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spk01: Let's go, thank you.
spk00: I think so, yeah. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Good afternoon and welcome to the DMG Blockchain Solutions Q3 2024 update conference call. Participants on this call are advised that the audio of this conference call is being broadcast live over the internet and is also being recorded for playback purposes. A webcast replay of the call will be available on the company's website. Joining us today from DMG Blockchain Solution is Sheldon Bennett, the company's chief executive officer, and Stephen Alisu, chief operating officer. During this call, management will be making forward-looking statements, including statements that address DMG blockchain solutions expectations for future performance or operational results. Forward-looking statements involve risks and other factors that may cause actual results to differ materially from those statements. For more information about these risks, please refer to the risk factors described in DMG Blockchain Solutions' most recently filed periodic reports and the company's press releases, particularly the cautionary statements within. The content of this call contains time-sensitive information that is accurate only as of today, August 27, 2024. Except as required by law, DMG Solutions' disclaimed any obligation to publicly update or revise any information to reflect events or circumstances that occur after this call. It is now my pleasure to turn the call over to Sheldon and Stephen. Sheldon.
spk02: Thank you, Louis, and good afternoon, and thanks to everyone who has joined the call today. My name is Sheldon Bennett, and I am the CEO and founder of DMG Blockchain Solutions. With a similar format as recent quarters, first I will provide an overview of the company's achievements in the past quarter. I will then pass the call to Steven who will review the company's performance. We will end the call with our Q&A session based on questions submitted to us prior to the call, as well as those from using the Zoom chat function. So now to highlight our recent achievements. First, regarding our core plus strategy, which is DMG's software strategy. As an update on Systemic Trust, we achieved a major milestone towards building a qualified digital asset custodian. On August 6, 2024, we received approval from the Alberta Treasury Board for the incorporation of Systemic Trust, a wholly owned subsidiary of DMG. Systemic Trust is now working with the Alberta Treasury Board to obtain a certificate of registration that will enable them to provide secure custody of digital assets to third parties. Our target remains to achieve this goal by the end of this calendar year. Although we are dependent on the regulatory body's ability to approve our application, we also expect to receive SOC 2 certification next month. DMG plans to utilize this platform to store some of its Bitcoin in Systemic Trust cold storage wallets while waiting for final regulatory approval. Systemic Trust is a centerpiece of DMG's Core Plus strategy and gives us the vehicle by which institutions can hold and transact carbon neutral Bitcoin. We are encouraged by the Systemic Trust team's pace combined with our own software team's pace who have delivered from scratch this year, an institutionally ready platform that is now going through the regulatory review process. Next on TerraPool. For TerraPool, we have utilized the best practices of our software team, which they developed for systemic trust to revamp out our TerraPool software, sporting both a fresh new UI and highly scalable enterprise grade backend that should be SOC 2 type 2 compliant soon. Like other major pools, it pays out utilizing FPPS, which is full paper share with competitive fees. A key benefit of TerraPool is that miners on our pool will be able to mine carbon neutral Bitcoin, which we believe may sell at a premium. We also believe there are many additional revenue opportunities for TerraPool members, exemplified by our collaboration with PayPal, where an additional bounty on top of the standard transaction fees that can only be unlocked by carbon neutral pools can be split among pool members. Regarding our relationship with PayPal, as the original collaboration was a proof of concept, we are continuing to work together to help them deploy a successor version of this proof of concept for institutional applications. As well, Helm has been our internal line management software platform that is also being revamped to enable rules-based facility management. While this concept isn't new, what DMG will bring to TerraPool members is highly scalable mine management software that is built on a modern tech stack, supporting even the largest mine operations. We expect an initial version of this expanded vision later this year. BlockSeer Explorer, which was the first and original software we acquired when purchasing blocks here back in 2018 is being rebuilt to be a general purpose Bitcoin Explorer with free downloadable reports with targeted availability in late calendar 2024. Subsequently, we plan to recreate the functionality of the original Explorer used by law enforcement to be able to search the Bitcoin blockchain and report transactions between wallets. We continue to