Comstock Inc.

Good morning, and thank you for joining Comstock Inc's full year 2025 results and business outlook. I'm Zach Spencer, Director of External Relations. Today is Tuesday, March 24, 2026. We are streaming live, and this session is being recorded. A recording will be posted shortly after we adjourn in the investor relations section of our website. Today, we filed our Form 10-K for the year ended December 31st, 2025, and issued a press release summarizing year end results. Both documents are available on our website. As a reminder, Comstock is listed on NYSE American with the ticker LODE, L-O-D-E. Joining me today are Corrado De Gasparis, Comstock's Chief Executive Officer, and Judd Merrill, Compsoc's Chief Financial Officer. After their prepared remarks, we will take questions. We received more than 35 questions in advance of the call. If you have additional questions during the call, please use the Zoom Q&A window and we will address as many as time allows. Today's discussion will include forward-looking statements. Actual results may differ materially due to risks and uncertainties detailed in our SEC filings. Full risk disclosures can be found in our filings on the Investor Relations page and on the SEC website. With that, it is my pleasure to introduce our Chief Financial Officer, Jud Merrill. Jud, you may begin.

Thanks, Zach, and thanks for everyone being on this call. I have a few remarks, and then we'll turn it over to Corrado. But I just want to look at the company dashboard here and just announce, you know, from a CFO's perspective, 2025 was really a transformational year for Comstock. You know, we really doubled our asset base. We strengthened and simplified our balance sheet. We eliminated legacy debt and other legacy obligations, and we fully positioned the company for its next phase of growth. And our balance sheet really is as strong as it has been, and it's positioned to be even stronger as we monetize non-core assets, and it's giving us kind of a speed advantage on our recycling competitors. Our capital structure is also very clean, and our shareholder base continues to strengthen. We continue our targeting and our outreach for what is still relatively a less-known story, you know, less-known metal story, less-known technology. financial execution, and monetization priorities. And at the same time, we're beginning to see the early results of that investment, particularly in metals. Our commercialization efforts are moving us into a second, more sophisticated phase. Here are some specifics that I'll bring up. Cash and cash equivalents stood at approximately $56 million at March 20, 2026. And our common shares outstanding are 74 million shares at March 20th, 2026. And this is reflecting the recent offering, which ended up being really outstanding, if not transformational. You know, it's a change in our shareholder base with significant, you know, Hood River, Gracia, Matt Capital. Those are just three that represent the top, some of the top investors that we have and the engagement with them. And support has been amazing, including what we just recently announced, enhancements to our board. And really, all this is critical, part of our foundation for building a global, multi-billion potential company and a testament to the capabilities that we have positioned. We did complete that second oversubscribed equity offering earlier this year, which brought in about $57.5 million in gross proceeds, which was approximately $53 million net of offerings expenses. And again, this was really driven by the demand from leading institutional investors. And what it does is it removes the largest single risk to the spend needed to capture the solar market. These funds allow us to deploy our first industry-scale metals recycling facility without distraction, secure and permit and fund facility number two, which positions us to corner the entire Southwest market right here from Nevada. We announce and build additional permitted storage sites like California, Ohio, Texas, and others, accelerate our refining solution and capability, including strategic partners, and really position us for the best, fastest monetization of SSOF and our other non-core assets. You know, when we look back and we started 2025, it was with huge developed potential, but really no capital resources and many, many assets. counterparty obligations that we required, you know, to be able to develop our platforms. We have effectively eliminated those obligations from our balance sheet. We did have revenues to construct metals had revenues for 2025. It was approximately 1.4 million compared to 2024, which was about 4.4 million. In addition to the reported revenue, we did generate additional billings, approximately $2.2 million in 2025. We called it deferred revenue, and that's associated with our early operations. So about $3.5 million for all of 2025, just as we guided to. It's also important to note that our 2025 results included several non-recurring items associated with the transformation of our balance sheet. These costs include debt conversion and extinguishments, as well as non-cash impacts from changes in the fair value of derivative instruments, which are all now behind us. So last year was a deliberate effort to simplify our capital structure and eliminate legacy obligations. And these actions, we believe, significantly strengthen the company going forward. And from a liquidity standpoint, you know, we are in a strong position. We believe our current cash combined with expected revenues from metals recycling later this year and priority asset sales and monetization, all that keeps us strong and in a leading position, you know, as we execute on the metals plan. And lastly, we are lining up and diligently – and positioning more traditional non-dilutive sources, which includes grants and industrial bonds, which we will qualify for and will have access to once our first facility is up and running this year. So those are my remarks. I'll turn it over now to Corrado to dive deeper into our metals progress and monetization.

