Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Argo Blockchain PLC Q1 2022 Results Investor Presentation. Throughout this recorded presentation, investors will be in listen only mode. Questions are encouraged. They can be submitted any time using the Q&A tab. Just type your questions in and press send. The company may not be in a position to answer every question it receives during today's meeting. However, the company review all questions submitted today and publish responses, where it's appropriate to do so. Before we begin, we'd like to submit the following poll, and as usual, I'm sure the company would appreciate your participation. I'd now like to hand over to CEO Peter Wall. Good afternoon. Thank you, Mark. Thanks everyone for joining us this afternoon or this morning, depending on where you're located. I'm Peter, I'm the CEO of Argo Blockchain. With me today also is Alex Appleton, who's our CFO, and Alex is in the U.K., and Tom Divine is with us as well. He has his camera off. He'll come on for the Q&A section at the end. Tom's our head of investor relations. We're gonna walk through our Q1 2022 earnings presentation. This slide will look familiar to you. It's our normal legal disclaimer. I'm not gonna go through it, but it covers the usual language about forward-looking statements. All right. Our opening slide is our classic Argo at a glance slide. Again, familiar to many of you who have tuned in to our presentations over the years. Not much has changed on this slide since our presentation last, I guess it was a few weeks ago, our 2021 year-end call. Our contracted hash rate is 3.6 exahash. That includes 1.6 exahash of our current capacity, along with another 2 exahash from our Bitmain order. As we, I think as everyone hopefully knows, we've already started installing this 2 exahash of machines from the Bitmain order at Helios, and we are expected to complete that process by the end of October. Installation is going well. Team on the ground is doing a great job. The 3.6 exahash translates into about 44,000 mining machines, and that's about 24,000 of our current fleet, and then another 20,000 from the Bitmain order that I was just talking about. I think, again, as everyone knows, at Argo, we're very focused on sustainability and ESG. We were the first Bitcoin miner to be 100% carbon neutral last year and are continuing that this year. Our Bitmain HODL at the end of the year was just under 2,700 Bitcoin and Bitcoin equivalent, and 10% of that is allocated to Argo Labs for non-mining activities. That is our innovation arm. As we discussed on the last earnings call, we're now more comfortable with using a portion of our monthly mining Bitcoin to fund our operating expenses and continued growth. We'll talk about that a little bit later as well. Lastly, our mining margin for Q1 was 76%, among the highest of all our peers, and a really good number considering market conditions for the Q1. All right, slide four is kind of a snapshot of our Q1 2022 results. We generated a revenue of $19.5 million, just under GBP 15 million. That's a 9% increase over our revenue from the Q1 of 2021. Our adjusted EBITDA, which excludes non-cash items like share-based payments and unrealized change in the value of our HODL, was $19.1 million or GBP 14.5 million. Our net income came in at $2.1 million or GBP 1.6 million. We mined 470 Bitcoin, which is a 21% increase over the same period last year. I also mentioned earlier our mining margin for the quarter was 76%. That translates into a direct cost per Bitcoin mined of just under $10,000, $9,779 to be exact, or GBP 7,448. This mining margin is a drop from the 84% mining margin that we saw for the full year of 2021, and that's primarily due to a higher global hash rate and the associated increase in difficulty. That's not surprising. We knew that, you know, if Bitcoin, if the price of Bitcoin didn't come up and network difficulty continued to rise, mining margins would likely come down a little bit for the Q1 of this year. At the end of the quarter, we held 2,700 Bitcoin and Bitcoin equivalents on the nose on the balance sheet. Just a quick note, you know, in terms of transparency, I wanna acknowledge these results are not the best we've ever had. We always knew that Q1 was gonna be a bit of a slog. We knew that we'd see some sluggish performance, as our hash rate stayed flat at 1.6 exahash while we were building Helios. The focus for Q1 was to get Helios online. We've done that. I'm very proud of our operations team for doing, you know, as well as we've done with the 76% margin for the quarter, amongst the highest of our peers, as I said. Obviously, I'm super proud that we launched Helios two weeks ago. All right, on to a few more points for Q1 2022. Again, our focus, you know, rather than growing our hash rate was executing our plans for Helios. Along those lines, you know, I've said many times, looking forward, you know, you need three things to be a successful miner. You need access to power. You need access to rigs. You need access to capital. We're very well set, with access to power at Helios. You know, our interconnection agreement there is 800 MW of capacity. I know that there's been reports out, you know, people have been talking about ERCOT slowing the pace of grid connections for new Bitcoin mining facilities in Texas. ERCOT, who are the folks who manage the grid in Texas. We have our interconnection agreement in hand for the full 800 MW. So we don't anticipate any negative impacts from adjustments that ERCOT is making. Our specific location as well is a particular advantage for us because we are very far from major centers, and there is almost no local load where we're based. We're really confident in our access to that 800 MW. With respect to rigs, you know, again, power, rigs, capital. With respect to rigs, we signed a supply agreement with Intel to purchase their new Blockscale ASIC chips this year. We'll be deploying those into custom-made mining machines at Helios during the H2 of this year. On the capital side, we also strengthened our access to capital by establishing a financing relationship with NYDIG, and that came in two different forms. One was in February, we borrowed approximately $27 million for a loan secured by electrical infrastructure that's deployed at Helios. These are things like high voltage, low voltage transformers, et cetera. Just a few weeks ago, we signed an additional agreement. This happened after our earnings call. We said we were, you know, continuing to explore debt, and then we announced, yes, here's a debt deal. That was an additional agreement with NYDIG to borrow $71 million, and that is secured by some of the mining machines at Helios. I'll go into a little bit more detail on this loan later on. We also signed an agreement with Core Scientific, our