Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the Argo Blockchain PLC Full Year Results for 2022 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 situated on the right-hand corner of your screen. Just simply type in your questions at any time and press send. The company may not be in a position, given the attendance on today's call, to answer every question it receives during the meeting itself. The company can review all questions and will look at those responses and publish them where it's appropriate to do so. Before we begin, we would like to submit the following poll. If you could give that your kind attention, I'm sure the company would be most grateful. I'd now like to hand over to Vice President of Investor Relations, Tom Devine. Good afternoon. Thanks, Mark. Before we begin, I want to remind everyone that today's presentation and remarks may contain forward-looking statements. With us today for our discussion of FY 2022 results are Seif El-Bakly, Argo's Interim CEO, and Jim MacCallum, Argo's Chief Financial Officer. Now I'll turn it over to Seif. Thanks, Tom. Thanks, Mark. Hi, everyone. Seif here with my colleague, Jim, who Tom has mentioned, our new CFO. It's great to be virtually presenting to everybody today, thanks for tuning in. Just wanna start off by saying we appreciate everyone's patience. I know we've been a little quieter than usual since the Galaxy deal. It's mainly because we've been working really hard to clean up house and establish a new solid foundation for Argo and its future success. Again, really appreciate everyone's patience here. I look forward to traveling in the coming months and meeting so many of our stakeholders. That being said, let's jump right into it. Perfect. If you've been following the Bitcoin mining space over the past 2 years, you know that 2022 was a very challenging year for all miners, including Argo. The price of Bitcoin decreased significantly from its highs in late 2021. We saw the digital asset market was already starting to soften in Q1, the collapse of Luna, Terra, Three Arrows Capital, Celsius, and eventually FTX last year created even more headwinds for the space and ended up forcing a ton of liquidations and overall de-leveraging. Hash price, the primary measure of profitability for hash rate, saw an even bigger decrease and hit all-time lows in Q4, that was largely due to the increase in network hash rate despite Bitcoin's price increase and despite the broader macroeconomic environment. We also saw a ton of disruption in the energy markets given the geopolitical environment. In the U.S., natural gas spiked much higher than its historical average, and that resulted in higher electricity prices as well. All this to say, it was really a perfect storm of headwinds faced by all miners, and hopefully that will provide some context for our 2022 performance and future strategic positioning. For the 1st half of 2022, we were really focused on completing the construction of Helios and growing our hash rate. We ended up energizing Helios in May and started taking delivery of our new Bitmain S19j Pro machines. Between May and September, we increased our total hash rate capacity by 55% from 1.6 EH/s to 2.5, so that was reflected in our overall output. Then for our financial results, I'll hand it over to Jim, who can give you guys a brief recap. Great. Thank you, Seif. My 1st three weeks at Argo have primarily focused on the 2022 accounts, assessing the opportunities and meeting the Argo team. I am looking forward to serving Argo, working with Seif and the management team to grow the business and strengthening our balance sheet. In terms of financial highlights for 2022, we mined 2,156 Bitcoin at an average mining margin of 54%. This translates to an average cost per Bitcoin mined of $12,118 for the year. We generated revenue of $58 million in 2022, which was down 36% from $90 million in 2021. We incurred a net loss of $240 million for 2022. Our net loss was largely driven by some significant non-recurring items such as the Helios sale transaction loss of $56 million, the $54 million re-realized loss on previously mined Bitcoin, and $61 million of asset impairments. After adjusting for the non-recurring items, we generated EBITDA of $1 million, compared to $68 million in 2021. Like Seif, I look forward to meeting many of you in the coming weeks and months. With that, I'll pass it back to Seif. Great. Thanks, Jim. I did wanna... and thanks, Mark. We can go to the next slide. Thank you, sir. I did wanna spend a few minutes to give you the high points of the Galaxy transaction that we completed in December 2022. Earlier in my remarks, I addressed some of the challenges we faced in 2022. That obviously impacted our profitability and ability to generate cash flow. After evaluating several strategic options, we made the decision to sell Helios facility to Galaxy, who we've known and had a very productive relationship with for some time. We sold that facility for $65 million. That allowed us to pay down our debt by $41 million, which significantly improved our liquidity position. The transaction also enabled us to streamline our operations and reduce our headcount by more than half. Most of these employees were Helios employees who went over to Galaxy. We also secured a 2-year hosting agreement at Helios, where Galaxy hosts our fleet of S19j Pro machines, and that's 23,619 machines to be exact. Galaxy, as the operator of Helios, manages power procurement, and we pay them a fixed hosting fee based on our machines' actual power usage. Also, under the hosting agreement, we get access to Galaxy's PPA power rate as a passthrough cost, and we share proceeds from participating in demand response programs and economic