Former oncology biotech company Leap Therapeutics ( LPTX ), which earlier this month raised $58.9 million in funding led by Winklevoss Capital to pivot into a digital finance company, announced the purchase of $50 million in Zcash .
At the same time, the company is renaming itself Cypherpunk Technologies and will start trading on Thursday with the new ticker CYPH, reads a Wednesday press release.
About the only crypto to rise in value in recent weeks, ZEC has more than doubled since the Leap purchases, up another 12.2% over the past 24 hours to $523.
LPTX stock surged 369% on Wednesday following news of the profitable investment.
Digital Asset Treasury pursues a strategy to raise funds by selling equity and debt to accumulate cryptocurrencies, a playbook developed by Michael Saylor’s Strategy (MSTR) with bitcoin. They became ubiquitous this year with dozens of public companies announcing a pivot, but the frenzy has cooled considerably in recent months as their share prices in many cases fell below the net worth of their digital asset holdings.
“The recent lackluster performance of digital asset companies stems from PIPEs dominated by short-term mercenary capital,” Will McEvoy, chief investment officer of Cypherpunk, said in a statement. “We’ve taken a different path by building a syndicate of value-aligned investors who believe in Zcash’s long-term importance and privacy to the US and the world.”
Zcash is designed to offer users greater privacy than mainstream cryptocurrencies like bitcoin . Cypherpunk’s executives viewed ZEC as a hedge against surveillance-driven financial systems.
