Melbourne-based Bitcoin Group Limited is a hair’s breadth away from an Initial Public Offering after raising over $3 million on Bitcoin equity website BnkToTheFuture (Bnk To The Future Ltd.). According to Forbes, the company has raised most of the $3.6 million needed for the IPO–and according to Bitcoin Group’s BnkToTheFuture website the company has exceeded its goals.

This will make the third time Bitcoin Group has attempted to make IPO in Australia. Founded in Melbourne in September 2014, Bitcoin Group represents Australia’s largest Bitcoin mining concern. The company is a five-year partnership between CEO Sam Lee and co-founders Allen Guo and Ryan Xu.

“Internet is democratising information, 3D printing is democratising manufacturing, Bitcoin is democratising money,” says Samuel Lee, CEO of Bitcoin Group. “How? As the worlds first and leading decentralised trust network, Bitcoin is able to transfer power from Banks (incumbents) to the people, and in the process help connect the billions of unbanked in the world to the global economy.”

The first two times, the company’s IPO was halted by the Australian Securities and Investment Commission (ASIC), after the commission found violations of policy. With the IPO finally on track (again) the public offer is expected on the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) in Sydney on 11 November 2015 at AU$20 million (US$14.57m).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOzQKzaJYRc

Bitcoin mining is the process by which transactions on the Bitcoin network are validated and entrenched into the Bitcoin blockchain, the globally distributed ledger that contains every transaction. Aside from securing the network, Bitcoin mining also provides miners with rewards of bitcoins every time a block is “mined,” as well as miners fees accompanying each transaction. As a result, Bitcoin mining contains an incentive to keep miners running.

Bitcoin Group boasts 6,129 “specialized mining machines,” providing an output of 6.2 petahashes (a measurement of bitcoin mining computing power), which comes out to approximately 1.57 percent of the total computing power of the Bitcoin network. This puts the company’s mining power right behind the Eligius mining pool (at 2 percent according to Blockchain.info).

In the past year less-efficient mining outfits, especially those running cloud-based mining concerns, have shut down.(For example: CEX.IO shut down early 2015 and DigitalBTC exited even more recently.) The presence of the world’s first Bitcoin mining IPO means that Bitcoin Group believes it has a profitable venture in a market that has shown previous instability.

Featured image credit: Bitcoin IMG_1924 via photopin (license)