HIVE Blockchain Technologies Ltd

XTSX:HIVE

Earnings Call Transcript 2022-Q2

[Holly Schoenfeldt]

Good morning, everyone. I'd like to welcome you to today's webcast, reviewing HIVE Blockchain Technologies' financial results for the 3 months ended September 30, 2021. On Slide #2, except for the statements of historical facts, this presentation contains forward-looking information within the meaning of the applicable Canadian securities legislation that is based on expectations, estimates and assumptions as of the date of this presentation, and you can see the corresponding full disclosure up on the screen right now. On Slide #3, you will see one of our most popular visuals. We included this last time, it's called the DNA of volatility. And we're always sure to include this table in our earnings presentation, especially following the disclosures because it's just a really great reminder to investors and shareholders on just how much various asset classes can move up or down over a 1-day and 10-day time frame. And as you can see here, the volatility of Bitcoin and Ethereum is much greater than the S&P or gold stocks. And then, of course, if you look at HIVE, it's even more volatile, and that's because we mine both Bitcoin and Ethereum. If we move on to Slide #4. I'm pleased to welcome the presenters for today's program: Frank Holmes, Executive Chairman; Darcy Daubaras, Chief Financial Officer; and Aydin Kilic, President and Chief Operating Officer. Next, we will have guests presenters today, which we are really excited about, representatives from DeFi Technologies, which HIVE owns 4.9% of the company; and then Network Media Group, which HIVE owns 3.4% of the company. And then if you move to Slide #6, representing DeFi Technologies for today's presentation is Russell Starr, Executive Chairman and CEO; and on the next slide, representing Network Entertainment for today's presentation is Derik Murray, Producer, Director, CEO; and Tom Lombardi, Strategic Adviser for NFT R&D Research. On the next slide, I would like to hand it over to Frank Holmes, the Executive Chairman for our corporate updates.

[Frank Edward Holmes, Interim CEO & Executive Chairman]