Thanks, Judd. Thanks, everyone, for being here. We probably have a record attendance for this call, so I'm really excited about the update. Let me start with the announcement that we made just after the market closed today, which for us is incredibly exciting and encouraging. As Judd mentioned, at the end of January, we had a robustly oversubscribed offering, We had tremendous quality of institutional investors. He named a few, Hood River, Mac Capital, Gradia. I mean, the list continues on, you know, down to, you know, a solid 25, you know, 30 institutions that joined. What was even more encouraging was, you know, Steve Pei at Gradia, you know, Craig and Mike Kaufman, the interest that was taken in the company was very, very high, including site visits, including reviews and tours of all of our assets, and quite frankly, extremely constructive engagement about support and help for how do we position this company to be a truly global company. truly dominant metal recycling company. I think that reflects a view that our technology is differentiated. I think it reflects a view that we have a really, really early adopter head start. I think it reflects a view that we did make good progress with this balance sheet. You know, if you go back to the shareholder letter from last January, it was a tough letter, but the message was, you know, we need to clean things up, we need to get recapitalized, and we need to fund these growth businesses. So if people go back and look at that letter, we could say, wow, we made huge progress. But now we have that posture. So the hard work is now the execution. And how do you How do you take a platform that's regional? Sure, half of the end-of-life market is in the southwest region. You know, the United States, absolutely, Nevada and these Nevada permits and platform positions us to capture it. But it's much bigger than that. You know, the United States has over, you know, a billion three panels deployed. They're coming into life rapidly. And that's only one-eighth of the world. You know, the world has just as big of a dilemma, you know, 8X relative to the U.S. So the conversation was around... you know, expanding governance, you know, expanding, you know, international business competency, accessing capital markets competency. So we're thrilled to announce, you know, the addition of three new independent directors. You know, Donald Colvin, who has extensive and, frankly, complex, you know, financial management background, but a very, very strong solar industry background. experience being the chair and a board member of a public solar manufacturer of global footprint, you know, and just the global public company governance posture, you know, from chairing boards to chairing audit committees. And then Steve Pei, as I mentioned, with extensive, I mean, quite remarkable capital markets background, entrepreneurial. What was intriguing was the notion of investing in smaller companies. you know, early-stage companies and watching them become national or international successes and watching those values, you know, increase dramatically. And then Bob Spence, who has an exceptional background in refining, in recycling, and electrification recycling to boot, including, you know, international operations, you know, 30 plus international sites in public and international governance experience, you know, both from audit, from acquisition, you know, from oversight. You know, we really could have spent a couple of years, you know, working on the searching and recruiting and aligning and onboarding of our board, we really jump-started that. So I think, you know, from a perspective of really, really strong platform that can really handle all of the things that are coming, you know, sweeping across, you know, the U.S., we've got a really good plan for that. But this won't stop there. You know, this market is just extraordinary. So we're welcoming, you know, of our expanded board. And I guess the final takeaway is, You know, when two of your top four investors, you know, are represented on your board, that screams a lot. You know, we couldn't be more thankful to Steve Paye at Gradia, Michael Kaufman at MAK, Craig and the rest of the team that just, you know, worked so, so diligently to make all this happen for us. We thank you very, very much. And for 2026, that team, that governance structure, that capital base is aligned, right? We're aligned on these objectives, which is very, very much first and foremost to monetize our non-core legacy mining assets. We've gone from a few years ago talking to less than credible people to talking to marginally capable people to now being engaged with very, very serious mining counterparties that absolutely like what we have here, what we've maintained here, which is a great mining district, great resources. If there's any question about this decision, let me put everybody's mind at rest. You know, every dollar. you know, that we take from the mining assets and put into the recycling assets multiplies exponentially. And let's be clear. If we were going to mine these assets, it would take 30, 40, maybe $50 million of capital to put a mine into production. That's with an existing resource and a permitted platform. There would still be a lot to do. So in that context, it's money that doesn't go to solar recycling. That's a non-starter for us. It never was a starter for us, frankly. But every dollar that we can then pull out of that non-productive asset and put into the recycling business, I think a few of you heard