In brief
- American Bitcoin has acquired 1,414 Bitcoin, the company said Monday.
- Bitcoin was trading above $115,500, its highest level in two weeks.
- More than 200 companies have built Bitcoin treasuries.
American Bitcoin (ABTC), the publicly traded Bitcoin treasury and mining company backed by Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr., has added 1,414 Bitcoin currently worth $163 million to its holdings, according to an announcement on Monday.
Miami, Florida-based American Bitcoin, a subsidiary of Hut 8 Corp. that debuted in April, now has 3,865 Bitcoin worth about $446 million based on BTC's present price above $115,200. The latest accumulations resulted from strategic purchases and mining, the company said.
ABTC continued its aggressive treasury approach, even as Bitcoin has sagged well below its all-time high above $126,000 set in October, and as some market observers have raised doubts about treasury strategies' sustainability if the asset price drops below companies' acquisition prices.
ABTC was up more than 11% on the day to trade above $6.20, according to Yahoo Finance. Shares have languished below $6 for the last two weeks amid a wider crypto market swoon.
The largest cryptocurrency by market value has been buffeted by macroeconomic uncertainties, although a lessening of U.S.-China trade tensions seemed to buoy the asset and other cryptos on Monday.
In its announcement, ABTC said it would provide periodic updates on satoshis per share (SPS), a measure of the volume of Bitcoin "attributable to each outstanding share of the Company's stock." The company said it would calculate the SPS by multiplying its total holdings by the satoshi conversion rate of 100,000,000 per Bitcoin and then divide the total by the number of shares of common stock outstanding.
The company's executive chairman, Asher Genoot, said in a statement that ABTC's mining operations separated it from other treasury companies. "By producing Bitcoin directly, we can reduce our average cost per Bitcoin to drive a cost advantage over vehicles that buy exclusively on the open market," Genoot said.
American Bitcoin formed when the Trump brothers merged their own business entity earlier this year with Hut 8, a Canada-headquartered miner. The joint venture then went on to combine with Gryphon Digital Mining via a stock-for-stock merger. Gryphon was already publicly traded.
The number of mining companies has mushroomed to over 200 this year, according to bitcointreasuries.net, as institutions have looked to benefit from gains in crypto markets and address investors' growing appetite for digital assets.
They have followed the lead of Strategy, formerly MicroStrategy, which pivoted from software development to BTC acquisition in 2020, and now holds more than $73 billion in Bitcoin. On Monday, Strategy said that it had added 390 Bitcoin worth $43 million to its coffers.
In a Myriad market, more than 74% of the respondents agreed with the crypto trader Mando who predicts that BTC will regain $120,000 instead of falling to $100,000 as the crypto entrepreneur KBM forecast. (Disclosure: Myriad is a unit of Dastan, the parent company of an editorially independent Decrypt)
Editor's note: This story was updated after publication to correct detail around Bitcoin's most recent all-time high, and to add data from a Myriad market.