The Argo Blockchain ‘mafia’ is pushing crypto onto London’s public markets

In startup land, former employees of successful tech companies who go on to wield significant influence as founders and investors are often branded, not as alumni, but as a “mafia.”

It is a term that fits neatly with the work of executives, past and present, at the crypto mining outfit Argo Blockchain. 

Listed on the main market of the London Stock Exchange since 2018, Argo today boasts a market capitalization of around £550 million. At one point in February, it was worth more than double that figure.

The company’s principal activity is mining bitcoin and holding it, offering public market investors an alternative, more familiar means of gaining exposure to the industry.  

It is an idea that executives connected to Argo apparently think can be replicated in other, even more esoteric sub-sectors of crypto. Indeed, the Argo mafia’s fingerprints are all over several of the small number of niche crypto investment vehicles trading on London’s public markets.

Spheres of influence

Four past and present Argo directors, in particular, have been busy lately setting up publicly traded crypto companies in London. They are: Peter Wall, Argo’s current CEO, and former directors Timothy Vincent Le Druillenec (who resigned from Argo in March 2020), Mike Edwards (resigned January 2020), and Jonathan Bixby (resigned May 2019).

Each of these men have gone on to hold prominent roles at either NFT Investments or Dispersion Holdings — or both. Wall also has ties to Pluto Digital, another DeFi investment vehicle that The Block reported was aiming to go public on the Aquis Stock Exchange in London earlier this year.

NFT Investments went public via its own listing on Aquis’s Growth Market in April, raising £35 million to plough into the non-fungible token (NFTs) sector — targeting blockchain-linked digital art and collectibles, infrastructure investments and celebrities’ digital rights. Jonathan Bixby is the company’s executive chairman, sitting alongside both Mike Edwards and Timothy Vincent Le Druillenec on the board.

Dispersion Holdings also came to market in April, after being admitted to the Access segment of Aquis. The company raised a little shy of £10 million. It has since acquired DeFi “yield farming” operations Accru Finance and DeFi Yield Technologies for £8.75 million and £10.65 million, respectively — both of which were paid for in newly issued shares. 

The former will be positioned as a consumer-facing platform offering high returns, while the latter will target institutions, according to Phil Blows, who was recently named as Dispersion’s new CEO.

“The majority of the growth and the majority of the investment that you’re going to see out of us now is to grow the direct customer bases of those two businesses,” said Blows.

As for Pluto Digital, Peter Wall currently holds the role of “Starfleet Chairman of Advisory Excellencer” at the company, according to its website. A spokesperson for Argo told The Block in August that Wall was set to be succeeded as a director of the company by Sebastien Chalus, Argo’s VP of Operations. The spokesperson said that Wall would instead take an advisory role.

Pluto was only incorporated in January but raised $40 million in March in a round led by Argo, which invested around $10 million to retain its 25% stake in the firm. Pires Investments and Riverfort Global Opportunities also participated in the fundraise.

In April, Wall told The Block that Pluto was “rocketing to its IPO on the London Aquis Exchange, with a target of late May 2021 for its admission,” but the listing has not yet happened. Pluto did not respond to a request for comment by press time.

“There is a material lack of scalable crypto-oriented companies available on public stock markets in the U.K.,” Wall said at the time. “With the support of its strategic shareholder Argo Blockchain, Pluto is listing to address the gap between the massive growth in DeFi and the lack of equity investment capability available to UK stock exchange investors.” 

Shared postcodes 

The extent to which these Argo-linked crypto businesses work together is not entirely clear. Dispersion boss Blows stressed that “they are standalone businesses,” while acknowledging “some shared directorships across them.”

They in fact share more than just directors; some of them also share a registered office.

Corporate filings show that in August Argo changed its registered address from 50 Jermyn Street to 16 Great Queen Street. The very same place, indeed the same floor, is listed as the registered address of NFT Investments, Dispersion, and other non-crypto companies of which Mike Edwards is a director — namely Motto Technologies and Clarify Pharma. It should be noted, however, that registered addresses and operational headquarters are not always one and the same. According to Argo, 16 Great Queen Street is the office of city law firm Fladgate.

What, then, is the thinking behind this growing network of closely linked — if formally independent — crypto businesses? 

Blows said that their architects are simply trying to capitalize on institutional investor demand for the next big things in crypto, such as NFTs and DeFi. Given how recently these companies were formed, any investors that do buy into the group are effectively making a bet on their overlapping management teams. 

In an interview in April, shortly after NFT Investments’ £35 million raise, Bixby outlined exactly that.

“You’re buying the team, you’re buying what I think is a great plan,” he said. “And then I think you’re buying the opportunity where we have already navigated the process of going public – we’ve done it multiple times and we’ve done it successfully.”