hosting provider, in the Q1 of this year to do a machine swap. We have about 10,000 S19s that were located at some of Core's facilities. Rather than spend the money and the effort and the time to unplug these machines and ship them to Helios, which would have resulted in downtime, Core is sending us brand-new machines, brand new S19j Pros, and we're swapping out the machines that we have that we already have at Core. As we install these new machines in batches between May, June, July, Core will take ownership of our S19s that are located in their facility. We've already done the first of those swaps along the way. It's an elegant solution. It avoids major operational risk, and it benefits both us and Core. It's truly a win-win. Once that machine swap deal is complete at the end of July, we'll be operating all of our own machines, and we'll no longer have any machines hosted at third parties. We also officially launched Argo Labs this quarter. I'll talk through a slide on Argo Labs a little bit later on and some of the projects that they're working on. Finally, we strengthened our board of directors with the appointment of Raghav Chopra, formerly a portfolio manager at a large asset management firm in the U.S. Since left that firm to start his own digital assets fund, and this has allowed him to come and join our board. We're very excited to have him. He's added a ton of value already. All right, moving on to our Helios update. Definitely the most exciting thing that's happened for the company in 2022 so far is that we've officially opened Helios. We had an event, I guess it was two weeks ago now. We energized the facility on May 5th, and we actually started mining Bitcoin that day. Here's one of our latest photos. You can see the substation that we've built that's connecting to the Cottonwood Substation in the foreground, and in the background is the facility, 125,000 sq ft with the air coolers coming out on the side. In that picture, if you look carefully, you can see a tent on the left side down the building, where there's, that was where we had our opening event or part of the opening event, the food for the opening event, on May 5th. All right, moving along. A little bit more about our grand opening. We had about 300 folks in attendance, including most of our Argo team. About 150-200 people were from the local community, came out to show their support. It was great. We also had U.S. Congressman Ronny Jackson there to say a few words. This is a, you know, the first mining facility in his district. He was happy to be there, happy to learn about the space, and learn about, you know, our business. We also had Bill Flores, who's the Vice Chair of the ERCOT Board of Directors. Obviously a good ally to have. He came and gave some remarks. ERCOT, as I've said, is excited about, you know, the opportunity for Bitcoin mining to play a role in stabilizing the grid in West Texas. We're happy to have Bill come. We had a bunch of other people there. Last week, we put out a video recap of the day. If you haven't had a chance, it's up on YouTube, check it out. We're also gonna have a few other videos coming out in the next few weeks about some of the backstory of Helios and some of the kinda, you know, the trials and tribulations of setting up a large facility in the Texas High Plains. All said, it was a fantastic day, and the team has done an incredible job. No one in Dickens County can believe that we've built the facility as fast as we can. In fact, no one in the space, you know, can believe that we put it up as quickly as we can. We're getting a lot of congratulations, which feels good 'cause we obviously, you know, it is a big moment for us and a big part of our vision for the future. A couple more pictures. On the left you can see the crowd that came out. As I said, a ton of locals. Had a lot of partners there as well. A lot of people have helped Argo along the way, and we wanted to make sure that they were recognized and had a chance to, you know, touch and feel what we're building. It was awesome to have them there. On the right, you can see our immersion facility. Perry Hothi, our CTO, has done an incredible job of coming up with, you know, the design and the system for immersion. Roughly speaking, you know, you can see those tanks, those large silver tanks, double-decker. Those hold the fluid which cool the machines. The machines sit in those tanks, and then the fluid is pumped. You know, you see the large pumps and hoses, the hoses that come out, and then the larger piping below. The fluid goes into those and it goes out into those air coolers that you see outside. Essentially, those air coolers are like a giant car radiator, and they cool the fluid, and then once the fluid is cooled, they come back in. The black boxes which you see on the front of those racks are PDUs, power distribution units. Those manage the electricity that flows into each mining machine. Those are important part of any mining facility. We had ours custom built. You can see they're branded Argo. It's really, truly a custom facility from top to bottom. Again, you know, this is a new space, this is new technology, and we are at the absolute forefront of it. Perry and our team are doing an incredible job and really feel a sense of ownership over this design, over this facility. That's what we want. You know, we're good at mining, we're good at running facilities, and every time we've set out to do something on a technological level, we've achieved it. It's hard, you know, it's not easy. That's a question I get all the time: How easy is it to do immersion mining? Why aren't more people doing it? A lot of people aren't doing it because it's challenging, but our team can do it 'cause they're really good. I'm very proud of the work the team's done. All right, moving on to kind of a look ahead of Helios phase I. Again, we showed this slide during our last earnings presentation a few weeks ago. Shows, you know, the basic kind of work streams moving forward. We've already started installing machines at Helios. Let's pass over the construction 'cause we're done that. The key little dot there is the energization dot. That's happened start of May. We can check that one off. We've got, you know, demand response registration and installation of immersion equipment. Well, the demand response is done. We're registered for that. The installation of immersion equipment is happening, still going on to the end of June, building out ahead of what we already have done so far. There's core swap machines, which are also Bitmain machines, and then the Bitmain orders. Those are being installed as we speak. As we said to the end of July and then the end of August. Lastly, the Intel machines. We're in that design testing phase right now for those. The deployment of those would be in the H2 of this