Defi Technologies, Inc.

Hi, everyone, and welcome to the DeFi Technologies 2025 Quarter 2 Financials Review and Shareholder Call. I'm Curtis Laufman, VP of Marketing and Communications. On the call, we have CEO Olivia Rusi-Newton, President Andrew Forsen, CFO Paul Bozoki, and co-founder Johan Wattenstrom. I'm going to read a forward-looking statement to get started. and then we'll get the webinar rolling. Certain information set forth in this presentation contains forward-looking information, including future-oriented financial information and financial outlook under applicable securities laws collectively referred to as forward-looking statements, except for statements of historical fact. The information contained here constitutes forward-looking statements and includes, but is not limited to, protected financial performance of the company, completion of, and the use of proceeds from the sale of shares being offered here either the expected development of the company's business projects or joint ventures these statements are not guarantees of future performance or undue reliance should not be placed on them such forward-looking statements necessarily involve known and unknown arrests and uncertainties which may cause actual performance of financial results in future periods to differ materially from any projections of future performance or result expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements So done with that. I'll give you a little overview of how this is going to go. We'll start with some statements from the exec team here, starting with Olivier. We'll move on with Paul with an overview of the financials. And then Johan will give a brief overview on our 2025 financial guidance. We'll then open it up and take some retail questions from the Q&A and then invite our analysts on live to ask additional questions and wrap it up from there. So with that, I'll hand it off to our CEO, Olivier Roussinouten.

Thanks, Curtis. And thanks to everyone who's joined on this Friday in the summer. Q2 2025. And Curtis, I'll let you flip onto the slide. Q2 2025 showed us what our platform, specifically all of our business units combined, can deliver in a softer market. We reported adjusted revenues of US $32.1 million, adjusted EBITDA of US $21.6 million, and adjusted net income of $17.4 million. The takeaways involved Our model scales, prints cash, and performs across market conditions. As a company, speaking with Johan, my co-founder of the team yesterday, in detail before we filed our financials, I still believe we're extremely early in our growth story, but the flywheel of all of our subsidiaries acquired or incubated in each business line is reinforcing the others. For Velour, our kind of largest business unit, which is specifically operating in the asset management space, demand continued to build with net inflows every month, year to date, totaling US $77.4 million for the first half AUM ended Q2 at US $772.8 million and reached US $947 million by July 31st. In Q2, Velour generated US $6.9 million in staking lending income and US $2.1 million in management fees. We also launched 14 new ETPs, keeping us on track with our target the largest issuer of digital asset structured products on regulated stock exchanges. Outside Europe, Andrew has done a tremendous job and effort in terms of pushing our global expansion. Outside of Europe, we're continuously expanding in Europe, but we are in the final phases of regulatory approval for in Kenya and both Turkey and are targeting other markets in Asia, LATAM, and we'll let Andrew elaborate on that further into the presentation. Stillman Digital, which was acquired, I believe, October of last fiscal year, has been a great acquisition. Q2 revenue was US $1.9 million. Stillman also completed its integration in Talos, deepened capabilities in FX, and a large focus of Stillman has been market making and providing liquidity for stable coins as that market segment becomes one of the largest markets you know, digital dollar-based stable coins and the availability for that. So we see that as a significant potential growth area. They also added some great senior trading talent. In our DeFi Alpha business, low risk trade in May with 17.3 million in returns and maintain a zero loss track record since inception, which was, I believe we've been operating for about a year and three months now that we incubated DeFi Alpha. Neuronomics, which was really, Recently, four or five months ago, acquired the majority stake of Neuronomics. We've been shareholder of Neuronomics for around three to four years. We see them as one of the leading and pioneering companies in artificial intelligence and specifically applying AI to the digital asset sector, which they've done for four to five years now, and traditional equities for almost 10 years. They completed the development and testing of Smart Crypto, which we'll have more news about shortly, and will open subscriptions for institutional and qualified investors in early September. Neuronomics also secured a validator node on the Canton network, which is a fast-growing blockchain positioning us to participate directly in institutional-grade tokenized assets. Reflexivity, which is our research unit that complements all of our customers at Forlore with leading edge information on all the alternative, primarily alternative crypto coins that they're kind of buying and trading. So that is kind of the main focus, but they've expanded distribution into platforms such as Beluga, BlockWire, and CoinMarketCap, which is, I believe, the largest trafficked digital asset website globally. And we are building new events and newsletter sponsorships alongside a brand upgrade aimed at institutional clients. So that kind of compromises all of our... within the DeFi technologies umbrella. Moving kind of to our balance sheet, we remain well capitalized with US $26.4 million in cash and $26 million in digital assets with a combined $52.4 million as of June 30th. We are in the process of renewing our NCIP, which is the Canadian terminology for share buyback program that we will utilize to buy back kind of what we see as an undervalued share for our financial performance as a company. What the rest of 2025 looks like, we've raised outlook. Based on the current performance and marketing conditions, we raised 2025 annualized operating revenue guidance to US 28, 200 million and 18.6 million dollars. Valor, More listings in new markets. We expect additional ETPs listings in the coming months with a robust pipeline through 2025 and into 2026. As I mentioned before, on track for 100 years, 100 products by year end. We're also expanding into Africa, Asia, Middle East, other regions within Europe, United Kingdom, And as I mentioned, final phases, regulatory approval, execution will continue. And, you know, all of these new geographies come on stream. It is a bit of a longer process, but, you know, regulatory approvals in all of these jurisdiction, market making, FX partnerships, make it all happen. And I'll let Andrew, as I mentioned, elaborate further on that. And yeah, I think that sums up most of, This, we've also kind of, I think we'll have more information coming shortly on our newest business line, DeFi Advisory, that uses our kind of expertise in trading technology, market making, OTC for public companies that are managing digital assets. So you'll see more news surrounding that. And to conclude, we're encouraged to see a structural upgrade in our shareholder base. Since early July, we've welcomed a reported 89 additional institutional investors and funds, bringing us to 95 institutional owners representing over 33 million shares. Despite recent share price action, the register is deepening with longer horizon capital. And I firmly believe it's an indicator of quiet or take a quiet rotation of our shareholder base away from retail, driven towards institutions that are welcoming digital asset companies. And yeah, to kind of I conclude, you know, put simply, I think we're delivering now and building sustainable value for the long term. And we're keen on being one of the leanest revenue producing companies in the digital asset space listed on the NASDAQ. I'll pass it over to you, Paul.

