Cango has agreed to sell its Chinese auto-financing business for $352 million to a firm affiliated with a Bitmain subsidiary, as reported by TheMinerMag.
According to a press release, the buyer is Ursalpha Digital Limited. The deal includes an advance payment of $210.6 million and additional payments contingent on meeting tax obligations and reducing the credit risk of the acquired enterprise.
Publicly traded Cango announced its entry into the bitcoin mining business in November 2024. The company soon acquired the third-largest hash rate among public miners, reaching 32 EH/s. The equipment generating this hash rate, sourced from Bitmain, cost nearly $300 million.
Journalists noted that as of September 30, Cango had less than $100 million in free cash against total assets valued at $560 million.
In March, the company received a non-binding acquisition proposal from Enduring Wealth Capital Limited, clearly affiliated with Bitmain’s financial arm, Antalpha.
This led to speculation that Cango’s mining initiative was initially conceived to make the firm a “proxy” for the largest ASIC miner manufacturer in the cryptocurrency mining sector. This would explain the auto-financing company’s significant equipment holdings, consisting of Antminer S19 XP units, which major miners are actively replacing with the more efficient S21 series.
Reporters discovered that Ursalpha Digital Limited, formally registered in the British Virgin Islands, shares a corporate address in Hong Kong with Antalpha. The firm’s founding director is Chiu Chang-Wei, a Taiwanese citizen and CEO of the Singapore branch of Bitmain’s financial division.
“Essentially, Bitmain could list its bitcoin mining assets on the exchange by first selling Cango the deployed capacity of 32 EH/s, and then using its Antalpha subsidiary to orchestrate a two-way takeover: one entity would acquire Cango’s cryptocurrency mining business, while another would take over its original auto-financing division,” TheMinerMag described the potential scheme.
Back in the era of tariffs imposed by U.S. President Donald Trump, all Bitmain factories in Southeast Asia were expected to suffer, industry experts predicted.