Defi Technologies, Inc. Q1 FY2026 Earnings Call

Everyone, welcome to the DeFi Technologies first quarter 2026 financial review and shareholder call. I am Curtis Schlaufman, VP of marketing communications. Joining me on the call today are chief executive officer, Johan Wattenstrom, chief financial officer, Paul Sandor Bozoki, and president, Andrew Forson. We will begin with opening remarks from Johan followed by a review of our first quarter 2026 financial results from Paul and then an update on growth initiatives and strategic priorities from Andrew. After that, we will open the line for Q&A. For investors, you can enter questions in the chat. I will get those to the team throughout the presentation. We will answer some of those live and then we will bring on our coverage analysts to ask questions live. Before we begin, I would like to remind everyone that certain statements made during today's call may constitute forward-looking information under applicable securities laws. Statements include, but are not limited to, comments regarding expected financial performance, business development, strategic initiatives, market expansion, product growth, and future opportunities. Forward-looking statements are based on management's current expectations and assumptions and are subject to known and unknown risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied. With that, I will turn it over to Johan.

Thank you, Curtis, and thank you everyone for joining us today. The first quarter of 2026 reflected a more challenging market environment across the digital asset sector, with softer market conditions impacting assets under management, staking-related income, and overall investor activity during the period. At the same time, we believe the quarter reinforced the strength and durability of the business we have built. Even in what we view as the most challenging quarter of this recent crypto market downturn, with asset prices reaching their lows during the period, DeFi Technologies generated revenue of $11.2 million and positive net income of $4.9 million while further strengthening the balance sheet through a significant improvement in working capital. More broadly, the quarter demonstrated the resilience of our business model and the discipline of our operating approach. We navigated the difficult market environment while continuing to manage costs carefully, support the product platform, and advance several important long-term growth initiatives. Average AUM during the quarter was approximately $503 million with AUM levels through the period reaching approximately $427 million. While lower than prior periods, these levels were broadly consistent with market conditions and visible through our publicly reported AUM disclosures. Importantly, our model continues to demonstrate durability even during weaker market conditions. Our management fee profile remained relatively stable, and our diversified monetization approach across management fees, staking activities, trading infrastructure, and institutional initiatives continue to differentiate the platform. Across the business, we have demonstrated that DeFi Technologies is not reliant on any single product, revenue stream, or market environment. Our platform continues to benefit from multiple pathways for growth across asset management, trading, and capital markets infrastructure, and we believe the company has never been better positioned to capitalize on the convergence of decentralized finance and traditional capital markets. At the center of the group remains Valor. Today, the platform includes 103 listed products across multiple exchanges globally. We continue to believe the breadth of the platform combined with our ability to monetize AUM across multiple activities differentiates us in the market. We also strengthened our commercial leadership during the quarter with the appointment of Jakob Lindbergh as chief revenue officer. Jakob is focused on expanding distribution, deepening institutional relationships, and accelerating revenue opportunities across our product platform. We believe this addition strengthens our ability to scale institutional engagement globally. In addition, we continue to advance our institutional product initiatives, including our usage platform efforts and our hedge fund efforts, which we believe represent an important long-term opportunity to broaden access to regulated digital asset investment products across global fund platforms and institutional allocators. As we move through 2026, we remain focused on expanding institutional product structures and other regulated vehicles while continuing to invest in the products and rails that support the future of digital asset investing. We also continue to see opportunities to increase monetization across the platform, particularly through the trading, hedge, and market making infrastructure embedded across Valor's issuance stack, which supports our ability to earn additional income on AUM more efficiently. From a financial standpoint, we ended the quarter with more than $103 million in combined cash and USDT/USDC, approximately $23.5 million in treasury holdings, and a venture and private portfolio valued at $29.1 million, for total cash, treasury, and venture portfolio value of approximately $155.6 million. We also ended the quarter with positive working capital of $47.3 million, a significant improvement from year-end 2025. This fortress balance sheet gives us the ability to be proactive rather than reactionary and to deploy capital deliberately into growth initiatives, strategic infrastructure, and potential acquisitions that deepen our capabilities and strengthen long-term earnings power. Overall, while Q1 was a soft quarter from a market standpoint, we believe the business remains well positioned operationally and financially, with strong cost discipline, a resilient platform, and multiple long-term growth initiatives underway. We are increasingly encouraged by improving market conditions as we move through 2026, which we believe will create a more favorable backdrop for AUM growth, strong ETP demand, and revenue acceleration through the remainder of the year. We are already beginning to see early signs of that in the business with AUM now above $530 million and April 2026 net inflows of $14.6 million representing the second strongest monthly inflow in the last 12 months after September 2025 inflows of $22.6 million. Following our Q1 period in which flows were relatively flat and with a proven business model, expanding monetization, and the financial flexibility to operate from a position of strength, we believe DeFi Technologies is exceptionally well positioned for the quarters ahead. With that, I will turn it over to Paul to walk through the financial results.