Thank you, Holly. Well, just as a recent magazine, Real Assets Adviser, and it talks about real estate to gold, what the next big thing is Bitcoin, and HIVE being where it is as a position in that space. So I bought this was fitting because it really is our big growth if you take a look at it, as I walk through the story today is Bitcoin. Next, please. Bitcoin mine and HODL by HIVE continuous momentum due to the BTC having, it -- that fell to 88%. And then as we increased our footprint, our production, which Aydin will go into greater detail later in the presentation, you can see that our production has been increasing each quarter. This translates into revenue, not only is Ethereum the sort of the stealth part of our revenue model, but our revenue continues, and we still are, as of the end of September, the highest revenue company of all the crypto mining companies. And a big part of that is not only the huge growth in our Bitcoin production and footprint but in the back of that is the Ethereum. They steady Eddie revenue, high gross profit margin of mining Ethereum, particularly in Sweden and also in Iceland. Strong profit and earnings per share, income was up fivefold. Gross mining margin Q-over-Q, if you take a look at the data points, Darcy is going to go into a much more explicit detail on this, but what's really important for investors is basic income per share ended September 30, it was $0.16. The previous year was $0.03. I'd like to compare the previous year to many of the peers in the crypto mining space, they were actually losing money. But we made money. And then not only did we make money in the previous year, we expanded it dramatically with the rise of Etherium and Bitcoin pricing, but in particular, because we've been increasing our footprint in mining Bitcoin. HIVE's strongest revenue growth for quarter end of September. As you can see, we're #1, #2 comes Marathon, then Hut 8, Bitfarms and then Riot. What's most interesting is a big part of that revenue, steady growth in revenue, has been from Etherium, but I'm going to repeat myself, but the big growth has been Bitcoin, and that's what we did a funding for last week to maintain that momentum. And some of these companies have market caps that are billions of dollars greater which sort of scratches your head on that relative valuation metric. And so with us this is just to recognize that we will focus on what we're doing in growing our revenue and having the highest returns on invested capital. Those cash flow returns on invested capital for HIVE are the highest of its peers. Next, please. As a quant analyst, Matt Kacur has a company called FSA Valuation Statistics. He talks about ranking all the Canadian companies based on a free cash flow, return on invested capital and cash flow return on invested capital, and he picks the top-tier stocks in each industry. And then as a group, he's a regular on BNN in Canada. And you can click through to watch the video where he talks about his analysis. But he feels that back in October '19, that HIVE was undervalued, and it was worth at that time, CAD [ 685 million ]. Next, please. This is sort of an idea of the intrinsic value of this quant model, which is a very common type of discipline in particular in America, of the quant approach of looking at these stocks. Next, please. Motley Fool has recently said that if you put $1,000 investment in HIVE in January 2020, it's worth over $47,000 today. So we have had nothing but so far, I would say, is wonderful stories, especially on companies like Motley Fool, which have a broad distribution in both Canada and in the U.S. and are read for their sort of analysis of the industry, and they do take complexity and distill it down to simplicity for investors. Recent press release, November 9 last week, we went out and raised over $100 million financing to expand our BTC production by an additional exahash. And I think Aydin will go more in detail, but that's worth something like 6 Bitcoins a day based on today's difficulty rate. It puts us in a very healthy position to maintain where we're going. And interesting for all you listeners, it was over 300% oversubscribed. And the other interesting part that the Bank of Montreal, which is a major Canadian bank is for their first time have come in and participated in a financing in blockchain mining. So we're thrilled to be welcoming them, Bank of Montreal and also thanking Stifel for leading this and Canaccord participating and Canaccord has done a great job in our ATM, which is now finished from last year, but this year allows us to fast track the momentum for next year. Recent press release on October 27 was our investment and like we've made other investments, strategic investments in other companies that are particularly using the Ethereum network. And so we made this critical investment in the NFT business via Network Media Group, which will be presenting today. It's a phenomenal micro-cap stock that had its challenges during COVID, that's all turned around. They produce high-quality content, which is sold to Netflix or Prime Time. It's Muhammad Ali, it's Bruce Lee. And you're seeing billions of dollars going into the NFT business. And the digitization, not just of film, it's also music. Next, please. We also mentioned that in October, we made the press release, Diana Biggs, who went to the University of McGill, is an engineer that has an incredible resume and has been deeply involved in the crypto space for a very early period for the past 10 years. So she brings tremendous knowledge, she was the Head of HSBC innovation labs. And we're thrilled to have her here. She was very much involved with DeFi, still is with DeFi, and she helped to expand their footprint, especially their own ETF in the Nordic countries, which has about $0.5 billion of Bitcoin in it and is a very profitable part of their business. She's joined us for our Board of Directors in Switzerland where the company basically is in Zug, Switzerland is the -- like the Silicon Valley for all the foundations in the crypto industry. Next, please. It's interesting, the ecosystem for Ether is the largest, and it's really important to recognize that this ecosystem includes thousands of bulk coins, dApps, NFTs, stable coins, and JPMorgan and Bank of America endorse Ethereum. But for us, it's interesting is that the valuation metrics and where the big growth is Bitcoin. And that's where we're focused for, its future growth by maintaining our Ethereum footprint because of this big bottle between proof of stake and proof of work, and you no longer be able to be mining. I've heard this for 5 years. And I suppose in next year it's going to eventually happen. But we'll see, as we continue to mine, and we have strategies in the event that proof of stake does take over from proof of work, we're in a very advantageous position with all the investments we made in this high-performance equipment. Next, please. this is another visual to give you an idea of the depth and scope of the Ethereum ecosystem. Next, please. One of the big challenges, and I will go to more detail on this, but the difficulty continues to rise. It's interesting that it fell for Bitcoin, but it did highly came off for Ethereum and Ethereum has gone to all-time highs. And the big reason for that is that there are so many kids who have AMD 580 chips or NVIDIA chips for gaming, in particular, they turn their computers on when they're -- to mine when they're sleeping. So you have a much more diversified ecosystem for mining Ethereum and there's one young, he's anecdotal, but one young designer told me last week that does CAD/CAM city planning for San Antonio and that he turns the machine on, and it generates about $4,000 a year, which allows them to get -- to buy new equipment, new PCs and any software he needs from mining Ethereum while he sleeps. Next, please. Now I'm going to turn over to Aydin. Aydin Kilic is our recent President and Chief Operating Officer, and he's been doing a great job, and he's going to give you a wonderful update of where we are. Aydin?