year. We're targeting kind of very late Q3, early Q4. All right, slide number 10, total hash rate capacity. Again, showed this slide last previous presentation. At the end of Q1 had 1.6 exahash of mining capacity. We've started installing machines at Helios and are expecting to increase our hash rate to 2.2 exahash by the end of Q2. We also expect to start deploying the Intel machines that I just said during Q4. That will take us to approximately 5.5 exahash by the end of the year. All right. Slide 11 is kind of looking forward to 2023 and 2024. And just kinda wanna talk through this slide again, just to emphasize the incredible runway that we have for growth at Helios. Phase I, 200 MW of power. Beyond that, we have an additional 600 MW that we can develop over the next few years. Our supply agreement with Intel is a key differentiator for us here. Not only are we gonna be deploying these chips, which are more cost-effective than buying stock machines, but we're able to custom design these machines to run specifically in our immersion system at Helios. Won't have to rely on off-the-shelf machines, but able to put our own form factor and our own software, et cetera, into the machines. That will really allow us to take advantage of the immersion benefits. All of this adds up to essentially a pretty significant amount of growth into 2024, and that's, you know, targeting roughly 20 exahash, north of 20 exahash, by 2024. That obviously includes the full development of the 600 MW. Even though we're still at phase I, we've already taken some of the key steps to kind of build out the next phase. Earlier this year, we announced four additional transformers that will take us up to that 800 MW of power. These are long lead items. You know, you can't get a massive transformer overnight, so those take nine to 10 months. We've got those coming in the H1 of next year. All right, slide number 12 is our financing our growth. In our presentation, a couple of weeks ago, we showed this slide and said we'd need roughly GBP 125 million of additional capital to complete phase I. Also said, as I mentioned, that we'd be looking primarily at raising debt and selling Bitcoin to fund this capital. In early May, we announced the next debt deal, a $71 million financing deal with NYDIG. We'll get into the details of that deal on the next slide. Additionally, essentially, we need $50 million of capital remaining to. We expect to finance this with a combination of additional debt and by selling a portion of our monthly Bitcoin production. We were at 125. You know, minus 71 need roughly $50 million of additional capital to fully build out phase I. That includes infrastructure, machines, you know, everything, the whole kit and caboodle. All right. Our machine financing agreement with NYDIG. You know, feedback from shareholders large and small is they, given where we're at right now, non-dilutive growth or non-dilutive capital is our best factor for growth, our best way for us to grow. That's what we've done with this latest machine financing agreement with NYDIG. We have built a relationship with them going back to earlier this year. Obviously, they've been in the space for a while. We signed an agreement with them to borrow $27 million for building out parts of Helios, and that was secured by some of that electrical infrastructure at Helios. We built upon that relationship with NYDIG, and now have this $71 million financing agreement. The borrowings from this deal, I think as people if they read the RNS and they saw the deal, they'll be funded in tranches over the next few months as we take delivery of the S19j Pros that are coming into the facility. The interest rate is 12% on this loan. You know, to the average consumer, obviously that's very high. If you come from a traditional finance background or if you're mortgaging your house, you're like, "Wow, that's a big number." This is actually a very competitive rate for machine financing. You know, when Alex and I started talking about machine financing with people not that long ago, 18 months ago, you know, 24 months ago, rates were 24%, 25%, 27%. They've been in the high teens for most of the last 12 months. Getting down, you know, to 12% is a good number. Obviously, you know, we want that number as low as possible moving forward. We are seeing the trend in the industry in general is to move towards lower and lower interest rates. As I said, these machines are secured against the S19j Pros. All right, Argo Labs. Sebastian and the team at Argo Labs have been doing a great job. We started Argo Labs last year and launched it to the market in the Q1 of this year. I mean, in a way, we've been doing Argo Labs since we first, you know, came together as a company. We've always been talking about other parts of the ecosystem, at least in an informal way. We had made a few, you know, deployments of capital over the years, but now we have officially, you know, this thing called Argo Labs. I think as everyone knows, the focus is on non-mining activities, participating in the disruptive sectors of the broader blockchain and Web3 ecosystem. So far we've allocated about 10% of our total digital assets to Argo Labs. You can see in the pie chart here a breakdown of some of those holdings. Polkadot we first invested in back in 2019 has done very well for us. Makes up a large portion of our Argo Labs holdings. We also have exposure to Ethereum, Solana, Cosmos, NEAR, and others. Aside from those specific tokens, the team is also looking at and deploying capital into early-stage projects in the areas of GameFi, NFTs, and DeFi. It truly is a diversified approach. We're also generating revenue through yield generation by running nodes, staking, and participating in DeFi liquidity pairs and others. Overall, generally, as I've said many times before, the goal for Argo Labs is to take a portion of our Bitcoin holdings and generate additional uplift from those holdings that simply outperforms just holding Bitcoin. Obviously, you know, last week in the Web3 space and in the non-Bitcoin space, well, in the Bitcoin space too, but last week was a particularly intense week with the collapse of the UST and Luna world, the Terra ecosystem. We're not super heavily invested in the Terra ecosystem. We did have some UST. We were participating in yield generation on the Anchor Protocol. None of these amounts were material. We were able to sell our UST positions at $0.93, which looking back was a very good move given where. The last time I checked, I think it was trading at $0.12. Overall, on a net basis in the Terra ecosystem, we nearly broke even on our positions, after taking into consideration the yield that we generated through our holdings there. We, you know, did pretty well, all things considered, with what happened. All right, that's my portion of