Thank you, Johan, and good morning, everyone. I will begin with an overview of assets under management. Average AUM for the period was approximately $533 million. At the low point during the quarter, AUM was $427 million. While market conditions were challenging, these levels remained within a manageable range for the business and were consistent with the market environment investors experienced across the broader digital asset sector. Our effective management fee yield was approximately 1% for the quarter, compared to approximately 1.2% in prior periods, primarily due to the larger relative weighting of Bitcoin-related products which carried lower or no management fees following the sharp decline in altcoin prices. Within Valor, our effective staking yield declined to 2.5% due to the significant price declines in the altcoins, which pay higher effective yields compared to Bitcoin. Compression in Bitcoin and Ethereum lending rates combined with lower effective staking of the AUM, given substantial market volatility, and the unstake during Q1 of previously locked Solana coins that became unlocked and distributed from our equity investments directly to Valor on April 3 contributed to the lower staking yield. Notwithstanding the lower monetization of 3.5% of our AUM in Q1, total revenues for Q1 came in at $11.2 million which is greater than $9.7 million in operating general expenses and fees and commissions, our primary cash costs reflecting the cost discipline efforts to maintain positive core operations through the challenging crypto market conditions of Q1. The company continued to maintain its balance sheet strength with $87.6 million in cash and $13.1 million of USDT/USDC for a total of $101 million of cash and USDT/USDC on hand at 03/31/2026. Turning to product activity, we ended the quarter with 102 ETPs and structured products across our platform. During the period, we continued expanding our higher-value offerings including the leveraged bull and bear ETPs, introduced in late 2025. We also continued expanding geographic distribution through cross-listings in markets such as London and Brazil. In terms of ETP flows, they remained relatively resilient during the quarter with a small $700 thousand outflow given the challenging cryptocurrency price environment which saw Bitcoin reach a low of $60 thousand per token. Stillman Digital continued to perform well during the quarter and remains an important diversification component of our broader platform. Stillman generated approximately $2.9 million in revenue during the quarter, an increase of 38% from Q1 2025 actual revenue of $2.1 million and is thus far on track to meet or exceed its planned 15% to 20% year-over-year growth. Turning to operating expenses, our Q1 actual operating general and admin expenses and fees and commissions came in at $9.7 million, which on an annualized basis is $38.7 million or slightly in excess of the $36 million target we set for ourselves. Management will continue to strive to keep core operating costs at levels that maintain cash-positive core operations. Based on our current cost structure and monetization profile, we continue to believe the business remains positioned to achieve profitability during fiscal year 2026. With that, I will turn it over to Andrew.