me say, our mining assets, which we believe have good value and are very attractive, you know, have about 2.5 million ounces of silver in situ just in the Dayton resource alone. And, yeah, that would take six or seven years to mine, you know, once the mine got up and running. Two of our facilities in Nevada, which we now know where they're going to be and they're up and getting up and running, would produce that much silver annually. That's just two, not seven. So you can see the difference in throughput and cash generation from what you could call two different silver mines. We also want to monetize our non-core legacy real estate. I'm going to give you more transparency on that today simply because we finally came to sufficient progress both with Sierra Springs' board and company and with third parties. that are very, very interested in these assets. The value is higher. The ownership is higher. So the amount that we're going to monetize here hopefully will be pleasantly higher than anyone might have been expecting. So we're going to do both of those things. Green Lion, we also want to monetize. It's less within our control. The company is making extraordinary progress, truly exceeded my expectations in terms of their journey to profitability. They have an operating facility in Oklahoma. We own 13% of the company. And they've announced that they're going to move into a public listing in Australia sometime later this year. So once GreenLine is successful, in its endeavor to becoming a public company, then we'll have a much easier and clearer exit strategy for that investment. We've worked very, very hard on all these monetization items. This is the crux of the corporate objectives. You know, we've had to put more capital into Sierra Springs, but at great gain. That wasn't clear before because the deals weren't structured and they weren't announced. but they are now structured and we've already taken effectively what was just under 17 percent of sierra springs to well over 36 37 percent that number could end up easily at well over 50 percent for something that we think has hundreds of millions of dollars of value we don't think that Based on conjecture, there is monster engagement in northern Nevada right now because if you're able to secure sufficient power to the land, it's it's an immediate demand if you're not able to secure sufficient power to land there's no interest okay so we're we're we're on the verge of something very meaningful here i think 2026 credibly now we'll see monetization of mining monetization of of non-core real estate and frankly timing couldn't be better. You know, so we're really all about supporting the exponential growth of the metals business, not just for national dominance, really for setting the global standard, you know, in this recycling business. We crushed it in 25, and when I say we, I mean the metals team. Fortunato, Paul, Kayla, I mean, they got the permits, first of its kind. Leo was absolutely instrumental in supporting us, one of our board members, in navigating through that regulatory regime. We didn't only get first-of-its-kind permits. We were held to what we originally thought was a ridiculously high standard. But now, with hindsight, it looks like it will be very difficult. for any existing competitor that we know of to even set foot in Nevada and even get permits, you know, within two years. So to the extent Nevada sits on 50% of the end-of-life market, certainly between now and 2030, now and 2035, Wow, we're literally on the beachhead of a battle that doesn't see any competitors anywhere near what we've positioned here. We don't want to stop in the southwest region because that's only half the market. We want to get to the rest of the U.S., and that will come, as Judd said, with less resistance and much more rapidly. We also have designed the engineered process – for recovering the metals from our tailings. I'll give you a little bit more color on that. But we did that with leveraging a handful of partners between universities and companies that have existing assets and existing infrastructure that allows us to take Fortunato's engineered design and very efficiently test up to a demo, which we hope to have here by the end of this year. So all that, you know, all that work in 2025 really positioned us, you know, to move fast, right? So what do we want to do? We want to get this facility up and running. Substantially all of the equipment has arrived. The ovens are arriving now, and the ovens literally represent, I just looked at the final truck schedules, represents 20 full, you know, 18 wheelers. So you start to get a sense of the magnitude of you know, of this process and these systems. Some of you have come and visited, you know, and I'll show some pictures of some of the equipment as it's getting assembled here. But it's all coming in. You know, we're on schedule. It wouldn't be right to say that, you know, three or four weeks of slippage hasn't occurred, but that was already buffered in our schedule. So commissioning in Q1, operating in Q2 holds. We're very happy about that. uh bringing the thing online and and yet another thing that's happening is that um we're starting to see um it's almost like if you're in the fourth quarter of a football game you're starting to see some of our competition you know um you know take a knee or or move aside really that's an analogy to say that um our our customers you know the the true utility scale companies um you know that are now very seriously engaged in a very