The man who became the face of a bitcoin miner spent almost two decades selling shares, not mining coins.
Andrew Kiguel joined Hut 8 as President and CEO on 2 April 2018. Before that he had spent more than 18 years at GMP Securities in Toronto, mostly in real estate and retail capital markets, and had raised over C$3 billion for clients in his last five years there. By the end he sat in GMP's blockchain investment banking group, one of the few bankers in the country with a crypto desk.
What almost nobody noticed was how thin the founders' mining credentials were.
That detail matters because of what Hut 8 was built to be. In October 2017, with bitcoin in a frenzy, Sean Clark, Harris Fricker, Kiguel and Marc van der Chijs conceived a company to give ordinary investors exposure to bitcoin without buying the coin. Their vehicle was a listed miner. Hut 8 was incorporated on 15 November 2017, with Clark as interim CEO. The name reportedly nods to Hut 8 at Bletchley Park, where Alan Turing's team worked on the German naval Enigma.
What almost nobody noticed was how thin the founders' mining credentials were. The machines came through a partnership with Bitfury Group, which supplied data centres, and the first site went up in Drumheller, Alberta. Michael Novogratz, through Galaxy Digital, contributed mining assets for equity. Bill Tai, a venture investor, became chairman and said the aim was to be "the leader in North American mining."
Kiguel took over when Clark stepped back at the end of March 2018, and said he wanted the company to be the world's leading crypto-currency miner. The timing was brutal: bitcoin fell through 2018. He stayed until 2020, when the board began a search for his successor.
The harder years came later. Bitcoin's 2022 slump pushed the company toward a merger of equals with US Bitcoin Corp, signed on 6 February 2023 and closed on 30 November 2023. Asher Genoot, from the USBTC side, took over as chief executive in early 2024. The merged company, listed on Nasdaq and the TSX, began describing itself as an energy infrastructure platform, adding high-performance computing and AI data centres to mining. Dealroom put its value near US$13 billion in November 2026.
The lesson is plain. Hut 8 began as a financial product wrapped around a technology, and its early founders understood the wrapper. When bitcoin turned, it was the power contracts and sites underneath that carried the company into a second life.