the presentation. I'm gonna hand it over to Alex. He's gonna go into some more detail on our financial performance. Thanks, Peter. Hi, everyone. Just wanted to echo what Peter said about seeing the facility firsthand. It's the first time that I've seen the facility a couple of weeks ago, and really hats off to the ops teams and the techs team. You know, we've invested, you know, a great deal of money there. And we're now about to see the rewards from that investment. Really exciting time to be part of that build-out and part of that facility. To go into the figures. As Peter said earlier, the first three months of this year, you know, while we haven't been investing in new machines on the ground, we knew that this would be a bit of a difficult time. Having said that, our mining margin is still at 76%. We always aim to be in TRA, and that is well within TRA of our fellow miners. Our cost per Bitcoin was just below $10,000 per Bitcoin, or just under GBP 8,000. So still very, very competitive, and still very, very profitable. In terms of what we are now starting to present to the market, we've made the decision to present an adjusted EBITDA, as Peter said. This excludes the share-based payment charge, and also the change in fair value of digital currency. What we think that really gives the shareholders a view of how the company is performing, taking some of the elements that we don't necessarily control out of the equation. We're taking out those charges which go through or are seen, or gains indeed, that are seen in our profit and loss account, so that people can see how we're actually performing as a business. Obviously, as we look at that adjusted EBITDA, it was very pleasing, and a great figure. It's in the high nineties there. You know, the business is well positioned as we stand today. As we build out Helios, that will continue to grow, and we will see the impact of the lower power costs that we're able to get, you know, at the Texas site, and how that impacts our cost per Bitcoin, as we have machines mining in the immersion facility. Moving down the P&L, we can see that there's a couple of impacts here, particularly from foreign exchange. The pound weakening against both the US dollar and the Canadian dollar is adverse, but actually helped our income statement. We've also had a revaluation of the contingent considerations. This was the shares that we paid for DPN, they changed in value and hence we had a gain on the face of the P&L for those. We've seen interest expense increase as we've moved away from the equity and we've leaned into debt. We've seen an increase as we would expect in our interest expense well within our sort of coverage ratios and our internal coverage ratios and targets that we have, still very comfortably covered off there. That is our P&L. Again, given the challenges that we've seen in the Q1 and the challenges we knew we would face, really pleasing to see that we have a net income and a very healthy EBITDA and mining profit percentages and results. Moving on to the balance sheet. We can see that the balance sheet we've increased particularly our property, plant, and equipment, and we've also increased some of our trade and other receivables. The items that are flowing into trade and other receivables are significantly the machine prepayments that we put down for Bitmain. We've also, in the Q1, made our first payment towards the Intel machine, so we put a $10 million prepayment down for those as well. We've seen digital assets move as we've moved away from the pure debt and equity strategy to a debt and selling Bitcoin strategy. We've seen our digital assets reduce as we sold those off to meet our operating costs and expenses. On the liability side, we've seen the debt increases, as Peter has talked about earlier, in terms of NYDIG. Again, very much within our internal targets for debt to EBITDA, both forward-looking and backward-looking. We're in a very comfortable position with that. Our weighted average cost of capital is still below 10%. We're very happy with that. As Peter said, you know, the 12% on the face of it appears high, but as Peter said, only six or seven months ago, I think we were offered, it was in the high teens. You know, we're really seeing those rates come down, alongside, infrastructure rates are much more in line with traditional sector as well. Really pleasing to see how the debt market is maturing and how we've got optionality there to continue our build-out. As Peter said, you know, we presented a couple of weeks ago, you know, the requirement for 125. We've already secured, you know, GBP 70 million of that, leaving us with GBP 50 million, to be spread between, debt and also selling of Bitcoin, in the near future to get us to the end of that 200 MW phase one. Thank you, Peter. Pass it back to you. All right. Thanks, Alex. So again, you know, a classic slide that you've seen from us, three key differentiators. One, massive runway of power, 800 MW in Texas. I can't emphasize right now how important that access to power is and how important Helios is for us. We are continually hearing reports, having phone calls with people in the space, and infrastructure's hard to get right now, and infrastructure at scale is hard to get right now. You know, everyone thought that machines were gonna be, you know, the issue with the supply chain, with chip shortage. Machines are not the issue right now. Access to power at scale is an issue right now for a lot of miners. The fact that we're doing it and executing on it in Texas is a huge advantage for us. The fact that we have an incredible team, both on the construction side and on the operation side in Texas is another huge advantage for us. We're very excited about that. Secondly, our relationship with Intel and our supply agreement that we have with them, and the fact that we're building out you know, our own custom machines for immersion is a huge advantage or will be a huge advantage for us in the H2 of this year. Then lastly, I think it's important that we, as a company, continue to emphasize our you know, our climate friendliness and our emphasis on ESG. That's a big part of who we are. It's a big part of what brought a lot of people into the company, or turned a lot of people's attention to the company, you know, a couple of years ago, or even last year. It's something we're gonna continue to emphasize, and that's, you know, why we're setting up in Texas, where there's wind. We're gonna continue to be leaders in that part of the space. All right, we're gonna open it up now for questions. I think Tom Divine is gonna come on, and he will be our Q&A moderator. No problem at all. Just before Tom comes in, may I remind ladies and gentlemen to continue to submit your questions using the Q&A on the right-hand corner of your screen. Just while the company