Uber's Largest Shareholder SoftBank Denies Deal With Bitmain, Other Investments Uncertain

An official from SoftBank has denied their involvement in the investment deal with Bitcoin mining behemoth Bitmain that was reported last week by both crypto and mainstream media sources.

As previously reported, Bitmain had allegedly sealed a pre-Initial Public Offering financing deal which had brought its valuation to $15 billion.

Both Chinese tech conglomerate Tencent and Japan's SoftBank - another tech giant whose 15 percent stake in Uber makes it the drive-hailing app's largest shareholder - were purportedly involved.

After receiving an anonymous tip that Tencent and SoftBank were not actually involved in any deal with Bitmain, Cointelegraph reached out to SoftBank and Tencent for confirmation.

"Neither the SoftBank Group Corp. nor the SoftBank Vision Fund were in any way involved in the deal."

The original story on SoftBank and Tencent's participation in a deal with Bitmain was reported by Chinese publication QQ on August 4.

After the story originally broke, there were no official confirmations or denials by either SoftBank or Tencent of their participation in an investment deal with Bitmain.

As the media began reporting SoftBank and Tencent allegedly participated in a deal with Bitmain, bringing the company's reported valuation to $15 billion, Blockstream CSO Samson Mow tweeted August 11 an image - reportedly from the Bitmain pre-IPO investor deck - showing the company allegedly had a large amount of Bitcoin Cash.

"Why is Bitmain raising capital so fast & only showing Q1 results to pre-IPO investors? We're well into Q3 now. The reason is Q2 was a disaster. Bitmain is sitting on a massive $1.24 billion USD in inventory & S9 prices dropped by ~85%! Q2 losses range in the $600-700 millions."

The seemingly refuted investments come after a year of reports that appeared to indicate Bitmain's astonishing profitability.