curtailment. Next slide, please. As I mentioned, the Galaxy transaction allowed us to pay down debt by GBP 41 million, which enabled us to completely pay down our loans with NYDIG. With the lower debt balance, our interest expense is now 24% lower, which translated to roughly $3 million in cash flow savings per year. On top of that, with the reduced head count, our G&A expenses are now lower by 44%, and that translated to roughly $5 million in cash flow savings per year. As for the rest of our debt, we'll continue to look for more ways to de-lever and strengthen our balance sheet in order to reduce what we feel is still a high balance. Next slide, please. We came out of 2022 having learned some very, very valuable lessons and with a lot more experience, that's for sure. We're back. We're better equipped for this new version of Argo. The focus since my appointment has been on four key pillars. Number one is people and retention. Number two is financial discipline and cost-cutting. Number three is operational excellence. Number four is thinking about future growth and strategic partnerships. Let me start by talking about the 1st of those pillars, people and retention. Next slide, please. At Argo, we have a team of really, really bright and very experienced people. As you can imagine, coming out of last year, the priority for me was to make sure that the team stayed intact. I really wanted to keep the experience that we had in building and operating Helios within the company. It's the closest thing that we have to intellectual property. You're dealing with a team that has planned, built, operated, and sold a world-class immersion facility, and keeping that breadth of knowledge and experience extremely important and beneficial to the company and its future. We spent some time thinking about the best organizational structure for the company, and we updated compensation and incentive programs in order to retain our key employees. I'm really happy to say that every employee is now a shareholder, and we did that to better align everyone's interest to the company's success. I'm proud to say that almost all of key employees who planned, built, and operated Helios are still here and are still part of the company. I'll say this again till I'm blue in the face. Argo has a great platform and a great reputation within the space. Our people live and breathe mining, and all of them are hungry and ambitious and well connected with strong relationships within the industry. It's really no surprise we're getting solicited with some really interesting partnership opportunities with both big and small names. Now with the addition of an experienced CFO such as Jim, as well as some other strategic hires, I really feel we're in a much better place to get Argo back on track. Next slide, please. Thank you. This brings us to our next pillar of focus, financial discipline. Financial discipline means we're making sure that we're well capitalized, well funded, and have a solid runway to give us the opportunity to solidify the current foundation. Financial discipline means controlling OPEX and general costs, which we've already reduced since the Galaxy deal and will continue to do so. It also means maximizing cash flow and strengthening the balance sheet through potential deleveraging and accretive finance while optimizing the mix between equity, debt, and cash. I do wanna say that we have multiple levers at our disposal, including selling non-core assets and partnering with firms that need Bitcoin mining expertise. That is to potentially use our expertise as a currency. We also have the ability to hedge our production or forward production to manage downside risk. We'll consider potentially raising equity, but only if there's opportunities to invest in projects that will create value and be accretive to our shareholders. As 2023 continues, mining economics are improving, which is obviously very helpful to our profitability as it allows us to generate more cash flow. Next slide, please. Thank you. Next, we have operational excellence as a key pillar, which to me means focusing on yield. Specifically, this means maximizing the return we're getting from our asset base, which is ultimately going to differentiate us from our peers. We're focused on optimizing our current fleet across Quebec facilities and our miners at Helios, be it machine allocation to space or power. Operational excellence means squeezing as much yield as we possibly can in the most efficient way possible from our miners, while we consider things like settings and conditions, maintenance, uptime, and upkeep. We're focused on perfecting our operations and ensuring that we keep our hash rate up, we're working aggressively to improve this production metric. Another aspect of operational efficiency is finding the right balance of machines deployed at Helios versus the ones that are deployed in our Quebec facilities. That's to say that we will be turning our focus to Quebec as we have the capacity to expand usage there. We'll talk about it in a minute, but we're really excited about the new ePIC miners that are coming in in early Q3, as we're planning to deploy them in both Baie-Comeau and Mirabel. We also have some smaller but exciting projects in Quebec that I'm excited about, such as the greenhouse pilot that we've been working on with the city of Richelieu. Essentially, the concept is to recycle and use waste heat from our facility to grow some vegetables for the local community. We've been working on this project for years, even before my time, so we're excited to share that that's finally underway. Thank you. Finally, just to quickly talk about our growth strategy. As mentioned, really our primary focus is about building and maintaining a