Canaan, a maker of bitcoin mining hardware, let its application for a Hong Kong IPO to raise at least $400M lapse
Context & Ripple Effects
Canaan's Hong Kong bid was a casualty of timing: it filed in May 2018 when sources pegged the raise at roughly $1B, but by November the application to raise at least $400M had simply lapsed rather than been withdrawn or repriced. It followed Bitmain down the same path — the larger rival's own Hong Kong application officially expired months earlier despite a draft filing showing $2.8B in revenue.
The escape route was New York: a year later Canaan priced its US IPO at the bottom of the range at $9 per share, raising just $90M — a fraction of what the Hong Kong filing once targeted. The episode is an early data point in Hong Kong's long arc from closing its door to crypto issuers to the reforms that eventually let lossmaking companies float and produced deals like HashKey's 2025 listing.
First-order effects
- Canaan forfeits its planned Hong Kong listing and the at-least-$400M raise attached to it, leaving the world's second-largest mining-hardware maker without fresh public-market capital during the downturn.
- Bitmain is no longer alone among top miners in letting a Hong Kong application die — the two dominant ASIC vendors have now both failed at the same venue.
Second-order effects
- Mining hardware makers reroute to US exchanges on far weaker terms: Canaan's eventual $90M New York raise versus the ~$1B once floated in Hong Kong sets a visible discount for crypto-adjacent listings.
- Hong Kong's exchange cedes the entire first wave of bitcoin-miner IPOs to the US, pushing the sector's public-market anchor offshore just as the city was positioning itself as China's financial gateway.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, crypto hardware companies' access to public markets is cyclical rather than structural — windows open and shut with the coin price, forcing issuers to shop venues across cycles.
- Hong Kong's later reforms allowing lossmaking companies to list suggest regulators learned from this wave: the city re-entered crypto capital markets on its own terms years later, via licensed operators like HashKey rather than miners.
The trend: Crypto-mining companies' IPO prospects track the bitcoin cycle, with listing venues shifting between Hong Kong and the US as each market's appetite for the sector opens and closes.