Bitcoin Firm Swan Announces Layoffs, Nixes IPO Plans

Bitcoin financial services firm Swan revealed on Monday that it will likely shutter its managed mining operations, and as a result, it has abandoned plans to pursue an IPO and implemented a wave of layoffs “across many functions.”

“Without the expectation of significant near-term revenue from our managed mining unit, we are pulling our plans to IPO in the near future,” the company’s CEO, Cory Klippsten, said on Monday. “Accordingly, Swan is pulling back from our accelerated spending plan for our core financial services business.”

Neither Klippsten nor a company spokesperson, who declined comment when reached by Decrypt, elaborated on what developments within the company or beyond were responsible for Swan’s pullback.

Generally speaking, Bitcoin has enjoyed a bullish upswing this year boosted by the listing of spot Bitcoin ETFs on Wall Street, the latest Bitcoin halving in April, and strong conviction that the world’s top cryptocurrency is poised to soon climb to never-before-seen highs. 

Curiously, Klippsten himself referred on Monday to Bitcoin’s strong standing, without explaining the disconnect between those macro conditions and Swan’s internal struggles.  

“This is an incredible moment in time for Bitcoin, with real institutional adoption, an increasingly favorable regulatory and political environment, and the ranks of Bitcoiners swelling in number,” Klippsten said. “At Swan we remain ready to serve you with an array of Bitcoin financial services and free Bitcoin education.”

To be fair, though, while Bitcoin is having one of its best years ever, BTC mining has continually shrunk in profitability with every Bitcoin halving event, which reduces mining rewards by 50%. Yet, publicly-traded Bitcoin mining companies have recently soared in attractiveness to Wall Street investors, in part due to the increased efficiency of their operations. 

Swan previously announced in January that it planned to go public at some point in 2024. The company said at the time that it had doubled its team size in 2023 and grown its revenue “dramatically” to $125 million annualized, largely thanks to its mining operations. 

In June of last year, Swan came under fire for pulling all its assets from crypto custodian Prime Trust, weeks before the company collapsed amid revelations that it misappropriated user assets and routinely lost private keys.

At the time, Klippsten adamantly denied any prior knowledge that Prime Trust was insolvent, claiming that Swan had been planning to migrate funds from the custodian for months.

Edited by Ryan Ozawa.