Crypto’s newest craze is attracting some big names—including one of Tesla’s biggest bulls. On Monday, Dan Ives, an analyst at the financial advisory firm Wedbush Securities and one of the most vocal cheerleaders behind Elon Musk’s electric car company, became chair of a small, publicly traded company that aims to load its balance sheet with cryptocurrency.
Eightco Holdings, a firm that specializes in packaging and retail inventory management, announced that it had raised $250 million through a private share offering to buy up Worldcoin, a cryptocurrency linked to the crypto project World, which itself is backed by OpenAI cofounder Sam Altman.
Ives is a widely recognized Wall Street figure, but he made his name as an analyst, not as the operator of public companies. He may appear to be a strange choice to oversee a board—let alone one devoted to accumulating cryptocurrency—but his appointment comes amid a rush of big names on the boards of so-called digital asset treasury companies, or public firms whose primary aim is to accumulate cryptocurrency, providing investors with exposure to tokens they would normally not be able to trade through brokerage accounts.
Others include Alex Spiro, an attorney to Musk, who is chairing a company dedicated to the memecoin Dogecoin. And then there’s Kyle Samani, a well-known crypto venture capitalist set to chair a different public treasury company for the cryptocurrency Solana.