see Bosonic as an element of our ecosystem, but given our custody business model, we expect to be partnering not only with Bosonic, but also with many exchanges, which will enable volume and liquidity through systemic trusts. The goal of these efforts is to build a carbon neutral ecosystem where TerraPool supplies carbon neutral blocks, which in turn are to be filled by transactions from financial institutions and ordinal content providers. Next, regarding our core strategy, which is our Bitcoin mining. During the June quarter, we had a realized hash rate of 0.95 exahash, down 2% sequentially, with a fleet efficiency of 25.6 jewels, as measured from our substation, an improvement of 11% sequentially. We mined 87 Bitcoin, down 42% sequentially, as we were impacted by the halving that occurred on April 20th, compounded by a 10% difficulty increase. As the network produced about 94 Bitcoins per exahash in the quarter, down 41% sequentially, our Bitcoin production was in line with expectations based on our realized hashrate. While we originally targeted to have our 4,550 Bitmain T21 miners installed in June, which was then pushed out to July and then August, to date we have energized about 40% of our new mining fleet producing about 0.35x a hash and have optimized our legacy fleet to run in the lowest power mode to best deal with the summer heat producing about 0.75x a hash or in total 1.1x a hash. Most of the balance of our T21 miners are racked in containers awaiting connection to our distribution line, to which we added an extension on our Christina Lake property. We still believe we can reach our goal of 1.7x a hash at an efficiency of 23 joules per terahash by the end of this quarter when we energize the balance of the T21 miners and operate our legacy fleet at a slightly higher power consumption, producing about 0.85x a hash. As we have stated in a recent press release, we have seen modest dips of hash rate on warm days. As we enter cooler weather periods, this should have a limited impact by quarter end. The cause of our T21 development delay has been the result of a fragmented supply chain composed of a plethora of suppliers and contractors who have served us well in the past but are susceptible to supply chain issues as North American electrical power is in greater demand. Going forward, we plan to A, source turnkey solutions that include pre-assembled transformer units containing all required circuit breakers needed to interface directly with our mining containers. B, for containerized mining, we are now likely to purchase off-the-shelf solutions rather than engineer them ourselves as we have done in the past. We've had great success with the Bitmain and boxes that we have deployed for housing most of our T21 fleet, and we will likely utilize similar solutions from Bitmain or other vendors going forward. C, we will also be more careful ensuring improved procurement of components related to our distribution lines, as lead times for mainly mundane components are the double-digit weeks. D, as we need to stay competitive and while the engineering of power distribution between a transmission line and individual mining rig still requires a substantial amount of expertise the capabilities of what supply chain can offer has evolved and we will be capitalizing on this evolution What is exciting about this is that we can now source custom transmission infrastructure equipment in less than six months and the distribution infrastructure in about three months, which will enable us to deploy much faster than we have historically. Of course, all of this is dependent on receiving approvals from utilities and regulators. Compressing timelines with them remains a challenge. We also stated last quarter that we would be bringing on additional staff who are highly experienced in Bitcoin mining equipment repairs. These individuals have been onboarded, and as a result, we are making good progress with performing all of our maintenance work in-house. We plan to exit our financial year with incremental hash rate improvements as a result of their work that is well underway. As we go forward, the staff will be focused on maximizing the output of our largely depreciated legacy fleet while ensuring high uptime of our new fleet. Additionally, we have put the brakes on our immersion cooling employment and are focusing on hydro equipment. We made this change as One, we see a notable maturing of both hydro infrastructure as well as mining equipment, which is now being offered with the industry's highest miner efficiency, along with a dozen or so containerized turnkey solutions in miner racking. B, the momentum for AI equipment is to utilize direct liquid cooling, or DLC as the acronym, for the highest density next-generation systems from NVIDIA and AMD. We believe Hydro or DLC becomes a harmonizing cooling technology for all next-generation high-performance computing data centers, whether they be Bitcoin mining or generative AI. We are currently in discussions with both minor vendors and container vendors and expect to make a purchase of the 12 megawatts originally targeted for immersion this fall for target installation by early calendar 2025. Assuming we purchase equipment with 16 joules per terahash efficiency, this translates to an additional 