Voyager Therapeutics, Inc.

Good day and welcome to this Voyager Digital fiscal year third quarter 2022 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in the listen-only mode. After the prepared remarks, we will conduct a question and answer session. In order to ask a question or make a comment, please press the star key followed by the one on your touchtone phone at any time. Questions will be taken in the order they are received. At this time, I'd like to turn the call over to Kevin Rodriguez, Investor Relations at Voyager. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you, operator. I'd like to welcome everyone to the Voyager Digital Limited Earnings Call. Today, we will be discussing our fiscal year 2022 third quarter results, which we announced prior to the market open this morning. On the call today are Steve Ehrlich, our Chief Executive Officer, and Evan Seropoulos, Chief Financial Officer. I would like to take a moment to direct investors to the investor relations section of our website at investwars.com, where we have posted our investor presentation and upcoming event schedule. Before we get started, I want to remind everyone that certain statements discussed on this call are based on information as of today, May 16th. It may contain forward-looking statements which are subject to risk and uncertainty. And given our limited operating history, market volatility, and unprecedented industry growth, Trends can materially deviate from today's level. Actual results could differ materially from our forward-looking statements if any of our key assumptions discussed in today's earnings press release and the comments made during this conference call or in our latest reports and CDAR filings, each of which can be found on our website, www.investforage.com, or under our profile at www.cdr.com are incorrect. The company has made assumptions that no significant events occur outside of the company's normal course of business and that current trends in adoption of crypto assets continue. Listeners are cautioned that assets on platforms, revenues, and trading volumes fluctuate and may increase and decrease from time to time and that such fluctuations are beyond the company's control. We do not undertake any duty to update any forward-looking statements, except where required by law. Today's release also includes references to non-IFRS financial measures. You should refer to the information contained in the disclosures found in today's release, including the financial information and reconciliation of historical non-IFRS measures to the comparable IFRS financial measures. This call will touch on some guidance provided in our earnings press release issue today. I would encourage each of you to review the forward-looking statement, risk factor disclosure, and similar disclosures in today's press release. Please note the dollar amounts referenced are in U.S. dollars unless otherwise noted.

With that, let me turn over the call over to Steve Ehrlich, Voyager's co-founder and CEO. Thanks, Kevin, and thanks to everyone for joining this morning.

