$EBON is a China-based crypto company that has raised ~$374 million from U.S. investors in 4 offerings since going public in June 2020.
We think a majority of that investor capital has been diverted out of the company and is never coming back.
Before going public on NASDAQ, $EBON twice applied to list on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.
Multiple media outlets reported that Ebang’s Hong Kong IPO plans were suspended following involvement in an alleged sales inflation scheme with a company called Yindou.
Yindou was a massive Chinese P2P online lending scheme that defaulted on its 20,000 retail investors in 2018, with $655M “vanish(ing) into thin air”.
Its ultimate beneficial owner “fled the country”, and Chinese prosecutors have been pursuing other suspects associated w/ Yindou
While $EBON represented that it would use the majority of its numerous capital proceeds to develop its business operations, our research discovered it instead directed much of the cash out of the company through a series of opaque deals w/ insiders & questionable counterparties.
$EBON directed $103M, representing ~$11M more than its entire IPO proceeds, into bonds linked to its U.S. underwriter AMTD (Chaired by Calvin Choi), which has a track record including (a) fraud and self-dealing allegations and (b) listings that have subsequently imploded.
AMTD entered into similar bond transactions with another company it recently took public in January 2020 called Molecular Data $MKD.
That company is down 70% since, has seen 6 board members and its co-founder resign, and had its auditor decline to stand for re-election.
In November 2020, $EBON tapped the market for its first secondary offering, announcing a $21M raise. It claimed proceeds would go “primarily for development”.
Around the same time, the company directed $21 million to repay related-party loans to Chairman/CEO Dong Hu’s relative.
$EBON claims to be a “leading bitcoin mining machine producer”, yet our research indicates this extraordinary claim is backed by no evidence.
Ebang released its final miner in May 2019 and has since seen its sales dwindle to near-zero, delivering only 6,000 total miners in 1H20.
With its mining machine business failing, $EBON has pivoted the story to a cryptocurrency exchange launch called “Ebonex”.
Announcements about the exchange added as much as $922 million market capitalization to Ebang.
We found that $EBON's exchange appears to be purchased from a white-label crypto exchange provider called Blue Helix that offers out-of-the-box crypto exchanges for as little as no money up-front.
$EBON’s exchange looks remarkably similar to other exchanges related to Blue Helix, like a popular exchange called Huobi.
We found numerous mentions of “Bhex” throughout the source code of $EBON’s exchange.
Ebonex reports what appear to be fictitious volumes. Despite just launching and having virtually no online presence, Ebonex volume data implies it is one of the largest spot exchanges in the world.
Yet its trading metrics are absent from well known crypto exchange trackers.
$EBON is yet another cautionary tale for inexperienced investors.
As is common with other China-based schemes, the co. will likely keep selling shares as long as investors are willing to keep buying them. We think this is a clear one-way street & the capital isn’t coming back.
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$EQIX is an $80 billion market cap data center REIT with over 260 facilities globally.
It has 10,000+ customers, ranging from small businesses to large cloud “hyperscaler” providers like Amazon, Microsoft and Google.
(2/x)
Even if you ignore our findings & take the financials of $EQIX at face value, the company trades at elevated levels; an ~86% premium to its peers on a price to forward AFFO basis and a ~59% premium on a price to forward FFO basis.
Our 4-month investigation into Temenos, involving interviews with 25 former employees, including senior leaders at the company, uncovered hallmarks of manipulated earnings and major accounting irregularities.
(2/n)
This includes evidence of roundtripped revenue, sham partnerships, rampant pulling forward of contract renewals, backdated contracts, excessive capitalization of seemingly non-existent R&D investments, and other classic accounting red flags.
$RENB is a biotech company with several preclinical drug candidates that is “committed to curing people with cancers and infectious diseases”.
Weeks ago, it voted to merge with “AI Health” company GEDi Cube, giving the company a pro-forma diluted market cap of ~$567m.
(2/n)
CEO Dr. Mark Dybul has a prestigious background:
(i) serving under Anthony Fauci at the National Institute of Health (NIH)
(ii) as Executive Director of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria and
(iii) as a tenured professor at Georgetown University
LifeStance is a $2.3 billion market cap mental health provider with 6,400 clinicians located across 33 U.S. states.
The company has grown its clinician base at 18% per year in a behavioral health market forecasted to grow ~5% per year until 2030. (2/n)
$LFST trades at a ~23% premium to its peers in the behavioral health industry, despite reporting in its most recent Q3 ’23 report: $188 million in losses over the last twelve months, $482 million in debt and lease obligations and a $716 million accumulated deficit.
In its complaint, the SEC alleges Mmobuosi and other defendants “booked billions of dollars’ worth of fictitious transactions through two Nigerian subsidiary companies Mmobuosi founded and controls”.
The complaint called Tingo Mobile a “sham” and “a fiction”, alleging that claimed assets, revenues, expenses, customers, and suppliers of Tingo Mobile were “virtually entirely fabricated” – and that the public co’s that control it have been “perpetrating an ongoing fraud”.