big end of life problem uh they're they're they're almost only you know they're certainly not talking to the two or three people that um we we previously talked about as showing up most often so there's a really good trend there something even more strategic is happening some of these institutions um are either very very large or part of even larger organizations and they've engaged us for more strategic things. You've heard me talk about co-locating, you know, on one of the sites or venturing into a third or fourth site. This all ties to getting market share, right? So we want to dominate the market share. We're very happy with how those underlying, you know, conversations are going. And we've identified the second site. We're pinning it down, final stages. The permits actually have already been submitted, you know, so we're excited about it. It will be in Clark County. It will be just outside of Las Vegas, you know, exactly where we wanted to position the second site, you know, for this southwest region. And California's permitted up and running. Ohio's coming up in line. Those right now are primarily either storage and or transition activities, prep activities, logistics activities. There's no processing. There's no processing that we're planning at all for California, but certainly Ohio would evolve into that. And we're looking as well at a specific site in Texas. So that side of things are moving very, very quickly. And we're continuing, you know, all of those efforts. 26 is going to be You know, as foundational as 25 was, 26 is going to show the light. You know, 26 is going to show the large industrial system running. It's going to show it turning profitable. It's going to show volumes increasing. And you're going to see revenue go from, you know, from $100,000 a month to $200,000 a month to $1 million a month to $2 million a month. That's our profile for 2026. And we don't see any reason why that isn't going to come together just like that. So we don't need to talk that much about, you know, silver demand. Every one of you that I've talked to seems to understand the supply and demand equation for silver and is very bullish on it. You know, even with some pullback, we're sitting at $70 silver, which is above anything that we've modeled, you know, in our process. As I mentioned previously, even at $60 silver, you know, our offtake revenue isn't $125 a ton. It's $375 a ton. You know, so we already have an enhanced profile, you know, given the current realities. You see the inside of 600 Lake in this picture. That was seven months ago. You know, now when you look at the inside of 600 Lake, you know, it's assembling equipment. That shine that you see on the floor there is an epoxy that we had to lay down that outlines perfectly the footprint, you know, of the large system. You can't see the ends of the footprint. It's extremely large, 80, 90, 100 feet. you know, of processing, fully integrated, fully automated. We are testing the robotic arms. We are assembling the front end crushers. We are pulling together, you know, all of the equipment. And we're heavily finalizing the grading and the preparation. Fencing is going to go up next week for the storage. And it just gives you some context here. If you're looking at this picture, hopefully that building there in the background, is where our demo facility, you know, sits, okay? So, you know, we're talking about major – I kept saying, like, this enormous expansion or massive expansion for storage. You're starting to get a sense of it. I was annoyed earlier one of our investors posted four beautiful pictures. They must have been circling the site or something. And I criticized my team and said, these guys are getting better pictures than I'm getting. So if you're on Twitter or X, you can see some even more elaborate pictures of this development. It's happening, you know, real time. And the Holy Grail, the Holy Grail. you know, is not, you know, getting $125 a ton for tailings or $375 a ton for tailings. Those numbers reflect us capturing 50% or 60% of the silver value and leaving the silicon metal and leaving the copper, you know, and depending on the types of panel, leaving the gallium or the tellurium or the iridium behind. You know, what we've applied it for a grant on and what we've already started the development work on is being able to capture the substantial majority, we'd love to say substantially all of the value from those critical metal recoveries, you know, from the tailings. So we've been ridiculously busy site preparing. We've been ridiculously busy receiving equipment. We've been busy expanding the market. And that would be satisfactory. But it's been exceptional that the team has made and forced the capacity in to design this refining solution. When we say we feel like we're a couple of years ahead in recycling, we're humble about that. We're not arrogant about it. We want to expand it. We want to assume we're one day ahead. We don't want to assume we're two years ahead. But we're talking about recycling. We're not talking about refining. We don't see anybody even talking about these types of refining solutions. And the reason this is so important, and I think the reason our capital base is so interested, is 3.5 million panels last year would load one of our production lines. In four years, that number is going to be 33 million. You know, we would need 10 production lines, you know, to do that. And I'm not sure if people appreciate it. One production line, that $13 million of one production