Goldenstone Acquisition Ltd said late on Tuesday it has entered a deal with Roxe Holding Inc to take it public for a combined enterprise value of $3.6 billion.
The deal bucks an unfavorable market environment with cryptocurrencies plunging in value and investors losing interest in special purpose acquisition companies SPACs of this kind, due to disappointing returns.
People familiar with the matter said that Reuters had earlier reported on the deal. According to the sources, none of the Roxe investors plan to sell their stakes.
If certain stock price targets are met, stockholders will roll 100% of their equity into the combined company and certain stockholders will get an earnout for additional shares in the combined entity, according to Goldenstone.
Goldenstone raised just $57.5 million in its initial public offering in March this year, a slither of the deal's value.
Roxe was founded in 2019 and connects banks, payment firms and remittance companies with their own private token to facilitate cross-border payments. It does not use cryptocurrencies, whose market value has been volatile.
On June 18, the price of digital currency fell below $20,000 for the first time since December 2020. It has dropped about 60% this year. The market for cryptocurrencies has slumped to around $900 billion, down from a record $3 trillion in November.
This year, Roxe's founder Haohan Xu agreed to take over the Apifiny public earlier this year in a $530 million deal, which would be Roxe's second SPAC merger this year.
According to data from Dealogic, about 600 SPACs that went public in the past couple of years are still trying to complete deals. A little over six months into 2022, 26 SPAC mergers have been terminated in the United States, according to industry tracker Spac Research. It is a total of 18 in the whole of 2021 and 7 in 2020.
Goldenstone will be renamed as Roxe Holding Group Inc and listed on the Nasdaq upon the closing of the transaction.