Z Squared, a firm that specializes in mining dogecoin (DOGE), the dog-themed memecoin that was propelled to mainstream recognition by Elon Musk in 2021, is merging with biopharmaceutical company Coeptis (COEP).

The merger will enable the resulting company to keep DOGE mining operations going, while Coeptis’ pharmaceutical business will be spun out and operated separately. As a result, the firm will become one of the largest publicly-traded companies with a primary focus mining dogecoin and other cryptocurrencies like litecoin (LTC).

“Going public provides us with broader access to capital markets to fuel the growth of our mining operations and pursue additional strategic opportunities we believe will be accretive to shareholders,” Z Squared CEO David Halabu told CoinDesk in an email.

The transaction is expected to close in the third quarter of 2025. The combined entity will have 9,000 U.S.-based DOGE mining machines. The company declined to share revenue figures with CoinDesk.

COEP is down 37.5% on the day.

Spun out from Bitcoin (BTC) in 2013, Dogecoin follows a similar Proof-of-Work consensus mechanism, meaning that miners compete to solve an algorithmic problem in order to produce the next block on the blockchain; whoever solves it first is awarded coins for their efforts.

At $27 billion in market capitalization, DOGE is currently the eighth largest cryptocurrency, just ahead of Cardano’s ADA and Tron’s TRX.

With the bitcoin mining industry becoming extremely competitive in the last few years, mining operations are seeking new avenues for revenue — by dedicating resources for AI purposes, for example, or mining other cryptocurrencies like dogecoin and litecoin. Bitcoin mining firm BIT Mining (BTCM), for example, announced in December that it had made three times more money mining DOGE and LTC than BTC since it expanded into those cryptocurrencies.

Z Squared isn't the first crypto miner to go public using this strategy. Other entities such as Core Scientific (CORZ) and TeraWulf (TERA) employed a similar playbook in 2022.

UPDATE (April 25, 18:40 UTC): The article was updated with extra context about bitcoin miners going public through mergers.

UPDATE (April 25, 19:40 UTC): The article was updated with information about COEP stock performance.