This morning, we announced that Voyager has obtained subscription agreements for a private placement and gross proceeds of approximately U.S. $60 million, led by Alameda Research, which was a follow-on investment from their strategic investment in October. We are excited to have them lead this round with additional investment from strategic investors and partners, including Galaxy Digital, Lock Damon, and Digital Currency Group. These participants are deep industry players who partner with Voyager as we pursue our goals to deliver quality execution, custody, staking, lending and borrowing, and will insist in our expansion into NFTs and Web3. This investment shows the dedication to and power in the Voyager model and how much these partners value the Voyager relationship. These funds raised through a pipe offering into our existing net liquidity position to give Voyager a position of over 225 million of available capital. Closing of this fundraise remains subject to customary closing conditions, including approval of the Toronto Stock Exchange. Voyager's strengthened liquidity position allows us to continue to grow our business, and together with the changes we continue to make in our cost structure, puts the company in a strong industry position to weather any protracted market slowdowns going forward. On our last call, I noted that we were aggressively working to turn our rewards program from a marketing cost to a profit center. I am happy to report that change is underway as we adjusted the program on May 1st to significantly improve profitability for the June quarter and moving forward. As the marketing landscape continues to change, we are using our collective years of experience to continue to develop cost-effective programs and intend to make additional changes to maximize capital efficiency and continually optimize our cost per account acquisition. The company has also begun a strategic review of all expenses and is committed to reducing expenses to keep the business streamlined and efficient in both expanding and contracting crypto markets. We think these changes will deliver profitable quarters even as we face market headwinds. The past week has been one of extreme volatility. Before I discuss our metrics and give an update on the business, I want to address a few specific related to recent events in the crypto market. First, we never listed the UST coin as we were never comfortable with the algorithmic stable coin. For coin to be listed on our platform, it goes to an intensive legal, business, and operational review process. In not listing UST, you've protected many customers. Not all stablecoins are created equal. We operate using the USDC for customers, which in my view is the only true stablecoin as it is backed by a full reserve of U.S. dollars and short-term U.S. treasuries, with a monthly attestation performed by Grant Thornton, one of the leading public accounting firms. We also spoke to all of our counterparties on lending and verified that there were no issues. In the past, we've had questions from investors about one counterparty, and as of today, we have no exposure to that counterparty. All Voyager customer U.S. dollar balances are held by our banking partner, Metropolitan Commercial Bank, and our SDI insured up to $250,000. We are a customer-focused business and therefore concentrate on the safety and security of customer assets. And lastly, over the past week, we have seen a significant increase in trading volume and account growth. Now, for our industry as a whole, the March quarter kicked off a challenging macroeconomic environment and lower trading volumes. But Voyager continued to deliver customer account and net deposit growth, build on our revenue diversification strategy, and expand our coin and product offering. Despite the challenging operating conditions in the quarter, customer engagement on the Voyager platform remained healthy. We had over 1 million unique users engaged with the Voyager app during the quarter. representing almost 30% of our 3.5 million registered users. And while we saw an overall decrease in trading volumes, 25% of our nearly 1.2 million funded accounts executed a trade in the quarter, all through our award-winning mobile app as we added another 28 coins, reaching over 100 coins available for trading. These key metrics are something I get very excited about. as they are strong indicators of the level of engagement that Voyager customers have with our platform. We also saw a significant growth in our USDC balances, and we believe many of these customers hold USDC while they wait for trading opportunities. A similar pattern in 2001 in the online brokerage industry, as consumers sold their equity positions, held the balances in dollars. They then redeployed those dollars later to reengage in the next bull market run. Same pattern you see right now with a significant expansion of USDC being held by customers. I saw this in the internet bubble burst in 2001, and I saw it start again this past week. Back in the September quarter, I discussed Voyager's commitment to staking, which is at the forefront of our diversification model. We are now staking 12 coins through our partners with plans to add more this quarter. As we continue to grow the staking program, Our average revenue per account, our ARPU, will continue to grow. The monthly ARPU for the quarter was approximately $24 per account in the lower transactional volume market, which annualizes to $288, delivering a return on our marketing dollars of approximately 10 months, demonstrating the effectiveness of our marketing program. Our app consistently ranks high among crypto-first apps and what we believe is the most competitive category in the app store. And we recently won some significant awards, including top ten most innovative personal financial finance company for 2022 from Fast Company and top 100 fastest growing online brands in the US from SimilarWeb. We believe our success and growth and engagement stems from our commitment to disciplined and data driven marketing spend. We think the best way to engage new users and to grow the crypto ecosystem is thoughtful marketing that engages and educates new customers. With that in mind, we recently launched our Crypto for All campaign that brings more humanity and accessibility to the world of crypto as it appeals to a mass audience. The campaign features Voyager customers from a variety of backgrounds sharing their thoughts and experiences with crypto and Voyager, highlighting transparency, inclusivity, freedom, and opportunity.

We've seen great results so far and are very pleased with the level of engagement. Calendar year 2022 is all about product delivery.

