Increasingly more publicly traded companies are buying altcoins.
Bitcoin treasury firm Strategy started the trend but now companies are diving into other cryptocurrencies to put on their balance sheets — with the latest being SUI.
Nasdaq-listed Mill City Ventures III on Monday announced a $450 million private placement to buy the 15th biggest digital asset by market cap. The company, which makes loans to small businesses, said it would buy SUI on the open market in a press release Monday.
Its stock (MCVT) was trading 11% higher on Monday but over a five-day period, it has soared nearly 270%.
“We believe that Sui is well positioned for mass adoption with the speed and efficiency institutions require for crypto at scale, plus the technical architecture capable of supporting AI workloads while maintaining security and decentralization,” proposed Chief Investment Officer of Mill City and General Partner at Karatage Stephen Mackintosh said.
Karatage led the investment round with the SUI Foundation. Crypto investment giants Galaxy Digital, Big Brain Holdings, FalconX, and Pantera Capital also contributed, the release said.
SUI is the native coin of the SUI network, a blockchain developed by former Facebook engineers that wants to compete with Ethereum. It was recently trading at $4.07, down 5% slightly over the past 24 hours, according to data provider CoinGecko.
Strategy — formerly MicroStrategy — was the first publicly traded company to start buying Bitcoin. The software firm is now the largest corporate holder of the asset and allows investors to buy its stock as a Bitcoin proxy. It currently has 607,770 BTC worth about $71.4 billion, according to bitcointreasuries.net.
Other publicly traded companies that have followed suit include Semler Scientific and Metaplanet, while other firms have bought assets like BNB, Solana, Ethereum, and XRP as a way to increase the price of their stock.
Arca Director of Research Katie Talati told Decrypt that companies are not only trying to “remake themselves” by buying crypto but are getting approached by the entities that issue the digital coins or tokens.
“I think that a lot of [the companies] are getting approached by the token issuers — obviously not for Bitcoin,” she said, adding that the crypto market was getting “frothy.”
