GCIQuantum Blockchain shares jump as it wins €6.2m in Italian court ruling
( ) shares jumped 20% in London this morning after the company issued an update regarding its claim against Sipiem's previous board and internal audit committee. Sipiem was formally declared bankrupt in August 2022.
Quantum said a Venice Court had ruled in favour of CL17, Quantum's wholly-owned subsidiary, and ordered the defendants to pay €6.2m in damages plus €85K in legal expenses. The defendants have until 25 November to appeal, however the ruling is enforceable immediately.
Quantum will now begin the process of collecting the payment. However, given the size of the award and that only one of two insurers involved in the litigation was held responsible for damages (with a liability capped at c. €450K), there is currently no certainty on the exact amount or timing of award payment that will be collected, Quantum explained.
Quantum said CL17 will evaluate the defendants' assets available for seizure should voluntary payments not be forthcoming.
The Sipiem Claim was acquired by CL17 in 2019 for €50K plus 30% of any funds recovered, minus legal and other expenses borne by CL17, including applicable tax duties. Tax duties of c. 3% are payable on the amounts awarded by the Venice Court.
Francesco Gardin, CEO and Chairman of QBT, commented:
"While the process has taken a long time to reach this point, we are very pleased to have finally attained this outcome. We will now apply the same very determined and scrupulous approach to the collection of the sums due from the defendants."
View from Vox:
Markets' strong reaction to the news is justified given the time horizon of the case and amount awarded to Quantum. It has taken seven years of legal proceedings to obtain this result for Quantum, and the battle is not fully won as collection complications may arise.
Overall, this is a major financial win for the company which finished FY2022 with £1.3m in cash eq. Investors have reacted accordingly, sending QBT shares up 20% this morning.
Quantum Blockchain is now primarily focused on developing disruptive proprietary methods for BTC mining. The company's R&D efforts have been focused on building an optimised and efficient BTC miner. To that end, it has partnered with two independent entities to test the performance of its proprietary prototype ASIC miner (a hardware accelerated crypto miner).
Quantum's current plan is to produce a variety of working 12nm or 7nm-based ASIC prototypes in order to obtain data for future production of 5nm ASIC chips. 5nm lithography is the current state-of-the-art in semiconductor manufacturing, but is still significantly more expensive than the 7nm or 12nm processes.
Quantum has already produced an ASIC prototype that reduces the number of operations needed for Bitcoin mining by approximately 7%. Investments in R&D during 1H22 amounted to €347K, of which €111K has been invested in hardware equipment supporting R&D and €236K in costs related to cloud services and consultants.
Overall, technology investments carried out by Quantum's R&D programme are yielding positive results, now expected to accelerate with the additional funds granted by the court ruling.
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