Anthony Scaramucci backs AVAX treasury aiming to raise $550 million

SkyBridge Capital Founder Anthony Scaramucci announced on Monday that he is backing a new Avalanche-based digital asset treasury (DAT) company, which aims to raise $550 million.

Scaramucci will lead the company's strategic advisory board as it targets accumulating over $700 million in AVAX tokens, according to a statement.

Small-cap AgriFORCE Growing Systems, which trades under AGRI on the Nasdaq, is rebranding to Avax One. The company's shares surged on Monday and were changing hands at $5.99, up 149%, as of 10:58 a.m. ET, according to Yahoo Finance.

The trend of transforming smaller Nasdaq-listed companies into altcoin DATs has shown no signs of slowing down in recent months. Initially inspired by Michael Saylor's Bitcoin DAT Strategy, investors and large token holders have been coming together to form companies designed to accumulate popular tokens such as Solana, Toncoin, and XRP.

Avax One's ambitions

"There's a couple of very good Layer 1 technologies like Solana, Ethereum and Avalanche that we believe are going to be the future of tokenization," Scaramucci said during an interview on CNBC. "We made a big a bet on this alongside Hivemind and the Avalanche Foundation and we're going to have a digital asset treasury for Avalanche."

The soon-to-be rebranded Avax One plans to raise "approximately $300 million" through a private investment in public equity (PIPE) private placement in addition to "near-future capital raising activities to raise up to an additional $250 million, which are expected to be focused on equity-linked instruments."

Scaramucci also said that many chief technology officers at big corporations have demonstrated interest in utilizing Avalanche's technology. In its statement, Avax One said Avalanche's technology has been used by Apollo and J.P. Morgan Chase.

"Avalanche is like a Swiss Army knife of Layer 1s, so it's got a lot of flexibility," Scaramucci said.

Hivemind is leading Avax One's capital raising efforts "with participation from over 50 institutional and crypto-native investors," including ParaFi, Galaxy Digital, Digital Currency Group, and Kraken.