Bitmine Immersion Technologies Aktie

Well, welcome, everyone. That was quite an introductory video. And it's my first time seeing it because Marcy wanted to make it a surprise. I've got a presentation -- but before I dive into it, I just want to make some sort of opening comments, especially because those on the live stream are just hearing us begin this.

So first, I do want to recognize the folks that organized and put this shareholder meet together in Las Vegas. So that's Marcy Simon of [indiscernible] Change and her team over there. At the end of this sort of programming content, Marcy will come on stage and explain some of the other fun things that are going to follow the formal presentation of some of the content.

I do want to recognize several constituents that are behind Bitmine. So I'm going to start with the Board of Directors, which if you can all just stand up at once, if you don't mind, there's going to be 7 standing up. Okay. Great. Board of Directors. And I'd like to recognize those from Bitmine's executive management team. So everyone who is from Bitmine please just stand up. Great. I'd also like to recognize some key partners for us. One of them is Mosaic's capital. And if there's folks from Mosaic here, if you could stand up, I believe there should be a couple I see some hands waving in the back.

Okay. Of course, our outside counsel, Mike Blankenship and the team from Winston Strong, they've been critical, critical partners as we forge a crypto treasury. So and Mike was up here with me earlier, but where is Mike and team. They're back there. And I recognize a couple of original pipe investors here. Seth and others. So if you are part of the original pipe, could you please stand?

I see Adam here. Please stand up. These guys helped us fund the initial transformation of Bitmine. I believe I see ASH from the term foundation here. So Ash, could you please stand up? ASH is from the Ethereum Foundation. Okay. And then, of course, I'm not going to ask all the stockholders to stand up, but I do want to recognize you guys because one, I appreciate you making the journey out here. It's the first ever shareholders meeting we have.

We tried to make this a fun event for you, and we have some content for you to learn. But it really means a lot to us because we're here to serve the shareholders and really do right by the stock. Okay. So let me just click forward on this presentation.

Okay. So I put together a presentation for our annual stockholder meeting. And here's some disclaimers. Again, just like the proxy statement, I hope you read it, line to line. But here's the agenda. I want to give you a recap of 2025, which was the year that we transformed Bitmine.

I want to give you an update on progress about the Alchemy 5% and what it could mean. I do want to spend a lot of time talking about the 4 pillars of growth to drive stockholder value. And this is going to apply to 2026 and beyond. Then I want to go back to why Ethereum is the future of finance.

And of course, we've got the team in place to drive transformation. Okay. I think it's a year we need to recap 2025 because the year was where a lot of digital asset treasuries came on to the scene by our count over 80. But in that 12-month period, by the end of last year, we have now seen the emergence of what I would call dominant DAPs.

Okay. First, just a reminder, I want you to think about holding periods. At Fundstrat, we first wrote about Bitcoin in 2017 and let's look at how Bitcoin has -- and at that time, we said you'd want to own 1% of Bitcoin and let's see how it did compared to other assets. And a lot of these other assets, I would still own. But as you can see, Bitcoin, in that time period that's passed has gone from $960 through September 26, which we just want to record before the liquidation event, $109,000.

That's 112x return. It outperformed NVIDIA which went from $2 to 170, which is massive already, 65x, it beat NASDAQ, it beat Gold, which went from to 3,800 and at BT S&P, which went from 2,200 to 6,600. So if you put 1% into Bitcoin, that was a good insurance debt because it really crushed everything else. Buehring did even better. You can see the went from $8 to 3,900, that's almost a 490x return.

Okay. But last year, crypto kind of disappointed. You can see gold did great. The MAX7 did well. NASDAQ did well, S&P did well. And you could see Bitcoin Ethereum actually were down for the year. So in some ways, it made many people wonder, is a crypto winter started or was even last year, cryptowinter. Keep in mind that crypto was doing great until October 10 of last year.

So Ethereum was up 40% and Bitcoin was up 33%. But then we had the crypto mass liquidation event. $1 trillion of value was wiped out. As many of you know, it was the largest deleveraging event in the history of crypto, even bigger than what happened with FTX. And they estimate over 2 million crypto accounts were wiped out [indiscernible] to 0. And many market makers and even crypto exchanges had their balance sheets hurt.

So the industry since October 10 has been limping along. In 2022, November 2022, when FTX collapsed, it took 8 weeks before the market began to show signs of life. So if you asked us this year, it's a larger event, but when would crypto begin to maybe find its bottom, it would be December 10.

And post October 10, as you can see, Ethereum fell basically by half and Bitcoin fell by 36%. So here we are. But if you kind of squint, you can see since just the late December, the quantity Tearing had begun to claw their way back okay? Now think about that. It was the largest liquidation event in the history of the crypto industry.

So crypto treasuries were built to go public and outperform ETFs by buying crypto. And since October 31, only 2 crypto companies bought any crypto in size. MicroStrategy from December 31 to the end of the year, about $2.9 billion worth of Bitcoin, which is a lot, MetaPlanet bought $330 million of Bitcoin. And among the Ethereum treasuries, only 1 Crypto treasury bought any Ethereum, which was Bitmine, which bought $2.4 billion worth of Ethereum. And in fact, 2 ethane treasuries actually sold Ethereum.

Okay? So if you think about accretion by buying eat accretively or buying Bitcoin accretively, it's only 2 companies. Now let's think about other dimensions about Ethereum treasury dominance. One is just the size of the balance sheet, dollar value will be there held. These numbers, of course, are a little stale, but bit minus around $13 billion.

And that is basically 5x larger than the next largest Ethereum treasury. But the lifeblood of a crypto treasury is trading volume. Bit mine trades $1.6 billion a day. And as you know, we published weekly stats, but routinely, it minus a top 50 most traded stock in America, top 50.

And as you can see, that's 14x larger than #2 in crypto treasury. So if you're looking at what institutions want, institutions want a really liquid stock that they can buy without disturbing the price, well, we trade $1.6 billion a day. So they can buy $1 billion in a day. But the next smallest crypto treasury only trades $100 million save. It would be very hard for them to put $1 billion to work.

So again, that's the comparative dominance. And so my takeaway is in 2025 because of October 10 and -- it has shown who are the dominant crypto treasuries. And really, in my mind, is to MicroStrategy and Bitmine. Between the 2 of us, it's 90% of all crypto trading volume for DAS. So the other 78 companies represent 10% of the volume.

Okay. So let's jump to Part 2, which is the company has made rapid progress on getting to 5% of Ethereum. So that was our mission statement on June 30, when we launched the term treasury funded by our pipe investors, 2 of which are here today. And in those ensuing 6, 7 months, as you can see, we wanted to get to 6 million [ eat ] tokens. And in 6 months, we're at 4.2 million [ eat. ] So we're 68% of the way to 5%.

We originally thought this would take 5 years, but we're 68% of the way there in 7 months. Now we have cash, $1 billion of cash on the balance sheet. So if we add the cash instead, let's buy other with the cash, we would have 4.5 million at tokens, which means we're 75% of the way to the [indiscernible] 5%. So we believe if you believe this trajectory a bit mine should cross 5% sometime this year, assuming the 7 months continue to hold.

And as you can see, we studied the blue chip standard for Crypto Treasury, which is MicroStrategy. And as you can see here, we have $13 billion of ease, including cash in roughly 7 months. At the same point, MicroStrategy had $3.4 billion of Bitcoin. In fact, we accumulate as much there strategy accumulated which took them roughly 1,300 days or 4 years.

Okay. So now that we've stacked some eat. I think you need to think -- because many of you might get angry at us because I've seen it on Twitter, like Tom, if you cut ease and don't do anything else. You're just going to stake it, okay? But then I think you're misunderstanding what happens if you have a substantial stake.

