Hong Kong-based investment company DST Global denies its involvement in the pre-IPO funding of Bitmain, the Chinese mining hardware giant, in an email to Cointelegraph on August 22.

The denial comes just days after Japanese conglomerate SoftBank and Chinese technology group Tencent both rejected press claims that they were participating in the latest pre-IPO inventment round. The successive withdrawal of heavyweight investors have cast a shadow over Bitmain’s coming IPO on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.

An anonymous tip-off received by Cointelegraph today said that DST Global has not participated in Bitmain’s$400 million funding round earlier this year, with John Lindfors, a managing partners of the investment fund, confirming the rumour later in an email that, “I can confirm that DST has never invested in Bitmain.”

Tencent, China’s largest technology company, on Monday steered clear of Bitmain’s IPO, by stating that “ the company did not take part in the investment of Bitmain Technologies”, tech.sina reported.

Similarly, Japan’s Softbank, Uber’s largest shareholder, indicated it had no connection to the Bitmain round. “Neither the Softbank Group Corp. nor the SoftBank Vision Fund were in any way involved in the deal.” A spokesperson of Softbank said August 18.

The world’s biggest producer of cryptocurrency mining chips is headed by 32-year-old Jihan Wu, one of the most powerful figures in crypto who founded the Beijing-based company five years ago. The past few years have witnessed Bitmain which has shift its business focus to producing application-specific integrated circuits, or ASICs become one of the most valuable cryptocurrency companies across the globe.

In early August, various media houses reported that Bitmain concluded a pre-Initial Public Offering (IPO) financing deal, the involvement of investors including Sequoia, IDG Capital,Tencent, Softbank, DST Global,etc had brought its valuation to over $10 billion, citing “internal document” as the source.

Bloomberg reported last week that Bimain is planning a Hong Kong IPO that is expected to raise as much as $3 billion, and they possibly file the listing application as early as September.

But Bitmain has not responded to a request for comment on any IPO plans at press time.

As its IPO draws near, concern has been raised for Bitmain’s murky relationship with Bitcoin Cash(BCH), a cryptocurrency came into existence after a hard fork from bitcoin blockchain a year ago. The company was reported to support BCH by sacrificing its profit and hodling the coin even in the crypto bear market. Beyond BCH, some people even question its undisclosed but likely disappointing Q2 performance. Amid a barrage of criticism, will Bitmain successfully launch its IPO in September?