There has been another delay in the merger of a blank-check firm and bitcoin mining company GRIID.
In November 2021, a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) named Adit EdTech announced its intention of acquiring GRIID.
Last week, the SPAC said in a filing with the SEC that the deadline had been pushed to February 14th from January 14th.
Another delay
This makes it the third delay that the process has seen. Initially, a deadline of May 2022 had been set for finalizing the deal, but it had come and gone without a peep from either company.
They had formally agreed to extend the deadline to October 1st, 2022, but it had been postponed and Adit had asked its shareholders to give approval for further delays.
The company had held a meeting of its stockholders in December in which six delays of one month had been approved, with the latest delay being the first of the six.
The delay includes a loan of $148,045.32 from GRIID to its would-be buyer that would be placed in a trust account.
In the event the deal remains incomplete, shareholders will receive their share of the trust account.
The purpose
SPACs usually acquire businesses with the purpose of taking them public, as they are listed shell companies.
GRIID and Adit had made a deal worth $3.3 billion, which had been aimed to function as a reverse takeover, similar to other SPACs.
It would have allowed GRIID to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange. However, this does not appear to be likely anymore because Adit also said in the new filing that it does not satisfy the listing standards of the NYSE.
According to the filing, the company believes that it will not be able to meet the market capitalization requirement for its publicly held shares, which is a minimum of $40,000,000.
Therefore, it is now exploring its options, which include transferring its shares voluntarily to a different exchange altogether.
Declining SPACs
The early 2020s saw the SPAC process become very popular because it turned out to be a faster and cheaper alternative to the traditional process of Initial Public Offering (IPO).
In recent years, the process has dealt with a great deal of scrutiny and there has also been a decline in enthusiasm because the market has become more cautious.
There have been delays in a number of deals and many have also been called off completely, while other SPACs were liquidated because they could not find an acquisition target.
Last year in November, a total of 14 SPACs were liquidated, which were valued at $3.7 billion. Another crypto miner by the name of Bitdeer is also facing a similar SPAC delay.
Its merger is valued at $4 billion and it was delayed in November for the third time. Meanwhile, the issuer of the USDT stablecoin, Circle, also abandoned its plans of going public via a SPAC in December.
The GRIID deal had been announced at the peak of the 2021 rally in Bitcoin, but conditions for crypto miners that are publicly listed have changed significantly since then.