take a few moments to review the questions submitted already, I'd like to remind you that a recording of this presentation, along with a copy of the slides and the published Q&A, will be accessible via our Investor Meet Company dashboard. Tom, if I may, if I could hand back to you, and just if I could ask you to read out the questions and give a response, obviously, where it's appropriate. Thank you. Great. Thanks, Mark. Peter, our first question today comes from Ramsey El-Assal at Barclays. Can you help us understand your margin expectations for the remainder of the year? To what extent will the launch of the Helios facility offset network margin pressures? Yeah, it's a good question. Thanks, Ramsey. So, listen, I think our overall margin is obviously determined by a number of factors, price of Bitcoin, power costs, and mining difficulty. You know, we have expected this year that mining difficulty would continue to rise throughout the year. Bitcoin price is gonna be Bitcoin price. It's you know, we are bullish long-term, but in the short-term, as we saw over the last few weeks, Bitcoin can be volatile. So, you know, in terms of margin expectations, it's not just our power costs that are gonna determine you know, what our overall margin is. That being said, our power costs at Texas are expected to be, you know, lower than our operations in Quebec. That's why we set up in Texas because we can take advantage of lower power costs, you know, curtailment. All of the advantages for being in that competitive Texas grid is why we're there. We think we're in a good place there. We have more control over our operations. But ultimately, you know, it's not just the price of power that's gonna have an impact on our margins. I don't wanna be overly bullish and say that, you know, we're gonna have an incredible mining margin at Helios right now. I think the margins will be good. I think they'll be better than, you know, Quebec. I don't think, you know, to use your word, I don't think it's gonna offset necessarily because we don't know, you know, where the price of Bitcoin is gonna be. We know the difficulty is gonna continue to rise because lots of people have invested in machines and infrastructure and more power is gonna come on, more machines are gonna come on. Ultimately, you know, the goal is to always be in that upper tier of efficiency. Being in Texas will get us into that upper tier of efficiency or is getting us into the upper tier of efficiency, especially with, you know, having an immersion facility. Great. Thanks. Thanks, Peter. Next question is for Alex, and we've received this a few times. We've said that we'll be focusing on raising capital through debt and by selling Bitcoin. How much debt are we willing to take on? It's a good question, particularly given our strategy going forward, and one we've given a great deal of thought to internally. We've had discussions at board level in terms of what level of debt, particularly, as I say, against forward-looking EBITDA, but also against backward-looking EBITDA. You know, as a company, many of you have followed us for a while, you know that we take a very prudent approach. Those targets internally, we've not released to the market, but again, are very prudent. We wouldn't want to be exposed. Part of what our strategy is around debt is matching the length of the debt against the assets to which we are, you know, financing those against. If you look at our machine debt, our machine debt is financed over a period of two years. You know, our infrastructure debt is over a period of four years. We're always taking a very prudent view on the length of the debt that we have exposed against the assets that it's also being financed against. When we think about debt for the rest of the build-out, what we will do is we'll continue with that approach. We also hope that when we look at the rest of the build-out, we'll be able to take on financing, which we'll be able to as we build out the rest of Helios in a more modular fashion, potentially, we will be able to shorten the lifespan of the debt against the assets to which it's financing. If you think about how we've built out Helios to date, you know, we've used equity, it's been long lead items, and we've had a lot of investment for a long period of time. Whereas we expect to bring that down and have that over a much shorter period of time going forward. Again, as I said earlier, in terms of interest cover and looking at those sort of ratios, you know, our weighted average cost of capital is still in the single digits. We would expect that to also be the case going forward as we see the maturation of the debt markets and the ability for us to have debt against those items. That's how we're thinking about it. It's a very prudent approach within bounds of both forward-looking and backward-looking EBITDA levels. Great. A follow-up question to that, you know, this comes from Darren Aftahi at Roth. Do you feel like you have ample financing options to complete phase I of Helios? And you just talked about debt, but how much of the strategy involves selling of Bitcoin on a monthly basis? Maybe you can go into that a little, in a little more detail. Absolutely, yes. We do feel that we have a number of different options available to us. We have machines which are unencumbered which will be delivered in the H2 of Q3. We have machines there that we would be able to obtain financing against. There is still some infrastructure which we could obtain finance against as well. We have really good relationships. We have relationships with. You know, first of all, we've got recurring relationships with NYDIG and Galaxy are some of the biggest lenders in the crypto space at the moment. We also have relationships with other, you know, more traditional sector banks, et cetera, which we're also exploring. At the moment, you know, we have seen a tightening of the market. That is absolutely true. What that has meant really is that more, you know, newer entrants to the market are finding it much more difficult to find debt. Whereas those who've got a proven track record, as we have, are able to, you know, provide the due diligence requirements that are necessary, et cetera. We are finding that ourselves, we have options and we have optionality, you know, in terms of the debt markets. In terms of selling Bitcoin, again, we have strategy around selling our Bitcoin, and when is obviously a good time, when is a bad time. We look at that, and we can pull back and accelerate that as needs be. We're in a very healthy position at the moment in terms of our HODL, how much of our HODL is, you know, unencumbered or is collateralized against, loan, et cetera. We're very comfortable with our position today. In terms of filling that gap for the GBP 50, you know, the GBP 50 million that we've