The latest crypto treasury company is set to hit the public market with an ambitious plan to build the largest public vehicle for institutional exposure to ether.
The Ether Machine will begin trading on the Nasdaq Monday under the ticker ETHM, once a merger with blank check company Dynamix Corporation is complete. Andrew Keys, the co-founder and chairman of the new company, has committed about $645 million in an anchor investment. The entity is backed by crypto investors 10T Holdings, Electric Capital, Pantera Capital and more.
The company is the latest in an emerging cohort of new entities vying to become the MicroStrategy of Ethereum by replicating the bitcoin proxy’s successful accumulation strategy, but around ether, the second largest cryptocurrency by market cap, rather than bitcoin.
Keys’ company plans to differentiate with a focus on yield generation through “staking” rather than simply buying and holding the ether. Staking is a mechanism for generating yield by contributing to network operations around security and transaction processing.
By purchasing ether from a crypto exchange or buying shares of an ether ETF, investors would get exposure to the coin’s price, “but without access to the dividend,” Keys explained.
“Ether produces yield if it’s properly managed,” he told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” Monday. “The ETFs right now don’t generate yield because they don’t enable staking … we’re able to enable staking and we’re able to do other additional risk management on top of that.”
