Alcohol company Madison Group pours $60M into crypto miner Diginex

The cryptocurrency and blockchain space appears to be getting crowded of late with several multinational companies and other large entities looking to pounce on what is proving to be a considerable investment opportunity, even amid the negative press that the market has had over the last few months.

The latest news in the acquisitions and sales market comes from Hong Kong. Diginex, a multinational crypto-asset investment services firm, announced that it has sold 51% of the company’s stake in the cryptocurrency and mining field to another Hong Kong-based firm, Madison Group Holdings.

Diginex is heavily invested in blockchain or distributed ledger technology (DLT), and it is slightly curious that they should sell their stake to a company who is better known for the retail of alcoholic beverages. The price for a 51% stake in the company was around $60 million. Undoubtedly Madison Group see a considerable potential in the cryptocurrency mining business, which has taken the world by storm of late. In fact only last week, multinational companies Samsung and AMD have reported record turnover and profits from their mining-related operations, largely through the sale of semiconductor chips.

The Memorandum of Agreement signed by the two companies listed other synergies, including the leverage of Diginex’s proprietary platform DigiAssets, which can also be used for cryptocurrency owners to purchase wines of high value as well as other assets. Madison’s investment will allow Diginex to continue rolling out their GPU mining operations in Western Europe in partnership with several hardware suppliers, as well as power and security providers—with a goal of building efficient mining and high-performance computing (HPC) data centers for cryptocurrencies.

In a statement, Diginex CEO Miles Pelham said Madison Group’s cash injection will allow the company “to expedite our steps towards becoming the global provider of Distributed Ledger Technologies. We will continue to build out our mining operations in Sweden and Switzerland, but also focus on helping corporates and governments across the world to implement transformative DLT applications.”

Privately-owned Diginex described itself as a full services provider for distributed ledger technologies, operating out of Hong Kong, Switzerland, Germany, and Japan. The company offers all DLT ecosystem services with mining and HPC operations in Asia, Switzerland and Sweden, as well as blockchain consulting, ICO advisory, smart contract design and provision together with cryptocurrency payments and crypto-asset investment services.