Thank you, Olivier. Go into the financials. So starting with presentation currency, beginning with the second quarter of 2025, DeFi changed its presentation currency to the US dollar to better meet the needs of our US investor base following our successful NASDAQ listing in May. In terms of AUMs, DeFi closed June 30th with AUM of $773 million. Q2 average AUM decreased to $748 million from the $780 million in Q1 due to negative cryptocurrency price movements on our alternative coins. However, cash inflow into our ETPs remained strong with positive Q2 inflows of $27 million bringing total inflows for the six months ended June 30th to $77.4 million. In terms of revenue, our Q2 IFRS revenue of $13.4 million brought our cumulative IFRS revenues for the six months end of June 30th to $57.1 million. Company's revenue guidance for the six months end of June was $62.5 million, thus the actual revenue shortfall was $5.5 million. or 8.7%, due to DeFi Alpha trading revenues deferred into the second half of 2025. The minor miss was due to DeFi Alpha revenues being lower than planned in the first half. The company reminds investors that these trades are opportunistic and may not be realized on a straight line basis, but we reiterate that we do have a strong pipeline. Our IFRS reported revenues also include the effect of a movement in the discount of lack of marketability provision, DLOM, The acquisition of $18.7 million locked SUI tokens as part of our Q2 DeFi Alpha trade and crypto price increases on our existing locked Solana and AVAX coins, the DLOM increased by $18.7 million in the quarter and brought the total DLOM provision to $74 million. I remind everybody that that $74 million DLOM provision will unwind over the locked period of the coins, which goes until 2028. So it will come back into income and increase our equity. Talking about AUM monetization, our Q2 effective realized staking income was 3.6% on the average 748 million AUM. We staked 72.5% of our AUM during Q2. Staking revenue decline is due to the notable drop in on-chain activity, particularly on the Solana network. Lower average prices of key assets, Ethereum and Solana, which were both down about 20% quarter over quarter. Lower protocol reward rates in Q2 versus Q1. Protocol inflation and reward reductions across Solana. 4.4% down from 4.6% in Q1. And similar down reductions for Toncoin, Polygon and NEAR. Inflation reductions lead to lower baseline reward rates, resulting in lower staking yields. We also redeemed 71.6% of our unlocked coins within one of our equity investments in digital assets, which resulted in some of the coins becoming unstaked at the end of Q2. Our effective staking income burned for the full six-month period ended June 30th was 4.3%. Our effective management field yield earned during Q2 was 1.1%, down slightly from the 1.3% earned in Q1 due to positive price performance of Bitcoin and Ethereum, where we earned management fees of nil. People remember we earned a headline rate of 1.9% on most coins, but Bitcoin and Ethereum zero. So the effective rate was 1.1% in Q2. This brings our total effective AUM monetization, being staking income and managing fees in Q2 to 4.7%, down from 6.2% in Q1 due to the factors noted above on lower staking yields. Average AUM monetization for the six months ended June 30th was 5.5%. An adjusted EBITDA came in at 21.6%, reflecting a strong focus on profitability. Adjusted EBITDA includes adjustments to add back the non-cash DLOM and non-cash share-based comp. In terms of the balance sheet, the company focuses on maintaining balance sheet strength. We ended Q2 with $26.4 million in cash to provide ample liquidity to meet our obligations. In terms of new investments, the company's venture portfolio consists of eight private investments with the largest investment being our 5% stake in Aminabank. Aminabank continues to perform exceptionally well, growing its revenues in AUM while maintaining strong fundamentals. Readers can find additional detail on its performance in our press release and our MD&A. And lastly, to just reiterate what Olivier said, during Q2, we did repurchase 675,900 shares and returned $1.9 million. to investors and we are in the process of renewing our NCIB to continue doing so. I'll pass it over to Johan.

