Chia’s former COO Gene Hoffman has stepped in to lead the company during the market downturn.
(Bloomberg) — Chia Network Inc. has a new chief executive officer who says he’s planning for an eventual public offering, despite the deep freeze in the crypto markets.
The blockchain startup plans to announce Thursday that Gene Hoffman was appointed CEO on Jan. 1. Hoffman, who was the company’s chief operating officer, succeeds Bram Cohen in the top post. Cohen was named chairman of the board and chief technology officer.
Hoffman said Chia will file with the Securities and Exchange Commission for a traditional initial public offering soon, but that the company does not plan to make its public debut this year. “We are very realistic that this market is not going to be open for us,” he said.
Chia was valued at about $500 million in 2021, and isn’t the only crypto company angling for the public markets. Jesse Powell, co-founder of digital asset exchange Kraken, said in September that he was stepping down as CEO and becoming chairman of the board, noting that the company was still positioning itself for an IPO.
Cohen, the creator of the BitTorrent file-sharing service, said that Hoffman’s appointment represents a continuation of the company’s current direction. “Things have been working this way operationally for a while,” Cohen said.
While the stock market has struggled over the past year, the crypto industry has been particularly hard hit after a series of scandals, including the collapse of crypto exchange FTX in November. Brian Armstrong, the CEO of Coinbase Global Inc., a publicly traded crypto exchange, told Bloomberg in December that he expected to see the company’s revenue fall by 50% or more in 2022 compared with the previous year.
But Cohen said there’s still promise in blockchain, and that “the collapse of FTX is not a failure of cryptocurrency tech by any stretch of the imagination.”
Chia, based in South San Francisco, California, bills itself as the creator of a more environmentally friendly, less energy-intensive blockchain that relies on hard drives, including recycled ones, for data storage. Hoffman said the company, which now employs about 80 people, is open to getting new funding, despite the market downturn. “We’re always looking at options to be able to raise additional capital,” he said.
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