And we'll wait another minute here. All right. I got the wave down from them. If you guys are ready, just— Okay. All right. I think we're ready to get started. Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Mike Colanese. I head up HC Wainwright's crypto and digital infrastructure research franchise, and I'm extremely excited to be joined by some of the leading digital asset treasury companies to discuss the investment case for DATCOs and the outlook for Bitcoin and Ethereum. And with that, let's jump in with a brief introduction. Why don't we start with you, Ben, at the back of the panel? Hey, everyone. I'm Ben Pham. I'm the CFO of Strive. I've been with the company since it was founded in 2022 as an institutional asset manager. About a year ago, we went public with our Bitcoin treasury strategy. We also—a year to this date—executed the first digital asset treasury public company-to-public company M&A transaction. We followed that with a pretty quick launch of our state of preferred equity instrument, which pays 13% APR daily dividends. In that time period, over the last year as a public company, I was joking with Mike, actually, earlier this morning about how we've only known the darkness. But notwithstanding that, we've been able to grow our stack five times to 25,000 Bitcoin, and we're now the fifth largest Bitcoin treasury company in the world. Hi. My name is Charles Allen. I'm the CEO of BTCS Inc. BTCS is the oldest public crypto company in the world. We went public in 2014, so we've, you know, battled a decade of tough regulatory environments. Right now, we are primarily focused on Ethereum and building an operating business within the Ethereum ecosystem across three verticals: staking, DeFi operations, and block building. And so—and I think we've probably been the first to do most everything in the public markets in the crypto kind of sphere. Hi. I'm Sam Tabar. I started my career as an attorney at Scott & Arps, and then I became a banker at Bank of America Maryland, and I learned about Ethereum when it got started. I decided to abandon my career in the law and finance in legacy finance, and I decided to start an Ethereum company and myself and my co-founders hired a bunch of engineers and reprogrammed on Ethereum, and we created one of the world's first decentralized exchanges called AirSwap. And then we tokenized Manhattan real estate. We were the first ones to do that in Harvard Business Review. Did their first blockchain study on my company. And we were very—we're very technical on Ethereum. We—as we were tokenizing Manhattan real estate, with Brian Seacrest, actually, he was our partner—Joe Lubin, one of the co-founders of Ethereum, decided to back my company. Became one of the main shareholders. And so did Mike Novogratz, he also became one of my main shareholders. And we also did something called an ICO—I'm not sure if some of you in this room remember what that was—but we did this ICO for $40 million. Long story short, we exited the company. We sold the company to Consensus. One of the largest Ethereum platform developers in the world today. And then I joined Bit Digital. Bit Digital was a Bitcoin miner at the time, and I joined on the executive team. And we decided—we realized that Bitcoin mining was actually not a good business. It was a trade. It wasn't really a business. Especially with the halving. Short version of what the halving is, is basically every four years your profits are basically cut in half as you're mining Bitcoin, and it becomes more and more expensive to mine Bitcoin. We just realized that was a hamster wheel of misery, and it was just not worth becoming a Bitcoin miner or continuing to become a Bitcoin miner. So we were one of the first ones, I think, in the sector to announce that we will stop investing in Bitcoin mining and we started—I think it was in 2022. I can't remember the year now—that we started buying Ethereum. And then we eventually announced that we're selling our Bitcoin and we're buying Ethereum and we will become—we will become what some people consider a digital asset treasury in the Ethereum space. But we didn't stop there. Because we also saw another trend called artificial intelligence. We wanted to get—we wanted to get ahead of that. We were able to leverage our skill set as Bitcoin miners of looking at the data center space. We landed a very material cloud deal and things got very successful for us on the AI space to a point where we decided to spin off our business. It's called White Fiber. And so last year we spinned off our artificial intelligence business. It's a cloud business and it's a co-location business. We have data centers in the United States and Canada. We have contracts that amount to over a billion dollars with Enscale and Cerebras. We've been taking over mattress factories and textile factories. We've turned that into data center campuses to service these billion-dollar contracts that we have. So all very successful. And when we spinned out White Fiber, we made sure that Bit Digital continued to own at least 60% of White Fiber. So what Bit Digital today is just two line items. It's the Ethereum that we have on the balance sheet and it's the second line item is our ownership of White Fiber. So it's extremely easy to value Bit Digital. You just add those two. We are trading at a discount. We can get into the reasons perhaps why we're trading at a discount. But that's my background and that's Bit Digital. Thank you, guys. Great to have you all. And Sam, thank you for showing up on time for this one today. All good. Yesterday. Yes. So Ben, just to level set with the audience here, what exactly is a digital asset treasury company or DATCO, if you will, and why should an investor consider owning shares in a Bitcoin treasury company as opposed to buying the underlying token directly? Look, there's a lot of different flavors of strategies in this space. Obviously, like in 2025, you saw a lot of people