[Aydin Kilic, President & COO]

Thank you, Frank, for that introduction, and it's been a phenomenal quarter for HIVE. I'm going to get into some of the operational numbers here that represent how we got to the best revenue this quarter amongst our peer group. So right off the bat, that is because we have 1.25 exahash of Bitcoin mining active right now. It's about 0.8% of the entire network. In addition to that, 4,200 gigahash of Ethereum mining. So on a composite as an equivalent, if you convert the Ethereum mining, which is about each 1,000 gigahash of Ethereum mining works out to about 220 petahash of bitcoin mining. So that actually puts our total to over 2 exahash of equivalent Bitcoin mining, about 2.1 exahash of equivalent bitcoin mining. So that's good for the investing public to understand how did HIVE get to best revenue in the quarter. Now we're looking at the difficulty rate here. The big news out of China earlier this year, where we had the difficulty drop as a result of the miners coming offline. Well, it underscores the importance of having a politically stable jurisdiction. In addition to HIVE having green and clean energy, all of our power sources are hydro or geothermal, again, of course, we've got our operations in Sweden, Iceland, a new [ branch ] in Quebec. They are also politically stable jurisdictions. And that's, I think what gets overlooked sometimes as people just are focused on the megawatts or the dollar per kilowatt hour. It also shows how centralized Bitcoin mining was, over 60% of Bitcoin mining hash rate used to be operating out of China. Crypto is supposed to be decentralized. We're seeing a very centralized spirit in Bitcoin mining, but what you see -- so hash rate dropped significantly down to about half of what it was from 180 million terahash down to about 80 million terahash in July. That's now almost completely recovered. We're at 160 million terahash. So a lot of that has found -- a lot of that hashing parish found its way State side, into the U.S., and we expect these hash rates to continue to grow as a lot of companies have been raising capital to get into the Bitcoin mining space. Next slide, please. Now Ethereum on the other hand, is a lot more decentralized. And what I mean by this is you see the [indiscernible] for Ethereum has just continued to increase over the past few years here. And especially over the past year, you didn't see that massive drop the same way that you saw for Bitcoin mining. So to Frank's earlier point, Ethereum mining is a lot more decentralized globally. And as a result, we're seeing that it wasn't affected by China's outlying of crypto mining anywhere nearly as much as Bitcoin mining. So what does this all mean when we look at these 2 different ecosystems? Next slide, please. So one more point on Ethereum, actually. You could see highest production numbers here. For example, in second quarter, 8,688 Ethereum were mined, down from 32,800 Ethereum 1 year prior, right? However, however, of course, Ethereum has had a remarkable year, touching almost USD 5,000 per Ethereum, up from $400 or $500 a year before, right? So although the coin quantity has reduced by a factor of 4, the price has increased by a factor of 10, right? And so the fundamental economics for mining Ethereum are still very strong. And because HIVE has had, and historically had such a strong and large Ethereum mining footprint, that's part of the contributing factor to us having such a stellar numbers this quarter. Next slide, please. So we talk about coin output and we talk about price. And so what this graph here actually does is, is it represents the combined mining economics. So what this does is this shows you for Bitcoin mining, quite simply put, the $1 per terahash per day, you would be earning if you were mining Bitcoin, right? And so what it does is it takes the Bitcoin price and the Bitcoin quantity that you would be generating everyday mining and it would give you $1 per day price. So in this case, you could see that Bitcoin has remained very strong. We sort of hit all-time highs sorry, we hit multiyear highs earlier this year in the bull market around February, March. And so there was a little bit of softening in the summer. But after the hash rate dropped for Bitcoin, the profitability went up because the quantity of coins went up. And so now in the past couple of months, you've also seen the strong price of Bitcoin driving the dollar per terahash per day right back up to the levels that we saw in the spring of this year. So what this means is we're still seeing very strong Bitcoin mining economics. We know that hash rate has rebounded greatly as we saw earlier. The dollar per terahash per day is still very strong because Bitcoin is about $65,000, [ an all time high ]. And just to keep in mind, so this is dollar per terahash per day, and so you get about -- right now, about $0.40 per terahash per day. Well, HIVE has 1.25 million terahash, right? That's what it -- that's what -- when we say we have 1.25 