TradingKey - U.S.-listed Eightco Holdings (OCTO.US) announced the appointment of Dan Ives, a prominent Wall Street technology analyst and Managing Director of Global Research at Wedbush Securities, as its new chairman. The company also revealed plans to establish a cryptocurrency treasury. Fueled by the news, Eightco’s stock soared as much as 5,600% intraday, closing up 3,008.97%, with its market capitalization briefly surpassing $137 million.
Source: Eightco Holdings price chart, TradingKey
Ives is one of Wall Street’s most vocal technology bulls in recent years. He has consistently maintained “outperform” ratings on tech giants like Apple and NVIDIA, and launched an AI-focused ETF last year, boldly declaring that “the next two to three years will be a bull market for tech stocks.”
Eightco announced it will raise $250 million through a private placement to purchase Worldcoin (WLD) tokens — a cryptocurrency created by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. The move aims to position Worldcoin as the core asset in Eightco’s proposed “crypto treasury,” betting on the future of digital identity in the AI era.
In a statement, Ives described Worldcoin as the “de facto standard for identity verification in the AI era,” emphasizing that this is not a “cookie-cutter token strategy.”
The funding round also includes participation from BitMine Immersion, the world’s largest Ethereum treasury company, which invested $20 million. BitMine’s chairman, Tom Lee, is another well-known Wall Street bull. The World Foundation, the organization behind Worldcoin, also joined the round.
Eightco expects to complete the share issuance by September 11, after which it plans to change its ticker symbol to “ORBS”.
This series of moves positions Eightco as another publicly traded company — following in the footsteps of BitMine — to be led by a high-profile Wall Street figure and centered on a Web3 narrative. However, for a shell-like stock with little underlying business, the sustainability and intrinsic value of such a celebrity-driven rally remain questionable.