The Public Apology has moved to allay fears that the media company is facing financial turmoil following the dramatic price slump in virtual Bitcoin currency.
The Public Apology purchased obscure sports media website The Sporting Regard earlier this year in a deal done entirely in Bitcoin currency. The sale price was never made public.
Since then, the price of Bitcoin has tumbled by some 20% following the collapse of one of its leading exchanges, Mt Cox. Hackers are believed to have stolen an estimated US$460 million from the Mt Cox exchange in what some analysts have described as a “virtual bank job.”
The Public Apology founder Dave Edwards said that the company’s Bitcoin holdings were not tied up in the Mt Cox exchange and that the company remains as liquid as ever before.
“We purchased The Sporting Regard using Bitcoin currency at a time when it was doing very well against the Australian dollar. Since then, we have folded TSR into our operations and used the free cash flow to fund a range of new initiatives, which we will be announcing in the coming months,” Edwards said.
The Public Apology was one of the first start-up media businesses to complete a merger entirely in Bitcoin currency. Edwards himself was an early investor in Bitcoin along with a range of other open source software start-ups, following a rather enjoyable trip to Silicon Valley in late-2010.
Edwards said that the terms of the merger involved providing The Sporting Regard co-owners Sam Perry and Ben Shine with an equity stake in The Public Apology, with additional costs incurred for replacing the now-defunct website.
“We enlisted KPMG to evaluate the worth of The Sporting Regard before stepping into the M&A process, and I’m happy with that valuation. Following careful due diligence, we were very confident in using Bitcoin as the currency for acquisition.”
“I’d just like to assure our readers and strategic partners that The Public Apology is completely liquid. We’ve got a number of innovative solutions in our product pipeline and we look forward to bringing those to market in the coming months.”
Meanwhile, Edwards said that he hopes to take The Public Apology public, adding that he has been talking with a number of private investors in regards to an initial public offering “within the next year or so.”
Bitcoin was trading at US$678.6 at time of publishing.
AAP