The Satoshi ‘Banksy of Bitcoin’ thriller delivers a small-cap angle price watching

A little Bitcoin mythology first, prompted by a story that broke earlier this week on the potential identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, the inventor of the world’s premier cryptocurrency.

The New York Times apparently outed 55-year-old computer scientist Adam Back as Satoshi, based ostensibly on his use of dashes and other syntactical tics detected in emails written by both Back and the Bitcoin creator.

Having assessed my own misuse of dashes in compound words, I too could be Satoshi. Thousands of reasonably well-educated people probably fall into the same pattern spotted by the NYT’s John Carreyrou. The film is old, but the reference holds: I am Spartacus.

Speaking to a friend of Back’s, it seems he is regularly, and wrongly, identified as Satoshi, and his denial this week is simply part of the ritual.

That said, it would be foolish to dismiss Carreyrou’s analysis, which goes considerably deeper than the tongue-in-cheek summary above. He is a double Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter who brought down Theranos. He knows what he is doing.

Whether the Banksy of Bitcoin is hiding in plain sight remains to be seen.

More interesting to dedicated followers of small-caps is Back’s CV, his central role in the Bitcoin firmament, and his links to a small treasury company called Connecting Excellence (XCE), run by former rugby league player Scott Ellam.

Back is listed as a strategic investor and sits alongside a heavyweight team of advisers and directors that suggests XCE has ambitions well beyond its current modest market capitalisation. What that intellectual and crypto firepower ultimately brings to the table will be worth watching.

Turning to the wider market, it has been a stellar week for the UK’s growth companies with the AIM All-Share, the benchmark for our minnows, up 4.5 per cent as investors defied the geopolitical uncertainty to get stuck in.

The index outperformed the Footsie, which nudged ahead 2.4 per cent as traders settled into ceasefire mode.

Mercantile Ports plots its way back

The week’s big gainer, up 143 per cent, was Mercantile Ports & Logistics, which outlined plans to fully repay its debt and step up legal action to regain control of its Karanja terminal asset in Maharashtra, western India.

The port and logistics group said it has offered to redeem 100 per cent of its outstanding debt before the Supreme Court of India. The proposal is now under consideration by creditors, though the process has been delayed.

A hearing in Mumbai this week directed creditors to meet the company to consider the plan, with a further meeting scheduled in New Delhi on Friday.

Pilings specialist Van Elle jumped 54 per cent after it agreed to be taken over by the UK arm of Austrian contractor Strabag for £59 million.

Mirriad bounces, but nobody’s saying why

Nibbles of interest, or market makers correcting their precipitous markdown of the stock? Who knows the reason for the 50 per cent jump in Mirriad shares on no news. Readers of this column will remember the ad group warned about its ongoing funding crisis. Since then, crickets. So, we wait and wonder, attempting not to be cynical.

Wind in European Green Transition’s sails

It was a good week for investors in European Green Transition, with the shares up 31 per cent after the company told investors its Wind Energy Services business has built a £126 million repowering opportunity pipeline.

The AIM-listed group pointed to rising demand for onshore wind upgrades following last year’s UK planning policy shift.

Sorted Group anything but

Onto the week’s biggest loser. Down 43 per cent, Sorted Group was far from sorted after telling investors it was selling its main operating business for £1 and would become a cash shell.

Richmond Hill Resources fell 26 per cent after it inked a cash and shares deal to acquire 29 mining claims in an area of Ontario noted for gold discoveries. Good news on the face of it, though the market may be anticipating a stock overhang from the transaction.

Impax Asset Management lost a fifth of its value on Friday after the firm reported assets under management fell 8 per cent over its fiscal second quarter to £22.3 billion, as continued client redemptions prompted the AIM-listed specialist investor to guide for lower full-year revenue.

Gelion’s battery progress

The battery inside your phone or laptop degrades a little every time you charge it. Do that enough times and the battery holds less charge, runs out faster, and eventually gives up. The number of charge-discharge cycles a battery can handle before that happens is one of the key measures of whether a technology is commercially viable. And right now, lithium-ion, the chemistry that powers almost every device you own, sets the benchmark.

Gelion, a small AIM-listed company, is trying to build a better battery using sulfur rather than the materials used in conventional lithium-ion cells.

Sulfur is cheaper and more abundant, which matters if you want to bring down the cost of batteries at scale. The problem has always been durability: sulfur-based batteries have historically degraded too quickly to compete.

Gelion’s progress suggest it is closing that gap. Its latest material has now completed more than 750 full charge-discharge cycles in testing; the kind of numbers that start to look credible alongside mainstream alternatives.

Critically, it works with standard components already used in the industry, meaning manufacturers would not need to rip up their existing production lines to adopt it.

That last point is what makes this genuinely interesting. The world’s battery factories, gigafactories, in the industry shorthand, represent billions of pounds of fixed investment.

Any new technology that requires a completely different manufacturing process faces an enormous adoption hurdle. Gelion is explicitly positioning its material as a drop-in replacement: same factory, better battery.

The company has £10.5million in the bank and a partnership pipeline worth more than £17million it expects to convert into commercial deals by next year. 

It remains early stage, and the distance between promising test results and a product on a production line is rarely short. But the direction of travel is encouraging.

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