Thank you, Paul. As we discussed last quarter, our focus remains on building the distribution relationships and operational infrastructure required to support broader institutional adoption of our products across global markets. This process is ongoing. In Q1, we continued expanding our distribution onboarding efforts across Europe, Latin America, and Asia following our launches in markets such as London and Brazil in late 2025. We continue to see these markets as important building blocks in expanding the global reach of the platform and strengthening access to new pools of investor demand. Our capital markets distribution work also continues to be executed with an eye towards supporting future usage distribution. We believe that UCITS and other innovative fund strategies as provided by our portfolio company, Neuronomics, remain an important opportunity to broaden access to our products through traditional fund platforms and institutional allocation channels. The attractive aspect of the UCITS/ICAV structures we have been working on is their appeal to and accessibility by large institutional capital allocators worldwide. Progress on that front remains an important strategic priority, and we continue to position the business to meet the operational, regulatory, and distribution requirements needed to support broader institutional participation. Over time, we have repositioned our global investor symposia as the DeFi Technologies Capital Markets Series in order to bring targeted visibility to our full range of products and OTC prime brokerage services via Stillman Digital to institutional investors globally. The first in our Capital Markets Series is our Institutional Investor Event being conducted at the Canadian Embassy in London in collaboration with the Canada-UK Chamber of Commerce in June. We have also proven our ability to onboard assets into our existing ETPs through our institutional outreach programs. One such institutional allocation into our Valor ETP was highlighted in a press release and is reflected in these Q1 2026 financials. The other tranche of investment will appear in Q2 financials. This shows a resilient flexibility to the underlying technology and business model even in poor macroeconomic market conditions. We continue to build out the business intelligence infrastructure first referenced last quarter, including the launch and continued development of tools such as our Defi Devolution investment opportunity index, or DVIO. These systems are designed to provide more granular visibility into product consumption, regional demand trends, inflows, and competitive positioning across markets. This information helps us improve product targeting, identify areas where institutional demand may be developing, and better position both existing and future products across our distribution network. The DVIO index and the analysis-based visibility it provides was critical to our ability to close the investments into our two ETPs. Just this week, we released an improved index calculation engine which updates daily. This lays the groundwork for our ability to create innovative instruments based on our Valor ETP platform. Other innovations that have made considerable progress in Q1 include the work we have done to restructure our venture capital portfolio to bring more value to DeFi Technologies shareholders, as well as the continued development of the in-house digital asset custody technology. We spent Q1 researching and building proprietary tech and scaling our sales and distribution networks. All of this hard work during weak market conditions is designed to help us minimize costs, enhance marginality, and deliver new products that have broader accessibility globally and within the world of DeFi. Our results reflect the resilience of our business model and operating approach despite a challenging macro environment. Looking ahead, we will continue to build strong European and strategic global distribution networks and the necessary operating infrastructure to support wider adoption of our products. At the same time, we continue to believe the work underway today will better position DeFi Technologies to capture institutional demand, improve monetization opportunities, and support long-term growth as market conditions improve. With that, I will turn it back over to Curtis for Q&A.

Okay. We will take some questions initially from the chat. So if you are an investor and you have questions, please type your question in the chat, and we will sort it appropriately. Then, if you are an analyst, please raise your hand and keep it raised, and I will invite you on one at a time per usual to ask questions of management live. First question, are you guys planning to buy back shares? As a retail investor, we are so worried about the Nasdaq listing. Johan?

I think this is two different subjects. The buyback of shares is something we might do in the future. It depends on our cash flow. We do not buy back normally from our cash at hand but rather from strong cash flow. And this has no connection to delisting on Nasdaq. There is no risk of us getting delisted from Nasdaq. We have 180-plus 180 days to get over $1. If we are over $1 for 10 days, I think, it resets. Also, obviously, we will do a reverse split if needed, not if we do not need to do it. But if needed, we will do it. I know a lot of people are really scared about reverse splits, but I think that is uncalled for; the statistics that show bad performance after a reverse split include all the companies that do reverse splits. Most of those are companies in distress. So if you sort those out, there is no actual negative impact. Also, obviously, if we do a reverse split, we will make use of a buyback program to support through those days to make sure there is no negative impact. But, in short, there is no risk of us being delisted. We have plenty of runway. In the worst-case scenario, we can do a reverse split. When it comes to the buyback program, we have a lot of really high-potential investments and uses of funds to actually make more money. That is the primary use. We obviously keep buybacks as an option if we need to. So in the worst case, yes, we could do it, but it would never be for Nasdaq purposes because that is simply not a real risk. Any information to the contrary is false information.

