Following its announcement few days ago of plans to offer its initial public offering (IPO), Bitmain has also disclosed it will be hosting the World Digital Mining Summit next month in Tbilisi, Georgia. The proposed event seems like a ramp-up of awareness effort geared towards the company’s upcoming IPO whose actual launch date has not been made known.

According to CoinDesk, Bitmain’s proposed IPO is scheduled for next month and with the 3-day mining summit scheduled for between Sep 21 and 23, it could be deduced that the blockchain hardware, software, and services company is going to use the buzz around the event to rollout its offerings.

The event
The summit which is meant to offer industry insight and networking is being hosted in partnership with BitKan, a statement from Bitmain says. It is expected to have about a thousand attendees which may include miners, mining machine manufacturers, investors, mining pools, technologists, and researchers. Top among the speakers at the event are the CEO of Bitmain, Jihan Wu, BCash’s Roger Ver, CEO of BitKan, Yu Fang and the co-founder of Genesis Mining, Marco Streng.

Bitmain operates the largest cryptocurrency mining pools worldwide — Antpool.com, BTC.com and connectBTC.com — as well as a leading cloud mining platform, hashnest.com. It leads the global blockchain industry in the production of integrated circuits for cryptocurrency mining and mining hardware under the Antminer brand.

Cloud over IPO
With its IPO, the company seeks to raise up to $18 bln at a market capitalization of $40 bln to $50 bln to be underwritten by China International Capital Corporation and listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in Q4 2018 or Q1 2019. While institutional investors like GIC, Sequoia and IDG Capital have reportedly invested in Bitmain, there have been claims that the proposed IPO is risky for any investor to buy into.

The company reportedly entered one of the worst trades of 2017 by converting a majority of its mined Bitcoin into BCash to support the price of the forked coin after the attempt to alter the Bitcoin block size with the failed 2X fork in August 2017. The upcoming IPO has been seen by some insiders as a way for Bitmain to break free from its support for BCash as it will soon attract shareholders’ interest and scrutiny leading to pressure on its operations. Also challenging for Bitmain now is the entry of other chip manufacturers such as GMO, Avalon and Ebang into the mining market.

Requests for comments from Bitmain are yet to be confirmed as at the time of this writing.