exahash, we do have 1.25 million terahash. Next slide, please. So now this is the same graph, but for Ethereum, right? So this is dollars per megahash per day, right, for Ethereum. And so you take a step back and you say, well, hold on a second. This actually looks like it's been very consistent for the last year. Now there's a couple of big spikes in May of 2021, in February. And all of those actually were -- those were just transaction fee rallies. There's a few days where transaction fees in the Ethereum blockchain were very exorbitant. And so the London Hard Fork that came about in early August was designed to prevent these exorbitant transaction fees. Why? Because they wanted the network to be accessible. They wanted the network to be usable. They want people to be able to send and receive Ethereum or meant their NFTs to have these dApps and tokenized projects, being able to efficiently operate on the Ethereum blockchain by preventing super high transaction fees on any given day. Now in our last earnings, in some previous commentary we pointed out. In the 30 days following the London Hard Fork, right, compared to the 30 days seeing it, mining economics are actually better. And if you look at August here, -- You could see that there was rally in Ethereum mining profitability compared to the month of July. And that basically illustrates the point that we were making earlier, our technical team was running our own analytics, we're studying to pour awards at the dollar per megahash level if that is presented here. So for the technical guys out here, it's always great to look at dollar per megahash per day for Ethereum mining to understand the underlying economics and the first dollar per terahash for Bitcoin. Anyways, we've got a strong, consistent Ethereum mining business. And to our earlier slides, you know difficulties continue to go up. That strong Ethereum price action has made this a very lucrative business for us, which we're very happy to be a part of this ecosystem. Next slide, please. Some big accomplishments in this last quarter. We hit that magical exahash mark in August of 2021. And at that point in time, we had our future equivalent of Bitcoin mining at 3 exahash. And we had announced 1,500 machines that were purchased in 45 days. So that was a big highlight. August was an [ illustrious ] month for HIVE. But what's happened since then, next slide, we've actually increased our active Bitcoin hash rate by 35% in the last 3 months, so 1.26 exahash right now. In addition to that, we're at 4,200 gigahash. So our Ethereum footprint has increased. So this is remarkable because earlier, I mentioned that each 1,000 gigahash of Ethereum mining is about 220 bitcoin petahash. So HIVE's total global hash rate now on a Bitcoin equivalent is over 2.1 exahash, and that's important for the investors to understand. [ Another ] composite of these figures here. So remarkable growth this quarter. Next slide, please. An update on our data center, New Brunswick, construction is well underway. We're on line to have -- we're on track to have 50 megawatts online in December 2021. In Q1, so in a few months, we're going to have all 70 megawatts online hash in green and clean. This is a full-on infrastructure project. You could see our secondary substation that we've got there. It looks like something out of the sci-fi movie. And then our hot aisle and that gorgeous silver wall with all those fans poking through. So very exciting. We're going to have over 2 exahash of Bitcoin -- or sorry, almost 2 exahash of Bitcoin mining capacity at one site at our data center in New Brunswick. Beautiful, gorgeous passive design. You could see some of the architectural notes there in the superstructure photos. Next slide, please. And so the future looks bright for HIVE. We have [ EPUs ] on track to bring us to over 6,000 gigahash of Ethereum mining. And previously, we had also highlighted that we have 3 exahash of Bitcoin mining. So this is very exciting. And again, if you take that 6,000 gigahash of Ethereum mining, that's over 1 exahash of Bitcoin mining, that's over 1.2 exahash of Bitcoin mining. So again, on an equivalent basis, our current pipeline brings us to over 4.2 exahash of Bitcoin mining. Next slide, please. If that wasn't exciting enough, on top of all of that, just the compounding growth that we're experiencing at HIVE, which again is always exciting with Frank's leadership is, we just announced another $100 million raise, so that further increases that number that I just gave you to 4 exahash of -- through Bitcoin mining capacity. In addition, we've got that Ethereum mining footprint. So that would put HIVE's 2022 Bitcoin equivalent hash rate to about 5.3 exahash with our 4 exahash of Bitcoin mining capacity and additionally, the 6,000 gigahash. So it's going to be a very exciting year ahead. And we've got a great team globally positioned as we develop infrastructure and deploy our chips next slide. And on that note, I'll turn it over to Mr. Darcy Daubaras.