Already this year, we have launched our popular moon mode and have onboarded customers to the beta programs for both our debit card and our desktop app. The debit card beta program is going well. We are seeing high engagement and learning more about user behavior. Based on the success of this beta program, we are pleased to announce that our issuing bank partner, Metropolitan Commercial Bank, and our program manager, UCO, have agreed to move to full widespread launch. As we onboard the waitlist of approximately 200,000 users through the remainder of this quarter, We will obtain significant data that we can then utilize to deliver an even deeper and more robust Voyager loyalty program based on the very popular BGX token. The next upgrade to the Voyager loyalty program is in development and we have pre-announced that the base participation level will begin with only 50 BGX tokens held and will allow customers to advance to new levels by using the app and Voyager ecosystem. In addition to the delivery of debit cards, we anticipate a widely expanded deployment of the desktop app as well in the current quarter. The addition of the desktop, combined with more coins added to the platform, underscores our commitment to delivering more value to our customers. We were recently the first platform to launch eight coins, which helped drive both trading and customer acquisition. Our payments business has started to get some significant traction as we have added three payment service systems in the quarter. And we have added some major merchants to the system as well as launching our business platform, which has added a significant number of accounts in the quarter, growing 28% over the December quarter. This is all on top of the Coinify system being core to international expansion coming over the summer. Another area of activity I want to provide an update on is Voyage's venture investments. We strongly believe investing in the digital asset ecosystem. Over the last 12 months, we have made a number of equity investments in private companies. Previously disclosed investments include Fundstrat, who Voyager partners with on digital asset research, led by Tom Lee, CoinLedger, who Voyager partners with on tax preparation, and Talos, a cutting edge trading platform we use. We have also made some investments in companies that supply to have some of the infrastructure needed to support the business, such as SoCure, our KYC and Know Your Customer provider, UCO, our ACH provider, Endeavor card program manager, and BlockGammon, our node provider. The investments have grown in value since all initial investments. We're excited about the future. We believe participating in the financing rounds of select blockchain associated companies and infrastructure providers is not only a potentially lucrative investment activity, but also an effective way to stay fully current in a rapidly evolving crypto environment. Focus on venture investment activities. I'm happy to announce we recently formed a new subsidiary called Voyager Digital Ventures LLC. The subsidiary formation is only part of our ongoing efforts to further centralize and hone our investment activities. As you know, we spent calendar 2021 investing to create a truly scalable and more mature platform. The investments we've made and continue to make allow us to successfully build out our operations and strengthen our foundational core through automation, tooling and scalability, improvements, and continually improve our customer service. I truly am extremely grateful to be surrounded by such an amazing team, and it's extremely gratifying to see the progress we've made. I'd like to provide an update on the regulatory front. As we have shared in press releases, we have been in ongoing dialogue with regulators. Our businesses remain largely unaffected to date. Voyager's ongoing communications with these state regulators appear to better understand the terms of their respective orders and clarify certain statements in the orders that Voyager believes are inaccurate. It is Voyager's goal that these communications will result in a collaborative and constructive dialogue on an acceptable path forward. Voyager's discussions to date with the regulators demonstrate a willingness to work with Voyager to pursue a mutually acceptable regulatory framework. The company believes this provides an opportunity to contribute to the evolution of the regulatory framework for crypto, which is needed more than ever due to the unprecedented growth in the adoption of American consumers. Before we close, I would like to take this time to thank Mike Legg for all the work he has done in our investor relations role. Mike is moving on to pursue other endeavors, and Kevin Rodriguez will fill his role on an interim basis. Also, I am pleased to announce that Evan Siropoulos will be moving into a chief commercial officer role to help us build out our revenue diversification, as well as partner with our new CFO in creating cost efficiencies. And I am pleased to announce that Ashman Prithipal is our new Chief Financial Officer. Ash comes with years of experience, including being the former CFO of Galaxy Digital, and we are excited to have him on board. Ash's first day is today. In closing, we strongly believe that we are in the early stages of global crypto adoption, and there is an outstanding opportunity for Voyager to grow users and revenue as we execute our game plan. As part of this growth, we have a goal of returning the positive operating income after adding back stock-based compensation in early calendar 2023. Voyager is at the forefront of displacing traditional banks and brokerages through the use of digital assets, and I couldn't be more excited about our future. With that, I'll turn the call over to Evan to review the quarterly financial results in more detail.

