Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne To Sell Retail Business By February To Focus On Blockchain
Patrick Byrne, founder and CEO of retail giant Overstock, said that he plans to sell the firm’s decades-old retail business by early next year to allow them to focus on blockchain projects.
According to The Wall Street Journal, Byrne, who has been planning to sell his e-commerce business since 2017, said that the sale could be finalized as soon as February 2019, but declined to name potential suitors.
Overstock has invested $175 million in a fully owned unit called Medici Ventures, which was established in 2014. Medici Ventures has been investing in a number of crypto and blockchain startups, including Factom, Symbiont, Bitsy, Ripio, Bitt and others. Medici Ventures is also the parent company of Medici Land Governance (MLG), a blockchain portfolio company, and tZero, a platform designed to trade blockchain tokens in an easy, compliant, and user-friendly manner.
Despite Medici Ventures losing more than $22 million in 2017 and more than $39 million in 2018, Byrne believes the firm and its technology is the future.
“I don’t care whether tZero is losing $2 million a month,” Byrne said. “We think we’ve got cold fusion on the blockchain side.”
Earlier this year, tZero closed on an offering of the tokens that raised $134 million. Byrne said tZero will offer its own security token for trading when it launches in the first quarter of 2019. He added that about 60 outside parties are developing their own security tokens, with plans to list them on tZero, and 2,000 other companies have asked about possibly issuing tokens as well.
Byrne further said that they decided to sell the retail business because it wasn’t growing, despite a string of profitable years.
“Being the guy who pedals along and makes $10 to $20 million a year wasn’t sustainable,” he said. “With Medici, we have maybe several multibillion-dollar properties in there.”
