Bitcoin Miner Bitdeer Stock Slumps Nearly 30% at Trading Debut

Bitcoin (BTC) miner Bitdeer listed Friday on the Nasdaq after several delays to lukewarm reception. Shares of the miner, under the ticker BTDR, lost almost 30% of their value, trading around $6.81 at the time of publication.

The stock was halted shortly after market open, several times, for volatility. Other crypto mining stocks saw single-digit upticks in their share value at the same time frame.

Bitdeer's merger with a special-purpose acquisition vehicle (SPAC), called Blue Safari Group Acquisition Corp., was approved on Tuesday.

The Singapore-based firm is one of the largest miners in the world, shows a March prospectus filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. It has six mining sites across Washington state, Texas, Tennessee and Norway, with a total energy capacity of 775 megawatts (MW) as of the end of 2022, about 200 MW less than what it had estimated in February 2022. Its hashrate or computing power at the end of January stood at a total of 16.2 exahash per second (EH/s), second only to bankrupt Core Scientific (CORZ) and higher than Riot Platforms (RIOT) and Marathon Digital Holdings (MARA).

About one-quarter of that is used for self-mining, meaning it keeps the bitcoin rewards, whereas the rest is given out for cloud mining, meaning customers rent its machines and reap the rewards.

Read more: Crypto Miner Bitdeer May Extend IPO Deadline by 1 Year

Bitdeer was born out of the world’s largest rig manufacturer, Bitmain. After a spat between the two co-founders, one of them left and took Bitdeer. Another cloud mining firm also affiliated with Bitmain, BitFuFu, is also in the process of going public via SPAC, but has delayed the listing.

Bitdeer's financial performance, as with other bitcoin miners, deteriorated in 2022, in part due to worsening market conditions. The firm reported revenue of $330.3 million and a loss of $62.4 million for 2022, compared with $394.7 million in revenue and a profit of $82.6 million the year before, according to the prospectus filing.

The miner is going public at a better time than last year as market conditions have improved, with bitcoin passing the $30,000 mark and mining equities in many cases outperforming the digital asset in percentage growth. In the future the "market will begin to shift from not only focusing on operators with the biggest scale, but also operators with the best unit economics," said investment bank Stifel Nicolaus's analyst Bill Papanastasiou.

Read more: Bitmain Redux: Bitdeer and BitFuFu Are About to Test US Stock Market's Mining Appetite

UPDATE (April 14, 13:15 UTC): Adds dropped words in fourth paragraph.