Right, I give some color on the DP monetization for Q2. And I would say that absolutely nothing has changed on the downside in terms of rather the opposite. We have strengthened our ability to monetize the AUM to date as of today. The dip during Q2 was due to the composition of our assets and the markets. As Bitcoin dominance was up at 65% during Q2, it's down since that level. And now we've seen the altcoins being stronger and stronger. Obviously, Bitcoin, Ethereum, especially Bitcoin, remains the lowest yields for us, both in terms of management fees and in terms of staking and lending yields. And the reason we have upped our full year forecast is that as the market is today, the strong performance the last few weeks, not the least for altcoins, has put us in a much stronger position to hire the monetization rate to all-time highs, hopefully within this quarter, because of the composition of our AUM. So it's simply a function of what AUM we have in each of our 50 underlying assets and what assets are driven in and taking what percentage of the portfolio as a function of market prices. And those conditions were at worst, I would say, possible scenario in Q2. If you look at a few years back, Bitcoin dominance has been between 40 and 60 percent. It was a 65 percent during Q2 and has come down below 60 percent now. And altcoins are performing more and more stronger. This obviously leads to our basket of assets having a much better composition for us and allowing us to have a much higher average yield and monetization on our portfolio. On the full year forecast, there's obviously two components. We have the core business, we have the alpha trades. And on the alpha trade side, that accounts for, like communicated at last call, for around half of the forecast. And we have an even higher conviction of that coming to fruition. Not to least as our higher AUM in the assets where we can do these trades, which compose of our pipeline, has grown in terms of AUM and our capacity to do these trades. That's on the DeFi Alpha side. Nothing has changed in a full year forecast for what we will be able to execute. And in terms of the monetization rate, it's already up significantly from Q2. And we continue to see that trend following through as our assets composition has changed and product mix has changed to the better. Yeah, I think that concludes the returns we've seen and why we are very optimistic right now. So nothing has changed on the downside. Rather, we believe that this mechanism obviously will beat our advantage now when the market, what we believe is a continuous strong market for the year. So yeah, that concludes my color on the forecast for the year. Thank you, Johan.

And I'd also like to remind folks that over the past six quarters, we've raised the guidance. And initially, we do aim to offer what we view or Johan views as conservative guidance. I believe at the end of 2023, we offer guidance of around $60 million in revenue. we ended up at the end of the year at $144 million in revenue. Let's, you know, if we're not taking into account all the messiness of the D law. So we've continually raised guidance and we've exceeded those numbers and we expect to do that again. And with that, Let's open it up to some questions from our shareholders. If you want to type in the chat, you can, and I can pick out a few. And then we'll invite analysts to come on and participate as panelists. We'll have an open forum for questions for them. All right. I'm not seeing any questions in the chat. Let's just, I guess I'll just invite Mike on and Ed. If you're an analyst, please raise your hand and I'll invite you to become a panelist. All right, you guys have... There we go. All right. Cool. Let's open it up with... Mike, I think you're on mute. We can start with... Yeah, there we go.

Hear me?

Yeah, great. Okay, thanks. Mike, we can start with you. Go ahead and ask any questions you have.

Any questions you have. Thanks, guys. Hey, my first question is your guidance now of U.S. $218 million, can you help us bridge that? What number are you using for the first six months of the year? And what are the big drivers to get you to 218 US for the full year? I'll start with that.

Yeah, I think the simple answer there is that when we did the guidance last time, our market, the portfolio composition was different, which actually projected a lower monetization rate for the rest of the year because of the market action we've seen in a lot of the big AUM assets for us. It gives us a much better position at the moment for generating more yield from our base business. Also, the pipeline for our alpha trades, the alpha trades we have are measured for us in coins and the value has gone up. in those prospective trades we have in our pipeline. So given that we can execute the same amount of trades, which we have a high conviction of for the year that we were forecasted early on, those trades will be higher dollar value, if even be the same amount of coins. And that's basically it.

Okay, so just paraphrasing that a little bit, but what's the six-month U.S. dollar revenue number? I just want to understand the starting point. And then what I think you're saying, Johan, is... Most of this is going to be alpha trades. Like, you know, I think in U.S. dollars, we're at like $6 million. Or maybe for six months, we're at like $12 or $13 million in staking and $4.5 million in management fees. So maybe that annualizes to about $30 million U.S. So the rest is really coming from trading activity.

If you look at the dip we had in Q2 for management fees and for staking rewards, I don't have it on top of my head, but I would think that if I recall correctly, the average daily AUM was at a significantly lower level than our AUM is at now. There also has been some developments that there are assets now that we can monetize from now that we couldn't monetize historically at all, like for Ripple, for instance, where we will get 7%. We didn't get anything historically and so forth. So I would say that at these levels, the staking and management fees rewards would be just 30% higher, just giving the market level and the market composition at present. So we'll see a much higher monetization rate if this market continues. Obviously, that's the assumption here. And for the alpha trades, it's the same number of coins for the same trades in the pipeline that we guided on before. But it's a higher dollar value because of the higher values of those tokens, the higher value where we are exploring those trades. So it's correct that a big part of this would be obviously the alpha trade, similar to last year. And as we have discussed, I guess, in a lot of calls historically and also in these calls, unfortunately, it's not super easy to pin down when those will occur on a quarterly basis. But on a yearly basis, obviously, we have a high conviction that they will will occur. So and obviously realize that from your side, it's much easier to model and forecast staking yields, management fees, and so on. And we also try to look on how we can communicate that better. So the AUM composition is more clear, because I think that will give a lot of insight in the dynamics of the monetization yield. And you can see, for instance, that if we earn X amount on Solana in staking yields in MEV, yield in fees and transaction and in the management fees and also in market making in those assets, because that's also another revenue generator, then it will be much easier for you to follow just from the levels of the price levels of those assets, what our composition of the AM is and derive what earnings rate we are at.