And especially as a validator and a proof of state network. In one of the most important blockchains in the world today. I mean, Ethereum, in our view, is going to be the future of finance. So we have 5%. Imagine like someone saying, hey, there's this really tall kid, okay. He's like 7 feet tall, so we're just going to have them clean gutters, because he's so tall.

Like your best use, best return should be like, oh, he should we have ask about players right? Not a roof cleaner. Okay. So that's what I'm saying. You have to imagine, if you own 5% of Ethereum and it's the most important blockchain in the world, and it's going to be the future of finance, and it will be the settlement layer for almost everything else.

I don't know if you'd want us to just be staking [ Eth ] and then that's it. And like -- but that's what a lot of people on -- many of you might even think that's what you want. But let me just try to open your imagination to some things that would make sense. First, when we made our first presentation about bit mine, we gave you this road map.

We said we're going to have a made in America validator network. We're going to be a community participant, especially with the Ethereum Foundation and Ash, who was 1 of the key folks there. We also wanted to do moonshots. -- okay? These are select investments and ideas that would really enhance the future value of Ethereum.

And of course, we want to get to 5% of Eth. So I want to focus on this moon shot. And at the time we wrote this in our first presentation from July, we said we would use up to 5% of the balance sheet to do moonshots. Now 5% today is $700 million. So you should realize we've been giving you this idea that we would take 5% of the balance sheet, $700 million, and our balance sheet will grow, but we want to do moonshots that will strengthen Ethereum's competitive position.

So today, we announced one of the moon shots, okay? You might be confused. I'll explain to you why, this is not confusing, okay? We made a $200 million investment into best industries. I would say if someone said, what are you expecting to accomplish, if this was just like, hey, I'm going to make a $200 million bedded to beast, no-brainer, okay?

Because he is -- I'm going to skip around. I'm going to jump because he is the iconic content creator of our generation. There is nobody more important to Gen Z Gen Alpha and millennials. Now I'm looking at the room, okay, I'm going to guess, okay, that the representative population of Gen Z, Gen alpha is not here okay?

Because otherwise, you guys would be using a lot of sling, I don't understand. I see some millennials, but I've seen a lot of Gen X and a lot of baby boomers, okay? So the thing is, is that you might think that we have gone off the rails. But that's not the thing, okay? Mr. Beast is the #1 content creator of the world.

And if you're not following how important he is, first of all, he has 1 billion followers, okay? 1 billion like -- 7 billion people on this planet. He's 1 in 7 people following it. But I'm going to say, I only think there's 3 million people with like Internet accounts. He is like 1/3 of all people that are on the Internet following him.

That's reach. For instance, he has the only person with more followers that our celebrities is Ronaldo Christiano, Reynaldo, okay? And of all the creators, he is $1 billion. The next is I can't really read the name, I need my magnifiers Okay. 300 million. He is a giant among content creators. In fact, is nobody is going to be able to become Mr. Beast again.

I would say it's almost impossible for someone to -- in the next 10 years to get 1 billion followers, and he's created this organically. In fact, if you look at YouTube usage, Mr. Beast has more viewership than Walt Disney or Netflix or NBC or Paramount, Fox, Warner Bros, amazon. Nobody's more watched in streaming world than Mr. Beast, okay?

And think about that for a minute. And the Super Bowl, which is like considered the global event gets 256 million views on that event. Every twice a month, Mr. Beast puts out a video and each one gets 252 million views. His content is more watched than the Super Bowl, okay? So he has 535 million views a month, out of this 1 billion followers. They are super engaged.

And now he does all these collaborations, that's the key word. Okay? He collaborates with all these people that you might care about somewhere on the grid, okay? But he does content with them. And guess what? Actually, let me just jump forward. Well, yes, let me back up then.

Okay. So that's where it comes with us. So again, I'm going to start with what I just said. So if it was just a $200 million investment, guys, this is a no-brainer. This guy is the most important content creator in the world. And Bitmine was invited to invest in their capital structure.

Look at who else is allowed to invest, [indiscernible] which, Alpha Wave. Mr. Best himself, he owns 51% of the company. We're the largest corporate and strategic investor in his company. So we are big. What do I think that investment is worth?

Okay, I can make a forward statement because I'm not east industries, but I think we're going to easily make a moon shot return on that 10x. But that's not the reason, okay? So he's the #1 content creator. And now we have substantial call option value on any future consumer service developed by each, okay?

Now I want to read what Jeff Housenbold, their CEO actually stated. Sorry, I'm going to have to pull this up on my phone about this investment that we made. And I want you to lose some carefully to his words, okay? What he said was -- we are excited to welcome Tom Lee & Bitmine as new investors and Best Industries join our current top-tier venture investors, and we're not a venture investor. We're a strategic corporate.

Their support is a strong validation of our vision, strategy and growth trajectory, and it provides additional capital to achieve our goal to become the most impactful entertainment brand in the world. Okay? So we're helping them get to their goal.

We look forward to exploring ways to further collaborate, see that's the word and incorporate DP into our upcoming financial services platform. So think about this. If you want Ethereum to be part of the future of finance, it kind of makes sense to have a connection to the most important content created in the world. Okay?

So again, if you were angry and you downloaded our investment in Mr. Beast, you're allowed to change your download. Okay. So I just want to explain the potential synergies. So you have -- Okay. Someone says the #1 investor for retail investors, okay, me, the #1 holder of Ethereum there in the world, okay? We own more term than anybody, and it's the future finance. Plus the #1 content creator in the world. I mean, guys, that's the option value. I mean that's the moonshot potential.

And that's what we just put Bitmine on a trajectory for another moonshot beyond just the money we earn from staking okay? Now lastly, if you want to know where we could have potential collaborations.

I'll give you some thoughts. For instance, do any of you guys watch beast games? Okay. Like it's huge. It's the #1 show in 80 countries. #1 show in 80 countries. 144 million people watched it in the first 25 days. It's the #1 script unscripted show in prime video history. 50 million families watched in the first 25 days I mean this is driving Amazon growth, and it broke 67 world records. Well, would it make sense for Bitmine to be a sponsor partner with Mr. Beast in one of the episodes. Right?

It makes perfect sense. Well, that's what we're going to have synergy from by being their largest corporate strategic investor. And by the way, something that the Mosaic partners and I met from there here and Chen's missing. But one of the things that was super compelling to us is that the corporate values of beast industries. If you're not aware, they are a very philanthropic group.

Mr. Best himself is extremely charitable. These philanthropy has grown to one of the biggest giving engines in the world, okay? They've raised hundreds of millions of dollars for things like refugees, food, prosthetics, surgeries, it's incredible. So we have corporate values aligned again with what I think is the most important content creator in the world, okay?

So hopefully, and I took a lot of time to explain that you understand this was a smart move, okay? We're not doing something crazy with shareholder capital. And they're growing, by the way. Look at his follower count is up 30% year-over-year. I mean, pretty soon, his filer counts can include like Mars and habitants because he's going to cover the whole planet. Right, after $7 billion? Or it will be like frozen eggs and stuff and 41% growth of us.

Okay. So that takes us back to our strategy going forward. We have 4 pillars of growth because, again, I don't think as shareholders, you want us to just simply be staking eat and buying at, especially as we get close to 5%. So let me explain to you our 4 pillars of growth.

The first is to maximize yield on Ethereum. Okay? So we're going to optimize the staking yield. The Caesar benchmark is 2.8. We're going to try to do better. One way we do it, at least 1 way that we've talked about it is to pursue alpha strategies.

Now the entity that will execute this for us is Mosaic's capital. But we also have an adviser, Tom Demark, of Demark Analytics. For those who are boomers or older GenX, Tom Demark is iconic. He is 1 of the most famous market timing people. He has won so many awards. -- he only has 2 clients I believe he's discos Well, I don't think it's disclosed the first quite, so I'm not going to name it.

