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Susquehanna crypto CEO departs to lead $675 million Avalanche treasury company
Another heavy hitter from Wall Street is diving into the crypto treasury craze. On Wednesday, a group of investors announced that it plans to establish a $671 million company dedicated to stockpiling the cryptocurrency Avalanche. Bart Smith, the former head of the crypto arm of the quantitative trading firm Susquehanna, will be CEO.
Dubbed Avalanche Treasury Co., the company plans to go public on the Nasdaq in the first quarter of 2026 via a special purpose acquisition vehicle, Mountain Lake Acquisition Corp. Investors who contributed to the fundraise include the crypto venture capital firms Dragonfly, ParaFi, and Pantera Capital. VanEck, an asset manager that’s made significant investments into crypto, also invested.
Avalanche Treasury Co.’s $671 million valuation comes from about $440 million in capital it raised from investors added to the approximately $230 million with which the acquisition vehicle had already been seeded.
Board members for the new company will include Rob Hadick, general partner at the crypto venture capital firm Dragonfly, and John Nahas, chief business officer at the blockchain developer Ava Labs. The firm’s advisory board will add other partners from Dragonfly, along with some familiar crypto names: Emin Gün Sirer, cofounder of Ava Labs; Stani Kulechov, founder of the decentralized finance protocol Aave; and Jason Yanowitz, cofounder of the crypto media company Blockworks.
To start, the company has bought $200 million in Avalanche tokens at a discount from the Avalanche Foundation, one of the main companies behind the eponymous blockchain. It plans to own more than $1 billion in Avalanche cryptocurrency once Avalanche Treasury Co., whose ticker will be AVAT, combines with its acquisition target in the beginning of next year, according to a press release.
“One thing is very clear is that investors want to get exposure to blockchain technology and its prospects, and to date, they haven’t had a really good way to do it,” said Smith, who left his job at Susquehanna in early September to become CEO of the new crypto treasury company.
DAT deluge
Inspired by Michael Saylor, whose software company Strategy has grown its hoard of Bitcoin to a market capitalization of almost $100 billion, digital asset treasuries emerged in the last year or so as a hot new crypto sector. Typically, they are formed by investors taking an already listed firm or blank check company and loading up its balance sheet with cryptocurrency. Proponents say the financial structure gives investors who hold shares in the new company exposure to digital assets in a way they previously weren’t able to achieve through traditional brokerage accounts. Detractors say treasury companies are a fad.
The sector has grown rapidly and evolved beyond the model of holding just Bitcoin. Some digital asset treasuries, or DATs, to emerge this year include firms that stockpile Ethereum as well as more exotic cryptocurrencies like Solana and XRP.
In fact, the forthcoming Avalanche Treasury Co. isn’t even the first DAT to stockpile Avalanche. Last week, AgriFORCE Growing Systems, a small-agricultural-tech-turned Bitcoin-mining company, announced that it had raised $550 million through a private shares offering from Hivemind Capital and more than 50 other investors. As part of the deal, Anthony Scaramucci, founder of the investment fund SkyBridge Capital, agreed to join the strategic advisory board for the company, which plans to rebrand to AVAX One. (AVAX is the ticker for the Avalanche cryptocurrency.)
Still, Smith, the CEO of the Avalanche Treasury Co., believes his forthcoming public company has an edge: “I feel very confident that we will be able to distinguish ourselves to the market.”