Yeah, I think it's important to emphasize that we're not only with Valor specifically, we're not only making staking fees and management fees, but also trading fees and market making fees as well. So Johan and team have monetized effectively that issue and structure in every facet where we're squeezing margin from every area we can.

Another line item that I think will make it easier for analysts to forecast once we can publish it, hopefully that would be quite soon, is the money we generate at liquidity provision and market making. Right now, that's part of the realized and unrealized profit and losses from all trading activities and all positions.

Yeah, it would be great if you could break that out.

Yeah, because that's definitely something that's easy to model because our margins, net margins are very stable over time, but they correlate strongly with the turnover on our products on the stock markets, which also is very highly correlated to the turnover in the crypto market. So I think then you would get also a lot of super important input for your models as well. to increase accuracy.

Cool. Well, Hey, just one more question. You know, we've been waiting for you guys to expand into Africa, Asia, and the middle East. What, what are still some of the roadblocks to getting into those regions?

Andrew. Yeah. If I may, it's less, it's not actually a matter of roadblocks. It's a matter of, Dotting the I's, crossing the T's. As a case in point, this morning I was on a call at 5 a.m. Eastern Time with the Capital Markets Authority of a particular jurisdiction. So many jurisdictions, for political reasons, for instance, they would like to know where are the underlying assets of the ETPs custodied. And they want to do something like find out is there a way to get it, for instance, custodied in their country. And in that regard, since Velour is vertically integrated, we manage the custody, so we explain this process to them. We have to understand that the digital asset space, while it's quite advanced in terms of regulatory environments within our countries, Western Europe, Canada, and the US, in the others, there's somewhat of an education process. And all of these markets were more than advanced. And many of these markets were actually in the process of doing I'll almost call them a book generation of pre-sales. But I think it's something that I've said to Curtis recently. Going forward, we want to be very conservative about how we announce and when we announce and that when we do make announcements, it's almost like over-delivery. So we want to make sure that all the conditions are right before we talk about what's going to happen. But the appetite is actually quite strong for our products, not only the digital asset products, but other products that our infrastructure will permit. And the expansion, it does continue in various regions of the world. Obviously, East Africa is a big one. With regards to the Kenya Digital Exchange, the technology there has actually been assembled and developed. And we're actually just in some final stages legal stuff. And it's sort of unfun to have to have this particular discussion during a Q2 call, because August is a huge holiday month in many parts of the world. So that means governments in particular are not as present in these months, but we are moving right along. Definitely in East Africa, as mentioned, I think there'll be some pleasant surprises there. Latin America, We've had some great progress there. Asia, we've had great progress as well.

Okay. Thank you.

You're very welcome. Thank you.

And you want to move on to Michael Kim?

Hey, guys.

Hey, guys.

Thanks for taking my questions. Just first, in terms of product development, just curious to get your perspective from maybe more of a broader strategic approach. Seems like you've got opportunities to launch existing strategies into newer geographies on the one hand, as well as coming to market with newer, more innovative strategies. So just curious to kind of get your perspective on the broader approach, if you will.

I can give a first comment there on something that has been kind of becoming quite clear the last few months here that the decision we made to be the leading asset manager in this space in regards of number of assets, number of products has shown to have a lot of synergies with other new initiatives we have on products. Because we have such a complete universe of investable securities in digital asset space, we have been approached and had a lot of really deep discussions with major global banks about building products on top of our product portfolio. And that those includes the usage funds, which are in high demand from institutions in Europe and Latin America and other places of the world. Also on the structured product side, where there's large banks that use their own distribution, constructive structured products based on our assets, because it's it's not allowed in most jurisdictions to do these types of products directly on on crypto assets. Whilst we can offer a full investment universe to build these products out of. So that's also corresponds very well with our initiatives to launch our own usage fund in Europe. And also do so with our own structured products for three to five year term structures in some key markets. But we were obviously pleasant to surprise to see a lot of demand from from large institutions with their own distribution networks to start building exclusively on our products, which obviously will feed into our AUM. And I think that that's a great receipt for us that we made the right decision in terms of how we build our portfolio and develop the products on top of this. It will not only be our product developments, but also the product developments of major banks and new jurisdictions on top of what we already have. That's one interesting point, I think.

