On February 17, 2022, CoinDesk issued an article entitled, “Questions Swirl Around NuMiner’s ‘Best in Class’ BitcoinMining Rig.” The article reported that “Sphere 3D (ANY), a Toronto-based data management company, announced it was acquiring 60,000 mining rigs for about $1.7 billion from NuMiner Global, a New York-based company that appears to have popped outof thin air. A search on the New York state company registry yielded zero results for “NuMiner.” The company claims to be affiliated with NuMiner Technologies Ltd., for which practically no information is publicly available.” Several people were skeptical of the deal, the report citing, “Fred Thiel, CEO of one of the biggest publicly traded miners, Marathon Digital, also tweeted that he was skeptical of NuMiner’s claims and voiced concern about the cooling technology, or lack thereof.” Then, on March 3, 2022, Culper Research issued a report viewing Sphere 3D as a stock promotion. Regarding the deal with NuMiner, the report stated, “The deal is meant to be structured with $29 million in cash, roughly $400 million in ANY-equivalent shares, $1.1 billion in vendor financing (at an abusive rate of 9% interest and 18% of all bitcoins mined), and $185 million in milestone payments. We think this deal is totally contrived and will never happen.”

On this news, Sphere 3D’s stock price fell $0.28, or 12.23%, to close at $2.01 per share on March 3, 2022.