If anyone made money from crypto last week, it was DigitalX (ASX:DCC) director Toby Hicks.

Last week the cryptocurrency and blockchain consultancy said Mr Hicks converted 150,000 options into shares at 8c each.

Although the conversion took place as DigitalX was following markets and cryptocurrencies into a trough of despair, the shares were still trading on market at 24.5c.

While bitcoin fell to around $US6000 last week — two-thirds off its December high — Mr Hicks added the new shares to his 1.3 million share holding for a total paper value of $333,500 at the Friday closing price of 23c.

Mr Hicks wasn’t the only crypto director making hay while the sun shone.

Two directors of blockchain wannabe First Growth Funds (ASX:FGF) thought exercised 2c options expiring this month.

Chairman Geoff Barnes used his options to buy just over 4 million shares for $81,000 — then promptly sold all of them on-market over the course of the week for a cool $94,000. That’s an average of 2.3c a share.

His boardroom colleague Michael Clarke — not the cricketer — spent his $115,000 of options on 5.8 million shares.

Mr Clarke has so far held on to his pile.

First Growth Funds bans directors from trading for two weeks before quarterly reports come out (the December report arrived on January 31). The directors did not exercise in time to make money off the heady highs seen in early January.

Spitfire Materials (ASX:SPI) director Neil Biddle bought $200,000 of shares last week, the largest of five packages he’s bought on-market since the start of December.

All up he’s spent $317,470 on 3 million shares — he now owns 6 per cent of the company.

Mr Biddle came with Admiral Gold, a company Spitfire bought in March last year.

“I wasn’t able to participate in either of previous two placements because of the timing and we didn’t have any additional placement capacity — both were heavily oversubscribed — so I decided to buy online instead of seek shareholder approval to participate in the placement,” Mr Biddle told Stockhead.

“I always wanted to have about 20 million shares… because my associates in the company have around that number… and I want to be supportive of the company.”

Mr Biddle now owns 12.5 million shares, so he’s still got some way to go before he hits his target.

Spitfire merged with Aphrodite Gold in December and started drilling at is Aphrodite gold project last week. The project has a JORC compliant resource of 1.3 million oz of gold.

Neometals (ASX:NMT) director David Reed pocketed more than $400,000 after selling 1 million shares on-market in late January at an average price of around 41c per share.

“It was a million shares. I’ve got 60 million so it’s nothing in terms of my overall holding, I just needed some working capital,” Mr Reed told Stockhead.

Chinese tech park builder Lionhub (ASX:LHB) is in a spot of financing trouble.

They had one of their projects in Anhui Province cancelled unexpectedly in January and in the last quarter didn’t even spend (or make) anything on development — just $240,000 on staff and admin.

But chairman CK Kho has stepped up to provide $390,000 of convertible notes to Lionhub even as the tech park edifice appears to be crumbling.

One of Mr Kho’s companies has already provided convertible note funding of $14.8 million and is on the hook for another $260,000 in the near future.

As it stands Mr Kho owns 64 per cent of the company via three companies, not including 15 million in ambitiously priced options (they are worth 22c — the company closed on Friday at 7c).

Last week Cfoam (ASX:CFO) director Toby Chandler loaded up on $104,000 of stock by buying on market.

He now own 5.8 million shares or about 6 per cent of the company.

Mr Chandler is an ex-managing director of division of Morgan Stanley and HSBC and a vice president of Citigroup, so he’s used to handling a bit more money than a mere hundred grand.

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