We are his only other client and I showed you that slide where we bought $2.4 billion of Eth in the last 2 months. Tom De Mark's strategies, along with Mosaic's execution probably saved us $400 million on those purchases. So think about that. We bought in a way that made you guys money.

So don't shake this at eat when it's down. We like it when it's declining, okay? All right. But here's where I can give you some imagination. We have $13 billion of. So imagine proposal 2 didn't pass and we're stuck in the water. We don't buy another dollar beat for the rest of the history of the company.

But using staking yield and with some optimization that would generate $367 million to $390 million a year in rewards. We have $1 billion in cash that would generate another $35 million to $40 million. The company will generate $400 million to $433 million a year in pretax income. That's more than $1 million a day. And that's been achieved in 6 months. I think a company that goes from 0 in 7 months, a company that can make $400 million a year, that's quite an achievement.

But of course, thank you for the stockholders for getting us here. But let's think about a future scenario. Let's say that East price stays at 3,000, but we get to 5% of eat. That number rises to $542 million to $583 million. But I think Eash is grossly undervalued, okay? Let's see a proper price for Eth's is 12,000, okay? And I'll explain in a later section how I get to then their annual rewards and interest jumped to $2 billion to $2.2 billion, okay? That would make us 1 of the 20 most profitable companies in America.

So or maybe third most, but it's really up there, okay? So that's why if our vision is correct on Ethereum, and we're generating this level of rewards and income you don't want us to just be a stake in entity.

Okay. So that gets us to the second, which is we want to invest in moonshots. So far, we've done 2. We will do more, orbs and World coin. We want to accelerate tokenization products. We want to work with the L2s and the [indiscernible], the leading projects, including something like lighter, and I'm going to have a fireside chat with Vlad today about lighter and why you really should pay attention to lighter and its token.

And we're really excited about this beast industry's moonshot. Okay. Just to remind you, it mine invested in AECO $20 million, okay? World coin. It was founded in 2019 by Sam Altman, who's open AI CEO; and Alex Bania.

They have built an incredible technology for proof of human. It is the only way to verify your humanity today using an iris scan. They're not scanning your Iris. They're using your iris to create a cryptographic cash, but that is unique.

Out of 7 billion people, that would be the only number cryptographically unique identification. It's the only thing more secure is a fingerprint. And ACOs done well. They hold 10% of the circulating supply of World coin, 11,000 eth, $69 million cash, and they verified 17 million humans. The World coin app, if you haven't downloaded it, it's almost an omni app,it's that good. And they've done some cool pilot partnerships to do proof of human verification, sort of a single sign-on with Kraken and coin based. And they've also made strategic investments in something like mythical

And of course, tokenization is the future, and that's why we want to do moon shots into tokenization. I might talk this conversation for a bit to explain to you, tokenization because I think people are underestimating how important it is.

Tokenization does give you fraction ownership. It reduced cost and efficiency, 24/7 trading. Enhanced transparency and security and increased liquidity, okay? But I think it's really taking Wall Street into the future, okay? So it's a huge evolution. And in fact, Larry Fink said it's the biggest innovation since double ledger accounting.

He's the CEO of BlackRock. So I'll just give you some examples of [ toci ]. I'm sorry, this is taking a long expected, but I had to explain to you, Mr. Beast. So first, to tokenize something, you could just do fractional ownership. So you could say, take the painting and fractionalize it, and this is what you own.

But what we believe is more important is to factorize an asset. So let's say you took the painting, you broke it down into the colors, okay? And it the equivalent like take a company and break it down to its components. Then you can decide that you just want to own a factor -- so I'll give an example for Tesla. You can time tokenize the company, you can base it on -- remember, Tesla stock price is the sum of all future earnings.

You could pick a single earnings year to own. It's a product tokenization. You can break it into its products, the present products. You can do geographic tokenization. And you can tokenize the financial statement, okay? Let's give you an example of time. Here's the -- all the future earnings of Tesla, and let's -- and we know Elon Must gets paid on his 2036 earnings, okay? So you might just want to buy the earnings for that year because he is going to obviously have some enormous upside number to get paid. And that would be a lottery ticket because imagine you don't own any of the earnings for Tesla for the next 9 years, and you just own it for the tenth year. That's a huge way to make a bet. If you believe in Elon Musk, that would probably be the bet I would make. And you wouldn't pay a lot for it because it's 10 years from now. You can product tokenize. He's got EVs robotaxi. I left Optimus Prime.

[indiscernible] driving solar. Remember this -- if you look at Tesla stock price, it's the sum of all the future product streams that are here. I forgot Optimus Prime. And then what -- then there's going to be this plug, which is the growth of Tesla in the future, which is EON's brain, you can just make a bet on Elon's brain in the future.

Okay. That's the kind of tokenization that can happen with smart contracts. And that's what I think a company like Lider, that project could be the ones working with us to develop these tokenized products. That would be a future moonshot, right. The third pillar growth is we want to productize bit mine.

There's an app coming -- we have a huge community of dedicated shareholders. And the bit Mind brand is strong. It's interesting. When we did the initial transformation of it mine -- we're like, wait, we're in Ethereum treasury company, Why? And that was -- Bitmine was a bit in mining company. Shouldn't we change the name?

Well, 7 months later, I think we like to bet my name. We're going to keep it. And of course, I've got a bit of mine lapel [indiscernible] here. So an app is coming, and it's being developed by an outside technical team. Now you might wonder what are we going to offer on it. That's what you have to wait to find out.

Okay. Okay. So next, the final pillar of growth is that we're going to bridge TradFi and TRADImeans traditional finance and consumer services. Again, because we believe Ethereum is going to be the future settlement layer in the future of finance and we're the largest holder ethereum, we should act as that bridge where the top 50 most traded stock Maven when it launches is going to be the largest staking entity in the world. So once we launch Maven, we're the biggest staking operator in the world and we think about that. Like we're not going to be small fry trying to get market share, will be the biggest.

And that means we can actually act as a settlement layer for a lot of other for Ethereum and maybe other tokens as well. So Maven, as you know, it's going to be best-in-class staking. Again, we really don't want to divulge too many details before we reveal it, but this is what we've told you so far.

So you can see where things sit. We're the largest holder here in the world, we're going to bridge things in finance and in DeFi. So you should -- you realize the road map is quite optimistic ahead for us. I'm going to fly through this because I think I am running over time. So Ethan's a future finance, okay. Let me fly -- take us to this slide. I am Okay. If you're going to think about ethane price, you should think of it as its relative importance versus Bitcoin because the BTC ratio is essentially saying, is Ethereum doing better than digital gold.

And as the ratio goes up, that means smart contracts are more valuable than digital gold. And so that's how you should think about that price ratio. And currently, Ethereum to BTC is 0.03463, okay? In 2021, that ratio was 0.08727. In my opinion and many opinions of the team here at it mine Ethereum is more useful now than it was in 2021.

I mean the fees have come down. The amount of developers has expanded vastly A use case has massively emerged, which is stable coins and now there's tokenization. And of course, there's going to be a bridge into the consumer through things like best industries, right?

So in fact, Standard Charter, which is we think we've seen a lot of Wall Street research. I think Jeffrey, Kendrick does some of the best work. He says 2026 is the year of Ethereum. He sees the Eat BTC ratio returning to its 2021 highs, okay? So he's using that metric.

Okay. Well, let's think about that ratio. There's 3 sets of columns here, okay? See the middle set of green. Okay. Yes, I mean it's still hard to see on the screen. So that's the 2021 high ratio, 0.0873. And then we put a little horizontal line because we expect Bitcoin to get to 250,000 this year. If they congest 250,000, and Ethereum trades at its high relative to Bitcoin, ethers at 22,000. And it's currently 3,200.