Thank you, Steve, and thank you all for joining us today. As a reminder, all figures discussed on today's call are in U.S. dollars under IFRS. I will speak to our fiscal 2022 third quarter ended March 31, 2022. As Steve highlighted, our third quarter transaction revenue was impacted by significantly lower trading volume consistent with the rest of the industry. Our total revenue of $103 million is in line with our previously announced guidance of 100 to 105 million. Despite overall lower trading volumes, we continued to add new accounts to the platform with an increase of nearly 115,000 funded accounts in the quarter for a total of 1.2 million funded accounts. Overall assets on platform decreased slightly from $6 billion to $5.8 billion in the quarter due to overall lower crypto prices and offset by net new deposits of $574 million for the quarter. With respect to transaction revenue, in addition to overall lower volumes declining, our overall average spread, excluding stablecoins, decreased from 110 basis points in the December quarter to 92 basis points for the March quarter. In periods of lower volume and lower volatility, we see a heavier concentration of our transactions in Bitcoin and Ethereum. These major coins accounted for 37% of our non-stablecoin volume, compared to just 25% in the prior quarter. overall USDC customer balances grew $260 million, or 45% in the quarter. In periods of lower volatility, we see our customers moving more into USDC to earn yields in place of trading, which is a testament to the stickiness of our platform in retaining customer assets despite lower trading levels. Our combined lending and staking revenue totaled $45 million as we continue to make progress in maximizing yields with staking protocols. We continue to expect the staking business to outpace the lending portion of the revenue line item and expect to increase staking utilization of ETH going forward. It is important to note with recent news related to UST and LUNA, that Voyager does not have UST listed on the platform and has not placed any assets in any DeFi lending protocols, such as the Anchor platform. With lower trading volumes and a loss on a rewards program, we had an operating loss of $43 million or $37 million before stock-based compensation. As we move into the fourth quarter, we are making a concerted effort to tighten our spend across the board and have already made progress in narrowing this with the adjustment of our tiered rewards program to drive at least a break-even program. On overall liquidity, we finished the quarter with nearly $100 million in cash and adjusted working capital of $185 million. This concludes our prepared remarks. With that, I will now turn it over to our operator who will open the line for questions.

At this time, if you'd like to ask a question, please press the star and one on your touch-tone phone. You may remove yourself from the queue at any time by pressing the pound key. Once again, now the star and one to ask a question. We'll take our first question from George Sutton from Craig Hammond.

Thank you. It would seem, Steve, based on a couple things you said, that things could be challenging for the following reason. You mentioned you're maintaining very high ratings. in downloads, but you are also in the most competitive category in the app store. So can you help us with that versus now looking to pull back on expenses? What sort of things are you looking to try to accomplish in terms of key metrics?

Thanks, George, and thanks for being with us this morning. It is challenging. There is competition, but where we do set ourselves apart, and we always have, is a few places. One is the number of coins we have in our platform. And we've always said that the ability for consumers to have an easy to use platform, probably the best platform with all the coins and participating in the altcoin space with our platform is one of our big differentiators. That's one. Two is the debit card that's begun to roll out is another big differentiator as people can earn rewards on not just holding the USDC with us, but they earn rewards for the use of the platform. So we still think that the platform we have, even though it's more competitive, by being product differentiated with those two things, our expansion international will all make our metrics, which we still look at as that's an important metric is new accounts is our key metric, but we don't do it at all costs. And I think Pam and the team has done a great job we maximize the efficiency of our marketing program, which, again, sets us apart. So KPI for us, still a number of new accounts. The differentiated platform is how we really will set ourselves apart and drive cost efficiency. And our marketing dollars, as everybody else starts coming in, we seem to be very, very good at finding areas that others are not participating as well. And we find those places and become very cost effective as well. And then on the rest of our cost infrastructure, finding areas that, you know, I think it's imperative that as a company, whether it's us or anybody else, you're always looking at your cost structure to, you know, to find out how you could be more cost efficient. And we've made a concerted effort now to begin that as well.

One other question if I could. Given that the cease and desist came at the end of the quarter, Can you give us any perspective on how much impact the business might see from the cease and desist?

We've seen zero impact from the cease and desist. Business is as usual. We have and will continue to operate, as I said in the statement, is that we're working with each of the states, and they seem to be very open to working through all those orders.

Thanks, George. Our next question comes from Kyle Vogt from KBW.

