iPower is no longer being priced as a mid-sized Amazon catalog seller and is instead being priced as a residual claim on a shrinking marketplace business that has begun to finance itself with convertible notes and a pledged digital-asset account. Lawrence Tan's company still ships fans, pet goods, grow lights, and house-brand housewares through Amazon and a handful of other marketplaces, but the economic center of gravity has moved from SKU velocity to capital structure. The March quarter showed how far that migration has already gone. Product sales collapsed as management paused vendors and inventory during a shift toward United States sourcing, then the same quarter booked a full goodwill write-off and an unrealized mark on bitcoin and ether. Equity value at a mid-September quoted close near $1.82 is only about $1.7 million. That is less than unrestricted cash plus receivables net of payables, and it is also less than the pledged BitGo account that now sits next to operating cash. The market is not confused about the catalog. The market is assigning almost no going-concern value to the retail franchise and almost no scarcity value to the treasury experiment.
The event that reset the file was the December convertible-note close and the Digital Asset Treasury program that came with it. An institutional buyer funded the first slice of a facility sized up to $30 million, and iPower used a large piece of that cash to buy bitcoin and ether into a controlled account rather than to restock the Amazon pipeline. Subsequent optional closings added more note principal, more conversion, and more collateral that the lender, not the common holder, controls. In February the company sold Global Product Marketing, the subsidiary that had been a cost center inside the old fulfillment stack, for a $2.3 million promissory note rather than for cash. That sale cleaned the operating-expense line and replaced a living subsidiary with a long-dated receivable. Together the note facility and the subsidiary sale changed what a holder actually owns. The holder no longer owns a leveraged claim on a sixty-million-dollar Amazon seller. The holder owns a thin residual on a much smaller seller, plus a treasury book that is pledged against the same notes that keep creating new shares.
The tension is that cost cuts and a warehouse sublease have made the smaller company look almost solvent on a non-cash basis while the cash that can actually pay vendors and Nasdaq fees keeps shrinking. Unrestricted cash at March 31 was only $0.71 million. Restricted cash at BitGo was $2.2 million, and digital assets were another $1.7 million, both economically spoken for by the note documents. Gross margin in the March quarter compressed to 21.6% after sitting in the low forties for a year, which is the first clean sign that the sourcing reset is not just a volume pause. Three reverse splits in ten months kept the listing alive and told every remaining holder how the board intends to handle a bid-price problem. A $2 million repurchase authorization announced after the Global Product Marketing sale sits next to that stack as a confidence signal the cash account cannot fund in size.
What decides the file from here is not another branding slide. It is whether Amazon product volume stabilizes now that the vendor pause has run its course, whether further draws on the note facility keep converting into common at distressed prices, and whether the pledged treasury is treated as working capital or as lender collateral. Fiscal 2026 fourth-quarter results are the first print that can show a post-reset run rate rather than another transition quarter. Until that print lands, the mid-September capitalization is consistent with an option on survival, not with a franchise multiple on last year's sales.