MARA Holdings, Inc.

Good day, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to Marathon Digital Holdings' first quarter 2022 earnings webcast and conference call. I would now like to turn the call over to your host, Charlie Schumacher, Vice President of Corporate Communications. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Taryn. Hello, everyone, and welcome to Marathon Digital Holdings' inaugural earnings call. Today, we'll be reviewing our results for the first quarter, ended March 31, 2022. We will begin with some prepared remarks from our Chairman and CEO, Fred Thiel, and our CFO, Hugh Gallagher. After their prepared remarks, we will be taking questions from our covering analysts. Before we start, a few reminders. I would like to remind you all that in this call, management's prepared remarks contain forward-looking statements, which are subject to risks and uncertainties, and management may make additional forward-looking statements during the question and answer session. These forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties, and actual results may differ materially. When used in this call, the words anticipate, could, enable, estimate, intend, expect, believe, potential, will, should, project, and similar expressions as they relate to Marathon Digital Holdings are, as such, a forward-looking statement. Please refer to our earnings release for a full recitation of our forward-looking statements. Investors are cautioned that all forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties, which may cause actual results to differ from those anticipated by Marathon at this time. In addition, other risks are more fully described in Marathon's public filings with USC Securities and Exchange Commission, which can be reviewed at www.sec.gov. Finally, please note that on today's call, management will refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures in which Marathon excludes certain expenses from its GAAP financial results. Please refer to our company's periodic reports on Form 10-K and 10-Q for full reconciliation of its non-GAAP performance measures to the most comparable GAAP financial measures. Once again, this call in its entirety is being webcast on our Investor Relations website. A replay of this webcast will also be available on our website shortly. And with that covered, I'm going to turn it over to Fred to kick things off. Fred?

Good afternoon, everybody. Thank you all for taking the time to join us today for our first earnings call. Marathon is a mission-driven company. Our purpose is to secure and support the development of the world's monetary network, which is the Bitcoin ecosystem. Today, we're supporting the adoption, security, and evolution of Bitcoin by building one of the largest, most agile, and most sustainably operated Bitcoin mining operations in the world. Miners like Marathon are essential, base layer infrastructure that enable Bitcoin to be distributed, trustless, and secure. We perform a service to the network, and for performing that service, we have the opportunity to earn Bitcoin. We operate in a nascent industry that has the potential to dematerialize traditional finance in the same way the internet dematerialized communications. And we believe the opportunity for innovation and value creation are immense. We believe 2022 will be transformational for Marathon, as we're in the process of deploying nearly 200,000 miners. growing to represent potentially 7% of the total Bitcoin mining network and transitioning our operations to be 100% carbon neutral. And to kick things off, we started the year with our most productive quarter to date in terms of Bitcoin produced. Some highlights from Q1. In Q1, we increased our Bitcoin production 556% year over year and 15% sequentially and produced a record 1,259 Bitcoin in the quarter, In dollars, this translates to $51.7 million in revenue for Q1, which is a 465% increase from Q1 of last year. The improvements in our Bitcoin production were tapered by the fact that the global hash rate increased by approximately 17% during the first quarter of this year. Holding the global hash rate and difficulty rates constant from the end of Q4, we would have produced approximately 1,282 Bitcoin in the first quarter. As of March 31st, we held 9,374 Bitcoin, and as you can tell from our monthly production reports, that number continues to grow as we hodl all the Bitcoin produced, solidifying our position as one of the largest holders of Bitcoin among publicly traded companies. Some strategic and operational highlights. In Q1, we made substantial progress strengthening Marathon's competitive advantages to expand our position as the leading Bitcoin miner in North America. A year ago, when I transitioned from the board of directors to become CEO, we had 12,000 miners operating. Our hash rate was 1.3 exahash, and Marathon consisted of four full-time employees. Today, we have approximately 37,000 miners installed. Our hash rate is more than three times higher, and we have 15 full-time employees, most of whom are in senior-level positions that extend across technology, operations, strategy, and finance. Our philosophy is to maximize intellectual capital in-house, test everything, and then outsource the muscle of our operation. This industry is evolving quickly, and we want to be agile and informed so that we can effectively adapt to changing circumstances and capitalize on new opportunities as they present themselves in hardware, firmware, immersion, Layer 2 protocols like Lightning, and elsewhere. In regards to deployment, and perhaps most important, in Q1, we began deploying with our hosting partner, Compute North, at their new facilities in Texas. We increased our hash rate 15% from the prior quarter, which drove our record BTC production, but the timeline has admittedly shifted from the original targets we set for ourselves. Deploying and effectively operating miners, which drives our hash rate and our Bitcoin production, is our primary focus at Marathon today. However, before discussing our deployments and outlook for the rest of 2022 in detail, I'm going to turn it over to our new CFO, Hugh Gallagher, to discuss our financial results. Hugh?