Looking for your next great investment opportunity? Believe it or not, it may be with bitcoin. The little cryptocurrency that could has come a long way since its seedy beginnings, and now, an Australian bitcoin company called the Bitcoin Group is on the brink of being listed on the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX). The company describes itself as “one of the largest bitcoin mining operators,” and boasts a fleet of over 6,000 machines in seven locations that “mine” for bitcoins. Last Christmas Eve, the Melbourne-headquartered firm became the first cryptocurrency miner to ever undergo an IPO, and offered investors a total of 100 million shares at the price of 20 cents, hoping to raise $20 million.
But now, Bitcoin Group CEO Sam Lee says that his company, and the industry at large, could be worth much more than that — billions rather than millions of dollars, in fact. “Every day more stores are adopting bitcoin as a preferred payment method over systems such as Visa, Mastercard, and PayPal, as merchants don’t need to pay any transaction fees to receive bitcoin,” Bitcoin Group CEO Sam Lee told ZDnet.
Lee also notes that the company was profitable in 2015, a trend that he anticipates Bitcoin Group continuing in years to come.
“Bitcoin will revolutionize the world of finance because it has the potential to make the world of finance more accountable and cheaper to operate,” he told Yahoo Finance, and compared the cryptocurrency to “digital cash,” claiming that this newfangled money has “zero risk to merchants from fraud or charge-backs.”
Shares are currently slated to begin trading on February 2, and Lee calls it “an exciting opportunity for investors who want to be exposed to this technological paradigm shift.” So if you’re looking to diversify your portfolio in rather creative ways, you may consider turning your attention towards the Australian and Bitcoin Group.