0.75 exahash of new hashrate. To support long-term expansion, DMG continues to have ongoing discussions with multiple parties about new sites for both Bitcoin mining as well as AI data center applications. On May 15th, 2023, DMG announced it entered into a non-binding agreement that will result in development of a new data center with low cost power and renewable power located in Canada in a province outside of British Columbia. While working towards a definitive agreement, DMG is actively planning the manufacturing of power distribution infrastructure, land preparation, and utility transmission interconnection. Now for a summary of our strategy. First, Core Plus. On our year-end 2023 earnings call, we highlighted how we were focused on executing our Core Plus strategy. As we have reached major milestones on systemic trust with both the first major stage of regulatory approvals, as well as software execution, we hope to have demonstrated the first of many wins on the execution front for which we are focused on turning into revenue. This is a huge change for DMG. And as we are clear as to what we want to accomplish in software and have the team two in place to execute, we're optimistic that 2024 will be a pivotal year towards realizing our core plus vision. For DMG's core mining strategy, We have elaborated at length some of our recent misses and our vision as to how we can grow at the leading edge to reach 3x hash in 2025. A key change has been that as the network hash rate continues to climb, despite the less favorable economics post happening, we know that it will become an increasingly and relentlessly capital intensive business. Accordingly, we are seeing the need to access the capital markets. Given our relative strength, we believe we are in a good position to raise capital and as such have filed a 400 million base shelf registration. We want to signal to the markets that not only do we have a plan to reach 3x a hash in the next year, but also we are here to stay as a Bitcoin miner and potentially in the future provide AI co-location and cloud services. We plan to use a disciplined approach to capital raising that avoids massive 10 or 20x dilution that we have seen from some of our peers. We plan to raise capital with very well-defined and specific uses of capital to drive revenue growth. We do not plan to raise capital to buy Bitcoin, as investors already have access to spotty Bitcoin ETFs. And as we have previously indicated, we expect our Bitcoin balance to become a smaller portion of our overall asset base over time. We have covered a lot of ground here today. And even as we are being very ambitious and our goals remain focused as to what we want to accomplish. Now I'll hand it over to Stephen to review the company's performance.
spk01: Thank you, Sheldon. I'm Steve Eliskew, DMG COO. Now a few words about the company's overall position. In the June quarter, our cash plus Bitcoin balance was $39.6 million, a decrease of 9% sequentially and up 76% year over year. We have utilized about half of our Bitcoin balance as collateral for our Signum Bank credit facility, which we utilize specifically for the purpose of purchasing our Bitmain T21 mining fleet. For our mining operation, our near-term focus has been deploying our fleet expansion. It is important for investors to understand that even as our execution on this deployment has missed our target, we have evolved our approach to working with the supply chain in a way that should speed up future deployments. While revenue expansion is important, it must be done at a cost level that can result in a solid return on investment. To manage mining costs, we are focused on driving fleet efficiency from its recent level of 28.4 joules a terahash to 23 soon, and then down to the range of 20 or below next year. As newer generation mining equipment, later in calendar 2025, As expected to have efficiencies of under 10 joules a terahash, we want to incrementally add to our fleet while retiring older miners so that on a blended basis, our overall efficiency remains competitive, especially as we know that network hash rate is going to continue to rise. Now for a few words on AI. We know that tier three data centers, which are required for most AI applications, demand a level of uptime that requires a substantially more robust power distribution infrastructure than Bitcoin mining. We are currently investigating what it would take to enable our Christina Lake facility to support becoming an AI data center. We believe the transmission infrastructure feeding our Christina Lake substation is supportive of the uptime required for a tier three data center. As we own our own substation, we understand what upgrades we will need to do to implement redundancy and believe we can make these upgrades in under a year at a reasonable cost. Finally, we have access to multiple 40 gig fiber lines that can provide us network redundancy. As we progress in this investigation, we will keep you up to date. Now to review our financial results. In our June quarter, our revenue decreased 17% to 8.3 million, down from 10 million in the prior quarter, due mainly to the drop in self-mining revenue, which decreased 11%. The 25% higher realized Bitcoin price was more than offset by the 42% drop in Bitcoin