(Bloomberg) — Shares of TeraWulf Inc., the cryptocurrency miner that recently touted the backing of celebrity investors including Gwyneth Paltrow, tumbled during the company’s public trading debut on the Nasdaq stock market.
The firm, which strives to provide more environmentally-friendly processing of crypto transactions, went public after completing a merger with imaging-technology company Ikonics. The stock dropped as low as $20.02 after being listed at $25, a 20% decline. Taken from Ikonics’ Monday closing price, the shares were off as much as 40%.
The slump comes amid a broader drop in the shares of other cryptocurrency miners, which use massive amounts of computing power while competing to win freshly minted tokens for processing transactions. The quantity of electricity used is equal to the amounts by some nations.
Crypto mining stocks have been “hard hit” following the sharp selloff in Bitcoin prices and concern of falling profitability, said Chris Brendler, an analyst covering the industry at DA Davidson & Co., with the so-called hash rate or the speed of mining back to highs unseen since China took their rigs offline.
“Profitability has fallen dramatically. The price of Bitcoin going down and global hash rate going up means bad news for miners,” Brendler said.
TeraWulf said it expects to have 800 megawatts of mining capacity deployed by 2025, powered by nuclear, hydro and solar energy.
(Update price change information in the second paragraph.)
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