And I think, just to add to that, we would also qualify for another 180-day extension if needed. So, effectively, that gives us about a year to regain compliance. We are optimistic and growing more optimistic about coming out of this crypto winter. If there are additional catalysts to underlying asset prices, that should push our AUM much higher and help us get over $1. On top of that, we do have growth initiatives coming up that we hope help the share price. So there is nothing imminent right now in terms of risk or even a reverse split. But it is certainly, like, if anybody is hearing that we are going to be delisted, that is absolutely not true.

Number two, when do you plan to re-release your annual goals? I think we talk about our institutional fund structures: the UCITS, actively managed certificates, fund-of-fund programs—those are our primary focus for this year. I will let Andrew and Johan speak on that further.

Yeah. Absolutely, Curtis. I might comment on that. I think people should take comfort in the work that the company is doing to launch these products. The fact that we are being so rigorous and meticulous and doing it the right way to build out a full and complete fund platform is an indication of the moat that exists in this industry. Some time ago, Johan indicated that one of the strategic objectives of DeFi Technologies and our Valor asset is to become one of the world's leading asset managers. In order to do that, we have built infrastructure for a broad range of fund products. What makes me particularly excited about these fund products is that it actually changes the revenue profile of the business in terms of being able to generate higher returns than a standard hurdle rate and also in terms of being able to distribute our products globally without needing any particular new type of listing. The upshot is these are very valuable structured instruments in capital markets and it means you have to do it right. This is something that DeFi Technologies and Valor has consistently done. In the heart of macroeconomic uncertainty, with a lot of volatility in digital asset prices, I have to remind people that we generated nearly $100 million in revenue on a profitable basis when many in the Web3 industry either do not generate revenue at all or certainly do not do it profitably. So we are taking this same safe, consistent, structured approach to building out a new fund platform that will enable us to scale consistently and quickly and globally with a range of new instruments that will also provide us higher marginality and higher revenue potential.

Thanks, Andrew. Next question. Hey, Curtis team. Hope you are doing well. If you guys are optimistic over crypto price action, how optimistic will guidance be for next quarter and full year? I will start, and then Paul you can wrap this up.

We have technically issued guidance for Stillman. We are guiding for 15% to 20% growth. Last year, they did just about $10 million in revenue. Fifteen to twenty percent growth puts them at $11 million to $12 million. They had a really great first quarter with over 30% growth year over year. So, hopefully, they can continue to execute at that level. In terms of Valor, from a technical standpoint, we have not broken out of the bear market trend; I think that comes around breaking past $83 thousand for Bitcoin, the 200-day moving average. We are taking a more conservative approach this year in regards to guidance. But if you look at Q1, and if you believe Q1 represented the lows in this bear market, we came out profitable. So at these levels, you can assume that we will continue to be profitable through the course of this year. Paul, if you want to add any additional color.

Okay. So for everybody, let's start with Stillman because it is easier to get your head around. They did about $10 million in 2025, and we have said 15% to 20%. So 20% would be $12 million. If you look, they did $2.9 million in Q1, so they're tracking to do $12 million this year. For Valor, valor.com shows our AUM in real time every day. Our monetization in 2025 was 5.2% for the full year. Q1 was low at 3.5%—we think it was a pretty crazy quarter with prices. We are crypto bulls, so we are suggesting 4.5% as a conservative monetization rate for the year, and then you can put that on an AUM number for the year. Our AUM has moved around a lot; it generally moves with crypto prices. We have been over $1 billion as people know. Now we are just over $530 million-ish. You hear about all the initiatives we have: Andrew, Johan, and Jakob are working on bringing in new money. In terms of providing guidance, with those numbers you can kind of get to a core safe revenue. But we are declining to put out a formal consolidated guidance for the entire company because we need a little more time on UCITS and the fund structures, which we think can really drive big numbers. Until there is more visibility, we are going to hold off on giving a consolidated fixed number. But that is what I would suggest people watch for, and that hopefully will really spark up the company once we get those things going.

Thanks, Paul.

