Australian Bitcoin miner Iris Energy plans to raise as much as $223 million from its IPO by selling about 8.3 million shares at an average of $26 each, according to a filing with the SEC. The document states:
This is Iris Energy Limited’s initial public offering. Iris Energy Limited is offering 8,269,231 ordinary shares in this offering (“Ordinary shares”). We expect the public offering price to be between $25.00 and $27.00 per Ordinary share. Currently, no public market exists for our Ordinary shares.
Citigroup, JPMorgan among deal bookrunners
The Sydney-based miner’s shares will be listed under the ticker “IREN.” Among the bookrunners for the deal are JPMorgan, Citigroup, CLSA, Canaccord Genuity, Macquarie Capital, Cowen, and Cantor Fitzgerald.
The funds will be used for growth initiatives, including acquiring and developing facilities and data center sites and buying Bitcoin mining hardware.
Miner aims for a tenth of total BTC network hashrate
The miner targets aggregate power capacity of up to 1GW for planned hashrate capacity of 15.2 EH/s, which means they will have about a tenth of the total Bitcoin network’s hashrate. According to Glassnode data, the total hashrate was about 146 EH/s on November 8.
According to Iris, they have been mining Bitcoin since 2019, but there was none on the balance sheet for the third quarter of this year because they have liquidated all the mined coins. In total, the company’s revenue for that quarter stood at $10.4 million, up from just $0.8 million y/y.
The filing states that Iris targets entry into regions with attractive, plentiful, and cheap renewable energy sources. The miner acquired its first site in British Columbia last year. This site is connected to the BC Hydro power transmission network, on which the electricity was 98% sourced from renewable or clean sources as of this year.
Further, the filing states:
In addition to our first site in BC, as of September 30, 2021, we have conditional and unconditional rights to a number of sites across BC, Texas and Asia-Pacific, over which we are currently pursuing development activities. These sites are anticipated to support our operating and contracted nameplate hashrate capacity of 15.2 EH/s, equating to approximately 530 MW of data center capacity when online and fully operational.
Iris’ mining operations make money by earning Bitcoin through a combination of transaction fees and block rewards from the operation of app-specific integrated circuits – specialized computers – and exchanging Bitcoin for fiat daily.
