Sell Your Crypto on the Stock Exchange

Last Tuesday, SharpLink Gaming Inc. was an online marketing company for sports betting with a stock price of about $2.91 per share and an equity market capitalization of about $2 million. It was listed on the Nasdaq, but only barely; a few weeks ago it had to do a reverse stock split to stay above Nasdaq’s $1 minimum stock price, and it also didn’t meet Nasdaq’s minimum $2.5 million shareholders’ equity requirement. So on Tuesday it announced a stock offering, raising $4.5 million at $2.94 per share, with a use of proceeds of “regaining compliance with Nasdaq’s minimum requirement for total stockholders’ equity.” Though it added: “We may elect to use a portion of the proceeds to acquire crypto currencies in connection with execution of the potential treasury strategy we currently have under consideration.”

And why wouldn’t it? SharpLink was only in the very most technical sense a US public company: It had a public listing, but with a $2 million market capitalization it did not really meet the requirements for a public listing, and its business — with revenue in the mid seven figures — did not really justify the expense and complexity of being a public company. In the past, that would be bad.