I'd love to add on to this because this is where I really think the strategic future and vision of Velour and the founders of Velour and DeFi Tech comes into play. We are being reached out to by not only global banks, some multilateral development banks and actual exchanges that have a sovereign basis. And what they like about us is that we have the ability to create instruments that hybridize digital assets with traditional assets on the same infrastructure. So whenever people think about Velour, they're thinking about the limitations of digital assets. But I mean, notwithstanding the fact that we have the broadest portfolio of digital asset ETPs in the world, people are reaching out because we also currently today have a very, very broad distribution of instruments listed on a number of premier exchanges. So I think that that's a significant area for expansion. And the fact that more and more in the real world asset space, you're seeing linkages between digital assets and traditional assets. This is a position that we are already there. We are already leading effectively in the real world asset space. And it doesn't actually require too much modification of what we already do in order to expand with significant products there. And I can say without a doubt, I'll call it our R&D initiative has us working with sovereign level exchanges on creating innovative products over the last few months. And I'm really excited about that.

Got it. That's super helpful. Appreciate the color there. And then maybe just one other question. In terms of the new advisory business, can you frame sort of the pipeline or the opportunity more broadly, just given all the public companies that are seemingly transitioning to digital assets treasury strategies? Just seems like there's a lot of pent-up demand there.

Well, I think I can give a quick... take at that. I think I was a recent import from a foundation from Hedera. And what you'll find is DeFi Technologies is uniquely placed to solve a lot of foundation problems. And every single token that you hear of out there has a backing foundation that normally has liquidity related issues. They not only have liquidity related issues, they're also very interested in figuring out how to get their tokens into the hands of most people, more people, particularly institutions, because a lot of institutions can't touch them. And they're actually also really interested in figuring out what are the best revenue generating projects to invest in. Now, the one thing that DeFi Technologies has been exceedingly good at doing is actually finding projects in the digital asset space that generate revenue, either in the stable coin space, either in the liquidity provision space. And a lot of these foundations actually want in on these types of projects. So whenever you combine our ability to bring liquidity to foundations that are somewhat hamstrung in terms of what they can do with their tokens, when you combine the fact that we have a very, very broad exposure, so a foundation can only look at their own token. I mean, could you imagine if Oligon or some other foundation started dealing in another change token that would be politically suboptimal. But in our case, since we have connections and all, it gives us the ability to provide broader solutions and linking them with the capital markets. So in that way, the DeFi advisory isn't even a service line we had to make. It is something that was more of a demand pull. And I mean, myself, I think this is an okay thing to say. There have been three foundations that are begging us to provide them with particular solutions that I never reached out to. And these solutions are quite easy for us to deliver on, either in terms of provision of liquidity, defining new ETPs, assisting with establishing almost like a corporate venture capital portfolio and having novel yield generating strategy companies, because a lot of them have determined that, Oh, having a pure buy and hold with no revenue model strategy company is actually suboptimal. So they're trying to figure out how can they get productive assets together with their native assets to deploy strategy companies that would have more value and, and, we're well positioned for that.

And I think just touching on just the brief synopsis of advisory in general, we did announce our first deal a few weeks ago with NBVE. This is, call it a digital asset treasury in a box. I think somebody termed that NBVE. Matt Siegel from VanEck, I saw him use that. So we want to work with partners or public companies that we see as really partners or leverage in a commercial way as well. And Implement digital asset treasury strategies that we think are sustainable and long term, usually using only tokens that we have high conviction in. As I mentioned, one deal in the pipeline. We have a couple of others that we'll announce over the coming weeks and months and looking to add into that or our way to take advantage of this sort of. BOMO catalyst in the industry right now. And we're taking either, we're taking a percentage of the AUM in either a flat rate in cash or equity from that perspective.

I'd love to add one more thing. I mean, I'm trying to hide my excitement about this, but, you know, it's really incredible because it's not mutually exclusive. And what I mean by that is a lot of these foundations are looking for multiple options. So the fact that we exist, we can provide a structure, but it doesn't mean it locks out other participants in providing a structure. Where we have a real advantage is it's soup to nuts. Right from origination, right from the token, we're able to go directly to the capital markets. And that's something that the Web3 space, I mean, back when I was doing VC in the Web3 space, we used to talk about like Web3 math because their valuations are were really, really wonky and they would have a hard time bringing capital into their projects. Well, this is where DeFi technologies excels, right? So to me, it's super exciting and it's definitely useful for the foundations.

Great. Appreciate it. Thanks for taking my questions. Ed Engel.

Hi, guys. Thanks for taking my questions here. And we appreciate all the additional color on the guidance. I just kind of wanted to hone in on, I guess, DeFi Alpha. You talked about how this year some of these deals are taking a little bit longer than you usually expect, at least the first half of the year. I guess what kind of gives you conviction that this can all kind of happen in the second half of the year? And I guess, do you see any risk that some of these deals can maybe slip into next year? Thanks.