The investigation into the share price manipulation issue has been around for almost a year. Shareholders need answers—no platitudes. Any meaningful update, please? This is an ongoing process. It is still ongoing and it is something we will release updates about when there is material information, due to the fact that it could be a legal process. We also cannot comment because if we were to comment on something that is not public and privileged to the company, we would lose privilege on that information. If we have further information on that particular topic, we will release it and it is still currently an ongoing discovery process.

And I think as a public company too, we have to be very responsible and mindful of what we put out publicly especially in matters that can be this sensitive. So we cannot, unfortunately, speak openly and freely about it publicly. Next question: you spoke to your stablecoin strategy. You have small investments in the stablecoin CNHN and potential collaboration/integration into your stack. FireLabs in-house development update. Andrew?

Our strongest assets are part of our venture portfolio. As the questioner correctly identified, we have investments in continental stablecoin projects, which include the CNHN, and in StableCorp. We consider these very valuable and they will be increasingly accretive to DeFi as our fund structures come online. One of the things I alluded to in my remarks is that we are working on innovative ways to generate more revenue-based value for the DeFi Technologies group from our venture portfolio. Having access to these stablecoin projects on which we sit on the cap table alongside Circle and Coinbase Ventures is advantageous. The objective is to leverage these partnerships to explore potential liquidity products. Of course, they are already in the process in both instances of working on onboarding to Stillman, which is significant being that these stablecoins need access to markets and trading pairs in order to generate liquidity. From our perspective, these are anchor products to the future of our venture portfolio, which we believe will be quite innovative and will actually leverage our core fund platform.

Have you all considered bringing custodial services in-house given the SOC 2 issue? I think one answer is yes, but I will let Johan explain more about our custody plans.

On custody, obviously, we have an in-house custody technology stack, which we are developing now to productize and release to the public as a service. I think we have a very unique offering in this area. One of the reasons I believe it is very important to build on this and release it is that we do not want to pay any other middleman for these types of services. Also, our needs are on a different level than what we see from other offerings in the market. It would provide a foundation for other things we are building in DeFi capital markets infrastructure and decentralized finance. Once we have this productized and launched, we will go after both institutional and retail deposits and money into this tech stack. We already have quite a lot of infrastructure we will stack on top of the custody offering. We are aiming to have something ready this year for public release and ready for custody use. It is a bit early to give a firm date for public release, but it is not just about the custody stack—it is the foundation for other unique products we can bring to the market.

We will move on into some analyst questions. I will get Alan Klee from Maxim. You are on, so go ahead and unmute yourself.

Alan? I think you are on mute. Okay. Maybe he stepped away for a second.

Oh, I am sorry. I think I was—can you hear me? Can you expand on your new institutional structures a bit and the feedback that you are hearing from potential customers?

I am happy to. Historically, about 95% of our AUM has been in the ETPs from the retail side. Over the last nine months, we have seen very strong demand from institutional clients in our core markets—the EU, Switzerland, and the UK—and on a global scale from other types of funds and institutional platforms. To meet this demand, we have accelerated our efforts to build globally available and more institutionally targeted products. Part of this is UCITS funds and Valor funds, as well as hedge funds we have in the pipeline. These will cover needs both from pension funds and alternative investment funds, as well as fund-of-funds both in crypto and outside of crypto. Family offices are also a strong driver. We have some commitments and strong demand from participants in this space. The upside in terms of AUM is larger for this area than for the retail side, and ticket sizes are much higher. You will see innovation both on the fund side—normal hedge funds, UCITS funds, and usage funds—but also in asset-backed ETPs to meet demand for volatility-targeted ETPs that many allocators want so they do not have to reweight their allocation to crypto continuously. Over a slightly longer time frame, a few of these products will be well suited for tokenization as well.

Thank you. One last question: it did not seem like you put too much into staking in Q1. How much of the AUM do you think can be put to work in staking and lending?

I will comment first and then let Paul comment on the level. We can continuously increase the percentage of AUM we put into staking. A temporary factor in Q1, where we already see improvement, is that with the lows of the crypto market, the dominance of Bitcoin and Ethereum increased, and the price declines in Solana, Sui, and other altcoins were much deeper. As a result, overall AUM constituted a larger proportion of Bitcoin and Ethereum, where our margins are the lowest. Once the market recovers, you will see a much higher percentage of the AUM being in higher-yielding staking assets. We have already seen movement in Sui, TON, and BNB, and we are confident the market is bouncing back. The lower staking in Q1 was mainly driven by the steep contraction in altcoin values.