And so you see the massive upside in Ethereum. Well, is that good or bad for bit mind stock? I went to Bloomberg did what they call historical correlation. The X axis is ethereum's price since July, the y-axis is bit mine's stock price. And you can see if Ethereum's price goes up, it mines stock price goes up.

So the correlation is like 90-something percent which makes like intuitive sense. Okay. Well, let's shrink that a little bit and say, what if them gets to 22,000, what does this trend line project to $500 price for Bitmine -- if EM gets to 60,000, the stock price is 1,500 and of course, if Joe Lubin is correct, as you know, he's been dedicated to it trim and I think he has a good argument for he thinks he here and gets to 250,000, Bitmine stock price is 5,000.

First of all, that's why we need the share authorization because, I mean, how many people can buy a 5,000 share? Like people are going to buy like 1 share or 0.1 shares, right?

So that's the upside. And then finally, we have a strong team, which I already introduced, but here are some of the members of the executive team. So I think that the presentation might have created some questions for you guys here. So I think we're going to have a few questions. So if you have a question, raise your hand. However, please do not ask about the shareholder vote. That's already concluded. I see a hand there.

Thank you for the question.

I think there's a microphone.

Thank you so much for the question, Mr. Chairman. Crypto holders will know the slogan, not your keys, not your crypto. How does Bitmine custody their private keys and prevent them being stolen or absconded, et cetera?

It's a great question, and it's a question for all the crypto treasuries. As you know, crypto is a bear instrument. What does that mean like if you buy crypto directly, you now have a private key that you're responsible for. And you can access it if you memorize the cryptographic hash or you have a password or some seed phrases or whatever.

Now you met the executive team here. None of us has a memory to memorize all the cryptographic keys, especially buying $14 billion worth of ETH. So we do not custody the Ethereum ourselves. We use recognized and regulated custodians. Now we do not name our vendors for security reasons. But again, if you want to try to shake us down tonight, none of us has the private keys. So -- and it's the same structure as MicroStrategy. Michael Saylor does not keep a ledger wallet in his pocket for his $59 billion of ETH. He uses the same custodians. But for obvious reasons, I don't want to tell you more than that. Okay. I see a couple of questions here.

Thanks, Mr. Lee. I was wondering what does Vitalik Buterin think about Bitmine immersion? What's his take on it?

Well, I've met Vitalik. Vitalik is very diplomatic because he doesn't want to bless winners and losers. And -- but he also recognizes the importance of community and users, and he has a vision around Ethereum. He doesn't necessarily believe Ethereum is created to become the next monetary system. However, it is literally the blockchain that's best for the future monetary system. There's a reason why JPMorgan is building their money market tokenized fund on Ethereum and why Robinhood is tokenizing stocks on Ethereum. And BlackRock is doing tokenized funds on Ethereum. So these do not make Vitaliks unhappy. Now Ash, who's been one of our folks that have really connected to Ethereum Foundation, he might be willing to share us what he would be saying secondhand what Vitalik might think about Ethereum. I don't know if you're willing to -- and Bitmine. I don't know, Ash, if you want to make any comments.

Okay. Thanks, Tom. I think what's key and what's key with Bitmine and other DATs is that they are bridging the gap between Wall Street and what has been built over the last 10 years. Now I think Tom has been a key proponent here. If Ethereum was to have an Investor Relations man, he is the Chief of Investor Relations of Ethereum.

[email protected].

No. So it's great. And I think Ethereum will store most of the world's value at some point in time. And if you think about a technology that is storing most of the world's value tokenization, as Tom was talking about, that is where the collateral will exist, and that is where the capital efficiency of the world's financial system will exist. So I think Tom is a big proponent and driving Bitmine and global adoption of Ethereum. So from that perspective, I think he's a key stakeholder as is Bitmine.

Yes. And just to emphasize, I don't think Vitalik wants to pick winners and losers. So I don't think he views us as any more important than any other Ethereum debt. And I think that's important because, as you know, we don't want -- like if you look at traditional equity markets, you don't want policymakers to pick winners and losers. You want the market to make that decision. So I really respect Vitalik's view. Okay. Other -- there's a few more questions. So can we hit this gentleman?

My question is about the current legislation it's processing through our government. And specifically, if you would address this issue of the banks not wanting stablecoins to -- owners of stablecoins to receive a yield.

Yes. This gentleman is referring to the Clarity Act, which is making its way through Congress. I think some of the crypto industry and some of the lobbying groups that we work with are not happy with the current -- some of the current proposals. I don't really want to say too many things because remember, the audience who's watching the stream are people in the crypto industry, but also people in the traditional banking industry. And I don't want to have another -- I don't want to have a bull's eye on my back.

So -- but what I would say is it's -- you realize the crypto industry and the traditional Wall Street banks have very different objectives when it comes to crypto regulation because the traditional banks want to stack it in their favor. They want to make it harder to be a new entrant, and they want to make it easy for them, for the banks to dominate by being like a big bully and saying, "Hey, listen, all you little pygmies, I just entered the room, and it's my game." Whereas the new entrants want a level playing field. They want the best projects to win. And it's already kind of been happening in crypto. Like Tether, if you guys know, Tether is the issuer of the USDT. They have 130 -- maybe -- I'm sorry, $180 billion of USDT outstanding. Let's say it's $190 billion. There's $19 trillion of dollar supply out there. So Tether has 1% of the money supply.

Is that right?

Yes, 1%. But Tether is going to earn close to $20 billion by making a stablecoin for 1% of all U.S. dollar supply. That makes it the sixth most profitable bank in the world, and its market value would be #2 only to JPMorgan. So this crypto-native stablecoin issuer is suddenly like the second biggest bank in the world. They only have like 300 employees. JPMorgan has 300,000. A crypto-native company using blockchain as settlement. And by the way, most of Tether runs on Ethereum is like a better bank than a bank. So you can see why Clarity Act is -- it's kind of -- there's a big fight, right? There's what the crypto guys want versus what the banks want. But I don't have a view beyond that because again, this is all being streamed. I don't want to drink coffee and like get sick or something. Okay, a question here.

Great job, Mr. Lee.

Thank you.

I want to say you're #1 right here right now.

Thank you.

Anyway, I wanted to know what your thoughts were about BMNR. When will it top out this year? What month do you think it will reach its top? What month this year?

I can show you my diary and like every day, I have a target price. Here's the thing, like I really can't give you forward guidance because then we have to 8-K it. And then, of course, I already know from my days at Fundstrat, like if I say this is going to happen on this day, then everyone like marks in their calendar. And then all of a sudden, they're like hate me because they bought call options on that expiry date. But you saw the chart, like Ethereum is undervalued. Ethereum's ratio to Bitcoin should be going up a lot. I mean it should go beyond the 2021 high. And Bitcoin is undervalued because Bitcoin had a rug pull on October 10, and it's beginning to recover.

Gold has been on a dramatic rise. Every dramatic rise in gold has been followed by a Bitcoin rally. And year-to-date, Bitcoin is beating gold for the first time in many years. So I think Bitcoin should do well, which would mean if the ratio of Ethereum to Bitcoin goes up because Ethereum is already up 12% year-to-date, Ethereum should outperform dramatically. And then that's great for the stock price. So I mean if you're worried about Bitmine where it is now, just keep in mind, ask yourself these questions. Is Bitmine going to have a liquidity problem. That's $1 billion of cash. Does Bitmine have any debt coming due? 0 debt. Does Bitmine have to sell its Ethereum to fund operations? It's $400 million of pretax income a year. I mean no problem there. Is there a problem with Ethereum? Ethereum's usage is going through the roof. Fusaka upgrade happened late last year, use cases are growing.

