Bitcoin Miner Hut 8 Inches Toward Merger With USBTC as Court Approves Deal

The Supreme Court of British Columbia has approved plans for Bitcoin miners Hut 8 and US Bitcoin Corp to unite as one company—but the deal isn’t finalized just yet.

As originally announced in February, Canada’s Hut 8 Mining (which trades on the Toronto Stock Exchange and Nasdaq under the HUT ticker) and America’s US Bitcoin Corp are seeking a business combination as “Hut 8 Corp,” which will be domiciled in the United States. The transaction is now expected to be finalized by the end of the year.

HUT shares rose 2.82% on Monday following the Canadian Supreme Court’s approval. Shares of new HUT will continue to trade on the TSX as well as the Nasdaq.

“Closing of the Transaction remains subject to certain conditions, including USBTC’s registration statement becoming effective, the approval of USBTC’s stockholders, and other closing conditions customary in transactions of this nature,” wrote Hut 8 in a Monday press release.

Hut 8 could not respond to Decrypt’s request for comment, stating that it was entering a “quiet period” until the transaction is complete.

The Canadian Bitcoin miner’s shareholders voted overwhelmingly to approve the combination deal last week. As stated by the company’s CEO Jaime Leverton at the time, the firm plans to “move forward as a new Hut 8 focused on economical mining and highly diversified revenue streams,” including high-performance computing and hosting.

The resulting company will turn Hut 8 Corp into one of North America’s largest Bitcoin miners by hashrate, and also one of the healthiest. “Hut 8 is financially healthier than many others with nearly 10,000 BTC on its balance sheet and very minimal debt,” MinerMag analyst Wolfie Zhao told Decrypt in June.

Hosting is when mining companies let individuals rent out their machines to mine BTC on their behalf. Meanwhile, high-performance computing is a growing interest among public miners like Iris Energy, taking advantage of the AI wave by leveraging miners’ existing data center capacity.

It will also expand to managed infrastructure operations – described as the “maintenance and management of third-party mining sites using purpose-built software.”

Hut faced a steep earnings decline in year-over-year revenue in its latest earnings report, dropping from$43.8 million in Q2 2022 to $19.2 million in Q2 2023. The company credited its earnings declines to legal and equipment failure issues at its North Bay and Drumheller facilities, respectively, alongside rising Bitcoin network difficulty.