come to the public markets with their version of what a Bitcoin treasury company is or what a digital asset treasury for some of the other companies that have chosen other asset bases. But if I had to boil it down, it's a company that not only holds as a reserve asset Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, something like that, but also they look at their capital allocation decisions, their business decisions in the context of outperforming that asset. That's the overall thesis and as you talk about, you know, concepts as companies trading at a discount or a premium to that asset, that's ultimately what you want to deliver as value to investors, where it's amplified or leveraged exposure to that underlying asset. Look, if you're an individual investor and you want to have exposure to Bitcoin and you also have a thesis of sovereignty and having control of your capital, I mean, the obvious solution for you is self-custody. Now, you don't want to take on that burden for yourself. You could think about going to a custodian like Coinbase or you could go think about buying an ETF like BlackRock. But in either of those paths, you can't get the type of leverage that a public company can get for instance, what we do with MicroStrategy does, what Bitmine does to a lesser extent, and get basically perpetual equity capital by virtue of creating a credit-like instrument. And so that has a lot of benefits for us where we're not faced with things like retail margin calls with collateral requirements, things that otherwise an individual investor would face. And oh, by the way, a hedge fund would face those same kind of things. An ETF that's a 2x exposure to the underlying asset just like in the world that overlapped our original business thesis as Strive in terms of being an ETF manager, like there are constraints in each of these other forms of leverage. And it creates not only a drag on the actual performance of the asset both upside and downside. That I think is not the same when you think about a well-structured digital asset treasury strategy. So that's kind of how I would think about it. There's obviously a lot of different flavors of exposure, a lot of different risk profiles, a lot of different ways that you can obviously then utilize the underlying asset and either strip volatility for yourself, earn yield on it. I mean, I mean as an investor standpoint, but look, it's an exciting time because there are so many options in the marketplace. And I think that's been enabled by the regulatory environment that we've been in since the Trump administration has taken over and since Republicans have been in Congress. And look, heading into the midterms, who knows what happens. I think there's a lot of attention right now in the space and that's partially why we've seen some of the, you know, run-up in both Bitcoin and some of the other currencies. Thank you for that overview, Ben. And Sam, what are some of the key differences to Ethereum treasury companies that you like to highlight when compared to Bitcoin treasury companies out there? Well, Bitcoin is a store of value and Ethereum has technology behind it. So just the short version of that is Bitcoin is competing with the gold markets and I would say Ethereum is competing with the financial system because with Ethereum you can rewrite the financial system using atomic swaps. I'm very familiar with this because we invented a decentralized exchange which solves for escrow and that technology was purchased and is now being used. And so Bitcoin just can't do that, right? There are other merits from a capital markets perspective. Ethereum does create a staking yield. I don't think you could really do that with Bitcoin. Not easily anyway. And also everybody understands that Bitcoin is the mother coin. It has first mover advantage from a marketing perspective. But, you know, when I speak to private bankers and when I speak to folks who are looking at capital flows, they understand that the smart money is going to Ethereum because eventually as people get more sophisticated, I understand that you hold a lot of Bitcoin. I apologize for telling this. But once you get to understand the technology a little bit better, you realize that, you know, the races have already been won with respect to blockchain. It's Ethereum. It's not Solana for reasons I can get into. And what banks and institutions and legacy finance can do with Ethereum, it can't be done with Bitcoin. So that's why I'm pretty bullish on that particular blockchain. Thank you, Sam. All fair points. Charles, anything to add on the Ethereum treasury front? Yeah, I mean, the way we look at our business is the treasury is really a byproduct of our operations. And it's something that we were kind of almost required to have in order to grow, you know, a thriving business within the Ethereum economy. You can't do that with Bitcoin. Not to knock Bitcoin, I do own some, but there's just certain things you can't do. Behind Ethereum, there's a whole infrastructure of, you know, automated market makers, DeFi protocols, lending and borrowing. There's just a whole ecosystem where you've got a trillion dollars of real-world assets that have been tokenized. And all the mechanics and piping that go beyond behind that is really exciting. And I look at the kind of the DATCOs, most of them are just holding one token and are completely tied to the price. When we look at it, if you just hold one token, you're an ARB opportunity for a pair trade for a bunch of hedge funds that can use an ETF. Your company options puts and do whatever other strategies they want. And control your stock in a way that your operations can't overcome. Our view is if we can build an operating business within the Ethereum economy, that drastically outperforms holding that asset over time, we should trade at multiples of book instead of being a pair trade for, you know, large hedge funds to play around with, especially as a