production due to the halving. On a year-over-year basis, revenue increased 11% from $7.5 million on a 5% increase in self-mining revenue. Our hosting revenue increased 5% sequentially to $0.3 million in our June quarter. We expect hosting revenue to decline to near zero over the next several quarters as our existing customers retire their fleets and we utilize our capacity for self-mining. Net pool revenue is minus 55K in the June quarter as we utilize TerraPool for a short period of time to have a chance of solving for block 840,000, which ultimately netted the winner nearly 5 million US in fees and auction value of the Epic Satoshi. Operating and maintenance costs decreased 11% to $4.7 million from the prior quarter. This metric mirrors the 11% increase in fleet efficiency to 25.6 joules a terahash, as our hash rate only declined slightly. Our margin percentage on our revenue less operating and maintenance costs was 44%. in the June quarter, down from 47% the prior quarter. And our energy costs to mine a Bitcoin was about 35,000 U.S., As a proxy for cash flow from our business, which assumes we're selling about 100% of our generated Bitcoin, our earnings before other items excluding depreciation and amortization and stock-based comp was 1.5 million or 19% on a percentage basis in the June quarter, down from 2.4 million and 24% in the prior quarter. Our cash flow from operations was minus 1.3 million in the June quarter, versus $4.5 million in the prior quarter. Non-mine expenses excluding depreciation, amortization, and stock-based comp were $2.1 million in the June quarter, down 11% from the prior quarter of $2.3 million. As previously guided, expenses will be somewhat more elevated in the current year as we're making more substantial investments in our Core Plus strategy. The main driver of increased Core Plus expenses is the build out of systemic trust. We're also incurring interest on our Signum bank loan, which is reflected in the interest and bank charges category. Regarding guidance excluding interest, we continue to expect non-mining expenses to be in the range of one and a half to two million per quarter. Last quarter was in the middle of that guidance. Depreciation expense of 5 million in the June quarter increased 32% from the prior quarter as we began to depreciate the new T21 mining fleet. Our earnings before other items was minus 4 million in the June quarter versus minus 1.8 million the prior quarter. Our net income was minus 3.8 million or 2 cent loss per share versus breakeven the prior quarter. Regarding our balance sheet, our cash plus digital currency holdings decreased 9% sequentially to 39.6 million as the value of our Bitcoin held at respective quarter ends decreased 11%. The value of our property and equipment and long-term deposits decreased slightly to 60.8 million from 61.3 the prior quarter. Note that even as we began depreciating last quarter, the new T21 fleet purchased for 12.1 million US, we spent the cash on the fleet in the prior quarter and hence the small sequential change. Accordingly, our total asset base decreased 6% to $111.4 million from $118.4 million the prior quarter. In the June quarter, DMG sold nearly 69 Bitcoin, generating $6.4 million of cash. Thus, we sold 79% of the Bitcoin amount mined versus the prior quarter of selling 92%. As a treasury policy, investors should continue to expect us to sell most or all of the Bitcoin we mine. Regarding raising new capital, we are actively exploring several options. As we are focused on our 12 megawatt hydro deployment and infrastructure deployment for our new site this calendar year, we expect fundraising developments in the near term. I will now hand the call back to Sheldon to summarize our prepared comments and we will answer questions. Sheldon.
spk02: Thank you, Stephen. To reiterate our key results and outlook, in summary, we are positioning the company for hash rate growth with a focus on hydro direct liquid cooling technology, but our spending is also being directed to establish and grow our core plus business. We have achieved a significant milestone towards systemic trust becoming a qualified custodian, and we are focused near term on our carbon neutral pool, TerraPool. We are committed to our core plus strategy and are building a software that will enable us to execute the strategy. DMG mined 87 Bitcoin in the June quarter on a hash rate of 0.95 exahash and a fleet efficiency of 25.6 joules per terahash. We are positioning ourselves to grow to 3 exahash in 2025. Cash and digital currency at quarter end was 39.6 million with total assets of 111 million. As a proxy for cash flow from our business, earnings before other items, excluding depreciation and amortization and stock-based comp, was $1.5 million, or 19%. On a net income basis, we swung from break-even to a $0.02 per share loss, but we have in place growth initiatives that can return us to profitability. As we have provided a lot of detail on this call, I want to continue to maintain transparency as we believe in the strategy and the ecosystem we are building. We said at the beginning of this calendar year that we would fix our software execution and since then we have demonstrated results. From our mining deployments, we have been open that we have had execution