line can do 3.3 million panels a year. But that facility that you just saw, It was permitted for two and a half production lines, really three production lines, with the capacity of doing 250,000. So if this southwest region does anything close to what we think it's going to do, doubling the capacity, two and a half X-ing the capacity of that facility will have literally zero permitting lead time. zero permitting lead time. It's already permitted. What it will require, of course, is equipment ordering lead time, which we can let the market tell us when to trigger that. And this is the old map that most of you have seen. But for any of you that haven't, here's Arizona, Nevada, California. These are the 1.3 billion, 1.4 billion panels that are deployed in the U.S. The fatter the circle, the older the panel. That's why these two facilities in Nevada are so critical and why we're going after this half of the market, you know, so diligently, so vigorously. But at an enhanced metal value, you know, you're not talking about, you know, $55 or $60 million of cash flow from one facility running full. You're talking about $75 to $80 million, you know, for one facility running full. And that doesn't consider the enhancement that would come with a refining solution. Now, let me just spend a little bit more time on this, you know, monetization of non-core assets. Some of you may have seen previously a higher NPV that we calculated for our mining assets. That number was correct. It stays correct. But as I said earlier, these assets take some capital to put into production. As I said earlier, we're engaged with some very, very serious counterparties. They have capital. That's, I guess, the litmus test for me on are they serious. They have capital. They have capital to deploy. And we're talking about a range of value. of, you know, let's say 50 or 60 million. We're not necessarily talking about all cash up front, but we are talking about full monetization. What we would like to do is sell it for all cash, or we'll sell it for cash with some very, you know, relevant or meaningful milestones. You know, any dollar that we pull out of nonproductive assets to put in our solar business, we believe is a home run. With the Sierra Springs, we have been allocating capital to that. You'll see that it increased. But we have agreement now to convert that, you know, into ownership at extraordinary values. And I'm going to talk about that a little bit more. I'm going to give you a little bit more color. But I've been busy with this because... It's super active. Nevada went through a monstrous hyperscale data center expansion. It's listed right now as fifth or sixth in the U.S. with projects under construction, with 29 projects under construction. And it's every big name. We have an industrial park very, very close to us, not the Tahoe Reno Industrial Park. Everybody knows about that. Another one that's very close to us in Silver Springs. that is out soliciting industrial lands for this purpose, and they secured access to power other than the grid. The grid's tapped out. The grid's not available until God knows when. So we secured similarly access to that power. It required some small financial commitment initially, you know, a small bond, a million, million and a half dollars of posting, which was easy, but it opened up the whole world for us. You know, now we've got, I'll be very frank, like I'm behind, you know, in being responsive to them. And if that's annoying to you, it should be because it's annoying to me. But the dollars that we're talking about are not, $45 million or $50 million, like we talked about before. It's a couple hundred million. And that doesn't include our properties that we own 100% and directly. So, as you can see, it's in everybody's interest for us to prioritize and monetize these assets. The mining assets are You know, last year we acquired the Haywood Quarry. You see it right here, you know, this Haywood target on the map. We also sold some of the northern properties, which are now taken off of this map. But in selling those northern properties, you know, we also got these green, you know, there's about 240 acres that we added that fully support and surround both the mining of the Dayton asset and the processing for the Dayton asset. We got those 230 acres at no additional consideration. So between the Haywood property, which is ideal for processing data, and those other properties which fully support the mining and the processing of data, we've made this much more saleable, much more monetizable. You know, and as I said earlier, we're fully engaged now. You know, when we first announced that Haywood purchased, some people were like, I thought we weren't interested in mining. I thought we were trying to monetize the mining. And I just want to make it clear that's exactly, you know, what those moves were designed to position us for. And these properties, they're flat. They're expansive, and they're very, very attractive to real miners, you know. So we're really having productive conversations. Judd's getting very, very close, and I really appreciate that help and that support. Now, just more transparency on Sierra Springs because there's approval on the Sierra Springs side, right? There is approval for Comstock to take the lead, for Comstock to drive this thing to the finish line, for Comstock to enable this bigger monetization. And, of course, Comstock needs to benefit dramatically, you know, from that capacity. Where we are is we're sitting in the largest