Antalpha might be leaving money on the table to better serve the interests of bitcoin mining’s biggest company: Bitmain.
Last month, Antalpha (ANTA) conducted an initial public offering (IPO) on the Nasdaq exchange, raising $49.3 million at a $329 million valuation. The IPO was a success in many regards, and it also laid bare the financials and operational ins-and-outs of Bitmain’s top financing partner in what has been historically an obfuscated business.
The company, which provides bitcoin-backed loans and bitcoin miner financing to Bitmain customers, recoups a much lower return on its lending book than other Bitcoin financiers. If we compare Antalpha to Galaxy Digital’s lending business, for instance, Antalpha earns roughly two-third of the income as Galaxy for every dollar it lends.
To understand why, we have to evaluate how Antalpha fits into the intertwined – if somewhat blearily defined – universe of companies in Bitmain’s orbit.
Editor’s note: Unless otherwise stipulated or linked back, the information in this article is drawn from Antalpha’s IPO prospectus.
Antalpha vs. Galaxy Digital
There are few crypto lending companies with public financials. But there is Galaxy Digital (GLXY), which recently uplisted to the Nasdaq. So how does Antalpha’s lending business stack up against one of the largest lenders in the crypto space?
TLDR: not great.
Antalpha offers three different types of loans. Its so-called “supply chain loans” consist of ASIC miner financing and what is calls “hashrate loans,” which miners can take out to finance CAPEX costs in addition to machine purchase including hosting fees, repair, and other services. It also offers standard bitcoin-backed loans.
The company draws revenue from its financing business in two ways: from interest on its supply chain loans and platform fees it extracts from clients who use its platform for managing bitcoin-backed loans.
Antalpha hauled in $13.6 million in Q1 2025. $10.1 million of this revenue flowed from interest on its supply chain loans, while $3.5 million came from platform fees for its bitcoin-backed loans. In its IPO prospectus, Antalpha reports that a typical mining machine loan carries 8-10% interest and a hashrate loan 6-8%. In 2024, the average interest rate on Antalpha’s supply chain loans was 8.5%.
Per the same prospectus, Antalpha had $139 million and $439 million loans outstanding respectively for its ASIC miner and hashrate loans in Q1 – $578 million in total. The company doesn’t offer an average loan book size for the quarter, but if we take its supply chain loan book value at the end of 2024 and average it with Q1’s end value, we get $503 million.
If we annualize Antalpha’s Q1 supply chain loan revenue, it nets out to a 8% return on that $503 million. Not quite 2024’s 8.5% average, but pretty daggum close.
You’re probably wondering about the bitcoin-backed loans. Well, Antalpha doesn’t carry these on its balance sheet (more on why later), but it did list $1.19 billion bitcoin-backed loans outstanding at the end of Q1, which is coincidentally the same as the average between this figure and the outstanding bitcoin-backed loans at the end of 2024. Antalpha earned $3.5 million from the platform fees to manage these loans in Q1, so annualized, the company can conceivably earn roughly 1.18% on this lending.
Now let’s compare that to Galaxy Digital’s lending book. Galaxy actually provides an average loan book value for Q1 (which this humble analyst greatly appreciates), $874 million. This loan book is a blend of cash and crypto loans, and Galaxy raked in $27.4 million from all its lending in Q1 2025. Annualized, this nets out to a 12.5% return on this capital; if we look at revenue on the interest it earns solely from its cash lending, we get a return of 10.7%.
So to summarize, Galaxy is conceivably earning 4-4.5% more on its lending book than Antalpha. If we compare the net interest margin (the difference between what a lender earns from its loans and its cost of funding) for either company, the contrast is even starker.
Antalpha funds its supply chain loans from another Bitmain affiliate, Northstar, at the fed fund rate (currently 4.25-4.50%) plus 0.20-1.20%, meaning its aggregate net interest margin is in the ballpark of 3-4%.
Galaxy funds its cash loans partly from its balance sheet and short-term borrowing from institutional counterparties, and its crypto loans partly from its own crypto inventory plus digital-asset borrowing (including DeFi pools). While the company doesn’t publish an all-in cost of funds, the interest expense on its short-term loans payable works out to ~3.36 %. Using that figure against the 10.7% coupon yield it earns on the same cash-loan book gives a segment net-interest-margin of roughly 7%.
Just to reiterate one point: Antalpha doesn’t earn any interest from Northstar’s bitcoin-backed loans, only the supply chain loans. As such, Antalpha carries default risk for the supply chain loans but not for the bitcoin-backed loans, so Antalpha does not hold the bitcoin loans on its balance sheet.
All roads lead to Bitmain
In short, Antalpha is charging a lower interest rate for its loans than Galaxy, so its net interest margins are lower than they could be. The bottom line here doesn’t make sense unless we look at bitcoin mining’s resident kingpin, Bitmain, and the companies closely tied to it.
Let’s start with Northstar, Antalpha’s funding partner. The company was founded in 2022 concurrently with Antalpha. The two were sister companies under the parent firm Antalpha Holding Company that was beneficially owned by Bitmain CEO and co-founder Micree Zhan.
In 2023, Antalpha registered as Antalpha Platform Holdings Company in the Cayman Islands to prepare for its IPO. A 2024 restructuring completely separated the companies as the parent company divested its stake in Northstar and both firms were carved out into standalone entities. Micree Zhan is still listed as a settlor and beneficiary of Northstar.
So Antalpha, which has clear ties to Bitmain, is originating loans for miners to purchase Bitmain machines from Northstar, a company which also has Bitmain ties. Put another way, Bitmain makes money selling the machines, which are purchased with loans that Bitmain’s close affiliates earn interest on from two separate entities (Antalpha and Northstar).
Oh, and that’s not even to mention the fact that, per the prospectus, Antalpha’s loans “help our customers finance the purchase of on-rack mining machines from Bitmain, which are held at facilities Bitmain leases from third-party data center operators.” Antalpha clients are financing turn-key ASIC miners at mining farms operated by Bitmain. If a client defaults, the ASICs go back to Bitmain by way of Antalpha and can immediately start earning revenue to pay back the loan.
One last thing: any client who finances ASICs through Antalpha likely has to exclusively use Antpool – of which Micree Zhan was the beneficial owner by way of Great Simplicity Investment Corporation as of January 2023 – as its mining pool provider. Antpool is the only mining pool that Antalpha lists in its prospectus under the “other mining operators and service providers” that Antalpha uses to “serve [their] customers.”
To recap, Bitmain and its close partners – partners which either share a beneficial owner with Bitmain and which have historically had material interest in Btimain – are extracting income at every level of the value chain here, from selling ASICs, to ASIC financing, to mining pool services.
Perhaps the best way to look at Antalpha, then, is a vehicle to funnel business into Bitmain’s other interests. Even if it isn’t making as much interest as other lenders, Bitmain and its allies still get theirs at various transaction points – and if the clients default, the ASICs are at Bitmain facilities, so it’s all gravy anyway.
The analysis leaves us with one larger question: is Antalpha leaving money on the table for its lending business? When compared to Galaxy, there seems to be less juice for the squeeze. That extra value seemingly flows to other counterparties with connections to Antalpha, Bitmain, and Northstar. So perhaps they do extract the value long term. As a newly public company, it’ll be up to shareholders to see if they value the Bitmain flywheel.
Antalpha did not return questions for comment by publication.