talked about to build out the rest of phase one, we're well-positioned. Of course, every day we mine more and more Bitcoin. That position, you know, improves with every day that passes. Okay. Great. Thanks, Alex. Peter, our next question comes from Joe Vafi at Canaccord. Congrats on energizing Helios. It might be early, but have you begun using immersion there yet? And if yes, have you upped clock speeds? And any other comments on what you have learned there since energizing? Hey, Joe. Thanks for the question. Helios is entirely an immersion facility, so if we're mining at all at Helios, we are using immersion. Yes, we have started using immersion. Have we upped clock speeds yet? We are ramping up operations, making sure everything's working properly. We've done some overclocking testing, but we are not overclocking at scale yet. We wanna make sure that everything's, you know, awesome and working properly. Once we have more kind of data on everything, what the overclocking systems, like, how that's functioning, we will update the market. In terms of other comments on what we've learned since energizing. The one thing I think I've learned is that how you build a team on the ground for operations is really important, and we've done an incredible job of building a team on the ground. Our facility manager there, Lane, has a culture of collaboration and teamwork and ownership. You know, we're working with new technology. We're opening this new facility. The team on the ground already feels a sense of ownership of that space, and that's incredible that that's happened in that short of time. You know, the HR folks that built that team, the tech culture that Perry and his team have built and then kind of brought to them because you obviously have a big moment like we had on May 5th where we energize and everyone's been working really hard. You know, Perry doesn't live in Dickens County. He goes back to Ottawa, and he's managing everything remotely, and Zhao is also not there. You're handing it over to your local staff, and now they're running the show. Obviously, Perry's managing things remotely and can do a lot from far away. The sense of ownership that the team has on the ground is amazing. That's the one thing that I'm most thrilled about, especially when you're working with new technology because there are bumps. You know, things do happen, and you're always troubleshooting. I mean, everyone uses technology these days. You know, there's always things to fix and to optimize. The team on the ground is doing an amazing job. Ultimately, that's why we're gonna be successful. I mean, you know, if you'd come, Joe, to our opening event, I mean, my message was, yes, we need these three things, you know, machines, power, and capital, but ultimately we need people. This is a people business and we're only gonna be as good as the team that we have. One of the advantages I think that we have as a team is we truly have an amazing team. That's I guess the one thing that I've learned. Thanks, Peter. Our next question, coming from the live Q&A is from Thanasis S. As Helios is immersion cooled, can you explain the procedure for receiving the mining rigs to converting them to immersion cooled setups? How long on average does that take from arrival in Helios to installation? All right. Thanks, Thanasis. Hey, how's it going? You always come and ask good questions, so thanks for asking another one. The process for receiving miners and putting them in immersion, you know, is a little more complicated than if you're just getting them normally and putting them on the shelf, but it's not that complicated. We have a shipping and receiving area. Machines come in on pallets. We store them, and then when they're ready to be installed, we take them, we unbox them, prep them. We prep them by taking off the fans, and then we actually have a team called the dunk team, D-U-N-K, the dunk team, and they. Part of that culture that we've already have, you know, at Helios, they then take them and dunk them into the fluid. Once an entire system is ready, the whole facility is broken down into 4 MW pods. You can do the math. There's 200 MW. Once each system is filled with miners, we power on that pod, that 4 MW system. It's a fairly, you know, the team is has already developed the process and the system, but essentially that's how it works. Once we have our own custom miner, we won't need to remove the fans because we won't need fans on an immersion miner. They will come without fans. Great. Thanks, Peter. Our next question, what is the criteria for Argo Labs involvement in crypto projects? All right. This is Sebastian and his team, you know, are constantly evaluating projects. Some of the criteria that they look at are the token utility, you know, how useful is that particular token? The track record of the team that is building out the project, the tokenomics of the project, the overall quality of the blockchain and the network that it's built on. You know, is it scalable, speed, decentralization, et cetera. Then the community around the project. That's a key piece. You know, how active is the community around the project? How engaged are they? Et cetera, et cetera. In terms of those early-stage projects that they're looking at, those are kind of the basic criteria that they're considering. Most of the time, you know, they have direct contact pretty much all of the time with the team. There's a conversation with the team, you know, and even going back to Polkadot, like when we originally invested in Polkadot, like we had a conversation with you know, a couple of the guys from the Polkadot team multiple times back in 2019. That's still the process now. We don't just, you know, deploy into you know, projects that we don't know the team. Great. Thanks. Our next question comes from John S in the chat. It was previously re-forecast that hash rate would be at 1.7 exahash by the end of the Q1, but the actual hash rate was 1.6 exahash, which is where we are now. Why, what's the reason for this reduction, and when will the shortfall be resolved? Yeah, thanks, John. Good question. The difference is back in 2021, we put in two orders for machines. One of those orders was with a company called Minerva. It was for that difference, 100 petahash. It was 800 machines from Minerva. You know, other people put in larger orders. We thought we would put a small order in, a test order. Those machines were supposed to come, you know, last summer, June, July. They got pushed back. Ultimately, Minerva was unable to deliver on those machines, and we requested and received a full refund from them. We've taken those funds and are deploying them into other mining machines. That's the difference. The shortfall is in terms of when it will be resolved. It's gonna be resolved as we bring the other machines online, the