Early Bitcoiner Adam Back Nears $3.5B BTC Deal With Brandon Lutnick-Led Cantor SPAC: FT

Brandon Lutnick, chairman of Wall Street investment bank Cantor Fitzgerald, is in late-stage talks with early bitcoin proponent and Blockstream CEO Adam Back for a bitcoin treasury deal that could be worth over $3 billion, the Financial Times reported on Wednesday.

According to the report, Lutnick’s blank cheque company Cantor Equity Partners 1 would acquire 30,000 BTC (nearly $3.5 billion at current prices) from Back. In return, Back would receive equity in the vehicle, which would be renamed BSTR Holdings. The firm also seeks to raise $800 million outside capital, the report said.

A final deal could be announced within days, though terms are still being negotiated, per the report.

The news follows Cantor Fitzgerald’s previous bitcoin investment vehicle Twenty One Capital, which was backed by SoftBank, Tether and Bitfinex and headed by Jack Mallers, the CEO of bitcoin-focused payments app Strike. That’s been part of a recent trend of turning publicly-traded companies into crypto treasury strategy plays, raising money from investors to acquires digital assets like BTC, Ethereum’s ether ETH or Solana’s SOL SOL.

Back has personally backed several bitcoin-focused companies this year, including Sweden’s H100 Group and France’s Blockchain Group.