Argo Blockchain plc

Good afternoon and welcome to the Argo Blockchain PLC Q1 update. Throughout this recorded meeting, investors will be in listen-only mode. Questions are encouraged and can be submitted at any time by the Q&A tab situated on the right-hand corner of your screen. Simply type your questions and press send. The company may not be in a position to answer every question received during the meeting itself. However, the company can review all questions submitted today and publish responses where it's appropriate to do so. Before we begin, we'd like to submit the following poll. I'd now like to hand over to Markela Zarifi, Argo's Financial Communications Representative. Good afternoon.

Thank you, Paul. Before we begin, I'd like to remind everyone that today's presentation and remarks may contain forward-looking statements. Please see our Form 20F filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission for our full risk disclosures. With us today for our discussion of Q1 2024 results are Thomas Chipas, Argos Chief Executive Officer, and Jim McCallum, Argos Chief Financial Officer. And now I'll turn it over to Thomas for some introductory remarks.

Thank you, Markella, and thank you to everyone for joining us today. We recently shared our 2023 full year results, and I'm excited to update you on our progress since then for this quarter. As everyone's aware, the fourth Bitcoin halving occurred just over a month ago, and Argo exited halving with a stronger balance sheet and leaner operations. As seen here, financial discipline, including the leveraging, operational excellence, and certainly growth and strategic partnerships are our three priorities, and they guide us on a daily basis for the sustainable future of Argo. By concentrating on these goals, we're optimistic about the ongoing growth and development opportunities for Argo, and we have a clear objective of delivering shareholder value. So I'm certainly excited to continue with the great work the team is doing and tell you more about what we've been up to. A few comments first on the macro front. With the 2024 halving complete, the block subsidy that miners collect now stands at three and an eighth Bitcoin down from six and a quarter. The launch of spot ETFs for Bitcoin were certainly big drivers of price from $40,000 to $75,000. But after the halving, ETF holders began selling and it actually resulted in about seven days of net outflows, a reversal of day after day of net inflows for those ETFs. Although initially there was a spike in transaction fees post-halving, it was short-lived and fees declined in the subsequent weeks. Runes, one of the drivers of fees in the initial period post-halving, are now generating far lower fees than regular transactions compared to the weeks succeeding the halving. As a result, fees per day have dropped below the first quarter's average of 64.39 Bitcoin, and hash price is coming down from its post-halving runes driven high. Concurrently, the network hash rate hit an all-time high of 654 exahash before the halving, but dropped to 580 over the following three weeks. This reduction can be attributed to miners adjusting efficiency settings on their machines and some shutting down temporarily. This might appear significant, but such a decline is not out of the ordinary, and this happened on two occasions previously this year. Going forward, the hash rate is likely to oscillate as hash price changes. However, for the near term, due to highly compressed mining margins and the upcoming summer months here in the U.S., hash rate growth will likely be restrained. And then just looking beyond Bitcoin for a moment, for the long term, the head of the US Federal Reserve has suggested that the central bank might have hit its peak rate cycle height, which is promising for Bitcoin mining because it suggests a more favorable environment with potential for increasing Bitcoin prices. So with that, we can talk a little bit about our 2024 results. So we generated approximately $17 million of revenue in Q1, which was an increase of 4% from the last quarter of 2023, really due to elevated hash price. At the end of the first quarter, our cash in hand stood at $12.4 million, which is an increase from the $7.4 million at the end of 2023. As mentioned previously, we had some significant balance sheet events occur in Q1 2024, including an equity raise of nearly $10 million in January, and the sale of our Mirabelle facility in Quebec in March. The proceeds were used to repay the facility's existing mortgage and pay down some of the debt owed to Galaxy. So let's move on to the next slide. We can talk a little bit more about debt reduction in further detail. So as discussed on the previous call, debt reduction has been a focus for us since we sold Helios and restructured our debt at the end of 2022. As noted, we executed two significant transactions in the first quarter of 24, bolstering our cash position in addition to reducing our debt, that being the equity raise and the Mirabelle sale. The Mirabelle sale was a great transaction for a number of reasons. First, we realized an attractive exit on the asset with a $6.1 million sale price. And secondly... Consolidating our Quebec fleet to Bay Como allowed us to streamline operations with minimal impact to revenue. We were able to execute the move quickly, and we realized an annualized reduction in OPEX of about $700,000 per annum. Now, let me turn it over to Jim for a deeper dive into Q1 financial results. Over to you, Jim.