So I mean, if Bitmine's stock price is in the dumps, which it kind of is, is it because of anything fundamental? Not really. But when did Bitmine's price kind of take a hit after October 10. I think all crypto kind of got hit after that liquidation event. But relative to other cryptos, especially debts, only 2 since that period of time have actually sort of picked themselves off the ground and continue to buy crypto, which is Bitmine and MicroStrategy. So I hope that makes you feel better. But again, I can send you my diary later after that. Yes.

Okay. Sorry, guys, one more question.

I get the last one. Sorry, guys. Tom, thanks for everything you're doing for all of us. We really appreciate you and the team. Being that Bitmine's role within the Ethereum ecosystem, the importance of it and how close we are to the 5% Alchemy? Has the consideration been given to go to 10%?

Yes. So the question is what -- if -- when we hit 5% of Ethereum, do we stop there? What if we go to 10%? We've asked that question a lot because we -- one of the reasons we picked 5% is because of the power law. The idea is that if you own enough of a network, you begin to have beneficial and unique influence, not on the network itself, but on people who want to interact with the network. So in other words, if we were only 1% of ETH, would we be invited to invest in Bast Industries? Probably not, right? They wouldn't care. Would we be the liquidity backstop for a lot of potential exchanges? Probably not because -- but we have like $14 billion of ETH. -- and it's no debt. I mean we can be liquidity for a lot of folks. And of course, that's why we could be the settlement layer.

Does getting to 10% give bequeath us more benefit? It might, but we also don't want to crowd out the network because if you own too much of Ethereum, then you become a malevolent entity because all of a sudden -- you ever heard the phrase like if you borrow money from the bank, they own you. But if you borrow so much money from the bank, you own the bank. Well, in a similar concept, we don't want to end up making this like to have so much Ethereum that we crowd out the voices. I mean Ethereum works because it's a huge community. So we want to balance that.

So I don't know what the right number is, but one path is like we get to 5%, and we're just dividending a lot of return because of our Alpha strategies and our moonshots or we see what level beyond that would be okay to pursue without having exerting too much influence. We just -- we want to keep Ethereum a decentralized network. So -- well, I'd have to ask the master of ceremonies.

There was some controversy about Fundstrat giving 2 different stock prices of Ethereum. Can you comment on that by chance?

Yes. When I first entered Wall Street, someone gave me some advice. They said, Tom, if you want to be correct, make 300 forecasts. And one of them will be correct and you're never wrong. So I decided to say at Fundstrat, let's make 20 forecasts because one of them will be correct. I'm just kidding.

That's -- what you're referring to is that in my other job, I'm the founder of Fundstrat, a research firm. I'm also the Chief Investment Officer of Fundstrat Capital, which, by the way, has reached $4.7 billion of assets under management, but -- thank you. And Granny can here. But at Fundstrat, we have 3 leading voices on markets. I do macro. I'm Head of Research; Mark Newton, who is our Head of Technical Strategy; and Sean Farrell, who does crypto strategy. Each of us looks and approaches crypto differently. I have a top-down view of Ethereum and Bitcoin I'm not trading that position. I'm trying to keep you from being your own worst enemy. Most people make a mistake because they sell at the bottom. Ethereum is like at the bottom. I'm trying to convince you like in 2017, just stack your Bitcoin.

Mark Newton is very tactical, and I consult him all the time. His time frame could be 5 days. It could be 2 weeks, 2 months, it can be 12 months. If it's 5 minutes, he's going to call me in the bathroom. I'm just kidding, he doesn't call me when I'm in the bathroom. And Sean Farrell, he manages a portfolio of crypto as if he's the portfolio manager. He's not -- he doesn't necessarily have a view. He might have a directional view. So the controversy that you're referring to is Sean Farrell said Ethereum would go to $1,800. It could go to $1,800 in December, okay? In December -- I'm sorry, in December, Sean Farrell said that Ethereum could go to $1,800 in January, whereas Tom Lee said Ethereum should rally in the first part of the year.

And so therefore, I pulled shot into my office, and I said, Sean, listen, I'll give you $20 to change your mind. Just kidding. But Sean, of course, is managing a crypto Alpha portfolio. So that's just -- he's not pinning $1,800 and betting on it. He's just saying, I'm going to be cautious around ETH, maybe I'm a buyer there. But if you're a subscriber to Fundstrat, Sean has modified his view. There's been a recovery in price. So now he's buying Ethereum. So I don't think he would stick to that $1,800 view.

So the Twitter world will say, hey, Fundstrat like thrown out 2 targets. It's not. It's just different voices. And if you're a subscriber to Fundstrat, you'd see it's not controversial. But by the way, if you'd like to get Fundstrat Research, you're welcome to sign up. Just kidding. Okay. Well, thanks. I think that concludes my part. Yes. Okay. Okay. So we're going to bring Vlad from Lighter up next, and we're going to have a fireside chat.

Okay. Well, welcome, everyone. We have a fireside chat with Vlad. Vlad and I had a conversation ahead of this. And Vlad is a crypto native. So that means he is like high IQ, could be autistic, but super high IQ. And -- but also that the audience here is not likely to be crypto native. So we -- I want -- he and I had a conversation because we want to make sure that we keep this conversation in a way that kind of makes intuitive sense to whoever is here. And we apologize if someone who's watching live stream is a crypto native and thinks I'm asking repetitive questions. But I do want to sort of have a conversation where we can explain what Vlad and Lighter do, but then also why for us, for Bitmine, we want to be doing more things with Lighter. So Okay. So Vlad, could you just start with talking about yourself and your background?

Great. Thanks for having me, Tom, and great to meet everybody here. So I actually, funny enough, started out in TradFi about 20 years ago at a place called Citadel when they were just getting into high-frequency trading. So did that for quite some time kind of was through the crash of 2008, the flash crash of 2010 kind of solve what works well in TradFi and what some of the shortfalls might be. And came out to Silicon Valley in 2012 and spent time there mostly working on AI and fintech, but started following blockchain and crypto kind of from the sidelines investing in some projects, advising some teams, so on and so forth. And really, things became really clear about what value blockchain and particularly Ethereum can add to the financial system, and that's kind of what led us to Lighter.

Great. And I'm going to guess a lot of folks have not heard of Lighter. Would love for you to give us a top-down sort of explanation, and I can sort of expand on that a bit.

Yes, absolutely. So Lighter is a decentralized exchange built on top of Ethereum, and we can talk more about what that means, but you can trade spot assets like Ethereum, like our native token lid, other spot assets on Lighter. But the biggest market you can trade on Lighter right now are perpetual futures. So these are derivatives that unlike traditional futures that have an expiration kind of you can trade them without an expiration and you don't have to roll them over, you can trade them with leverage. And Lighter, because it's on top of Ethereum, it's very secure. It's kind of on the most secure settlement layer. Everything that happens on Lighter is verifiable.

What that means is every single trade, every single order, every single liquidation, there's a proof that, that happened correctly and fairly. So for example, something like the Flash Crash wouldn't happen. And if there are big moves like on October 10, there's a record of exactly what happened, who got liquidated when and why and all that. But in terms of numbers, we have around $4 billion, $5 billion of daily volume at this point. We are live in many, many countries, hoping to be live in the U.S. soon, but you have tens of thousands of daily traders and process hundreds of millions of orders a day.

Yes. And so Lighter is a decentralized exchange in somewhat, you may have heard of something like hyper liquid, and that's similar. But some of these folks might wonder how does your project differ from what they call centralized exchanges like Coinbase or Binance or others?