On the regulation, you know, it sounds as though you're speaking to those individual states to create an acceptable path forward. However, can you confirm whether you're also speaking with the SEC about a path forward? And I guess given what we saw with BlockFi and their path forward that the SEC laid out with them in terms of the filing and registration statement, is that what investors should also be thinking about as a base case for how you could continue to offer the EARN program? Or is that not going to be necessary, do you think, given your conversation so far with the states and possibly with the SEC?

Well, Kyle, thanks for taking time this morning. Appreciate it. Look, we, as we've been saying for a long period of time, we've had ongoing conversations with all regulators as part of being in a regulated, you know, or in this case, an unregulated business, but being part of in a regulated business for 20-something years. The conversations with regulators are always ongoing. We don't believe, you know, we've said that in the statements too. We don't believe that these are securities what we offer. There are multiple paths. If the path that's determined is to register, then we have multiple ways to do that as well. So we're just going to keep having the conversation, but I don't think there's, you know, in my mind, there's a lot of paths forward here, and it not necessarily has to be registration.

Got it. Understood. Thank you very much. And then another follow up would just be, and sorry if I missed this in the prepared remarks, but just how quickly do you expect to see those rewards paid to customers move below the aggregate level of the staking and lending revenues? Seems like we're still firmly kind of in negative territory for fiscal third quarter. What can we expect to be kind of break even, if not maybe profitable on that as we head towards kind of year end?

Yeah, so we made adjustments in the program as of May 1st. We put a tiered rate structure in place. And so, you know, starting in May, we expect to be break even to profitable in May and June. So a lot also from how profitable or, or break even if it's based upon the far row market as well. But those inputs and those changes were made as of May 1st.

Understood.

And if I could just squeeze one more in, just over the past week, we think investors have become increasingly concerned about contagion risks stemming from Terra and stable coins more broadly. So I appreciate that. the prepared remarks around Tether. Can you also remind us how much of your lending activity is collateralized and if you expect that to change, or if you expect the trajectory of those lending balances to change as well? And I guess, given the uncertainty over the past week or two, did you call in any of those loan balances? Thank you.

Yeah, so it's disclosed in our financials, the number that's collateralized of the loans. There's collateral there. It's still a very small portion, as we've been saying, for the longest period of time. But the people we lend to are some of the biggest names in the industry. As we stated, too, we had conversations and verified there was no contagion with them. I had conversations with every single one of them. And since we limit who we lend to to these parties, we're really comfortable. We did not have to call anything in, and we had zero issues with any of our borrowers.

Great. Thanks, Steve. Thanks, Tom. Our next question comes from Joe Gomes from Noble Capital. Good morning. Hey, Joe.

So outside of the rewards program, what else are you looking at in order to try and cut on the expense side, as you said, to bring it more in line to where today's environment is?

Yeah, well, the rewards program itself will be savings of upwards of $15 million a quarter as well. And then in addition to that, It's just an overall review of all our expenses and, you know, where we can tighten our belt on that front. So it's an ongoing thing.

And just to add to a few areas, you know, we've grown so much in the past 18 months, as you know, and we were tied up with some contracts earlier on. So now we've achieved economies of scale and a lot of our contracts are coming up for renewal. So we'll be using that leverage that we have to apply that and, you We negotiate some of our key contracts.

Okay, great for that insight.

I appreciate it. And, you know, one more, Steve, maybe if you could just kind of, you know, give us obviously what's happened here in the past, you know, 10 days or so. I mean, what have you guys been seeing in terms of, you know, attracting new people to the platform over these years? interesting times, let's call it. I mean, is it just kind of come to a stop, just business as usual? Just any insight that you can kind of give us of what's been happening here, you know, kind of since the beginning of May would be appreciated. Thank you.

Yeah, May has started off to be a really good month for us here. We've seen in the last week, you know, tremendous activity on the platform. We've seen levels of account growth that were equal to some of the highest points of 2021. So we've seen some times here that we are a place where people go when they want to trade. And we've seen that customer acquisition pick up quite a bit, not go the other way in the last week. Now, we also have seen customers, you have different sets of customers, right? Subsets of customers. And there are a subset, as we mentioned, too, that in this volatility phase, they put their money into USDC. So we've seen USDC balances grow, but we've also seen a bunch of new accounts come on the platform and trade some of these coins that are pretty volatile.