solid foundation. Having said that, we will explore growth opportunities to maintain our market share as the hash rate network continues to grow. Our baseline criteria is to seek financially viable projects with accretive and compelling returns, which have low CapEx requirements. We are reviewing projects that utilize wasted or stranded energy as a way to access and secure low power costs. When we're thinking about growth opportunities, we're really thinking about innovative opportunities within power and within energy. We will be providing you with updates as we move forward. Next slide, please. Thank you. As I mentioned earlier, we're finally receiving our BlockMiners from ePIC. We'll be installing these machines at our Quebec facilities in early Q3 2023. We're receiving 2,870 machines with an average of 104 TH/s per 2nd and 29 J per TH/s in efficiency. That equates to an aggregate hash rate of about 300 PH/s. Once we install those machines, our hash rate capacity will increase from 2.5 EH/s- 2.8 EH/s. We had previously mentioned that we were expecting a larger order, representing about 900 PH/s. We ended up lowering the size of this order just to reduce our overall CapEx. We are excited about deploying those machines in Quebec nevertheless and growing our hash rate capacity. These machines do feature the Intel Blockscale ASIC chips. You may have heard in the last few weeks that Intel is discontinuing its ASIC business, but they will continue to provide service and support as needed throughout the projects, and we're still in touch with the team over there. Next slide, please. Thank you. In closing, I'd like to provide a brief update on our progress in Q1 2023. Just to be clear, before getting into it, these figures are preliminary and unaudited. We mined 491 bitcoin during the quarter, and we generated roughly net $11 million of revenue. We finally got a break on natural gas prices, which is translating into more favorable electricity prices in Texas. Argo's average all-in price, which includes power, hosting, sales tax, is approximately $0.05 per kWh. That translates into a mining margin of roughly 45%-50% with an average cost per BTC mined of around $12,000. We're really happy about these power costs. They make a significant difference to our bottom line, as you can imagine. As mentioned, we've also reduced our G&A spending by 44%, which is roughly $5 million a year, obviously favorably impacting our bottom line. Finally, on a positive note, the macroeconomic environment seemed to have improved as well. BTC is up more than 70% year-to-date, I think 77% as of this morning, and hashrate has been trending upward too. We will provide you with a more, with a more fulsome update on our Q1 2023 earnings that we'll be reporting in the coming weeks. That's it for us. I appreciate everyone's attention here. Jim and I are happy to answer some of your questions. That's great. Seif, Jim, thank you very much indeed for updating investors. I will just bring your cameras back up as well. Ladies and gentlemen, please do continue to submit your questions using the Q&A tab situated on the right-hand corner of your screen. Just while the company just take a few moments to look at those 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, can be accessed via your Investor Meet Company dashboard. Tom, if I may, if I could just hand back to you to manage the Q&A process. If I could ask you to read out the questions and of course let the guys give their responses. Then I'll pick up from you at the end. Great. Thanks, Mark. Our 1st question comes from Chase White at Compass Point. Can you give us some more details on the Helios hosting agreement and the hosting fee you're paying Galaxy? Thanks, Chase. We have a two-year hosting agreement with Galaxy, and we essentially pay them a pass-through power cost plus hosting fee. Essentially, as I mentioned, we share the economics of demand response and economic curtailment. And as I've mentioned is, you know, we've for our Q1 so far, we've paid an all-in cost including, you know, sales tax, power, and hosting of around $0.05 a kilowatt-hour. That's all I can say regarding that. You know, Galaxy is a publicly traded company on their own, and they have their own sort of restrictions. What I can say is that we're absolutely aligned, and we've been working with Galaxy very closely and, you know, we love how they're operating the space. They've been doing a great job and we're very much aligned with them. Great. Next question comes from Alan Howard at Tennyson Securities. Does the cost of power implicit in Q1 reflect a long-term PPA under which Galaxy operates, or is that also likely to change in the near term? Yeah. Thanks, Alan. I think, you know, Galaxy on their call has talked a little bit about their power strategy on their earnings call. They've publicly said that they hedge their power costs at Helios. Under the hosting agreement and pass through cost structure that we have, we basically benefit from what they do. Again, we're very much aligned on that front. Great. The next question, comes from Darren Aftahi at ROTH MKM. What are Argo's growth and development plans for 2023? I think. Thanks, Darren. I think for us, we're really thinking, number one, about the foundation of the company and financial discipline. I think that's very critical for us, and it's top of mind. We wanna deliver, we wanna have a healthier balance sheet, and that's why we had brought in Jim and some more strategic hires on the finance team. Obviously we're also thinking about growth opportunities as well. We've had a lot of different discussions. Like, the fact, you know, building and selling Helios was bittersweet. You know, it was obviously bitter for the obvious