issues and we're putting in place a supply chain strategy to enable us to improve We appreciate your continued support. So now on to our Q&A session. We received many questions throughout the last few days. As we normally do, Steve and I split the questions up a little bit, depending on what they're about. We have a dozen or so questions. So I'll get right into it. First question, what kind of timeframe is related revenue? So this is a great question. There's a lot of discussion about AI in the industry and crypto miners getting involved in AI. Realistically, it's sort of a two to three year process. You know, obviously, DMG, we would look at partners that are in the AI space to help us deploy infrastructure and connecting infrastructure with you know, users of AI resources. Given that we're just at the beginning of this, you know, we would first look at making upgrades to our transmission infrastructure at Christina Lake. As Stephen mentioned earlier, we've already looked into some of this infrastructure, some of the timelines for that infrastructure upgrade, as well as the Fiverr side of what is needed in a data uh high band fiber connections um christina lake uh is a great location from a power and fire point of view um and has lots of property uh and that's owning your own substation uh and with the work we've done with fortis on improving the stability of the transformation line over the last few years becomes a great candidate for AI operation in the province of BC. Hopefully that answers that question. The next question we received isn't really directly about DMG, but it's about systemic trust. A Swiss-based cryptocurrency company, Taurus, I think that's how you say it, recently made a big move into the US with its agreement to provide services state street how will systemic trust compete with much larger international providers that's a great question there's some really good companies out of switzerland and other parts of europe as well as great companies in the us that we will be competing with um but uh just to kind of be um clear the the business vision for systemic trust um is to really focus in on growing adoption of blockchain technology including tokenization of financial and real assets um all of this requires digital asset custody so we do see this as a market that's in the early stages of growth, even though there's already some large players there. We think there'll be a lot of additional players entering this market as well. Our research has shown the potential market in Canada alone at about $5 trillion. And so to start with, systemic trust is going to focus on Canada first. Our goal is to be the second qualified custodian after Tetra. and to build our relationships in Canada first before we would look at the U.S. or other parts of the world. I assume that this State Street is a U.S. bank. I assume that this is more about U.S. operations, which aren't currently the focus of systemic trust. Hopefully that answers the question. On to another question. How are you going to incentivize other miners to join TerraPool? Well, that's a great question. The greatest ascent we've ever seen in the world of Bitcoin mining pools was Foundry, who gave the pool away for free for a while. And they've subsequently stopped that. But I think the first thing that we would be doing in TerraPool is to ensure that the pool fees are competitive and profitable. What I mean by that is, you know, most pools are on two and a half percent. We would be looking at having, you know, a much more competitive pool than two and a half percent. Additionally, we believe that miners that have at least a portion of their hash rate generated using carbon neutral energy will want to benefit from being on an ecosystem where, A, they'll be recognized as a carbon free player. But B, they have the potential to make more money selling carbon neutral Bitcoin at a premium price. Obviously, we need to demonstrate that there is a benefit and a market for carbon-free Bitcoin, but we believe that's out there and we've been doing quite a bit of work towards that. Additionally, for TerraPool customers, they will have access to systemic trust, which will be a value add for managing their which other pools can't do. They can't provide, as far as we know, a third party, you know, legally mandated qualified custodian with insurance and other protections on their crypto. As well, Helm will be part of our pool. users access to an integrated mine management software to help them not, you know, control their miners, not just see them normally at pool. You can just see what the miners are doing. Whereas a mine management software like Helm, you can actually monitor, not monitor, but you can actually implement changes and get a lot more feedback on information on how the mine's running and what we'd like to do to optimize it. Another one here. What is causing the delays with new mining site announcement? Can you commit to any timeframe for an announcement? You know, we are encouraged that we can finalize an agreement in the coming weeks. And I've said this before, but as winter's coming in Canada, we want to get as much accomplished with respect to a new site or sites. where we have land prep and transmission interconnections that need to be done before Canada