Yes. So Coinbase, and they're actually an investor in us as well. And so they're partners with us, and they're in a variety of businesses. But the main business that they're mostly known for is the centralized exchange. They also do, do stuff in DeFi where we can partner with them on so on. But the main thing that Coinbase does in their core business is where they custody your assets, you can trade at this point for U.S. customers, you can trade spot assets for -- they also have a perpetual offering for customers in other jurisdictions.

But there, everything that happens kind of happens internally, both the custody and kind of the rules around matching and rules around risk and liquidations, all that kind of happens centrally as opposed to in a decentralized way, right? So that's kind of the main difference. Now there's different -- like if you look at the whole ecosystem, right, like you can -- there's the custody part then there's the part about what about -- how do you make sure the matching is fair, right? Like how do you make sure liquidations are fair. So there's kind of different aspects of what you want from a decentralized exchange. But at a very high level, like something that's completely centralized, there are some benefits to that as well, but we believe that kind of over time, the future is decentralized.

Great. Okay. So when we sort of finish with our conversation, if there are more questions, we may have some audience questions and to see if they need more explanation. But I wanted to sort of ask you very specifically about why did you decide to build on top of Ethereum?

Yes. So we started building in late 2022 when it was pretty clear after what happened with FTX and other things that we're seeing that a really strong decentralized exchange was something that was needed in the market, and we thought a lot about the architecture of that. It was pretty clear from the start that Ethereum is kind of the security layer, the layer that you can build upon, that's the kind of the most trusted, the most reliable has been around the longest of kind of any of the once. And they already had a really strong DeFi ecosystem, which I think in part -- I think you made a point earlier that Ethereum -- Vitalik and others aren't necessarily pushing DeFi, but I think that's actually a good thing, right? Like it organically because of how secure it is, hundreds of billions of dollars. I mean I think when we started building, it was more like tens of billions of dollars, right? But like all of that -- all of those assets are secured by Ethereum.

And so for us, it was very clear if we want to build something that has to do with Binance, that's very hard technically to make it work to have a very efficient exchange. So that's why it was actually a hard technical lift for us to do. But there was always no question for us that, that's the ground security layer you want to build on top of it.

Yes. So the way you built on Ethereum is that you are the largest L2 today, if I'm correct?

Well, by certain metrics, so we're -- in terms of...

Or one of the fourth.

Yes. In terms of TVL, we're the fourth largest. And just to step back, Lighter, I mentioned in the context of the product and what it means for the customer, but the tech behind Lighter involved building our own Layer 2 on top of Ethereum, which, as Tom said, is one of the largest -- fourth largest by TVL in terms of transactions per second, it's the highest. And in terms of orders that are processed and volumes, I think it's one or first or second highest. But yes, I mean, I think kind of the whole L2 architecture is really interesting because like the more secure the Layer 1, in this case, Ethereum, the more performant Layer 2s on top of it can be.

Yes. And before I exploit it, I kind of want you to add to the brag, aren't you the most used L2 today?

Yes. I think if you look at number of orders sent kind of daily customers, that's right.

Yes. I remembered Ash from the Ethereum Foundation, who happens to be here. So I hope I'm not misquoting you. But he said that think of Ethereum as like this very secure thing, but the L2s are like the interstate highways that let you go really fast. and have a lot of speed. Could you explain what it means to be an L2?

Yes. I think that's certainly a very good analogy. Another analogy I would use is kind of going back to TradFi, right? Like in TradFi, you have kind of the layer of kind of settlement and accounting kind of I remember like when I was on the trading floor, there are all these like we're doing high-frequency trading like hundreds of thousands of trades a day, but then there -- those are happening quickly, right? But then there are like these actual pieces of paper that we printed out after the market close, right, with like the trades and that -- I mean, in TradFi, that was like the settlement layer.

But I think -- but you can still run things like high-frequency trading on top of it. I mean that's in the traditional system now Ethereum, again, it's like you have this really secure and verifiable layer of kind of ultimately what movement of assets and kind of what actually -- which assets changed hands and how they settle, but then you can do hundreds of millions of trades a day, right? Because the way we build Lighters, they too is that everything that happens, there's a proof that's posted on top of Ethereum that every single order, every single trade was done correctly, right? And so as long as Ethereum has a record of that, that kind of makes sure that the execution layer and the settlement layer are -- can't be in disagreement with each other.

Great. Okay. So let's get into the technology and road map. I know you and I have had multiple conversations about this, both real-world assets tokenized stocks and other things and even working with some non-crypto exchanges. So how do you think about tokenizing revenue streams, especially prediction markets and maybe options and things beyond perpetuals?

Right. Well, that's really interesting, right, because I think like one of the, I think, big unlocks from companies like Bitmine, right, is kind of this idea that you can actually give access to this digital economy to more traditional investors, right? And then you can kind of go -- that can work both ways as well, right? So like you can actually have something like a tokenized stock where now crypto-native traders and investors can own a piece of a company, not in a synthetic way, but kind of in a way that actually mirrors real ownership.

Now that -- there's a question of how does that implement it on the back end and how it's settled. But then the next question is how do you trade it efficiently, right, with low cost, in our case, be 0 fees. And so that's where Lighter comes in. But I think to your point about there are all these different ways to bet on the future, right? So there's like you can have a prediction market. Now that's certainly not something that a traditional institution would likely participate in. But if you can tokenize a revenue stream, then they can because you can think of that as a security.

And then you can have options as well on those either on the underlying asset or on specific streams. And like imagine that all of these things are kind of playing together where on a decentralized exchange that can tie into these different forms of collateral, like maybe some market makers are able to trade all of these and can hedge the risk on the prediction market with the tokenized revenue streams and so on. Maybe others can only buy and hold the tokenized revenue streams, right? But then that makes price discovery and liquidity much better. And I think that's kind of the future we're building towards.

Yes. Great. And Vlad, I mean, I know you and I had some extended discussions, and we're seeking to really actualize these with you guys. But can you talk about like what you see as what could be unique about it like a tokenized stock, for instance? And I know you're talking about crypto folks could have real ownership of it. But do you see a way to create synthetic exposures, again, using all of this architecture and a lot of technical lift and providing the liquidity. But could you talk about some of the ways you can create synthetic exposures?

Right. So I think that's what makes it really interesting to have this kind of infrastructure that we're building, right, because you can actually have the spot asset, the cash equity and perpetuals share collateral, right? And therefore, it's capital efficient for market makers like let's say that somebody does just want to own something like a perpetual on a market index, right? And that is a synthetic instrument.

But there's going to be a lot more liquidity for that synthetic instrument if participants who are able to trade the underlying through tokenized stock are able to do that kind of on the same -- essentially, if all of that happens on top of Ethereum, you can really unify that collateral, right? And so then that's much more capital efficient because then whoever is providing liquidity can kind of hedge the risks, kind of you can do kind of the so-called basis trade, right, directly on chain.

Yes. And if you could unpack that a little bit, like imagine if instead of having a blockchain in your project, but you went back in time to your seat at Citadel and you're working with brokers, what is the difference in complexity of trying to accomplish that same thing on a traditional Wall Street framework versus doing it on Ethereum?

Right. Well, I think like one key difference, right, is the democratization of it, where if you're 1 of 5 biggest hedge funds in the world and you've had relationships with folks like JPMorgan and Goldman for years, you have these lines of credit across different asset classes, you -- I mean, even then, like if you're on the futures desk or you're on the equities desk, you -- it's nontrivial to just share collateral. But if you're one of the top 5 hedge funds in the world, you can probably get that done and it will work. But the beautiful thing about all this happening on top of Ethereum is you can -- anyone can do that, right? It's not just like it all happens through smart contracts and zero knowledge proofs and all those good things. So that -- I think to me, like that's the really exciting part about it.

Yes. I mean I think to me, that's a big deal because that means that DeFi projects and products are giving you access to things that only an elite group of hedge funds could actually trade and make all their Alpha from.

