Riot Platforms despatched an open letter to the corporate's shareholders on September 3, stepping up efforts to amass rival bitcoin miner Bitfarms.
Within the letter, Riot introduced that it had decreased Bitfarms’ board seats to 2 unbiased administrators following latest firings, whereas additionally criticizing among the firm’s latest choices.
Criticism of Stronghold acquisition
Riot expressed considerations about Bitfirm's latest acquisition of Stronghold, valued at $175 million, which the corporate stated represented a premium of over 100% in comparison with Stronghold's closing inventory worth the day earlier than the deal was introduced.
Riot famous that no different trade gamers have been prepared to pay such a excessive worth for Stronghold, which has successfully been “on the market” for a while.
In gentle of this, Riot stated the transaction isn’t in one of the best curiosity of Bitfarm's shareholders and urged the small miner to not enter into any fundraising transactions till the completion of the corporate's extraordinary basic assembly in October.
“Riot is deeply involved that any transaction pursued by BitFarm's present board of administrators would lead to punitive dilution for all BitFarm shareholders, given the supply of different extra engaging financing choices.”
Proposed modifications to the Board of Administrators
Riot, which owns about 20% of Bitfarm, had initially sought three seats on the smaller firm's board of administrators, however latest progress at Bitfarm to deal with a founder-led board tradition has led Riot to scale back its demand to 2 seats.
Riot has nominated Amy Friedman and John Delaney as candidates to exchange present board members co-founders Andres Finkelstein and Fanny Philippe. Riot has highlighted that Finkelstein, one of many three co-founders of Bitfarms, is partly accountable for the corporate's questionable CEO succession course of, which has seen 5 CEOs changed in 5 years.
Riot assured that the candidates are utterly unbiased from each corporations and stated they might carry public firm director expertise, company governance oversight and buying and selling experience to BitFarm's board.
Final month, Bitfirm co-founder and chairman Nicolas Bonta stepped down amid a wider management shake-up, following the departure of one other co-founder, Emiliano Grodzki, who was faraway from the board at Bitfirm's most up-to-date annual basic assembly.