[Darcy Daubaras, Chief Financial Officer]

Thank you, Aydin, and I'll continue on with the financial review of the company for the second quarter ended September 30, 2021. Next slide, please. Turning to Slide 36. We generated revenue from digital currency mining in the second quarter of fiscal 2022 of $52.6 million versus $13.0 million in the prior year second quarter. The increase in revenues versus the same quarter in fiscal 2021 and was due to an increase in the production of Bitcoin mining, as you have seen, to 656 from 88 in the prior year, driven by the acquisition of the 2 Bitcoin mining data centers in Canada. This was bolstered by the revenues driven by the Ethereum mining that took place during the recent quarter, even though the number of coins mined fell from 32,800 in the prior year to 8,688 in the current year. This is the power of the close to 10x increase in the price of Ethereum compared to a year ago. Our gross mining margin, which equates to our revenues minus direct operating and maintenance costs, increased in absolute dollars to $45 million in the most recent quarter, compared to $9.2 million in the prior year comparative. The gross mining percentage also increased to 86% from 71%. Gross mining margin is also partially dependent on various external network factors, including mining difficulty, the amount of digital currency rewards miners receive and the market price of the digital currencies at the time of mining. The next slide, please. Turning to Slide 37. Comparing our current fiscal Q2 quarter to the previous Q1 quarter, we generated revenue from digital currency mining in the second quarter of fiscal 2022 of $52.6 million versus $37.2 million in the previous quarter. The increase in revenues versus the prior quarter, again, was due to an increase in the production of Bitcoin mining, and this was driven by the acquisition of the New Brunswick data campus and the ongoing delivery of ASIC miners to both of our Bitcoin mining data centers in Canada. Our gross mining margin increased in absolute dollars to $45 million in the most recent quarter, compared to $31.0 million in the prior year comparative. The gross mining percentage also increased. Next slide, please. Our adjusted EBITDA increased in the second quarter of fiscal 2022 to $52.3 million, versus $10.6 million in the prior year comparative quarter. The Ethereum mining margins that we experienced during the quarter enabled us to continue the upgrade of our data center assets in Sweden and Iceland and also diversify our business by starting to invest in the HPC assets. We are proud to continue to record consecutive quarters of positive adjusted EBITDA and profitability, which is a reflection of our attention on reducing operational and overhead costs in the organization from top to bottom. I will highlight, as I always do, the gross mining margin and adjusted EBITDA are non-IFRS figures. Net income for the second quarter of fiscal 2022 was $59.8 million, compared to $9.2 million in the prior year comparative quarter. This increase was driven predominantly by unrealized gains recorded in investments, revaluation gains on digital currencies and realized gains on the sale of digital currencies in the current quarter. Next slide, please. Now comparing our adjusted EBITDA and net income to the prior quarter June 30, 2021, our adjusted EBITDA increased in the second quarter of fiscal 2022 from $29.3 million to $52.3 million compared to the prior quarter. Again, I'll mention the gross mining margin and adjusted EBITDA are non-IFRS figures. Net income for the second quarter of fiscal 2022 was $59.8 million, compared to $13.5 million in the prior comparative quarter. And again, the increase was driven by unrealized gains recorded in investments, revaluation gains on digital currencies and realized gains on the sale of digital currencies in the current quarter or in the prior quarter that we are comparing to the losses, where incurred. Next slide, please. As you can see here, when we're looking at HIVE's hodling strategy, the comparison from the year ago quarter to where we are now is astronomical. We have been using this very strong approach to HODL all of our coins as much as we can and at September 30, the end of this most recent quarter, we are sitting with $123.1 million in assets sitting on the balance sheet from the hodling of Ethereum of over 25,000 coins and Bitcoin of over 1,100 coins. Next slide, please. This continues a very healthy balance sheet that we've been able to build here at HIVE. Cash on hand of $4.8 million; amounts receivable in prepaids from normal course of business, a $9.4 million; and as I had mentioned, $123.1 million in digital currencies, having a strong current assets of $151.8 million versus the total current liabilities of only $10.2 million. This continues to give us the ability to fund our operations through the hodling. We've got a solid financial position, and this is something that we will continue to do moving forward. Next slide, please. Here, you can see our capital structure. As of November 10, 2021, over 388 million shares issued in outstanding, 7.8 million warrants. We've got our options there at around 15 million and RSUs at 1.3 million. We also show the investments that we hold in DeFi Technologies and Network and also in Tokens.com. These are investments that we have made in the past and hold small positions in each of those. And now I'd like to turn it over to Holly to finish off our presentation, and thank you very much to our shareholders and investors for listening to us morning. We're very excited about the future moving forward with Hive.