opportunity zone, if not the largest one of, by far, the largest opportunity zones in the United States. It's not only an expansive amount of land sitting right by Lake Tahoe. The fact that it's 10 miles from the California border, and maybe more importantly, one truck day away from seven different states and 75 million people is one of the biggest reasons that that all of these data centers and all of these manufacturing companies are locating here the other reason is that it's the environmental climate is almost perfect for optimal cooling of these data centers but it's even more than that it's literally nevada Northern Nevada is literally one of the safest places in the country when it comes to the hazard map or the disaster avoidance map. You know, we don't have hurricanes. We don't have hailstorms, we don't have all of these impediments. And so it's not coincidence that Google, Apple, Microsoft, Switch, Tract, you know, and at least two dozen more are locating here, you know, for mega hyperscaling. And for us, it was when USA Parkway was built, you know, from a nonexistent road to a dirt road to a four-lane superhighway connecting Reno right down into Silver Springs where, you know, my better lucky than good, you know, comment keeps coming out. You know, we were sitting right there, you know, ready to receive that ball. You know, it's still somewhat pioneering, you know, Two years ago, you know, everything was happening in the Tahoe Reno Industrial Center. Everything was happening up in Fernley. And people kept saying, well, what about Silver Springs? What about Silver Springs? Well, you know, if you look at the map this way, you see this connecting highway. Tesla's gigafactor is really what put us on the map. But the data centers are really what exploded the map. It comes right down to our properties. You see the Comstock load here just, you know, 30 minutes down the road, Highway 50, and then you see the congregation of this asset here. I haven't spoken about this much because we spend – You know, Fortunato and the team spent 110% of their time on Comstock metals. You know, I like to think I spend 50% of my time supporting Comstock metals. I want that to be 90% of my time. You know, Judd's handling the monetization of the mining assets. I'm handling the monetization of Sierra Springs. And I think it's also important to say, I've never took a penny from Silver Springs. I've never gotten any compensation from Sierra Springs. I only own stock there because I bought it with my own money, and I've agreed to rectify that. Like, we are going to align my interest only and solely with load. There is no even debate or discussion about it. I've already committed to it, right? What you're going to see with hopefully some foresight, but certainly soon with hindsight, is that load investors own something very, very valuable here. As exciting as monetizing something that's worth a couple hundred million potentially would be, um what what that what can be done with that money in solar recycling is a whole nother is a whole nother level of excitement you can read up all the articles about what's happening in northern nevada it's very easy to see them but what what's really important to see is that when i talk about these values i'm not pulling them out of the air when we first started this thing We were getting these properties for dirt. I mean, literally dirt cheap with almost like water rates coming for free. But, you know, industrial park was at $2 to $3, $4 a square foot. Then it was $4 to $5 a square foot. Then it was $6 to $8 a square foot. Then Microsoft lands and starts, you know, pushing $10 a square foot. Those are incredible numbers. If those numbers, if we're even close to those types of numbers, my numbers will be understated. So when Tract's CEO came out and said, that they're going to invest $100 billion in the next 10 years in northern Nevada. And that means from the Peru shelf right up here by Switch to right across the street from our properties in Silver Springs. There's three major developments that they're breaking ground on right now. If you don't understand it or if you'd like to see it, it'll only take you 20 minutes from Reno to see Monster trapped there. uh platforms being being built and positioned um so that only enhances the value like of everything in this area and if you look at this map you know um You know, the airport being the blue center. Everything else in color around us, you know, is part of our portfolio that I want to monetize for us, except the top of number 11 here. That's where Microsoft came in. And then right alongside of it, Tract is coming in. So you go from literally being out in the middle of nowhere on, you know, the loneliest highway in America to, to USA Parkway plugging into us to track the Microsoft coming in across the street. I mean, it's extraordinarily exciting, but none of it would mean anything. if the Great Basin Natural Gas Transmission Company didn't show up four months ago and say, we're going to spend a couple billion dollars and we're going to expand gas into this area, into Fernley, into Tri-Center, literally right into Silver Springs. If they didn't come out and say that, we'd still be talking about, you know, why the hell are we going to, why can't we sell these properties? But with that power commitment, the game has changed dramatically. And we're going to see something really exciting happen. So took a little bit longer than I was expecting. I apologize. But Zach, please, let's just jump into q&a.