Buterin, Altman to Attend BitMine Shareholders’ Meeting… “Capital Increase Proposal Is Key”

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, and Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum (ETH), are reported to be attending the shareholders’ meeting of BitMine, the world’s largest Ethereum treasury company.

According to DL News on the 15th (local time), Altman and Buterin will attend BitMine’s annual shareholders’ meeting being held that day in Las Vegas, U.S. This will be the first shareholders’ meeting since BitMine declared in June last year that it would build an Ethereum treasury. Altman and Buterin are said to be planning to speak at the meeting.

The key agenda item is a proposal to expand the cap on new common shares BitMine can issue by 100-fold, from 500 million shares to 50 billion shares. Since last year, BitMine has primarily raised funds through the issuance and sale of new shares to purchase Ethereum.

In an interview that day, BitMine Chairman Tom Lee said, “If shareholders do not approve the expansion (of the common-share cap), the company will stop growing,” adding, “We want to secure sufficient headroom so we don’t have to go back for additional approvals.”

Meanwhile, neither Buterin nor Altman has mentioned BitMine in public. However, Buterin has said he supports Ethereum-based digital asset treasury (DAT) companies because “they demonstrate institutional confidence in blockchain.”