[Holly Schoenfeldt]

Thank you so much, Darcy. And now we will see a quick presentation from Russell Starr, Executive Chairman and CEO from DeFi Technologies.

[Russell Starr]

Thank you, everyone, for joining. Thank you to HIVE and Frank Holmes for inviting us. I think this is going to be very, very interesting and compelling presentation for anyone attending this HIVE update. HIVE and DeFi Technologies did a share swap many months ago. It has resulted in tremendous value creation for both companies. Obviously, there are business lines outside of DeFi and HIVE that are generating tremendous revenues for both companies. However, the synergies between the 2, in my opinion, are geometric. So thank you very much for listening and attending. My name is Russell Starr. I'm the CEO and Executive Chairman of DeFi Technologies. What is DeFi? Simplified, it is the evolution and change of almost everything that you encounter in your financial world, it's bridging the gap between traditional capital markets and the new decentralized finance world. And DeFi Technologies is changing the way that people can invest in DeFi protocols themselves. What exactly do we do? It's very, very simple. We create equity wrappers and we put them around DeFi protocols that change -- trade on alternative exchanges and allow your average everyday investor to buy a DeFi protocol on a traditional listed regulated equity exchange. This is a very, very powerful proposition because to date, most of the world hasn't been able to benefit from truly one of the most innovative and compelling investment opportunities since the Internet revolution. Who are we? And who is building this amazing company? As you know, I'm the CEO and Executive Chairman. My background is in traditional finance. I help build and found and create a broker-dealer in Canada. I've built and sold several junior companies. Wouter is one of the co-founders, created a private company called Secfi. He is our President. Diana Biggs is now our Chief Strategy Officer. She was recently the Head of Global Innovation at HSBC. And 2 of our key and most influential executives are Johan Wattenstrom and Olivier Roussy Newton.Johan created and founded XBT Provider, which is now known as CoinShares. And Olivier was the founder and one of the co-creators of HIVE itself. He and we have taken the same innovative thinking that created HIVE, to DeFi, thereby allowing people access to the world of DeFi in traditional listed equities, similar to the way that HIVE was created to allow people to invest and get exposure to Ethereum and it's many complexities and opportunities. Our capital structure, approximately 200 million, well, actually 210 million shares, currently about $1 billion market cap. Our stock and our company has grown substantially as our AUM has grown over the last several months. We have a very, very robust balance sheet, as you can see, and we intend on growing our AUM and listing more and more and more ETPs listed equity instruments that allow exposure to the growing and very, very intriguing DeFi ecosystem. Why DeFi? Well, a lot of people ask me this question, and a lot of people are unaware of just how incredibly fast this industry is growing, between crypto and DeFi, this industry is growing 2x faster than the Internet. And you get a lot of questions from people suggesting that this may be a flash in the pan or that a key risk might be that Ethereum and Bitcoin and other DeFi protocols get halved or go to 0 with impending regulation. I actually think the exact opposite. We believe that as the regulatory environment catches up to this incredibly exciting sector, it will only grow in popularity and in size. To date, the total value locked in DeFi is well over $100 billion. And as you can see, it started the year just hovering close to $20 billion. Like I said, the opportunity to invest in the tech bubble in 1994 is almost analogous to what you're seeing today. And maybe I shouldn't even use the term bubble because I don't think that this is a bubble in any way, shape or form. This is an opportunity to realistically invest in the likes of Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, any of those major companies that you see today back in the single-digit figures and truly create wealth, generational wealth. Many, many companies are getting behind DeFi. And obviously, HIVE is benefiting. Obviously, we are benefiting. But you can see very, very quickly just looking at this slide, just how impressive the funds and the entities getting behind it are, which lends even more credibility to the thesis of this growing 2x faster than the Internet and what the future opportunity may bring to investors who participate in this exciting ecosystem and space. So how do we make our money? And what do we exactly do? Well, we have 3 business lines: DeFi Asset Management. We have numerous ETPs that we have created, Bitcoin Zero, Ethereum Zero, Solana, Cardano, Polkadot and the world's first ever Uniswap ETP. Unlike many other companies, we trade our own underlying, meaning we simply execute the trades and capture the spread on that. We charge no management fees for our Bitcoin and our Ethereum ETPs, and we charge minimal management fees for our DeFi protocols. Where we generate the majority of our revenues is obviously on the management fees for the DeFi protocols but mostly on staking the underlying and staking in my opinion, today with what the Fed has done to the treasury market and the fixed income market is something that's going to revolutionize the world moving forward because you can actually generate positive yield versus all of the negative yielding debt instruments that exist currently due to inflation and continuous money printing in the U.S. We just today launched one of our first nodes in our DeFi infrastructure and governance business line. And then, of course, our third basket is DeFi Venture where we co-invest with the likes of Anthony Pompliano and Teeka Tiwari as well as other related parties through our VaaS network due to Johan, Olivier, Diana, and Wouter's relationships. And we effectively get the opportunity to invest in very, very early seed opportunities on the DeFi universe and generate tremendous returns on that. Where I'm guiding investors to and where we believe we can get to is we've gone from 0 to approximately $400 million in AUM. Just on the Nordic growth market, we're about -- we are listing our products in Germany and have several listed in Germany already, and we're about to list many of our products on Euronext next. So we believe that this 9-month growth of 0 to $400 million is going to continue and quite possibly grow even faster than it has historically as we launch on Euronext and some of these larger markets and get exposure to a much broader audience for our underlying ETPs. And our infrastructure and governance model, as we build out and manage more nodes, you can make anywhere from $1 million to $2 million per node. At $1 billion in AUM, we believe we can make upwards of almost USD 100 million, and our profit margins are substantial because really truly our only costs are our people and we can run this company very, very efficiently on a low headcount. So the profit margins and the EBITDA margins on this business are actually staggering and, quite frankly, near the 85% to 90% level. This market space, like I said, is growing in leaps and bounds. It's something that you can't even compare to anything other than, quite frankly, the evolution of the steam engine and the railroads back in the early centuries -- sorry, the early 1800s and 1900s. And then, of course, the most recent Internet revolution. And like I said, this is growing 2x faster than even that was. So this is, in my opinion, going to be the most dominant business opportunity and investment opportunity over the next decade. Lastly, here, our underlying AUM in our protocols that we currently manage. As I mentioned, we've gone from 0 to almost USD 400 million, USD 374 million. And we anticipate that to double or triple in the near term over the next 6 to 12 months. And I look forward to any questions, concerns, comments, people can reach out to me. My e-mail is [e-mail]. Thank you very much for your time. Thank you, again for HIVE allowing us to do this brief presentation. And thank you very much to Frank Holmes and teams for inviting us.