Exactly. Exactly.

So could you -- look, I don't know if you feel comfortable what do you -- are you working with any traditional exchanges, traditional Wall Street firms to try to do things with everything you've just described?

So we are -- I wouldn't -- I don't think they would think of themselves as traditional, but they have been around for some time now. Robinhood is a strategic partner with us as well. And we'll have some more specific announcements on that in the coming weeks, but we have started -- I think it's no secret that they're working on tokenized stocks also on top of Ethereum, and we started a joint project with them on that, we'll have kind of more to say about it in the coming weeks. So that's definitely one.

I think we've also started kind of processes with kind of more traditional Wall Street firms, both in terms of kind of trading, figuring out how do you actually trade asset classes that traditionally have been unregulated, right, but now can be where, for example, you can have some form of on-chain KYC where, let's say, like a Citadel, they want to trade these assets, but they only want to trade with counterparts that have been KYC.

Maybe another trading firm is okay trading with all counterparts. Now how do you kind of do all of that in the same order book? Now that's -- our technology allows you to do that. So I think there are some really interesting projects that are on -- that we started on this year as well.

Great. Now as an aside, by the way, Lighter's token was air dropped, which means it became available to trade about a month ago. Could you tell us about how it's performed?

Yes. So the token actually, the generation event of the token was -- it feels like a month. It was actually 2 weeks ago. And initially, it was available only on Lighter. And so you could trade the spot natively there. And actually, today, you could start trading the Lit token on Robinhood, on Coinbase, [indiscernible] and OKX and a couple of others. And so now that ecosystem has grown. I guess maybe I can talk first a little bit about what the token does and the vision and then the performance.

So kind of the vision here, right, is that like we were saying, there's kind of the security layer at the bottom, that's Ethereum that's obviously ETH serves a very important function there. But then where we sit is a layer on top of that, right, is kind of trading, risk management, financial infrastructure, access to financial products, market data, all those things that exist in TradFi. And in TradFi, they happen either through kind of bespoke deals or in a way that's not democratized. Now the LIT token can be used -- you could -- if stake, you can get access to financial products. You could get access to real-time market data, right? You can get access to new listings faster, better infrastructure, right, like getting trading in a way that's not rate limited, right, like or better funding rates, something else we're looking at. So there's a lot there.

And I think in terms of the performance, yes, it's been kind of some ups and downs in the last couple of weeks, but I think the way these things go is like -- I guess one of the things about DeFi is there's a little bit of a double-edged sword where because it's -- I mean, I think, ultimately, what we're trying to build is like a vision of democratizing finance. And I think net-net, that's very much a good thing.

The one kind of downside of that right is like you got a lot of like anyone can trade, right, on the platform. So you get a lot of participants that are so-called like wash traders or kind of doing stuff that there's not really value add to the ecosystem, but you can't -- because of ZFi, you can't like kick them out, right? So these -- some of those folks are kind of -- they -- you can try to do your best to make sure the AirDrop goes to real traders and real institutions, but you can't do that perfectly. So some of those folks are kind of selling. Now that process will probably take another week and then it will be kind of constructed from there.

Right. And by the way, if someone is like checking on Robinhood, just what would the ticker be?

The ticker is LIT.

Yes. Great. Can you tell us -- I know you're not operating in the U.S. yet, but what are you building in the U.S.?

So we're a U.S. company. We started out as a U.S. company, kind of stayed here and want to innovate here, right? And it's -- I think like it's a little bit -- it's been a little bit of a shame that some of the innovation hasn't been happening in the U.S. because like we're talking about something that's at the intersection of finance and technology. I think like both the traditional financial system and technology industry were mostly innovations that came from the U.S. So it's a bit of a shame that the intersection has been unfortunately like outside the U.S., but I think that's finally now starting to change with policymakers really understanding -- it's interesting.

I spent some time talking to folks on the Hill last month. And some of our advisers warned us like when you go in there, they're not really going to understand what's going on. It's like you probably saw that video where Mark Zuckerberg was in a hearing like years ago, and they were like, how does Facebook make money again? Like -- but it actually wasn't like that all. They actually are like, oh, like how -- tell us more about if you have this -- if you have 0 knowledge proofs and you don't keep the data, how exactly does that work? They actually understand the stuff pretty well now.

And so we're confident that there's some iterations happening kind of right this week on some of the legislation, but we're confident that there will be smart approaches to regulation that will be enacted. And then we're kind of we would work with the CFTC or the SEC to kind of figure out exactly how to bring lighter technology to the customers and institutions.

Right. And we're running out of time here, but I do want to cover this. I mean, do you see DeFi merging with TradFi? And sorry, just to break the acronym, DeFi is really crypto and TradFi is traditional Wall Street.

Yes. So that's certainly our vision, right? Like because the financial system, like I think some of the -- and I think you have to give them credit because they were very early and kind of fighting enough lot of that. Some of the very early crypto people, I feel like kind of had this view like, okay, like finance, we should start over. It doesn't work -- traditional system doesn't work, you have to start over, right, or this view of like, oh, you have to like rebuild it, maybe some aspects of it work, but you have to rebuild it all from scratch.

My view is that it will be more of a merge in the sense that certainly like DeFi platforms can -- on one side, right, like DeFi platforms can do things like, okay, like you can actually do if an institution needs on-chain KYC, you can do that, right, and yet still maintain access to the pure DeFi customer. Or if you want to -- if there's an idea to run like an on-chain hedge fund, you can do that.

But conversely, you can go the other way, right? Like if, let's say, traditional exchange like New York Stock Exchange, if they want to verify that what they do, all their orders are verifiable or they want to make sure that the market data that they send to their customers goes through kind of a trusted Oracle network. Again, a lot of the things happen on top of Ethereum, right? But like you can kind of go both ways. And I think -- I don't think anyone knows exactly what that end state looks like. But definitely, I think as we see now with traditional players starting to understand the technology, like it will be somewhere in the middle.

Great. Well, that was a great conversation, Vlad. So if you want to follow, Vlad is going to be here. I think the LIT tokens is very lit. Yes. So Vlad we might. Yes. So it looks like there's a couple of questions here.

I think they gave me the mic. So Tom, you invited some elementary questions, and I'm going to -- with both of you guys, I can't pass this up asking this question. And so as I talk about crypto with friends and become -- talked with everybody that I come in contact with, I cannot elaborate and explain this. So my question is about how the value flows to the token that we all hold through Bitmine and through ETFs and as we hold our own tokens.

So my question is, I understand Vlad with a Level 2 as you face the customer, value can flow to you as you satisfy customer needs. I understand in Bitcoin, digital gold scarcity will increase the value. It's with Ethereum from having utility on how the value flows to the token that we hold. And so I would love to hear with the two of you on stage, this has been a burning question of mine.

Do you want to take a stab first?

Sure. I'll take a stab and then we'll give the real answer, right? But I think -- the way I think about it is pretty simple. like Ethereum is kind of the infrastructure layer, right, the security layer. It's like you can think of it as, again, if you look at the traditional system like for the Internet like a Cisco, right, or for cloud computing like Amazon, AWS, something like that, right? So now there are applications on top of those layers, whether it's Internet applications or financial applications. And -- but there's still a lot of value accrued to the infrastructure. Like we pay a lot of gas fees to Ethereum every day. I mean, yes, it's true like gas fees are coming down, but that also means like if you think about it, in terms of supply and demand, right, that also means there are a lot more applications being built. And so it's actually kind of the net-net of it is positive.

And so I think like if you look at traditional economy, like it's not like all the value accrues to the user-facing applications and not to the infrastructure. In some cases, it's even split in some cases, it's the other way around. So I just think there's a lot of value to be had in having the right base layer to build on is really important.

