MEI Pharma, a publicly traded pharmaceutical company, closed a $100 million private placement on Wednesday to refashion itself into a litecoin treasury firm. MEI sold 29,239,767 shares of its common stock, raising roughly $100 million, Litecoin Foundation founder Charlie Lee told Decrypt. Under the agreement, the company sold its stock at $3.42 per share. Lee led the private placement alongside digital asset market maker GSR and will be joining MEI’s board of directors, according a statement from MEI Pharma.
MEI joins a growing list of companies who have adopted crypto treasuries as their primary business strategy. In March, Canada-based Luxxfolio made an initial purchase of 4,982 LTC for its corporate treasury. Litecoin, which was created from a fork in the Bitcoin blockchain in 2011, is the 23rd largest digital asset with a more than $8.5 billion market capitalization. The token was recently trading at $113.35, down 4.6% over the past 24 hours, according to data provider CoinGecko. GSR will serve as treasury management advisor to MEI Pharma.
MEI’s pivot to a litecoin-led corporate strategy comes as a slew of businesses are imitating software firm Strategy’s digital asset-buying playbook. The software-developer-turned Bitcoin treasury now holds more than $72 billion in BTC. Currently, 145 publicly traded firms own Bitcoin, according to bitcointreasuries.net data. Their combined holdings are worth $108 billion as of publication time, the same data shows.
More recently, a number of publicly traded companies have been focusing on altcoins. In May, online gambling marketer SharpLink Gaming announced its conversion into an Ethereum treasury firm. It now holds more than 360,000 ETH with a value of $1.3 billion, based on current prices. Meanwhile, Singapore-based Trident and BitOrigin have signaled their intentions to top up their coffers with millions of dollars worth of XRP and Dogecoin, respectively.
To boot, more companies appear poised to embrace the Strategy-inspired playbook in the coming months, despite apparent risks. MEI Pharma’s will purchase Litecoin in tranches over the next few days or weeks, according to Lee. The purchases will be denominated in U.S. dollar investment and will be made over the counter or on an exchange.
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