rewrite this title Crypto asset manager CoinShares to begin trading on Nasdaq through SPAC merger

Crypto investment firm CoinShares said it will begin trading on Nasdaq Wednesday through a merger with a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC.

The company is merging with Vine Hill Capital to form the holding company CoinShares PLC. The deal closed late Tuesday, CNBC has learned. It was first announced in September, and it values the business at about $1.2 billion, including a $50 million investment from institutional investors. Shares will trade under the ticker CSHR.

CoinShares is a 12-year-old European asset manager with a focus on crypto assets, serving both institutional and retail investors. It offers structured investment products and funds – including the U.S.-listed CoinShares Bitcoin ETF – and manages $6 billion in assets.

“We have a lot of [assets under management] in Europe, we don’t have much AUM in the U.S.,” CoinShares CEO and co-founder Jean-Marie Mognetti told CNBC in an exclusive interview. “We could build that organically, but it’s going to take too much time, so the only way we’re going to be able to grow in the U.S. is by leveraging the equity currency we are developing through a U.S. listing.”

“We want to be a much bigger company, and we need to grow so our success will be measured at some point by our capacity to grow in this American market,” Mognetti said.

The listing comes on the heels of the successful initial public offering of crypto custodian BitGo in January and an explosive year of crypto IPOs in 2025 that included Circle Internet Group, Figure Technology, Gemini Space Station and Bullish.

Crypto investors have been expecting a healthy IPO market since President Donald Trump’s return to office given his administration’s friendly stance toward the industry.

Nevertheless, the timing of CoinShares’ listing comes at a challenging time for investors, whose sentiment has turned risk averse as the war in Iran drags on for a fifth week, pushing three of the major indexes into correction last week.

Crypto stocks have been suffering from a sharp sector-wide decline over the past six months, prompting crypto exchange Kraken to recently push off its widely anticipated debut. The price of bitcoin is down 40% from its October peak.

“We don’t believe in timing windows, we believe in when the company is ready,” Mognetti said. “Bear markets are when service companies get listed, bull markets are when hype companies get listed. We are not listing because the market is easy, we are listing because the business is ready for it.”

CoinShares is based in the British Crown Dependency of Jersey and was previously listed on the Nasdaq Stockholm exchange in Sweden.

He also said that CoinShares has been profitable every year since its inception in 2014, through the crypto booms as well as the busts.

A crypto asset management company could possibly be more attractive to investors versus exchanges because revenue is typically driven by recurring fees on assets under management, which can be more stable across market cycles. By contrast, transaction-driven revenue that platforms like Coinbase, Bullish or Gemini rely on can drop sharply during periods of low trading activity and market uncertainty.

CoinShares operates in three businesses: its ETF business, active strategies and, as of last week, on-chain asset management (where crypto and real world assets are managed directly on a blockchain).

“We want people to own bitcoin, to own digital assets through different types of products we can offer,” Mognetti said. “We make money when people own it … no matter where the market is going.”

When CoinShares began its journey in 2014, market demand in Europe was entirely driven by retail investors. He said it wasn’t until 2017 when “curious” institutional investors began to enter the market.

Meanwhile in the U.S., institutional participation was limited because there weren’t high-quality investment vehicles available until the bitcoin ETFs hit the market in early 2024. Since then, there’s been a significant catch-up in institutional involvement.

In the U.S., BlackRock, Fidelity and Grayscale dominate crypto fund assets under management. Bitwise Asset Management, a crypto-specialist firm, and VanEck, which also has a strong crypto commitment, are also prominent crypto ETF issuers.

CoinShares is still run by its two co-founders, Mognetti and Daniel Masters, who is a director of the company.

“We’re still running this company with an incredible amount of fiduciary duty, care and stewardship for both our clients and our shareholders,” Mognetti said. “Our shareholder base has been extremely stable over the years and we are coming to the market to reinforce this transparency.”

Given that tech and financial services make up the biggest equity allocations in the U.S., “there is a more natural audience for what we are doing, and we are very keen to to be able to show this great company to the market and let the market determine how we can keep growing in the U.S.,” he said.