Yes. And I'm going to add to it. So I've been covering markets, equities and now crypto, but equities for over 35 years. And of course, because I started when I was 2 years old. And then crypto for almost 10, okay? And I want to tell you that I meet a lot of people that are from top business schools like HBS, and they build great models. And for instance, like, let's say, they build a model for one of the cellular companies I used to cover, including Almasa Holdings, which David Sharbott is the founder of. And they do this and they go, Tom, this is the DCF. The stock is worth $5 and not a $0.01 more, not $0.01 less, okay?

And then I'll be like, oh, so you have a 10-year model, you have a discounted discount rate, you have a terminal multiple, you have assumptions for the growth of the business, the revenue per user, the customer acquisition cost, the depreciation or capital charge, interest rate assumption, tax rate. And like, so what's your confidence that you got all those 15 variables correct for each quarter for the next 10 years? And the guys is like, "Hey, I'm HBS. What are you talking about? So -- but I'd be like -- and then I've looked at -- then why do stock prices do this when there's this model that like people only update like every 3 months, right? I think most people are really anchored to the view that they believe there's a tangible way to price an asset and they get really stuck and then they miss everything.

I'll give you an example. gold. Gold has been amazing. Look at it, it's up 9% this year. So from the start of the year to now, it's worth 9% more. Did gold's usefulness go up by 9% in 15 days? Did gold sales go up? Do you know if you do a price to sales for gold, like the sale of gold and jewelry or for industrial use, it's like 120:1. You're paying like 120 price sales by gold. You tell that to a gold bug, they don't care. They're just buying gold, right?

Okay. Well, how about land? I mean, the biggest source of wealth in America is land ownership, okay? People have made money from land. I would like you to take a microscope and look at your land that you paid $5 million for. And if you look at it, there's worms and dirt. Why is it worth $8 million? It's because of where it is, right? Like why is a square inch of Manhattan so expensive? It doesn't pay you anything. In fact, you have to pay taxes on it. Guess what, why would someone tell me Ethereum is not worth anything if every real-world asset is going to be built on it and all the L2s run on it and Wall Street built most of their tokenized products. And I've literally had the same HPS be like, Tom, show me the revenue model, Ethereum.

And then they'll be like, look, I have my 10-year DCF of Ethereum. I can't get those things there without assumptions. I'm going to say in my 35 years, I've never found those people make a lot of money buying stocks because they are anchored to their own reality. I think the reason Ethereum is going to go up is the same reason gold trades at 120 price to value. If Ethereum is literally the single blockchain where most of Wall Street builds, it's N equals 1. It's like the Palantir of stocks. It's like the Elon Musk.

And if the next L2 -- sorry, the next L1 has like 100 of volume, should they have the same economic model and you just apply the same multiple? I mean it becomes -- you can see like it doesn't make sense. By the way, I don't really know what Ethereum's model is 10 years from now. Nobody does. And so that's why I question why people are so sure they know what the price of it is today. I'm not trying to give you a non-answer, but I'm showing you that everyone is convinced that there is an answer to model, and I've personally never seen anyone's model really work.

Thanks very much. This is kind of a question relating to what Ethereum's model is in 10 years from now. Some people have concerns about crypto as a whole in relationship to developments with quantum computing and quantum computing possibly being able to break blockchain encryption. So I think my first question is for you, Vlad. Just any insights on that possibility and on that speculation. And my second question is for you, Tom, if Bitmine is holding any strategy in that regard.

Great. So I think that's an important question. I think kind of the cryptographic compute that you want to use needs to be like way ahead of what's possible to break. And -- but I think the Ethereum Foundation has started taking this very seriously already, and there's kind of a plan to be way ahead by kind of decades.

I think it's not an imminent -- quantum computing is moving forward. It's not -- I think it will still be 5-, 10-plus years before we're -- before anything like that becomes more of a reality. But I think the Ethereum Foundation has done a really good job of like staying ahead of it. So that's -- to be honest, that's like one of the -- because of things like that, that's one of the reasons why like we want to build on top of Ethereum is because unlike other folks who are kind of maybe more focused on kind of day-to-day trends like Ethereum community things for the long term.

Yes. And what I might want to add is -- and there's been a lot of conversations about this. If quantum threats develop, Ethereum is able to push new upgrades to either make quantum resistance or to really improve the security. And when people think about the risk of quantum, many crypto experts are really talking about legacy Bitcoin wallets that haven't been upgraded because Bitcoin can be develop quantum resistance, but the wallets have to be upgraded.

And as you know, there's a lot of legacy wallets like Satoshi's Bitcoins. It's about I think it's about 1/3 of all the Bitcoins are in wallets that haven't been upgraded. So imagine if you're a quantum hacker whose sole goal is to steal something, then there's a huge bounty because you can do it on an old Bitcoin wallet. So that's -- and remember, when they unlock that, they have access to the entire history. So that's probably why more people are concerned about Bitcoin and quantum than Ethereum.

Now as Bitmine, what can we do about it? I mean, look, at the end of the day, Bitmine can take proactive steps as a -- because we're a company, right? We're not a DeFi project. So we can invest. We can buy quantum protection. We could buy quantum stocks. We could see quantum if we thought it would help Ethereum. So there's a lot of steps we can take. I think that's all the questions we could take.

Thank you so much, Tom and Vlad. I have a question for each one of you. First for Vlad. I'd like to know a little bit more about Lighter. Is it -- can you make an analogy for me as far as whether it's like a Robinhood in being able to trade it. It's a platform for trading? Or is it a token that you trade?

And then the question for Tom, would you give a breakdown on the revenues that Bitmine would make on each of the components? The last component was the -- you mentioned the staking, and we understand that. The other component has to do with Maven, which you had covered elsewhere, but you've not covered it here. I was wondering if you could state whether that is going to be significant and what part of percentage of revenue that it would contribute to Bitmine as far as the Maven stake service itself.

Sure. So yes, I think the short answer to your question about Lighter is it's all of the above. I mean we do have our native token. We have trading infrastructure and there's a front end to trade directly. Of course, other front-ends can and have built on top of Lighter as well. But I guess maybe the question is like how does all this fit together? And what's an analogy to it in the traditional world.

I mean I think one way to think about it is like imagine that when, let's say, like Robinhood was first built or Citadel Securities or any of these kind of key components like that the early participants actually all had a stake in that ecosystem and could that stake made everyone's incentives aligned. So it's like it's some components of what would exist in a traditional system that are interconnected through smart contracts and zero knowledge pros.

But importantly, through the token, there's kind of aligned incentives. So everyone who's early, it's like if you were one of the early traders and really helped build the ecosystem that way, you're going to have that incentive. And then now there is a variety of ways that those will be useful to you. So I think it is kind of all of the above and the token is kind of the link between all the different pieces.

Great. And with regarding to the breakdown of our 4 pillars, if we gave you that, it's -- we're giving you forward guidance. So that's why we kind of had to present it to you this way, which is just to give you guys an idea and you can track us as the year progresses, but just keep that in mind. It's -- we've given you the framework.

So Macry is going to come on stage, I think, and just give you a breakdown of the rest of the afternoon.

Thank you all, and thank you to everyone in the Bitmine family who joined us for our X Stream. We have to thank our Chairman, Tom Lee. Thank you, Vlad.

And we got some Feastables here.

We're very excited. If you join us next door, we have a lot of fun chocolate fountains. We have sliders. We have DJ. We have great hats that you can add patches on. We have something great. MrBeast couldn't be here with us today, but he sends his happiness that we are onboard as an investor and his chocolate and his drinks. And thank you, join us across the hall.

And again, thank you so much for your patience. Thank you for being a part of it, and we look forward to seeing you at the next Annual Shareholders Meeting of Bitmine.

Yes. Thank you.