Bitcoin machines that we've ordered, et cetera. It wasn't a huge amount, and we feel like it was when you're looking at new machines from new companies, and Minerva's a good example, they had good specs, they had good price, so we thought it was worth putting a small order in with them to test. It didn't work out. We got the refund, so no harm, no foul, ultimately. That's ultimately why we wanna be able to have, again, more control over our own rig production. That's why this relationship with Intel is so important. Thanks. Our next question is for Alex, and this comes from the live chat as well. With the continued maturation of debt markets, why has the second NYDIG loan been done at a significantly higher rate, 12% per year, versus the first NYDIG loan done at only 8.25% per year? It's a good question, and it shows that people really are reading our RNSs, which is nice to see. The simple answer is that it's on different items. The debt market is looking at assets that they will collateralize loans against. They look at how easily, you know, if there was worst-case scenario, how easily are they able to then sell on those assets in order to make back the money that they've lent out. The infrastructure is, you know, as Pete said earlier, high power transformers, medium power transformers, et cetera. Those are assets which are easily transferable to another technology, you know, another sector, et cetera. Therefore, the risk around those assets is much less, and therefore, the interest that we have to pay around those assets is much less. When you look at Bitcoin mining machines, they have one use and one purpose. Therefore, the risk around them is they would have to be sold to basically another Bitcoin miner or the debtor would have to take on those machines themselves, and therefore it attracts a higher interest rate. That's the simple answer is that trade-off between risk and reward, and the risk and the interest rate there. The second loan was against the machines, which have a higher risk attached to them than the infrastructure, which was at a lower rate. Thanks, Alex. Peter, our next question is from Shagar S from the live Q&A. What is your main focus after the Helios facility? Thanks, Shagar for the question. Our focus really for 2022 is to complete a build-out of phase one of Helios. That's the initial 200 MW. Then we've got, as I said, the next 600 MW and that's what we're calling phase II. You know, that's we've got that interconnection agreement. We've got some of the long lead items ordered. The focus for us in 2023 and into the first part of 2024 is that additional 600 MW capacity. Above and beyond that, you know, in terms of phase three for the company, we haven't put out publicly what our thinking is for phase three. We are working behind the scenes to think, you know, the next step because we always wanna be a few years ahead. When we're ready to announce that, we will. For now, really the focus is on Helios phase I and then Helios phase II. Obviously, we are big believers in not just Bitcoin mining and cryptocurrency mining, but in the space in general. That's why we have, you know, Argo Labs as a foothold into the world of Web 3.0. But we're ambitious, Shagar. We wanna continue to grow as a company, you know, not just as a miner. We're thinking big picture long term, but haven't announced that vision yet to the market. Great. Our next question, Peter, is from Chris Brendler at D.A. Davidson. Does the Intel rig design require significant CapEx or R&D expense? Thanks, Chris, for the question. The design itself does not require significant CapEx or R&D expense in terms of the design and testing, et cetera, et cetera. As with other rigs, it's the orders themselves that are CapEx-intensive. Mostly it's the chips that is the biggest expense. You know, then the rest of the machines is a fraction of that. Overall, the total cost on a per terahash basis, we anticipate being significantly less than buying off-the-shelf miners. It's not like we're dumping, you know, a ton of cash into R&D, which is, I think, kind of what you're getting at there, Chris. Thanks, Peter. To follow up on the subject of Intel, from Suthan Sukumar at Stifel. Can you give an update on the Intel-based rig design and development process? Are you still confident about having those rigs ready to deploy by the end of the year? Yeah, sure. The process is going well. You know, when we're ready to announce exactly the update on the specs and all of that, and obviously some of it is outside of our control because we're working with Intel and they have their own processes of disclosure. But when we are ready to give the full update on specs and costs, I will be excited to do that and happy to share that. To answer your second question, in terms of having these rigs ready to be deployed by the end of the year, the expectation is, yes, we will have those to be ready to be deployed by the end of the year, and we'll update the market, as we go in terms of the, you know, the steps along the way. Great. Our next question from the live chat, we've gotten this a few times, both from John S. and Shagar S. When will the board get a full-time chairman? Yeah, it's a good question or a fair question, I should say. We've been working on strengthening the board, as I talked about in the presentation. You know, we just have most recently added Raghav. We also added two board members last summer, Maria Perrella, and Sarah Gow. I'm really happy with where the board is at. They're very engaged, very involved, adding a ton of value, so that's great. The board itself is continuing to work on the chairman question, the chairman process, and working to strengthen the board. We do recognize that, and we want a chairman. When we are, again, ready to update the market on who that will be, we'll make that announcement, but that process is ongoing. Great. Alex, one question for you just came in from the live chat from Ju L. Does your cost of Bitcoin that you talked about, so the mining margin, include all overhead of operating costs, amortization, depreciation, et cetera? No, it simply includes the power cost. Once you plug the machine in, the only real cost line that matters is the power cost, or if you're hosting it, then the hosting cost. That is what these machines need. I mean, in terms of, you know, if you look at our facility, for example, you know, the Helios facility, in terms of techs and people on the ground, you know, there's very few people on the ground. You're talking less than 30. Actually the on cost, if you like, of plugging in another miner is very insignificant. When we look at the cost of mining and the production cost per Bitcoin, we are simply looking at the power cost that goes into that machine. Great. Another question, this one comes from Jonathan Petersen at