freezes up. The announcement that we've been working on, we brought into some delays in negotiating the agreement, mainly because it's a long-term agreement with various renewal clauses that are taking a longer than anticipated legal process to finalize between the two parties. And of course, lawyers love long processes. As well, the due diligence on the site was longer than we thought. And that due diligence isn't just physically seen. build out that cost and the ROI on that build out versus other things that we could be doing with our money and other ways that we could be expanding our hash rate out potentially to the site. So that takes a little while to do or at least to do it in a way that we're fairly confident that our investment decision for our shareholders will yield the kind of ROI that we're looking for as a company. Hopefully that That answers that question. There's many more to go, so I'll keep moving through them. Can you clarify the company's prior investment in Brain, which was acquired by Wellfield, but the investment value is recorded as nil? Did DMG receive anything from the sale? All right, let me pull this one apart a little bit for people. We recorded the Brain investment as nil due to a few issues. First, Brain is not a public company. And as such IFRS rules make it really difficult to substantiate the value of brain versus a public stock. And so if we held a public stock, we would just look at that stock price at the end of our order, how many shares we have, and that would be the value that we put on our balance sheet. Brain's private. You could try and get evaluators to do it. You have to work with your auditor and all these different things you need to go through. Normally when you first buy a, a private stock of a private company, the auditors are happy with the price because it gives a market price at the time. But as time goes by, unless there's other sales, shares of sales, sales of shares happening or other financial things happening, they can look at to see the value of brain. It's really hard to put a price going forward. So we took the decision Obviously, we can bring a little bit back up if there's value that we obtain in the future. Some people may want to say, well, Wellfield's public, so why isn't it easy to value now that a public company bought Brain? But Wellfield didn't buy Brain. They bought assets of Brain, and Brain itself still exists. So we own shares in Brain, not in Wellfield. Um, and so, uh, that's one of the reasons why we can't just say, well, well, Phyllis at this stock price and they own brain now. And, uh, that means that our share value is this, uh, we put it on our balance sheet. So what this comes down to is, you know, right now, um, the future brain is a little uncertain. We believe, um, uh, that brain will be wound down. And what that means is the cash that it has in the company. plus the cash it got from selling its assets into our out to well field. will then be dispersed out at a wind down to the shareholders of Brain, us as DMG being one of them. And we believe when this happens, and this usually takes a few years to happen, DMG will get its value returned to it through its value of shares held and the amount of cash that can be dispersed from Brain. So that's sort of what's going on with Brain and Wellfield. So just pull those two apart. Wellfield doesn't really own Brain so much as it owns assets of Brain. Brain itself as a company is still around, not doing much, but as far as we can tell, it's winding itself down and will return what it can to shareholders. Next question, can you provide an update on DMG's investment in Bosonic? And why are they recorded as nil as well? Okay. So similar to Brain, Bosonic's a private company. And so sort of what I said about private companies is a little bit different to put on your balance sheet. At least initially you can put them on, but it gets harder to substantiate that value unless there's multiple transactions going on with a private company that auditors can look at and say, yes, we can clearly see a value. But Brain's a little bit different than Bosonic. Bosonic is a little bit different than Brain because Bosonic is operating. It hasn't sold off its operations to somebody else. It's generating cash right now, as far as we know, from our calls with management there. And we're optimistic that Bosonic will continue to grow its operations. And hopefully in the coming year, 2025, our systemic trust will be added as a new partner. As well, we're hoping that Bosonic will, I guess, develop and implement a carbon neutral Bitcoin trading platform. So just we've had some discussions about this with Bosonic's management team. Systemics talked to Bosonic in detail about becoming a qualified custodian with them and liquidity services for that. So we see Bosonic growing. Still, as a good investment, we see that they are, as far as we say, we know they're generating cash and operating. So they're a little bit of a different beast than Brain, which made a strategic decision to sell itself to Wellfield. But like I say, with Bosonic, we think that that is a good investment and we are and systemic working with Losana in the future. So I've done about half the questions. I don't, Steve, would you like to take over the next half?