Great. Thanks for that. I appreciate it. I'll get back in queue. Thank you.

Our next question comes from Adhira Kadhi from eCapital.

Good morning, guys. Thanks for taking my questions here. And my apologies if I may have missed this in your prepared remarks, but what I wanted to get into is just maybe in this more volatile market. I know you said you're going to cut a little bit of the spending, but I just wanted to think, how does that change your overall investment priorities?

Thanks. I appreciate the question.

I'm not sure I actually – the investment – Yeah, we're going to continue to invest in the business, but I think as Evan pointed out here too, we do have a bunch of contracts that have come up that we're renegotiating, getting more cost efficiencies out of that. As we've grown in scale, some of the infrastructure we have allows us to take advantage of scale of higher volume discounts. And then on top of it is the rewards program that we've now changed and turned into from being a call center, to a profit center. Those are three main ways that we're, but we're not going to stop investing in the business, we feel that the way we can spend marketing dollars, we were going to be more efficient than the competition. And we have been for the longest period of time, and we're going to we have found other ways to market that others haven't yet. And we're going to continue to be most efficient as we can with with the capital.

Okay, great. And then are you finding that user acquisition is slightly different in this environment as well, or is that kind of just steady path that you guys are really leveraging your brand to kind of get out to the word to users?

Yeah, you know, the cost, as we said in the statement as well, is that, you know, our pool is about $288 on an annual basis, and we're getting that paid back in 10 months or less. And that was through the March quarter, which didn't have a lot of volume and wasn't all that volatile. We've seen a pickup in volume and a pickup of our effectiveness of our marketing, again, in May. And, again, volume and volatility drive a lot and help us drive the cost down. But the other thing that we've started to do is we probably have the strongest crypto community in the industry. And we're leveraging that community to help drive the cost down. And with our new Voyager loyalty program 2.0 coming out with some of the benefits that consumers get for referrals and using the platform and then throwing the debit card on that as well, we have so many effective ways to drive the marketing cost and the CPA down. That gets me so excited about this business because we're starting to see it. I mean, you can go onto social media and Twitter and see everybody posting the use of the debit card. What better way to use marketing than to have customers, you know, help you out? and support you and bring that. I mean, it's all over Twitter these days with people using their debit card. And we've got just a small fraction of the 200,000 people using that debit card. Just imagine what's going to happen when this debit card gets in 200,000 people's hands over the rest of the quarter.

No, that's definitely true. Something to look forward to. Thanks a lot, guys. I'll pass it on. Thanks, video.

And once again, that is star and one to ask a question. We'll take our next question from Chris Allen from CompassPoint.

Good morning. Thanks for taking my question. I just want to follow up. You are stating that you're seeing account growth in May, which to me is kind of shocking in the current environment. And anecdotally, I've been talking to people who have trouble they're having trouble liquidating assets on your platform and actually taking them out of your platform. So I just want to confirm that. And the activity that you're seeing from a trading perspective, are you seeing people actually putting money to work in crypto or are they liquidating positions and moving to cash or to stable cards?

Yeah, we're seeing a whole bunch of things. And I don't think anyone has had any issues with taking money and or moving coins off the platform at all on our platform. Customers are really active on our platform. The platform, knock on wood here, when every other platform went down in the last week, we didn't go down. It's a testament to Rakesh and the team and the work that we put into scaling the business over 2021. It slowed down a little bit of the product development because we had to scale this business, and it's proven to fruition right now. We've picked up accounts. We've said this all along. that our business is bigger and deeper than just Bitcoin and Ethereum. And by having coins that are active in the marketplace that are volatile, that we're seeing people trade on our platform, these coins, and we've seen a lot of active trading in the last week. So we've always been on this mission to bring the accessibility of more than two coins and more than five coins or six coins to the retail consumer We've done that. We're seeing people trade a lot. We are seeing a group of customers that are retreating, but leaving their money in USD, which is FDI insured up to $250,000 on our platform, just like any other bank. You know, any cash you hold with us has that FDIC insurance. Plus then we have USDC that people are getting the rewards on that on the USDC as well. So we're seeing multiple touch points and multiple activities from various groups of customers. And again, I think the last piece is, and this is all being done, and we've never listed UST. So we have all the other coins we have on the platform. They're active again. There's an activity spike happening in May, and we're taking advantage of it. And our customers are taking advantage of the ease of use of our platform to trade on our platform.

