Cody McGrath 
In the past few months, SPAC deals have been getting canceled because the market has been bad.
Two people with knowledge of the situation say that the CEO of crypto miner PrimeBlock has left the company after it canceled a merger with 10X Capital Venture Acquisition Corp. II (VCXA) that would have made it a public company.
According to his LinkedIn profile, Gaurav Budhrani, who used to be the CEO but is no longer, worked at PrimeBlock for about a year. He had worked for more than a decade at Goldman Sachs (GS), most recently as a vice president who helped run crypto investment banking, before joining the company.
Neither the company nor Budhrani could say anything about the move.
Not much is known about why he left or where he is going. The mining company ended its merger with 10X Capital Venture Acquisition, a special purpose acquisition company, earlier this month (SPAC). In April, the deal was made public.
PrimeBlock didn’t say why the merger was no longer going to happen. But the crypto space as a whole has been under pressure because prices have been going down. This has hurt mining, for example by making it harder to make money. Gryphon Digital Mining, another miner, recently ended a deal to be bought out by a SPAC. One of the main reasons was that the market had changed.
In the past few years, SPAC deals were a common way for crypto companies to get on public stock markets. However, their appeal has waned since the downturn in digital asset markets.