reasons, but it was sweet because we had a ton of experience in terms of building a world-class immersion system. We have, you know, mostly the same people who have built it within the company. It's part of the reason why I was so bullish on the company and why I took the position when the board tapped me on the shoulder. We have a lot of relationships within the space and we have a lot of different types of people and potential partners that are coming to us and talking to us about opportunities of stranded power, and opportunities in terms of, you know, how we can potentially, you know, partner up with utilities and power generators that can give us low cost opportunities. I think we're open-minded. We're thinking about growth, but we're also thinking about our foundation and cleaning up our balance sheet. Thanks, Seif. The next question comes from Jonathan Petersen at Jefferies. Prior guidance on the ePIC machines was that the Blockscale, the Blockscale chips would provide approximately 900 PH/s of hash rate and be installed in the 1st quarter of 2023. What drove the lower hash rate and the delay in installs? Thanks for the question, John. We ended up, you know, with everything that was going on last year, we ended up there was certain, you know, expenses and related to the delivery of those machines that we had to sort of push back, you know, for cash flow reasons. I think that delayed us a little bit. We were aiming for 900, you know, PH/s. I think, you know, we made the prudent decision that, you know, we would cut costs and it would be a little bit lower. I think that's what sort of drove the delay. As for the efficiency of those machines, I think on average, we're looking at 29 J per TH/s. We've tested them. They're purring. They're running very, very, very well. Our operations team has been testing them for the last few weeks. ePIC has done a phenomenal job with them so far. We like what we're seeing. We're really excited about having those machines come online. Great. Next question, also on the subject of the ePIC machines from Kevin Dede at H.C. Wainwright. Argo is expecting delivery of 2,870 units of the ePIC BlockMiner machines. How does Intel discontinuing its production of the Bitcoin mining chips impact Argo's partnership with ePIC? Thanks, Kevin. Short answer is there's really no impact to our relationship with ePIC Blockchain. ePIC Blockchain remains, you know, they have a very smart and innovative team, and they continue to do smart things and be innovative. Then as for Intel, I mean, we're still very much in touch with them, and they're still providing us with support and service throughout the process. Great. Our next question was submitted by Paob P. What is the latest update on the Pluto investment? Yeah, we've been speaking with Ian and the team. They, I think they did a really good thing, you know, merging with Maze Theory, and establishing their new entity, Emergent. We're really bullish on their business. I love what they're doing. I still need a little bit of time to get into all the details on what they're doing. They're building some really fun and interesting games, obviously related to, you know, VR and XR and Web3 and so forth. We're bullish on the investment. We're shareholders, and we're very supportive of what they're doing. We really like what they're doing, and so we're gonna continue working with them and supporting them as one of their key shareholders. Yeah, that's, you know. Really, really liking what they're doing, and we wish them an amazing year 'cause they have a lot of stuff in the pipeline for this year. Great. Our next question, Alan Howard, Tennyson Securities. When will management be able to focus on a long-term plan for increasing hash rate capacity, and what is the likely shape of that plan? Thanks, Alan. Yeah. I think, you know, what we're really focused on is currently just perfecting our operations again and our foundation. I think we've done a lot in the last two months. You know, if we can keep the same pace at the same rate, I think our intention is to just get as many things as we can as quickly as possible. We are focused on our foundation. We're focused on financial discipline, but we're also planting the seeds and looking at future growth and future production. I think, you know, we're striking a good balance. As you can imagine, sort of inheriting this business, there was a lot to do and there's a lot to work on. We're in a much better place than we were, and I'm really, really happy about that, especially with the team that we have. You know, once we have that and we start to delever and we start to get a healthier balance sheet, I think we'll be in a really good position to also continue to grow as well. Great. The next question, submitted, from a viewer from Marston M. Can you shed some more light on how you think about hedging? Sure. Thanks, Marston. It's a good question. You know, again, we've come out of last year learning a lot of valuable lessons. I think hedging was really a key one. We were hedging last year as well. I think this year, you know, when we're thinking about hedging, we're thinking about a portion of our of our production. Ultimately, you're trying to strike a balance between over-hedging, 'cause people are essentially buying into a Bitcoin mining company, and they want the exposure to the underlying commodity. Also, we're thinking about how do we do that so we minimize our downside risk in case Bitcoin prices start to fall or hash price starts to fall, that we still have a good runway in terms of cash flow. It's a balancing act between giving investors, the exposure that they're essentially buying and minimizing our downside risk and making sure that we have a good enough runway in