But then why are you cutting costs and raising capital?

Look, we want to from... From a raising capital perspective, these are some of the best names in the industry that wanted to be part of Voyager and expand their relationship with Voyager. And they're going to help us grow. We're adding more extensions on staking, more extensions on execution, the assistance in getting us into NFTs and Web3. These are some of the best names that wanted to be part of Voyager and help us grow the business. So we felt it was a really opportune time for us to do that. uh show the market how important and how we're growing and how voyager is you know is one of the top crypto companies in the us and that's before we even get into our international expansion and coming cost is always something every good smart company should do and we're just to do that we're going to make sure with a drive to profitability you know we want to get to break even so we're looking at every single cost we've gone through all our contracts as evan mentioned The ability for us to renegotiate because of our scale is all at the top of mind.

And the last one for me, you're telling your chain your rewards program to bring it to break even. Historically, one of your arguments for why you would avoid being classified as securities there is because you lost money on it. So when you're bringing it to break even, does that entail a risk now with the SEC to be classified more as a security?

We don't think that has, you know, that has much of a bearing in this point in time. We've also looked at the rates across industry and where we can. And, you know, we're comfortable with our analysis on the program and where it is and that it's not a security. And we'll continue to move forward that way. I want to also add one other thing on, you know, on the capital too and the capital raise is, Yeah, we're having a good May, but there is uncertain times. And to have even more capital on our balance sheet, you know, from strategic investors puts us in a really good spot.

Thanks, Chris. Thanks, Chris. And we do have a follow-up question from Kyle Voigt from KBW.

Hey, thank you. Yeah, I just wanted to follow up on the cost discussion. and really around the operating environment, if this remains challenging for a prolonged period, or we're kind of really entering this kind of next crypto winter, is there a specific number for kind of the maximum cash firm that we should really be thinking about per quarter? And I know it doesn't sound like this quarter there's as much concern because we already right-sized the rewards program. It sounds like the activity's been generally fairly good, Again, if we're kind of in a prolonged, you know, more challenging operating environment.

You know, with $225 million of capital in a challenging environment, if there was, you know, a March-type quarter of lack of volume and volatility, we still, with the $225 million of capital, we're extremely comfortable that we can operate our business and grow our business for well into 2023 and 2024. We have lots of capital now to continue to grow and be able to execute our game plan.

We've seen it. One thing I want to say is we've seen it before.

This team has seen it before. I've been through this at E-Trade in 2001 and my own business at Lightspeed in 2008 when market environments get challenging. You buckle down, you prepare for the worst and you just figure out how you're gonna grow and continue to grow the business. And then even in 2020, when we had a little crypto, you buckle down, we figure it out and we feel like where we are today, we're good for the next couple of years with the capital we have. So I'm really excited about getting this raise done and having these great partners with us and where this business is gonna go.

And this does conclude the question and answer session. I will now turn the program back over to Steve for any additional or closing remarks.

Yeah, I just want to say thank you again to everyone for joining us this morning. We're really excited, if you can't tell, about our business and how it's moving forward. And lastly, to one of our partners in our brand and our sports sponsorship partners, congrats to our friends over at the Dallas Mavericks and Mark Cuban for pulling off a historical win last night and look forward to participating with them as they keep moving on. So thanks to everybody. Appreciate the time today and speak to everyone soon.

This does conclude today's program. Thank you for your participation. You may disconnect at this time. Have a great day.