News from Cryptoground today indicates that a firm called Riot Blockchain is the latest to file a crypto exchange proposal with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission which has been less than speedy about ruling on various options for crypto investors over the past year.
“When it comes to publicly traded firms which work exclusively on the blockchain technology, there are only a few names that pop up,” writes Aditya Worah today, talking about the history of this firm’s progress in crypto. “Riot Blockchain is among the most popular of such names in the US. The company is now looking forward to take things one step forward as Riot has now proposed setting up ‘RiotX’ a regulated cryptocurrency exchange in the US…. Riot Blockchain has filed the proposal with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (US SEC), which published the proposal documents last week. Based on the proposal, Riot plans on starting off this exchange by the end of Q2 2019.”
Worah writes that an API developed by a third party will help to regulate this theoretical exchange and that it company called Shift Markets will provide “the software that powers the cryptocurrency exchange.”
Users will create accounts and link them with banks and financial institutions.
It’s worth asking what kind of animal Riot Blockchain is, anyway. The company started out as Bioptix, a Castle Rock, Colorado-based company that rebranded in October 2017. Now, Riot Blockchain has around 8000 miners and a mining facility in Oklahoma. Through a subsidiary, Riot wants to develop blockchain based escrow services for telecom partners. It also has holdings in a Canadian digital currency company called Coinshare.
In 2017, the news media was talking about how the renaming of the company led to a stock surge – however, Reddit commenters suggested it was just more hype:
“That reminds me of the “Space Age” where random companies would add “-tronics” or whatever random **** to their name, with equally impressive results,” wrote lagerbaer. “I think it’s in one of the history chapters in Random Walk Down Wallstreet.”
Dot com bubble all over again – wrote Swit Biskit.
The question I’m asking myself is whether non-crypto stocks are also going to fall and by how much when the crypto bubble bursts,” chimed in ccc45p.
Another Redditor pointed to a common strategy that many felt resembled what RIOT was doing.
It’s what I call companies playing “hermit crab” and you see it on the pink sheets where the company is X and then it sees something hot and drops its shell and picks up another one and becomes something else entirely,” wrote dvdmovie1. “Often doesn’t end well.
As for “is this the top?”, I don’t think “winter” is imminent but I think it’s not a bad idea to start thinking about/preparing for the eventuality within maybe a year or two.”
At press time, RIOT is around the four dollar mark after trading at up to $20 with in the past year – that’s about half what it was in October of 2017, so the current value really bears out those old comments. RIOT trended slightly up recently, and maybe if the exchange goes through it could get a further spike.
However, to many investors RIOT seems like a garden-variety company that is desperately trying to burnish its image by jumping onto the blockchain bandwagon. It’s worth putting on your list of secondary blockchain companies to watch as the SEC gets closer and closer to allowing new forms of exchange traded opportunities.
