Big B is at the peak of a Bitcoin surge which few — least of all the Bollywood men — had apparently ever presumed.
The cryptocurrency mania that has seized Wall Street and many financial markets across the world beget the value of a stock grant by the Bachchan family from $250,000 to $17.5 million in two and a half years.
In May 2015, Big B Amitabh Bachchan and his son Abhishek spent $250,000, as part of their personal investment, in Meridian Tech Pte, a Singapore firm founded by Venkata Srinivas Meenavalli.
Like many small technology companies, few outside the trade knew about Meridian. That dramatically changed last week when Meridian’s prime asset Ziddu-.com was acquired by another Meenavalli-backed overseas company LongFin Corp just two days after the latter’s listing on NASDAQ.
When Bachchans had invested in Meridian (under RBI authorised liberalised remittance scheme or LRS), Ziddu was a cloud storage and e-distribution startup.
In December 2017, it is described as a Blockchain technology empowered solutions provider” that offers microfinance using cryptocurrencies across continents.
Thanks to magic words like ‘blockchain’ and ‘cryptocurrencies’, the LongFin stock rose more than 1,000% between last Wednesday and Monday, after surging over 2,500% on Friday when the deal to acquire Ziddu.com was announced.
In lieu of their holding in Meridian Tech, Bachchans received 250,000 shares of Bitcoins and it is now flying sky high! The current valuation has been marked at $17.5 million (INR 114 crores).
Meenavalli explains the valuation:
It’s crazy… the global euphoria over Blockchain is sweeping the world…no intrinsic value can be attached.
It is still unexplained what the Bachchans’ plan to do with their cut. They could cash in seeing as how the value is still high right now or risk the potential breakdown of profit soon.