It's obviously extremely hard to say if any of these deals will slip into next year. Obviously, we're working super hard to make sure they happen within this year and sooner rather than later. And I would say each and every of the deals we are working on in our pipeline, there's different... different triggers for all of them. There might be some who do not want to execute before the price is at a certain level. I think we have not really forecasted to be able to do all the trades in our pipeline, but rather I think 65% of them, because there's always something that falls off. So I wouldn't say it's an overly optimistic forecast. And I wouldn't say it has necessarily taken longer time with any of these than the trades were already executed. It's always negotiations and back and forth and depends also a bit, the appetite depends a bit on the market conditions. In Q2, when the market came down for a lot of these tokens, there was a few of these that wanted to to delay a little bit. And I think that was to be expected. But I wouldn't say that any of these deals have been worked on for much longer than expected or the deals we actually have executed. So it's, yeah, it's... These are deals where we have a very strong relation to the other, the counterparty, and there's a strong will from both parties to do it. There might be some technicalities, there might be some incentive for some people to wait because of bad market conditions during Q2. But yeah, as I think I mentioned also, I think some of these might be much higher value because of the higher price levels we see now. And I don't assume we will do all of them, even though we hope to do 100%. But if we do 65% of them, we will be able to reach targets. On an individual basis on each of these trades, I would say we have around 15 of these trades that we could do and hope to do this year. We don't think we'll do all of them, but that's not in the forecast either.

Really good color. Thank you. And I wanted to touch on you guys issued a press release about an investigation into share discrepancies. I think some other details on like Canadian listings and maybe some indiscriminate short selling. Can you just give a little bit more color for those of us that are less aware of Canadian market structure and I guess some of your early findings there and I guess what you think might be going on?

I can touch on just that investigation in general. So this was at the request of many different shareholders to look into our trading activity. So, of course, we obliged because we want to make sure our shareholders are supported. And the initial few reports did raise concerns. Some flags in terms of the amount of unpaired shares that were present on over the course of three specific trading days. So we've reached out to the specific brokers in question for additional clarity on why that might have occurred or may have occurred. And we'll continue to pursue that. And if we get any actual evidence that there is any foul play involved, then we will take action. But we are still waiting on conclusive evidence before taking any further action. Right now, we're still looking into it.

And I guess you guys have made progress, obviously, listing on NASDAQ and changing your reporting to U.S. dollars. And I definitely appreciate that. There's definitely tons of progress going on there. It feels like a lot of this accounting, I guess, confusion and even some of this market structure is a bit more related to Canadian markets. And it's unfortunate because fundamentally, there's kind of been no change. But it feels like some of these more... technical issues have kind of been weighing on things. Any opportunity to either, I guess, focus more on the U.S., whether that's, I guess, moving past the Canadian listing or even domicile in the U.S.? I'm just kind of curious if there's an opportunity just to be completely U.S. in terms of the listing and some of these accounting rules. Thanks.

I can touch that. Um, we are a foreign private issuer. It's an annual test July 1st every year. Um, and it's a combination of your assets, your directors and your shareholders. So there are tests on America, how many of us people are in there. Um, and if you fail then January 1st, the following year, you're, you become a us domestic. So we just passed our July test. So we're still IFRS and Canadian. Um, If we fail, we'd have to adopt U.S. GAAP and become a U.S. reporting issuer under the SEC. If the feedback from the market is we should adopt U.S. GAAP, the board of directors can consider that as a separate matter to just do that. In terms of re-domiciling the CanCo to the United States to become a Delaware company, definitely. we would have a tax issue, right? Because Velour is now, the market cap of the company is essentially driven off of Velour. Our cost base of Velour is about 70 million. So our market cap is now huge. It would be a Canadian exit tax. So it's unlikely that in the near term, we would re-domicile to the United States, but the US gap, we either fail FPI or we voluntarily adopt FPI.

I guess even if you remain a foreign issuer and maybe avoid some of the tax issues, I mean, what's kind of the board's, I know you can't speak to the board, but what's kind of the overall view towards just the Canadian listing in general, especially just given that you have graduated to a NASDAQ listing?

Maybe I'll turn that to Ali. We could drop SIBO and go NASDAQ, but maybe Ali, if you want to.

Yeah, I think it's actively being explored and we've definitely looked at that that route and scenario, I think as Paul touched on being kind of all American doesn't suit our bottom line in terms of Canadian exit tax to re-domicile towards the United States. I think, you know, obviously, obviously, you know, the, You know, the political situation in the U.S. is not something I or kind of I think the board would want to be attached to in the long term. And we're developing this company for the long term. But, you know, the capital markets are great in the U.S. and we'll definitely explore that. But I think we remain a foreign listed issuer. And that could see us dropping our CBO Canada listing soon. in the not too distant future.

Okay. Yeah. Thanks again for the call guys. And again, the AUM is continues to pace really well and of course are great. So operationally things look fantastic.

Thanks Ed. And Kevin, we, we get to you and then we'll, we'll, we'll move on to Alan after that. Kevin, you're on mute if you wanted to ask a couple questions. All right, Alan, we'll let you go first.

Thank you. Hello. You mentioned that there's less activity on altcoins during the quarter and an increase in the value of Bitcoin and Ethereum, where you don't get management fees, costs are lower. yield on your AUN, but you expect this to improve in the future. Is there a way to think about kind of a range that's reasonable?

