On April 1, 2026, the New York Stock Exchange sent Cango a non-compliance notice.

The announcement showed that Cango’s share price had traded below $1 for 30 consecutive trading days as of March 9, putting it at risk of delisting.

The company has a six-month cure period to lift its share price, or it will be delisted.

Cango listed on the NYSE in July 2018, billed at the time as the “first auto finance to-B stock,” with Tencent, Didi, Warburg Pincus, Taikang Insurance and other institutions behind it.

Seven years later, its market value has fallen from nearly $1.9 billion on its first day of trading to about $150 million today, a fraction of what it once was.

Less than two years after this former auto finance company pivoted to Bitcoin mining, it has sent a dull warning through an industry that had only recently endured a crypto mining crash.

The “First Auto Finance Stock” Below $1

Cango used to operate as an intermediary platform for auto transactions, linking automakers and dealers on one side with banks and financial institutions on the other, helping car buyers secure loans and earning service fees.

When it went public in 2018, China’s auto consumption market was still climbing.

But later, most new energy vehicle makers shifted to direct sales, weakening the role of traditional dealers and intermediary platforms.

By the end of 2024, the total assets of China’s 24 auto finance companies stood at 855.134 billion yuan, down 11.37% year on year.

Data from Fitch Bohua showed that auto finance companies’ financing penetration rate fell from 29% in 2023 to 23% in 2024, while the penetration rate for new energy vehicle financing plunged from 20%-21% to 14%.

At the same time, commercial banks began entering auto lending directly, using their lower funding costs to seize market share.

But the real dividing line was Cango’s own choice.

In May 2025, Cango sold its auto services and auto finance operations in China to Ursalpha Digital for $352 million. As of the end of 2022, the outstanding loan balance of that business was still 25.581 billion yuan.

Even as the industry was shrinking, that business was still generating cash flow.

Yet Cango chose to sell it all and put the money into an entirely different direction: Bitcoin mining. Why mining, of all things?

The People Who Bought Cango’s Core Business Also Sold It Mining Rigs

The buyer, Ursalpha Digital, has ties to Antalpha, a Bitmain affiliate.

Hong Kong company registration records show the two share the same registered address and have overlapping executives. Before Antalpha’s 2024 restructuring, its actual controller was Micree Zhan, Bitmain’s co-founder.

EWCL, which pushed Cango’s restructuring, has directors including Andrea Dal Mas, a partner at Singapore-based Antalpha Ventures, and Yu Peng, a former chief strategy officer at Antalpha.

Some market analysts believe the people who bought Cango’s old business and the people who drove the management changes are connected behind the scenes.

After the deal closed, Cango quickly overhauled its ranks, dismissing the management team that had run auto finance and bringing in new directors with digital asset backgrounds.

The company’s direction swung 180 degrees from auto finance to Bitcoin mining. Market participants have described the move as a “backdoor listing.”

Reportedly, Cango’s NYSE listing status made it faster and cheaper for the Bitmain ecosystem to inject mining assets into an already listed company than to pursue a standalone IPO. But regardless of who was pushing the deal, the outcome is what matters.

Cango has transformed from an auto services platform into a Bitcoin mining company, with computing power now at 50 EH/s, ranking second globally.

Has Cango made the mining path work?

32 EH/s of Computing Power, 2,945 Bitcoins. Then What?

After its pivot, Cango deployed 32 EH/s of computing power, later expanding to 50 EH/s, and adopted a “mining plus holding coins” strategy.

But its timing was not ideal.

The industry has moved beyond the stage where buying a few mining rigs could make money. It is now a high-cost competition, with smaller miners exiting and leading players competing on power costs, compliance licenses and economies of scale.

Cango has no mining rig technology of its own; it buys machines from Bitmain. It also lacks clean energy supply and mining operations experience, meaning it has to build mining farms from scratch.

At the same time, leading miners have been pivoting toward AI, looking for a second monetization path beyond crypto mining.

In July 2025, CoreWeave announced plans to acquire Core Scientific for about $9 billion.

Around the same time, IREN signed a five-year, $9.7 billion GPU cloud computing agreement with Microsoft.

Cango is different from other miners. It had no accumulated computing power to start with and forced its way in from zero, leaving it with less confidence than peers when it comes to pivoting to AI.

On February 9, 2026, Cango announced the sale of 4,451 bitcoins, generating net proceeds of about $305 million, to repay Bitcoin-backed loans and reduce leverage.

In its statement, Cango described the move as “reducing leverage and adjusting the balance sheet.”

But some market analysts believe the sale signals cash flow pressure, leaving Cango stuck between pressing on with mining and pulling back.

Six-Month Countdown

Back to the NYSE letter at the start.

Cango received the non-compliance notice on March 10, 2026.

Cango’s position now is this: its China auto business was sold in May 2025, it sold 4,451 bitcoins in February 2026, about 70% of its holdings at the time, its share price has remained below $1, and it faces delisting if it cannot recover within the six-month cure period.

Cango is not the only Chinese ADR in this position.

Canaan also received a Nasdaq delisting warning in January 2026, again because its share price had stayed below $1 for 30 consecutive days.

What makes Cango notable is that it received $352 million from selling its auto business and another $305 million from selling Bitcoin, for a combined total of more than $650 million.

But as of April 2026, the company’s market value was about $152 million.

Public filings have not yet provided a full account of where most of that money went.

Real transformation is not blind diversification. It is iteration and upgrading within a field a company understands.

Cango’s problem may not be that it chose the wrong track, but that it never figured out what it wanted to become.