The stock price of cryptocurrency mining machine manufacturer Canaan has suffered a sharp decline in the past few days. As the first blockchain company that sells shares publicly, Canaan’s performance has been being closely monitored.

Kong Jianping, CEO of Canaan Creative, has recently about the challenges the company encountered during the process of financing from the traditional capital market along with his response on the company’s recent performance.

Kong revealed that the main challenge in the early stage came from the security regulators. He stated that “It takes time for regulators to understand new concepts, and of course, they are very open-minded. They have never denied our listing application. I believe the regulators will recognize this emerging industry in the future.”

“In the later stages, most challenges we encountered came from how big name capital institutions understand the blockchain industry. (But) the number of institutions that truly understand blockchain is gradually increasing.”

Canaan’s Nov.21 offering has raised a total of $90 million, which was reportedly over 75% less than the initially expected $400 million.

In response to the raise target downsizing, Kong stated that their aim was in effect to raise around $100 million considering the sluggish market. As for the reason why there were reports about the $400 million target, it may be that “we paid a fee in accordance with a relatively high standard on Nasdaq.”

“We are facing a sluggish capital market as a matter of fact. Since July 2019, no company has gone public in the U.S. with a particularly large fundraising amount.

In fact, from our own perspective, the performance of our secondary market – shot up over 40 percent shortly after opening – on the first trading day was fairly good in the U.S. stock market during the second half of the year, though it finally closed with a 0.11 percent decline.”

Commenting on Canaan being labeled as the “first blockchain stock”, Kong said that “the label also reflects investors’ expectations on us to be the company that could achieve new breakthroughs in this field. As the vice chairman of Nasdaq told us on the debut day, we are one of the companies with the largest number of people watching live broadcasts in the world, which may also reflect people’s attention on blockchain.

When asked to describe the current situation of Canaan, the sophisticated investor said that the company is entering a new bottoming process, to build a more solid foundation for the industry.

Actually, Kong has once said that Canaan aims to grow into the No.1 in the industry by 2020. Speaking about this, Kong said that the confidence comes from their investment in R&D and the deployment in the supply chain with the fund raised.

According to him, Canaan has already accounted for about 30% of the overseas market out of China, and the company sees the overseas market share will continue to increase in the coming years.