Jefferies. When the price of Bitcoin recovers to peak levels, would you continue to sell Bitcoin to fund growth, or will you go back to a HODL strategy? Alex, you wanna take that one, you want me to take it? Yeah. That's fine. Yes. I think at the moment, our strategy is as we've described, and it is to look at debt and also at selling Bitcoin. You know, obviously if you know if Bitcoin recovers significantly, our share price recovers significantly, that would be something that we would look at, but that would not be. That's not the near-term goal, and that's certainly not the short-term strategy. Yes, it is to continue to sell Bitcoin and focus on debt markets, not equity at the moment. I'll just add a little bit to this, John. I think it's a good question. You know, if you look at the history of the company, we've you know, if this is the continuum, this is selling Bitcoin, this is never selling Bitcoin. We've been to both extremes, and now we're in the middle, and we're pretty comfortable in the middle. Like I actually think it's the right place to be. I think, you know, HODL is great to have. It's a great piece to have on the balance sheet. It's something you can do a lot with, whether you're deploying some of it into Argo Labs, whether you're using some of it, you know, to borrow against, whether it's just appreciating, like those are, that's fine. Ultimately, at the end of the day, you know, we still live in a fiat-dominated world, and you're gonna need fiat for operations, you know, if you ever do a dividend, et cetera. Like you wanna have, you know, a war chest of fiat as well as a war chest of Bitcoin. I'm quite happy with where we are in the middle. You know, it might fluctuate a little bit this way or that way, but I don't think we'll ever go back to either extreme. Thanks, Peter. Our next question comes from Anthony Power at Compass Mining. With 29 listed companies currently in North America, do you see this number getting bigger, or do you see any M&A activity or consolidation? At what point do you believe the big energy companies ramp up their interest and investment in this space? Are there any opportunities to partner? Yeah. I think two questions in there, Anthony. Good questions. Yeah, it's hard to believe 29 listed companies. It's happened pretty quickly. I remember when there was like five of us. Do I see M&A activity, you know, and particularly with kind of the market we're in right now? I think there's always people out there evaluating deals. I would say as a whole, as a space, there will likely probably be some M&A activity in the H2 of this year, given where, you know, where the market is, and some consolidation. I mean, it's a lot of listed companies. In terms of energy companies ramp up their investment, and interest, I think that's happening, but I think they move slowly. You know, I think it's still probably a couple years away, but I know that they are looking at it. They've got skunk works happening. There's projects happening. In terms of really ramping up, I think we're probably into the next, you know, full cycle before we see that happening in a big way. In terms of opportunities to partner, yeah, look, I think, you know, you're seeing people get closer to rigs and people get closer to power. We're getting closer to rigs with, you know, the relationship with Intel. Getting closer to chips with the relationship to Intel. I think that's gonna start to happen on the power side. We're fortunate that we're in a Texas market where, you know, we can really get low cost power using the grid. That's not the case for everywhere in North America. You do have to have relationships with utilities or, you know, power generators. Ultimately, this space is heading in that direction for sure. Great, Peter. We're coming up on the top of the hour, but we've got two last just quick questions for you. First one, from the live chat from Kevin D. With the Core machine swap, is it a machine for machine swap, or is it based on total terahash? Yeah. Thanks, Kevin. It's total terahash. Pretty much when you're always doing machines, it's based on terahash. Great. Our last question, Peter, also from the live chat. This is from both Paul C. and Kevin R. Given the shortage of power that other companies are facing, is there an opportunity for us to host third-party rigs at Helios? I think in the short term would be challenging for us, given our commitments to ourselves, you know, with our Bitmain machines coming in and with plans for Intel in the H2 of this year, the Intel rig in the H2 of this year. Looking into 2023, 2024, it's something that we're always thinking about. You know, is there an opportunity for us to diversify our revenue a little bit and have some hosting relationships? I would say unlikely for 2022, maybe for 2023. That's great. Tom, thank you very much indeed for managing that Q&A. Obviously, just given the considerable attendance you've got on today's call, it's not possible to take everybody's question, but thank you to everybody that did submit questions, and we'll make those available to the company post today's call as well. Peter, I'm shortly gonna redirect investors as usual to give you their thoughts, their expectations and their feedback, but before doing so, I wondered if I may just ask you for a few closing comments, and then I'll conclude the meeting. Great. All right. Thank you, Mark. Well, thanks everyone for attending. It seems like we're doing these more and more frequently, which is, you know, part of our commitment to transparency as well as our commitment to, you know, now that we're Nasdaq listed, we're doing, you know, earnings. Not something we need to do as a U.K. kind of, you know, headquartered, primarily listed company, but we're happy to be doing these earnings calls. In terms of where we're at, I'm incredibly pleased with the work that the team has done to get Helios up and off the ground, and excited about the H2 of this year. I think, you know, it'd be nice if the price of Bitcoin could help us along a little bit, but ultimately for us it's really about, you know, head down executing, under-promising and over-delivering and I think if we do that, we're gonna be successful in the long term. That's great. Peter, Alex, Tom, thank you very much indeed for updating investors, this afternoon or this morning in your case, Peter. Could I please ask investors not to close this session as we'll now automatically redirect you for the opportunity to provide your feedback in order that the management team can better understand your views and expectations. This will only take a few moments to complete, but I'm sure will be greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team of Argo Blockchain PLC, we'd like to thank you for attending today's presentation, and may I wish you all a very good day.