I think, let me just rephrase that. I would say that in the main assets where we stake, the staking yields has not been falling at all. We have gotten more transactions. There's a small component called transaction fees that we collect on top of the staking yields and MEVA trading. Those are marginal and vary with the activity on-chain. So the only reason which makes it easier to model if we can produce more numbers for you going forward is just that the AUM levels sank quite a bit compared to the ones in Bitcoin, for instance, and Ethereum because of how the market was reacting in Q2. Obviously, with Bitcoin dominance up at 65%. So it's mainly a function not of falling rewards. It's a function of the product mix, the composition of our total AUM as applied to the different underlying assets. Sui, Solana, Avalanche, quite a few of these took a big hit during that quarter and suited our AUM in those assets. That has recovered strongly at this point. And our asset allocation is very much different as is our average monetization yield. And that also obviously reflects our management fees on Bitcoin. Most of our AEM in Bitcoin is in our Bitcoin zero product where we have zero management fee. So it's mainly a function of the market prices in our portfolio. And then obviously that leads to what percentage of our daily average AUM they represent and what contribution to our amortization rates that represent. So I think if we can give more clarity in the future on this, what the AUM is per assets I think that would make it easier to forecast on your side and see also why the drop occurred in Q2 and I think it might even be a good thing long term because we obviously we're We believe that there's a huge number of the digital assets, which has a lot of unique value added to contribute with in terms of utility and different applications. So we obviously are big fans of Bitcoin, but we're no terms Bitcoin maximalist, and we're trying to be the first mover in a lot of these other very interesting technologies. So if one believe that Bitcoin will not be the only asset, but actually there will be a... strong market for the others as well then I think what we saw in weakness in Q2 in that regard will be we will see the other side of that coin which is the upside when Bitcoin dominance falls and I think still we're at 58 to 60 where we're up at 65 and historically we've been in a range between 40 and 60 or so so I think there's a lot of upside in monetization rate when the other technologies will become stronger and we'll be able to monetize that to a larger extent.

If I could add on to what Johan is saying, I think he's absolutely right. Anytime you hear of an announcement of a stablecoin, you have to understand that the stablecoin is not likely built on Bitcoin. Bitcoin as a blockchain or token is not really used in a functional way. It is the altcoins that have very high transaction volumes, great smart contract programming languages. That's where the action is when it comes to RWA, real world assets, stable coins, yield generating tokens. And for the investor to gain exposure to that right now, I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that your most likely path to gaining exposure to these nascent technologies that are booming is through velour because we have the broadest portfolio of these instruments. And in particular, it's these newer layer one chains that have incredibly high transaction rates. So there's a distinction between financial transaction in terms of securities and the transaction volumes of the underlying chain. These are the chains that are capturing the imagination of developers, financial engineers in the Web3 space. And this is where we really do have a competitive advantage. Very exciting.

Yeah, we obviously were bullish on Bitcoin as well. But I think what drove the Bitcoin focus, obviously, in not least Q2, was the hype around the treasury companies, microstrategy and so forth, and maybe 100 copies of microstrategies around the world. And they have obviously been very good at marketing and selling that narrative. We are not big fans of that business model of the treasury companies. I don't think it's sustainable. It might hit back on the market at some point, I would guess. There's more efficient ways of gaining exposure to all these assets. So I think less of a hype in these Bitcoin treasury companies, but also... Even if we're not big fans of treasury companies, obviously, we see that type of entity spreading across other assets as well, which might help in short term, at least, to drive the visibility of those. So it's a good PR marketing thing, maybe, if nothing else. But I think I think we will see less of a sole focus on Bitcoin because of that hype. And I think that's what we see in the market right now. And it will turn out to be a strength for our breadth of portfolio rather than a problem like we see so early in Q2.

Let's let's we only have a couple of minutes left. Let's let me give Kevin a chance again. Kevin, are you there? You're still muted, Kevin Deedy, if you wanted to answer or ask questions.

Thanks. Thanks, Curtis. Sorry about that.

Hey, no worries.

Yeah, no, a little bit of a technical issue on my end, and I apologize. You gentlemen had spoken to management fees falling from the first quarter to the second quarter. I think the numbers you cited was 1.3 to 1.1. How different how do you see them improving in the second half and how, how much of a quotient is that in, in driving your up your raised guidance?

Yeah, I would say that, uh, as you might have deducted the, that fall was on the average of the portfolio and it's driven by the same factors as with the staking rewards and so forth and so forth because the, uh, we have, uh, The Bitcoin zero, which is our largest AUM product in Bitcoin, has zero management fees. And the bigger part of the overall portfolio, the less the average. So it's that simple. There's no pressure on the management fees on our products at all. We actually have launched a few products with higher management fees last six months because we think they have been maybe less liquid, maybe a bit more volatile and harder to hedge. And then we've taken some precautions and heightened the management fees. We also have a lot of assets where we have, I would say, monopoly at this point. But we have seen no pressure on the management fees as such. So similar to the staking rewards and MEV fees and transaction fees on our validators, the management fees are basically a product of the AUM and the composition fees. We don't have a product mix. So we have products with 2.5% management fee. We have products with 1.9%, which is the most common. But then we have Bitcoin, Ethereum ones. We have two big products with zero management fees. And the less part of the overall portfolio they are, the higher the management fee average will be. So it's purely a function of the composition, similar to with the other revenue streams.