small-cap company. So that's kind of my view on that is that it's a really hard model unless you do something special. Right. And that's actually a nice segue to my next question. There's certainly a lot of debts out there. I'm curious, what you guys would share in terms of what differentiates each of your companies from other DATCOs and highlight how you're generating shareholder value in your own way? Yeah, I mean, I'll start probably. It's been pretty easy for us. We've had a lot of capital appreciation. In our stock, in the growth of a preferred stock, we're trading at a premium in every which way you can look at the metric. We've increased the balance sheet pretty consistently throughout the bear market. I mean, there have been periods where we've raised 25,000 Bitcoin in a week. In the last couple of weeks, there have been weeks where we've added over 5%, nearly 10%. And so we've been growing pretty consistently. And I think that the reason that we have such a premium in the market is the fact that we've had such success in growing SADA to be over a billion dollar notional. We're 50% amplified plus against our Bitcoin stack. And I think that the market, I mean, has spoken as it relates to where they're attributing value for our kind of capital markets decision-making, our capital structure, and look, I think one thing that was discussed before, and I'll just make a very fine point, and it's our fundamental belief, I think some people agree with this view and some people will not, is that I think it's a low surface level kind of criticism of Bitcoin is that it has no utility. I think clearly the utility of it is as collateral. And I think it's proven by the fact that a company like MicroStrategy can raise tens of billions of dollars backed by Bitcoin. The fact that we've been able to do the same with SADA and I think that the world will start to see that there is a lot of other opportunities for you to think about that store of value, which I agree with, Bitcoin is a great store of value, as collateral in capital markets transactions that are more akin to what you would see in traditional banking and insurance today as opposed to, you know, I don't see the world personally as going completely DeFi. I do think that there's some merits to having innovations to the system, but there is very simple overnight transactions reinsurance transactions, those type of things that large financial institutions do to make money, like if you're a bank, for instance, and you get basically a free deposit and you can earn 4% to 7% on it, that's clearly the business model that's been successful for the last couple hundred years. And there are issues with that, right? Especially as it relates to the dollar as a reserve currency, the fact of the kind of sovereign debt that we're in. And I recognize that, but what I think is true right now is this. I think that STRIVE is obviously very willing to pay 13% per year cost of capital to acquire Bitcoin because we believe that it's going to grow by 30% plus CAGR per year. And as we get to critical mass and scale with our balance sheet, there's going to be a lot of utility that we can deploy that collateral to make it productive. So in terms of answering the question of what we're doing at BTCS to create shareholder value, I think we're doing things in a very unique way in looking at how can we generate high margin, revenue, gross profit, and grow that without just being subject to the fluctuations of the price of ETH, right? And we're doing that right now through liquidity provisioning and deploying capital into automated market makers and various protocols like Uniswap v3, v4, and a bunch of others with proprietary strategies. And with that enabled us to do is really, you know, pump out some really good numbers for the last quarter. I think we did like, you know, a million and a half in gross profit last quarter. We're on target to do 6 million in gross profit. For the year, if not above. We're expanding to other L2s like Base and I think when we do it in that strategy, it basically acts like a shock absorber, right? So if the price of ETH goes up, we're going to get kind of slowly bought out. And if the price goes down, we'll get kind of bought into ETH. The advantage of that is we can do it directionally long ETH with leverage and automatically rebalance our debt as needed because it's all on chain. And really drive superior returns at a lower risk for investors that want exposure to, you know, the blockchain ecosystem. And so I think that's what we're doing that's unique. It's relatively complex business model, but no one else is doing it in the public markets. And we're just starting to put out really good numbers from it. So you know, wait and see what happens for year end. Yeah, I think traditional debts that being just like buying Ethereum and just holding onto it is lame. I think that that's a beta play. I don't see how any company is providing value by just buying and holding and putting it on their balance sheet. So what we've done is we also as mentioned earlier, we own a controlling stake of white fiber. That's listed on NASDAQ. And so people can see the valuation of that. And we are basically on the intersection, I think, I don't know of any other company, it's on the intersection of artificial intelligence and Ethereum. And the one thing that I don't think is discussed enough is how we believe that the agentic economy is going to be run on Ethereum. And there is no company that expresses that thesis, except us. So we think that once that is finally surfacing where the agentic economy, I mean, there's no other blockchain I challenge anybody in this room to figure out which other blockchain can be used for agentic, for agents. It's logically Ethereum. So once that story comes out, I would imagine in a couple of years it'll come out in a big way. And I think that we'll be in a really particularly good position for people to understand