Mike Smith
Jul 17
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Bitcoin Standard Treasury Company announced its intention to go public through a merger with Cantor Equity Partners I, a “blank check” created by financiers from Cantor Fitzgerald. After the deal closes, the new entity will have more than 30,000 BTC on its balance sheet, and the company will apply for a listing on Nasdaq in New York this fall under the ticker BSTR.
The scheme is designed to raise up to $1.5 billion in a PIPE round, putting BSTR among the largest corporate holders of a digital asset instantly. According to preliminary estimates, the company's aggregate stock will exceed $3.6 billion at current quotations. The rating of issuers placing capital in the first cryptocurrency is currently headed by Strategy, but the emergence of another “heavyweight” may redistribute the focus of institutional demand.
The shift to a corporate vault model has been a new page for the sector, with more than 200,000 BTC flowing onto the balance sheets of public issuers over the past year and a half. Michael Shulman, partner at Running Point Capital Advisors, notes that for family offices, bitcoin quotes serve as a kind of stress test: if an asset can withstand volatility, the company operating it demonstrates to the market the stability of its own business model.
The context for the debut is favorable: on July 14, the price of bitcoin exceeded $120,000 for the first time, and since the beginning of the year the growth is more than 26%. Investors are counting on the imminent adoption of the federal law on stable coins, which will strengthen the legal landscape of the industry and remove some of the regulatory risks. Against this background, the crypto market capitalization reached $3.8 trillion and updated the historical maximum.
Cantor Fitzgerald has already managed to declare its ambitions in cryptocurrency: in spring, it teamed up with SoftBank and the issuer of the largest stablecoin, buying bitcoins for $3.6 billion. The current SPAC deal is a logical continuation of the strategy - access to the open capital market accelerates the scaling of the vault without selling off the underlying asset and without having to issue new debt securities at an inflated rate.
The SPAC format bypasses the long funnel of a classic IPO: auditing, marketing and regulatory approvals take months rather than years. The Cantor team is led by Brandon Latnick, whose family is known for its work in investment banking and commerce; synergies with the broker-dealer infrastructure will give the project immediate access to broad liquidity and an institutional network of investors.
Analysts are paying attention to the governance component. The course towards bitcoin reserves is not so much speculative as it is aimed at increasing transparency: the daily quotation of the asset makes it easier to assess the treasury, and wallet movements are visible on the blockchain. For bond and equity holders, this means real-time digital reporting, and for managers, a new treasury discipline.
If the deal closes in the fourth quarter, the BSTR ticker could be an indicator of how Wall Street's attitudes toward digital commodities are changing: whether corporate “bitcoin stock” will be seen as a hedge against inflation or a risk factor will become clear in the coming months.
