Crypto
Bitcoin?
(Artur Widak/Getty Images)

Nakamoto launches $5 billion ATM program to buy bitcoin

The company’s stock plummeted as investors digested the news on Wednesday.

Yaël Bizouati-Kennedy

Nakamoto, the bitcoin-native venture helmed by Trump crypto adviser David Bailey that recently completed its merger with Nakamoto, filed a “shelf” offering with the SEC to launch a $5 billion at-the-market program, primarily to buy more bitcoin as well as for working capital and potential acquisitions of businesses, assets, or technologies, according to the filing.

The company, which made its first bitcoin purchase as a public company last week, now holds 5,744 bitcoin.

Shares were down over 24% in early trading Wednesday, while bitcoin finally broke past the $112,000 mark.

“Excited to partner with TD Securities and 9 other leading financial institutions to execute a $5B ATM offering. It’ll take us a while to build the necessary liquidity to complete the program, but it’ll be a critical tool as we execute our strategy,” Bailey posted on X.

The other agents include Cantor, B. Riley Securities, Benchmark, Canaccord Genuity, Cohen & Company Capital Markets, Craig-Hallum, Needham & Company, and Yorkville Securities.

Fellow bitcoin treasury Metaplanet is also amping up the ante, announcing it plans to raise up to 130.3 billion yen ($880 million) by issuing up to 5 million new shares in an international offering, according to a regulatory filing. The bulk of the proceeds will be used to buy bitcoin.  

While shares of Metaplanet have surged 155% year to date, they have been struggling in the past month, down 30%.

CEO Simon Gerovich and Nakamoto’s Bailey arrived together at the Bitcoin Asia Conference in Hong Kong today.

In other bitcoin news:

  • Bitcoin miner Hut 8 announced plans to develop four new sites across the US with more than 1.5 gigawatts of total capacity. The announcement comes a few days before the “carve-out and go-public of nearly all its bitcoin mining assets through American Bitcoin (ABTC), likely to be executed in a little more than a week — a transaction that could lead to a re-rating of HUT shares,” Benchmark analyst Mark Palmer wrote in a Wednesday note. He added, “Carving out ABTC is not just structurally separating the businesses but deliberately pursuing a lower cost of capital for its energy infrastructure effort.” Benchmark reiterated its “buy” rating on the company and raised its price target to $36 from $33 — a 38% upside from its current price.

  • Global Asian food platform DDC Enterprise continued its steady accumulation, acquiring 102 bitcoin in its fifth purchase this month. The company now holds 1,008 bitcoin.

  • Finally, Swedish company H100 Group acquired 46.2 bitcoin and now holds 957.5 bitcoin.

More Crypto

See all Crypto
crypto

Hyperliquid reclaims all-time high

HYPE, the native token powering perpetuals exchange Hyperliquid and its underlying blockchain, rebounded to reclaim its all-time high previously set at the start of the month.

Treasury firms Hyperliquid Strategies and Hyperion DeFi have also rallied as the token increased double digits in the last 24 hours to trade as high as $76.70, rising past its record price set nearly two weeks ago, according to CoinGecko. In the interim between all-time highs, HYPE pulled back to around $53.

The token has several tailwinds, the first coming from ETF flows. Since their inception in May, HYPE ETFs have yet to record negative weekly outflows, posting a cumulative total net inflow of $171.8 million, per SoSoValue.

The second comes from Hyperliquid spending basically everything it earns in fees to buy HYPE, a mechanism embedded into the protocol’s codebase.

The venue’s buyback funding mechanism is set to add a new source of yield. Validators of the network activated “AQAv2,” which means stablecoin deployers will share about 90% of reserve yield revenue on their supply within the protocol.

Around $6.1 billion of Circle’s USDC resides in Hyperliquid, per DefiLlama. Accrual begins on August 26 and the first payment is made on October 3, the network announced in its Discord channel last week.

A substantial amount of capital is riding on different positions of HYPE. In total, a move down to under $53 would result in the liquidation nearly 1.8 million HYPE worth of leveraged long positions on the on-chain perps venue, or $131.7 million, data from CoinGlass shows. For the upside, a climb above $100 results in the liquidation of more than 3 million worth of leveraged HYPE short positions, or $221.5 million.

HYPE’s rebound to all-time high comes after Michael Selig, chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, defended his agency’s decision to approve regulated perpetuals, or futures contracts without expiration dates, CNBC reported on Monday.

Last month, the CFTC approved bitcoin perpetual futures trading in the US through regulated prediction markets firm Kalshi and an affiliate of centralized exchange Coinbase.

“Perps are highly likely to become lightly regulated and thus approved in the US,” said David Pakman, head of venture investments at CoinFund.

“We expect to see perps for many different types of assets, from commodities to equities,” Pakman told Sherwood News.

crypto

Crypto market snaps back as sentiment lifts, with altcoins from ethereum to XRP soaring

The market capitalization of the crypto industry has jumped around $83.2 billion in the last 24 hours, with privacy-focused token Zcash and worldcoin, the native cryptocurrency of the network backed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, leading market gains, jumping over 22%.

But the last 24 hours have been good across the board:

Investors have been eager to see some positive signs around the Iranian conflict ending, coupled with hopeful outlooks around the CLARITY act, both breathing some life into assets, Kairos Research cofounder Ian Unsworth told Sherwood News.

Simon Shockey, a crypto strategist at crypto wallet infrastructure firm Privy, said the upswing stems from several things converging. He pointed to how alt markets broadly were very oversold following the bug found in Zcash that shook confidence.

Friday, Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox said Anthropic didn’t find any more serious bugs with the Zcash protocol after Shielded Labs requested the AI firm run a security audit of the network with Mythos.

Shockey added that the pool of willing sellers has dwindled. Even if structurally, AI is a much more compelling and asymmetric bet in the eyes of allocators, many of these crypto assets have simply run out of marginal sellers despite some shorter-term narrative-driven pumps. The only people left to sell at this point are the teams themselves and VCs.

Net-net: oversold conditions plus exhausted seller bases plus a macro backdrop thats stabilized equals a snapback, especially in names that have real usage or community conviction behind them,” Shockey told Sherwood.

Latest Stories

Sherwood Media, LLC and Chartr Limited produce fresh and unique perspectives on topical financial news and are fully owned subsidiaries 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, Robinhood Money, LLC, Robinhood U.K. Ltd, Robinhood Derivatives, LLC, Robinhood Gold, LLC, Robinhood Asset Management, LLC, Robinhood Credit, Inc., Robinhood Ventures DE, LLC and, where applicable, its managed investment vehicles.