why we decided to be on this intersection of artificial intelligence and Ethereum. I think one of the reasons why we're trading at a discount is because we have this stake in white fiber that nobody really knows about. It's one of the reasons why I'm here at this conference, just letting people just reminding people, hey, we own this incredible company that's growing like gangbusters. I think when you value us without white fiber, the NAV discount premium is a very different number. But when you add the white fiber part, then we're trading at a discount. And I think the capital markets are simply forgetting that we own white fiber. And so that's something that will resolve itself after a while when people get to, you know, clue in on that fact. But that's how we differentiate ourselves. We're trying to get ahead of the trends. We think the trends is agentic economy, the agentic economy, which will be built on Ethereum. That's one of the reasons why we are we have these two line items in our balance sheet that expresses Ethereum, which is owning Ethereum and of course owning white fiber, which is the artificial intelligence piece. Now, this is certainly still a relatively nascent industry. I'm curious to get your thoughts as to how you've seen the market mature and evolve over the past year as we've navigated through this crypto bear market. And I leave it open to who wants to start with this one. Yeah, I mean, I think that a lot of the companies that went out in 2025, like we talked about, have had minimal success. And I think, you know, one of the reasons that we were able to combine with similar scientific, bringing 5,000 Bitcoin to our balance sheet was the fact that they were trading at a discount and they didn't have a pathway to explore preferred stock or other kinds of financing instruments in order to run what was at the time, not only their treasury strategy, but a medical devices business that was declining revenue and had, you know. Very profile that made it such that they were trading at a discount. And so by virtue of that transaction, we were able to actually buy Bitcoin relatively creatively because we paid less than the Bitcoin was worth. We were able to actually book that on our income statement as a gain. But nonetheless, I think that I agree with the notion that I think there needs to be some productivity in this space by and large because to just raise capital and hold the asset, I think it's going to be very difficult to achieve any real scale in that and real returns from that unless you're one of the large players in the space. Unfortunately. And I think that part of that is how the capital formation process happens. How banks will go and underwrite your transactions, whether certain institutional type investors will be willing to make an allocation to the company if it's a sub $1 billion market cap, if the issue is sub $200 million new issue. These dynamics exist in the capital markets. And so I think that's why people have found difficulty also because of some of the different decisions that they've made as it relates to taking on debt and the covenants they're in and when you invest in an asset like Bitcoin, the reality is that you have to underwrite not only upside but pretty significant downside as well. And when your capital structure has negative convexity to downside and causes liquidation scenarios, which I think a lot of people were facing, this summer, that makes it challenging environment. So I think there has been consolidation. I think there have been some pivots. I think there have been some ways to look to generate value other than just holding the asset. And I think that's constructive. Sam Charles, anything to add to that? I agree with that. Yeah, I agree with that. I would just add, I mean, it was kind of really having been in this space in the public markets for now 12 years, it was really interesting last summer to watch. What was just a huge money grab, right? I mean, if you look at what happened, crypto was hot. We had a decent administration in place. And everybody and their brother said, let's just raise $100, $200, $300 million, whatever, throw it in some crappy NASDAQ company that's on the verge of delisting. And it's not a reverse merger because there's no target company with audited financials. Bam, you're in this company. You're most of them were Wixie eligible. So if you don't know, you kind of got the golden ticket. You could just file an S3, be auto-effective on file. And just raise a tremendous amount of money. And what you ended up with was a lot of companies that had inexperienced management teams that had to keep the old board of the Shell vehicle, as required to keep your NASDAQ listing, that really had no idea what to do the second it turned bear market. They struggled with accounting around crypto. Had really no plan except let's sell into the hype and when the music stopped, they had no operating business, no operating plan. And I think now you're looking at can you do M&As with these? And it's like almost impossible because to acquire a company that's at a discount to NAV, if I was a shareholder, I'd sue management. It's a breach of duty. Just sell the asset and give the money back. How can you sell it at discount? So you end up with these stranded vehicles with no idea what to do. So it's I think the bear market's really put a hurt on some of these strategies. Well, congratulations, teacher. You for navigating the storm here. Hopefully, we're at a bottom. So next, I want to talk about growth. And how investors should think about specific near-term growth catalysts for your businesses beyond just the potential underlying price appreciation of Bitcoin and Ethereum. Sam, maybe you want to kick us off with this one? Yeah, I mean, we are very concerned about creating alpha in our company. And so besides owning white fiber and letting the market cap of that go up and then selling down the shares of that in the medium