Bitcoin miner Hut 8 CEO exits three weeks after short-seller allegations

financialpost.com:

Hut 8 Corp., one of the largest publicly traded bitcoin mining companies, named Asher Genoot to succeed Jaime Leverton as chief executive, three weeks after a short-seller released a report critical of its recent merger.

The transition is effective immediately. Genoot served as the chief operating officer and the president of U.S. Bitcoin Corp. Miami-based U.S. Bitcoin, which has large-scale mining facilities across the United States including Texas, completed its merger with then-Canadian miner Hut 8 in late 2023.

The leadership transition comes amid increasing competition among the miners, a bitcoin code update set to drastically reduce mining revenue in two months as well as the Jan. 18 report from short-seller J Capital Research alleging the merged company was a “pump and dump” waiting to happen. Hut 8 has disputed the claim.

“The Hut 8 board of directors has determined, following the completion of the company’s merger of equals, the time was right to set a new strategic direction for the company and that a transition of leadership was appropriate,” Hut 8 said in a statement on Wednesday.

Shares of Hut 8 tumbled as much as 26 per cent when the J Capital report was issued, which was also the day company officials rang the bell to open trading on the Nasdaq stock market. Hut 8 was down about 1.9 per cent to US$6.75 as of 1:41 p.m. in New York.

While bitcoin prices have been on a tear, crypto-mining companies are ramping up their operations to compete for the mining reward, a fixed amount of new coins released from the bitcoin blockchain to miners that successfully verify transactions on the network.

Bitcoin mining is an energy-intensive process, in which the more computing power a miner has, the more likely they will