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Crypto investment firm CoinShares said it will begin trading on Nasdaq Wednesday through a merger with a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC. The company is merging with Vine Hill Capital to form the holding company CoinShares PLC. The deal closed late Tuesday, CNBC has learned. It was first announced in September, and it values the business at about $1.2 billion, including a $50 million investment from institutional investors. Shares will trade under the ticker CSHR. CoinShares is a 12-year-old European asset manager with a focus on crypto assets, serving both institutional and retail investors. It offers structured investment products and funds – including the U.S.-listed CoinShares Bitcoin ETF – and manages $6 billion in assets. "We have a lot of [assets under management] in Europe, we don't have much AUM in the U.S.," CoinShares CEO and co-founder Jean-Marie Mognetti told CNBC in an exclusive interview. "We could build that organically, but it's going to take too much time, so the only way we're going to be able to grow in the U.S. is by leveraging the equity currency we are developing through a U.S. listing." "We want to be a much bigger company, and we need to grow so our success will be measured at some point by our capacity to grow in this American market," Mognetti said.
'The business is ready for it'
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"We don't believe in timing windows, we believe in when the company is ready," Mognetti said. "Bear markets are when service companies get listed, bull markets are when hype companies get listed. We are not listing because the market is easy, we are listing because the business is ready for it." CoinShares is based in the British Crown Dependency of Jersey and was previously listed on the Nasdaq Stockholm exchange in Sweden.
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