exchange-traded product - market.
The company has posted a profit in all twelve years since launching - through the 2018 crash, the FTX blowup, and this year's selloff.
The deal is priced at roughly 7 times its 2024 earnings before interest, taxes, and write-downs. Peers in the space trade closer to 21 times.
CoinShares still earns most of its money in Europe. Mognetti was blunt about why the company crossed the Atlantic - building an American client base from scratch would take too long, and a Nasdaq listing gives the firm a stock it can use as currency for deals.
It also just rolled out a new arm of the business focused on managing assets directly on blockchains - skipping the middlemen entirely. That's a bet on where the industry is headed, not where it is today.
Kraken hit pause on its IPO. The broader crypto market is deep in the red. CoinShares walked in anyway.
