A Wall Street Analyst Just Helped Turn $4M Eightco Into an $8B Crypto Giant

Dow Jones
Sep 09

Last Friday, Eightco was a $4.4 million company. On Monday, it closed with an implied market value of $8.5 billion.

The surge in value came as the company sold new stock to fund cryptocurrency purchases and announced that Dan Ives, a prominent Wall Street tech analyst at Wedbush Securities, had been named chairman of the board.

Eightco's private sale of 185 million shares will raise about $270 million for the company, which previously had three million shares outstanding.

The shares are being sold at a price of $1.46. At Monday's close they were valued at $45.08 after trading as high as $83.12 during the session.

Eightco said it intends to use the cash infusion to purchase Worldcoin, the crypto token of World, a project run by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

Worldcoin's value has jumped 46% in the last 24 hours, according to a quote on Crypto.com.

World plans to scan the irises of people across the world in exchange for Worldcoins. Sixteen million people have had their irises scanned over the past two years, according to the company's website.

World's app, the company says, will eventually serve as a global source of personal identity.

"I am so excited to be named Chairman of Eightco Holdings Inc., marking the next step in the AI revolution around authentication and Proof of Human," Ives said in a press release from Eightco. "While AI gives us infinite abundance, World gives us infinite trust and authentication."

Eightco's coin buying strategy follows a model used by Strategy, formerly known as MicroStrategy, which has spent $47.2 billion buying Bitcoin to store on its balance sheet. Strategy, at Monday's close of $329.90, trades for two times book value, meaning investors are essentially paying twice the value of the company's Bitcoin holdings. Eightco fetches roughly 30 times book value based on the company's new share count.

Eightco said that multiple firms, including MOZAYYX and BitMine Immersion had participated in the private offering.

BitMine's chairman is Wall Street strategist Tom Lee; fund manager Cathie Wood is an investor in the firm, which says it has a "focus on the accumulation of Crypto for long term investment."

Ives will continue to serve as an analyst at Wedbush, where he covers tech and other stocks including Apple, Microsoft, Palantir Technologies, Tesla, Uber Technologies, and General Motors.

"My Chairman role is in addition to my role as Head of Tech Research at Wedbush, which I expect to be for years to come," Ives said in a statement provided to Barron's.

Wedbush representatives didn't immediately provide a comment on Ives' new role.

Wedbush Fund Advisors said in June that it was launching the Dan IVES Wedbush AI Revolution ETF, which was built around research from Ives. At the time, the firm said that Ives couldn't hold the ETF, or the stocks in it.

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