I want to add that staking yield is down because altcoins pay more than Bitcoin and Ethereum. We staked about 59%, which is a little on the lower side, because there was a lot of volatility. In February there were some very sharp sell-offs and unbonding periods to get coins released so you can sell them. We do try to hedge, so staking was driven a bit lower. In theory, staking could get up to about 80%. Low seventies would probably be more realistic in terms of modeling. So in a volatile market, it's in the high fifties to low sixties. In a normal market it's seventies, and in ideal times up to maybe 80%.

We are seeing staking come up now both with the market improving and structurally as we push how much we can stake safely without being in danger and without being unable to hedge 100%.

Thank you very much.

And then Mike from Northland.

Hey, guys. First question: you are sitting on slightly over $100 million of cash. How much cash do you need to run your business with all the trading and new products? If you look out to 2026 and 2027, what is a minimum level of cash you need to run the business? Just trying to think through how much you truly need over the next couple years.

I can start and then Paul can add comments. For our own market making—where we will also try to make it more visible, as our profits on our own market making are somewhat hidden in realized and unrealized P&L—the demand has been between $20 million and $35 million in that range. There is obviously a scenario where we could go down to zero. We do have external market makers in all areas, but strategically it is important to hold control of the order books so we can have tighter spreads and higher-quality prices than competitors. I would say roughly $25 million to $40 million or so is what we need to have for market making. Then, we have a few other capital needs right now that will go down with time. When we are launching our funds and other structures, we will use some cash to seed these funds to make it easier to do roadshows and sell them because we need substantial AUMs to get big tickets in the beginning. It will be easier to accelerate that phase early on with seed money. We are also looking at different acquisitions. We are very careful about that, but there will probably be some good opportunities given consolidation in the market, and we are in a good position to take advantage of that. We do not want to opt out of acting quickly if there is a great opportunity.

Got it. And then maybe just secondly, where should the market's expectations be on you guys showing a ramp in revenue from new products? Is that 2026, 2027? When should we expect to see some of that?

I would say the first half of the year for sure, maybe towards the end of Q3. But second half for sure I would be very surprised if we do not see a significant contribution. Something we may not have commented on is our venture into alpha-type products with our funds and active certificates: those will have at least the first fund—and I think the second and third as well—with a 1.5% management fee plus 15% performance fee structure. So besides our Valor core business and Stillman, this will be a third, much less correlated leg of revenue. The types of strategies we will launch can have some really great years, and the 15% performance fee could be something that is uncorrelated to market levels while still being significant even with not huge AUMs because the strategy has a good Sharpe ratio, interesting performance dynamics, and low drawdowns. From how that return profile looks, it could provide an uncorrelated way of earning substantial revenue. I think from 2027 we should see significant income start picking up.

Thank you.

Any other analysts? Raise your hand and I will invite you on. Okay. Then we will go back to a couple of questions in the chat in the meantime. This one for Andrew: next steps in Brazil to get more Valor traffic on that exchange?

Q1 was a tricky quarter in the digital asset space. For most of Q1, we focused on setting up a very efficient, lean capital markets team, so we were not focused on selling in January and February. We had our kickoff event in Brazil and created DeFi Tech Brazil. What followed in the next month was that we ended up beating our next competitor in terms of total turnover within that market. Our focus is to be well positioned not just for the ETPs, which wrap our existing products, but to make sure the market understands our institution-friendly products on the fund platform. We have a team focused on capital markets, investor relations, PR, and publicity. I just returned from Brazil where I had no fewer than three long meetings a day with institutional investors to build our brand, make sure people know we are available, and make them aware of Stillman and the five ETPs that are listed, as well as our future fund products coming online. Each visit and month we go there we get more traction. Brazil is a market of 200 million people with a high local interest rate and a new entrant advantage for us. Many institutions get access to our European ETPs through offshore structured instruments, so not all activity will show up on the local exchange. We are in this for the long term to build strong distribution for existing products and future higher-margin unique products. I was pleased with our first-month results, but we need to continue building traction.