terms of cash flow. Hopefully that gives you a little bit of insight. I think we've thought about how to strike that balance, and that's how we're thinking about hedging. Great. The next question submitted through the chat from Ilya. Hi, Seif. Great job today and welcome as interim CEO. How does Argo plan to take advantage of the strength of Bitcoin during this ongoing banking crisis? The crypto bull thesis seems to be taking shape in front of our eyes. Does this instill confidence within the Argo team? Hey, Ilya. Thanks for the question. I mean, listen, BTC going up is definitely helping, and it's definitely good for our momentum. It's good for energy. It's good for the entire sector. It's good for the industry. You know, what's been happening with the banks is also, you know, just creating, you know, an even better story for BTC and essentially what BTC or what Bitcoin was fundamentally based on. We're really happy about what's happening. It's looking more and more like a commodity that is or an asset class for store value. I think there's a lot of potential, and we're really excited about the momentum. Yeah, so appreciate the question, Ilya. Thank you. We're liking the thesis. We're liking where things are heading. It's definitely, you know, helping us internally. Again, I mean, if things should turn the other way for whatever reason, you know, we are thinking about hedging and having a hedging strategy as well, so either way, but definitely having that momentum certainly helps us. Great. The next question comes from Joe Vafi at Canaccord. You mentioned that you're being solicited for some partnership opportunities. Can you elaborate on the kind of opportunities that you'd be open to at this time? Yes. Thanks, Joe. I think what's amazing about Bitcoin mining is it has this very unique ability to monetize energy from anywhere in the world. As an industry and as a company, we're very agile, so we can tap into stranded power, that may not have the power lines pushing load downstream. I think that in itself has some really profound implications for the energy. When we're looking at opportunities and growth opportunities, we're looking at it from the lens of power innovation and energy innovation. I think we've gotten to a point where we're thinking that way and our peers are thinking that way. You know, if I, if I had to bet, I would definitely bet on that's where the industry is heading as a whole. You know, those are my expectations, and I think the team is aligned as well. When we're thinking about partnerships, we're thinking about power generators. We're thinking about utility. We're thinking about folks who are naturally within the space and have access to low power costs. Great. The next question submitted, by Dermot B. Is there a possibility for an equity raise in the future? Thanks, Dermot. Yeah. You know, right now, you know, I mentioned that we have some non-core assets that we can tap into in terms of liquidity. I think we're doing a really good job and extracting more yield operationally. When it comes to operational excellence and bringing that hash rate up, I think it's gonna help us with cash flow. I think we're thinking about an equity raise, if it's accretive. If a project basically will give us a higher return than what the cost of our equity is, I think we'd be open to that. I think we would raise equity for very specific reasons. I think it's important for us, as a publicly traded miner, to have access to different levers and certainly equity is one of them. But we're careful about doing that, for projects that will add value to the company and be accretive to our bottom line. Great. Thanks, Seif. This will be our last question from Alan Howard at Tennyson. Can you talk more about your HODL strategy or is there now a non-HODL policy in place? Yeah. Thanks, Alan. I think for now we are selling our Bitcoin to make sure that we're covering costs and, you know, to continue paying off our debt. I think obviously we have a target in mind and, you know, we're gonna get to a point and we're hoping to get to a point where we're gonna build that HODL strategy up. You know, for now it's really dependent on our working capital needs and our growth prospects. That's the way we're thinking about our HODL strategy. That's great. Tom, thank you very much indeed for managing that Q&A. Seif, Jim, thank you also for your engagement this afternoon. I know investor feedback will be particularly important to you Seif and Jim, and I'll shortly redirect those on the call to give you their feedback. I wondered if I may, Seif, just before sending investors to give their feedback, if I could ask you just for a few closing comments. Sure. Thanks, Mark. Thanks everyone for tuning in to discuss our 2022 results and our path forward. We're all working very hard to execute on the plans that we've laid out, and we absolutely look forward to updating you along the way. Really excited to meet many of you. Thank you again for your patience. Just know that you have an amazing team that's working very hard to make sure that we execute on everything that we've spoken about today. Thank you. Have a great long weekend to our friends in the UK. That's great. Seif, Jim, thank you very much indeed for updating investors this afternoon. Can I please ask investors on the call not to close this session as we'll now automatically redirect you for the opportunity to provide your feedback in order that the company can better understand your views and expectations. This may take a few moments to complete, but I'm sure it'll be greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team of Argo Blockchain plc, we would like to thank you for attending today's presentation. Good afternoon to you all.