[Holly Schoenfeldt]

Thank you so much. And now we will be hearing from Network Entertainment representatives for today, which is Derik Murray CEO, Executive Producer and Director; as well as Tom Lombardi, Strategic Adviser for NFT R&D Research.

[Derik A. Murray]

I'd like to thank all of you for joining us today. And I want to thank Frank Holmes and HIVE for inviting us to this forum. My name is Derik Murray, I'm the CEO of Network Media Group. Today, I'm with Tom Lombardi, who many of you may have seen our press release where Tom has recently joined the network team as our NFT strategic adviser. I'm going to hand the microphone over to Tom.

[Tom Lombardi]

Thanks, Derik. It's a pleasure to be here. NFT presents an amazing opportunity to transform finance media culture and with $10.7 billion in platform revenue at the end of Q3 2021. And this technology has gone mainstream, and we certainly see that growth continuing into the future. And where we go from here and what we use these for, we're really only limited by our imagination.

[Derik A. Murray]

Thanks, Tom. I really appreciate you mentioning the word imagination. That's something that really resonates with me. For many, many years, I had up on my wall, a quote from Muhammad Ali, a man who has no imagination, has no wings. And that inspired our Academy Award short-listed film, Facing Ali, that our entire team at Network is very proud of. I'm going to show you just a short clip just to give you a sense of this film and this great man, Muhammad Ali. [Presentation]

[Derik A. Murray]