Yeah, Johan, have you penciled it out at all? And I guess how much of it is a function in the calculus of your guidance?

I would say it's a small, small, small portion because the staking fees are a much bigger, bigger part of our income. So if, for instance, if we take in Solana, what we stake in our own validator, which is more and more, We can make 7%. I think it peaked at 7.35. I think we have 7 point something now in base staking rewards. We have another percent in MEV fees. And on top of that, we have maybe a percent of transaction fees from within that network in the blocks. And then we have 1.9% in management fees. So it's basically... 11% and management fee is 1.9% of that. And so I would say that the management fees as such is a smaller proportion of the driver here.

So I have a question for all of you gentlemen. I think I've run it by Andrew and Curtis once before, and I guess it would be interesting to see how you might address it now. In order to hit your 100 product target for the year, you'll need to add roughly 25 new products. And I'm wondering, based on your history, if you've been able to look at what a new product commands in terms of new AUM. And if there's any way to apply any kind of an average product

Yeah, I think this chart shows the, if you look at the 2024, that's the inflow 2024. And what's going to be 45% of the inflow was November, December, and that was driven by 20 new products launched. And what we've seen also, I think the total AUM, we got up to 15%. Those 20 new products were... 15% or more, I believe, after two months from launch. And these are all smaller coins because we already had, I think, 25 products out there covering all the top ones. And this is something we've seen consistently that obviously there are trends in sometimes it's more AI type tokens, sometimes it's more level one blockchains and so on that are in fashion. But What we see is a big demand from these. And I think a main reason is that we are a first mover. Those are unique in the world. There's no other way for a lot of these investors to gain exposure to these. And if you see in this chart, the white line. That's more pronounced in the last month in this chart. That's all the small new tokens we launched. So even though these are much lower market cap, much less known. I would say it shows that our client base, which is loyal and is sticking money, they already have the portfolio. They don't reweight. They actually make new investments into these new assets. And a lot of them are... very well read up on the technologies and are requesting smaller coins for us to list that they followed a long time. And if they pass our test for eligibility and we have a conviction that this is a strong team, a strong history, strong technology and fills a market demand, then we will do an ETP on them and the marginal cost for us to do so is very, very small. But yeah, as you see, since we started launching smaller tokens, quite a big portion of our AM now are in these small tokens. Even though the green, blue, the larger fields here are Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, which are much more well-known. We didn't expect this large part of REM actually to be composed of these. But I think, as mentioned, it's part of us providing something unique and our first movers. And what we've seen in other coins we launched is that if we are the first mover, even when competition catches on, we will remain in the lead and remain the dominant actor in that asset. I think a lot of value is derived from just being the first mover, basically. Right, right.

Okay, and one more if I may, Curtis, please. I'm just curious of the 25 new products you're rolling out, How would you characterize them? And are they primarily going to be bringing existing products to new geographies?

Or as you were just talking about... Those will all be unique new products, right? So that's not... Our 100 products by year end is not accounting for potentially kind of, you know, 200 products that we would be listing in Africa. So it could, you know, potentially be, you know, when regulatory approvals are in place, there could be 300 products by year end. Theoretically, right? But we're characterizing these as independently unique coins that we monitor. We have feedback from our client base. We kind of hear things in the community and due to kind of our regulatory purview. in specific European market jurisdictions that we operate in, we have kind of, I would say, kind of a monopoly globally on smaller coins being rolled out and then passported to other jurisdictions globally that no one else can really do in a very quick and efficient timeframe. That could obviously change, but for the moment, you know, that that's where we're, we're kind of, I think going to see a large portion of growth. And I think, you know, what we've, you know, what, you know, Johan touched on earlier was, you know, similar to kind of equity markets. You have kind of, you know, blue chip bull markets that rotate into small caps, um, Bitcoin and Ethereum being kind of the blue chips of crypto. And then you see kind of rotations into kind of smaller coins, um, I would say the crypto crowd has been calling alt season for seven or eight years. So that's where I think we're gonna see kind of new adoption, new technologies. We're gonna be the first to market in a bunch of different geographies with these new verticals growth and revenue historically being the largest driver for Valor and DeFi as a company.

Perfect. Well, thank you, gentlemen. I appreciate you letting me tag on the end too, Curtis. Thanks very much. Yeah, Mike, we had to get you in. We missed you the last couple of times and I apologize for that. No problem. You guys have a great weekend. Thanks very much. Thanks, Kevin.

All right. I think we answered a lot of the questions from shareholders in the conversation. If you do have any follow-up questions, as always, Andrew and myself are always widely available. You can email ir.defi.tech, curtis.defi.tech, or andrew.defi.tech. bother me first because Andrew is on the road trying to expand our offerings. Thank you all so much for joining today. I know the share price isn't a reflection of how we're executing currently, but look at all the institutions that are coming in. We have high conviction that we're going to outperform this year. There's a lot on the radar for us coming forward. And thank you for your time and for your loyalty as well. Thanks, folks, and look forward to catching up with you in Q3.