Earlier this month, former oncology biotech company Leap Therapeutics (LPTX) announced its $50 million acquisition of Zcash after raising $58.9 million in funding led by Winklevoss Capital to transform into a digital finance company. .
At the same time, the company will rebrand as Cypherpunk Technologies and begin trading on Thursday under the new ticker CYPH, a press release on Wednesday read.
ZEC, the only cryptocurrency to increase in value in the past few weeks, has more than doubled in value since Leap’s purchase, rising another 12.2% to $523 in the past 24 hours.
LPTX stock rose 369% on Wednesday following news of investment profitability.
The digital asset treasury is pursuing a strategy of raising funds by selling equity and debt to accumulate cryptocurrencies, a strategy pioneered by the Michael Saylor Strategy (MSTR) with Bitcoin. The market has become ubiquitous this year, with dozens of publicly traded companies announcing business transformations, but the frenzy has subsided considerably in recent months as stock prices have often fallen below the net asset value of digital asset holdings.
“The recent underperformance of digital asset treasury firms can be attributed to PIPEs, which are dominated by short-term mercenary capital,” Will McEvoy, chief investment officer at Cypherpunk, said in a statement. “We took a different path by building a syndicate of investors whose values align with our belief in the long-term importance of Zcash and privacy to the United States and the world.”
Zcash is designed to provide users with greater privacy than mainstream cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin . Cypherpunk executives saw ZEC as a hedge against a surveillance-driven financial system.