Facing Ali is foundational in positioning Network Entertainment to be a globally recognized premium content provider of documentary series and feature documentaries. Networks celebrates the lives of the world's most iconic personalities and their enduring legacies and dives deep into fascinating and inspiring cultural topics from the worlds of music, film, comedy, fashion, sports, politics and business. The Network premium brand of content delivers world-class casts combined with digitally cinematic and richly crafted storytelling. As you know, the content universe demand for content has exploded over the last few years, and Network has been front and center in creating content for these media and tech companies who have launched these new streaming services. Our relationship with A-list talent in front of the camera or its producing partners is unparalleled. Famous talent and industry leaders across the spectrum are equally enthused about the NFT platform and its endless opportunities. embracing the new platform and aligning Network's NFT initiatives with top talent and IP owners is a natural fit for the company. I often say [indiscernible] Network, our content is platform agnostic. Simply put, we create content that is distributed and formatted for every possible media. We look at NFTs as a new and exciting digital content platform. every day at Network, we create and work with illustrations, animation, graphics, film, music, video or photography to tell stories and engage audiences worldwide. I think you can see why our entire team at Network are really excited about the apparent synergies between what we do every single day and what we will be doing in the future on this new and exciting NFT platform. And on that front, I'm going to hand the mic over to Tom and get him to dig in a little further with you on NFTs.

[Tom Lombardi]

Thanks, Derik. So let's talk about what are NFTs. NFTs are non-fungible tokens. So the best way to understand non-fungible tokens, we can talk about a fungible token. Everyone sort of understands like Bitcoin and Ether, these are digital assets. These are fungible tokens, much like a commodity, one is like the other. And we can use the blockchain to validate that. And non-fungible token, is something that is unique. And NFT and blockchain, allows us to now associates digital property ownership to these objects, such as photos and videos and music and essentially anything that is digitally native. The value proposition is really the digital uniqueness. It affords this level of scarcity for digital content that we've never had before. How are they used today, NFTS are used, what we call the NFT flex. We use them in profile pictures. It's a place where we can show our friends and show the public that we own this individual image. Probably the most famous one is a crypto pump. Some of them are selling for $7 million, but on average, we sell for $0.5 million. What really kicked off NFTs was the people sale. People as a digital artist, people sold the work of art for $69 million at an auction. I think once that happened, eyes opened, the media got involved. The other really good application was in the project called NBA Top Shots. NBA Top Shots is a collection of essentially, if you think of collectible playing cards. These were collectible videos of dunks, moves by basketball players. There was $0.5 billion of revenue in the first 6 months from close to 800,000 users. Not only do they have this cultural connection, but now there's an investment thesis behind the coverage. The tech majors, large companies are certainly diving in headfirst. So we saw the big Facebook rebranding to Meta for the metaverse. Mark Zuckerberg said in the speech, "we will be supporting crypto and NFT projects in the community."And then there's countless other projects, Quentin Tarantino, EA Sports thing, the NFTs are the future of gaming. McDonald's, Simpsons, Disney, there's a lot of adoption from global companies around the world. And we think that this unlocks so many opportunities within media, entertainment and commerce.

[Derik A. Murray]

As a pioneer in the blockchain industry, HIVE is the ideal strategic partner for Network. HIVE support, alongside our commitment to be a market leader in the rapidly evolving NFT ecosystem, is foundational. It also allows us to expand our IP pipeline with additional NFT rights and collaborations on the horizon. When I think of our relationship with HIVE, I start to do the math, HIVE, plus Network plus Ethereum plus NFTs, equals a global NFT content strategy. There's been tremendous success already in this new NFT universe. We're really excited about the prospect of bringing together a community, tying it into investment and packaging with culture, pop culture. Network NFT Studios, built on success, designed for now. Thank you, everybody, for joining us, and thank you, Frank Holmes and HIVE for having us here today, and there would be no presentation that would be complete without the pitch. Pretty simple pitch, really, an investment in network, NTE.V, provides access to the NFT revolution. Kind of sexy. That's it. That's all I got. Thanks so much, everybody. Good night. [Presentation]

[Holly Schoenfeldt]

Thank you so much. And just I want to bring everyone's attention to some of our new YouTube videos on the HIVE YouTube page, be sure to check those out as well as be sure to follow us across social media. We're quite active, not only on Twitter, but also on Instagram. And then as I mentioned on YouTube as well, be sure to subscribe for updates. And thank you, everyone. That will conclude HIVE Blockchain Technologies webcast for the 3 months ended September 30, 2021. And just as a reminder, you can read the full earnings press release on our website, and you can e-mail any questions to [e-mail]. Thank you.