Riot Platforms stepped up its efforts to accumulate rival bitcoin miner Bitfarms by issuing an open letter to the agency's shareholders on September 3.
Within the letter, Riot introduced that it had lowered its request for Bitfarms board seats to 2 unbiased administrators after the current removing, whereas criticizing a number of of the corporate's current choices.
Criticism of the Stronghold acquisition
Riot has expressed concern over Bitfarms' current acquisition of Stronghold, a $175 million deal. Based on the agency, the transaction represented a premium of greater than 100% in comparison with Stronghold's closing share worth the day earlier than the announcement.
Riot identified that no different trade participant was keen to pay such a excessive worth for Stronghold, which had successfully been “on the market” for fairly a while.
With that in thoughts, Riot stated the deal was not in one of the best curiosity of Bitfarms shareholders and urged the smaller miner to not enter into any monetary transaction earlier than the October particular assembly is accomplished. Added:
“Riot is deeply involved that any transaction undertaken by the present Bitfarms board will probably be punitively dilutive to all Bitfarms shareholders when different, extra engaging financing choices change into obtainable.”
Proposed board modifications
Riot, which holds almost 20% of Bitfarms, initially demanded three seats on the smaller firm's board. Nonetheless, attributable to current progress in addressing the board tradition led by the founding father of Bitfarms, Riot has lowered its requirement to 2 seats.
Riot proposed Amy Freedman and John Delaney as candidates to exchange the 2 current administrators, co-founders Andres Finkielsztain and Fanny Philip. Riot identified that Finkielsztain, one of many three co-founders of Bitfarms, is partly liable for his notion of the corporate's troubled CEO succession course of, which has seen 5 CEOs in 5 years.
Riot has assured that its nominees are utterly unbiased of each corporations. It stated they’ll deliver invaluable public firm board expertise, company governance oversight and transactional experience to Bitfarm's board.
Final month, Bitfarms co-founder and chairman Nicolas Bonta stepped down amid broader management modifications. This follows the sooner departure of one other co-founder, Emilian Grodzki, who was voted off the board at Bitfarms' final annual assembly.