spk01: That's certainly Sheldon. And we'll try to move through these a little more quickly. So, but these questions are a little bit more diverse than what we had in the first section. The first question just pertains to margins and the recent trends of margins declining and how we plan to reverse the trend. Well, first is bringing up the T21 fleet. That will be a market difference. And we obviously will see the bulk of that starting next quarter, but we hope to be able to give you some insight on our next earnings call in terms of how that increase in hash rate has proceeded. And along with that, we've indicated we're evaluating new hydro miners that are even more efficient than the T21 fleet. This will add to our margins. And the other aspect of that to things we can control are our fleet efficiency and our energy costs and production. We're working towards, as Sheldon described, completing our first step to reducing our energy costs. And we hope this is the first of a number of steps in that direction. But longer term, as we think strategically about systemic trust and other core plus initiatives, As that revenue, which most of it should fall to the bottom, to the operating margin line, that we really see that as a longer term lift to margins. And so it's just this overlay of in our core strategy, more efficient miners, lower energy costs, and our core plus strategy having a high degree of fall through. And of course, the Bitcoin pricing really jumps up here in the short term, like some of the Bitcoin bulls are forecasting for a December quarter rally. That would be much more of an immediate lift and catalyst for the whole sector. The next question, you said you won't dilute 10 or 20x. Well, how much would you be willing to dilute? And the answer to that is really it depends on how much we're able to increase our share price as a result of our execution. So our view is we will deploy capital in tranches with very specific uses. And as we've talked about from the infrastructure side, how to compress the lead times in the supply chain and really work with the supply chain in ways to allow us to make purchases and deploy that capital quickly to start getting a return in a short period of time. that execution should drive up our share price, which ultimately would result in less dilution than otherwise. And so this is really our focus. And it just along with this is if we can successfully execute on these successive steps, We are in a better position up list. We know that that is a point that people have asked us many times in the past. And so that is clearly something we would be looking at doing, but only when the timing is right. We do believe TSX offers us liquidity. But we know that there's a much larger base of investors with an up list. So did get a note from Panic Shareholder to ask, are we about to get diluted? We are doing our best to essentially minimize dilution, but we can't necessarily indicate anything on the timing of that, but we have been very public about for several quarters now that equity is under consideration in terms of form of capital raising. When do we expect Core Plus products to start producing meaningful revenue? I think one of the things we tried to do in this call is really talk about our two primary initiatives. We have a number of products we talk about in Core Plus, but the initiatives The centerpiece initiatives are really around TerraPool and systemic trust. And we've talked about both of those being in the coming quarter is our target to have those really the revamped TerraPool and the qualified custodian status for systemic trust. And that really has the potential to lead to a ramp up That could be meaningful in calendar 2025, but it really depends on our success of customer acquisition. The next question is an interesting one. Do you expect EMG more likely to be acquired by a Bitcoin mining company? or to be an acquirer. And what I would say is, in actuality, it could be both over a period of time. We do have opportunities we're looking at that are on the table of various sizes. The focus is lowering our cost of energy, giving our opportunity for expansion, and also looking at sites that could be AI data centers longer term. And we really see that if our strategy really takes hold and we have this portfolio of Bitcoin mining, potential AI is as well as the software and services, we could become an attractive target. But our focus is to remain an independent entity. Next question is just short-term catalysts for investors, really, about what we see is reaching our 1.7x hash target and really having capital deployed to be able to show and have expansion. And so we want to get momentum with regards to Our expansion. And so we certainly at the end are focused on increasing our share price. That's why we're very sensitive to the question about dilution, because ultimately anything we do has to be accretive. And then the final question here is just about recovering the 49 Bitcoin held with Prime Trust or held in with the bankruptcy trustee. One of the things we've learned in the bankruptcy process and kind of what we're seeing with FTX is Because bad things happen inside of Prime Trust leading up to its bankruptcy, we're kind of the mercy of the court to really sort out some of the nefarious activity that may have occurred to really ensure that the creditors overall receive as much as possible. And even though the Bitcoin we had was depositor property, and it should be straightforward to have it returned, nothing's going to happen until these other issues are sorted out. We hope in the fall we do get more clarity. And with that, that concludes our Q&A. I'll hand it back to you, Sheldon.
spk02: Thanks, Stephen. Just a few other comments here. One, We just want to remind our listeners that DMG is planning to participate in the Gateway Investor Conference on September 4th and 5th in San Francisco. And our presentation will be on the 5th at noon Pacific time. As well, DMG will be participating in the H.C. Wainwright Annual Global Investment Conference in New York on September 9th through the 11th. We will be presenting September 10th at 8.30 Eastern time. And the last one, DMG will be participating in the Arcstone Kingswood Growth Summit, September 26th in Toronto, in which we will be on a crypto panel. I think unless Stephen has any other comments, I think that we were done. And I thank everyone for attending and our call is now over.
spk01: All right. Thank you.
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