Thanks. Alan, did you have another question?

No. I do not know what happened.

Okay. You had your hand raised again. Let's see. Next question in the chat for Paul: please elaborate on what the next $150 million in AUM growth means to our bottom line and to our forward valuation of the company. Please also reiterate how swiftly a $150 million bump in AUM means since we are already profitable, and please outline our cash burn for the year.

That is a great question. We have a ton of operating leverage in this business. Our costs are relatively fixed. Last year, our operating general and fees and commissions were about $40 million. We have targeted $36 million on an annualized rate and we are at $38.7 million. If we do $550 million of AUM and Stillman is performing, we are break-even to positive. So any additional AUM largely flows to the bottom line. Assume 90% flows to the bottom line; there is a little bit of slippage on some extra fees and commissions for trading and maybe some SG&A to go with it, but we do not need to roll out a big team or add many bodies or rent more offices to manage another few hundred million of money—our existing infrastructure can handle it. Put a 4.5% monetization on it, and about 90% of it comes to the bottom line.

And adding to that, as Paul discussed, Bitcoin constituted a higher allocation of our ETP makeup in Q1, and since we do not charge management fees on Bitcoin, that decreased our monetization levels. But if we see alts run, which have much higher yield, allocations, that will increase our monetization levels as well. So if we can continue to grow Solana, Cardano, XRP, and some of these longer-tail alts which offer higher yields, that will also help our monetization levels increase. Just in case that was not clear.

Fully agree.

Another question: any plan to accelerate the stock price? Again, our current business model is looking to increase monetization where we can: new products, hopefully help from the macro backdrop and Bitcoin and altcoin prices, and some other initiatives. Typically, in a bear market crypto equities are hammered, but when we enter a bull market, crypto equities have consistently rerated and we are a crypto equity. We are working on new fund products and structures that would be market agnostic—meaning they are not significantly impacted by underlying crypto price movements. That will bring more stability to our AUM, revenue, and ultimately our share price. What do you think is the biggest misconception the market has about DeFi Technologies?

I think the fundamentals of the platform and the company are quite strong. The beauty is I can say that while pointing to the money we actually make. There will always be negative soothsayers, but our focus is on keeping costs down, generating revenue, and being profitable. We've navigated macro volatility and still made money. This is a platform being prepared to be a real infrastructure company in the world of digital finance. Custody represents more than just a service line: from an accounting perspective it helps us minimize costs because we do not have to pay others to store our digital assets. From an infrastructure perspective, every time you see a news article that talks about an RWA, think Valor custody. Every time you see tokenization, securitization, or stablecoins, think Valor Custody, because anything that lives on chain is going to need a quality custodian. We are the predominant avenue for structuring instruments so digital assets can get money from traditional capital markets. Foundations and institutional investors come to us for that. Johan created the world's first Bitcoin ETP in May 2015, and we have long experience in structuring these products. We are building infrastructure to service growing demand.

Do you all have any product plans to integrate into TradFi institutions?

Yes. Our funds are targeted to institutions: the largest banks, capital allocators offering strategies to private wealth divisions, and proprietary trading desks. Stillman Digital as a prime brokerage/OTC firm enables large institutions to take bulk positions with predictable pricing, so Stillman grows whether markets are good or not. It enables large holders of digital assets or stablecoins to transact in and out with predictable pricing and execution.

I agree. All the new initiatives we are doing now are intended for institutional and traditional investors, as well as the traditional infrastructure such as banks and prime brokers. From Stillman services to our funds or UCITS structures, these are instruments they understand and use to allocate into the new asset class of crypto. The custody side is foundational for integrating with traditional finance and introducing products in a format they will understand.

If I did not get to your question, please email me at [email protected] or [email protected]. Thank you so much for your time today. If there was anything more you want addressed, please reach out. With that, we will wrap up the call today. Thanks again.