Phoenix: Bitcoin investment firm eyes share buyback as crypto hoard grows

Crypto-focused investment firm Phoenix Digital Assets reported its assets boomed over the last three months as crypto prices soared.

In a quarterly trading update today, the firm revealed that the value of its cryptoassets had risen from £47.1m at the start of the year to £71.4m.

Bitcoin is the company’s largest asset, as it holds 508 of them, or £28.3m worth. This is followed by 8,814 ethereum (£25.4m) and 86,396 solana (£13.4m).

Trading on Aquis, the company first went public in May 2021, before falling to record lows during the ‘crypto winter‘ of 2022 and 2023.

Between November 2022 and January 2023, the height of the ‘crypto winter’, the company purchased 549 bitcoin and 5,494 Ethereum.

While these two were purchased for an average price of £13,549 and £1,005 respectively, they currently sit at £53,432 and £2,699.

The firm is currently planning a share buyback in the period after the ‘bitcoin halving‘, which is expected to take place this month.

In January, Phoenix changed its name from NFT Investments, stating that the new name “better reflects the company’s diverse range of crypto-assets and investments across the company’s high performing fund”.

The firm has seen its share price more than triple over the last six months, rising from 1.45p in October to 4.5p today.

Despite this, Phoenix’s share price of 3.65p on 31 March represented a 48 per cent discount to the value of its total crypto holdings, or a 42-45 per cent discount to its unaudited total net asset value, net of any expected tax change.

Tax liabilities will represent a problem for the company, it said in its trading statement, anticipating the “significant unrealised profits” from the growth of its crypto holdings will create a tax impact of between 0.7p to 1.1p per share.