Bitcoin Miner Ionic Digital Hires CFO to Shepherd IPO

• Bitcoin miner Ionic Digital hired John Penver, who used to work at data center service provider TSS, as CFO.

• Ionic bought bankrupt crypto lender Celsius’ mining assets and plans to IPO this year.

Ionic Digital, the bitcoin (BTC) miner that bought all of the bankrupt lender Celsius’ mining assets, hired John Penver as chief financial officer to oversee its upcoming initial public offering.

Penver was previously CFO of data center service provider TSS (TSSI) and has more than 18 years of data center technology and infrastructure experience, the miner said in a statement on Thursday. “As CFO, Mr. Penver will focus on driving the [public] listing process for Ionic Digital, overseeing the company’s financial operations, including financial planning, analysis, and reporting,” according to the statement.

Despite the bitcoin halving making the mining ecosystem tougher and less profitable to navigate, several private miners are vying to go public following bitcoin’s record high earlier this year. Among them is financial services firm Swan Bitcoin. Genesis Digital Assets, formerly backed by Sam Bankman-Fried, and two of Northern Data’s units were also among firms reportedly planning IPOs.

Ionic is helmed by Matt Prusak, former chief commercial officer of Hut 8 (HUT) and USBTC. Earlier this year, the miner said it would acquire all of Celsius’ mining assets as part of the bankrupt lender’s emergence from Chapter 11.

The firm said in February that it plans to go public in the next 12 months and expects to achieve 12.7 exahash per second (EH/s), a measure of computing firepower being directly toward mining bitcoin, once its fleets are fully operational this year. At the time, Ionic said the assets include about 87 megawatts (MW) of self-mining capacity, 142MW of hosted bitcoin mining at third-party sites and the Cedarvale site, which is in development to reach a capacity of 240MW.