EBC22 | Mining Crypto With a Green Footprint

three two one [Music] so my name is johanna thornblad and i am from hive blockchain technologies we are a crypto mining company and i am responsible for the swedish operations of hype today i wanted to introduce you to hive and also talk a bit about our esg strategy where we mine only with renewable energy and we also participate in a frequency balancing program that allows us to support the local grid where we operate to to stabilize that grid i think it's a very interesting and important initiative disclaimers so hive is a publicly traded company in 2017 we were the first crypto mining company to go public when we listed on the toronto venture exchange we have since also listed in frankfurt and a year ago as you see here we listed on nasdaq in new york at this time we manage six data centers two in eastern canada two in iceland and two in northern sweden it's at these data centers that we provide the computer power and that provides the the computer power for the bitcoin and ethereum mining and all the mining is done in the cloud and for our own portfolio all the coins that we mine are green virgin coins green because they are from renewable resources uh powerful sources and because these are newly minted coins that have never been used or circulated in the system before as of may 31st this year hive had over 3 000 bitcoin on our balance sheet we mined 273 new bitcoins during the month of may and we also mined almost 2700 ethereum so we're one of the few mining companies to have since the start a very deliberate strategy of both mining ethereum and bitcoin and actually if you if you make that ethereum into bitcoin we would have mined over 450 bitcoin and that's the bitcoin equivalent for the month and so it's been a tough time for crypto miners and anyone who follows ethereum or bitcoin lately knows this but uh i wanted to show this slide because it's not something new to hive we've been around for a while and we've been through tough times in the past here what we're trying to show is we're a lead mean very efficient company and even if the bitcoin price were to stay here around twenty thousand dollars if ethereum stays around one thousand dollars we still have a positive cash flow of 45 cents per share uh if or when uh bitcoin goes back up to 40 000 and we see levels we've seen in the past with ethereum at 3 000 we would have a two dollar per share positive cash flow skip this this is a slide that we always bring with us to all presentations because it's very important especially when you're working in an industry like ours here we're trying to show the comparison between for example the volatility of the s p 500 of gold to bitcoin ethereum and a company like ours high blockchain technologies this is showing that 70 percent of the time it's a non-event for uh s p two uh s p 500 to go up or down one percent over a one day period and three percent over over a ten day period but looking then at bitcoin that same volatility would be three percent over one day up or down or uh 11 over a 10-day period and then take a look at hive who minds both bitcoin and ethereum and therefore moves very correlated with those two assets and have a volatility of up or down six percent over one day and 17 over a 10-day period so when we talk about our data centers you probably realize that they are all northern location and this is not something by coincidence but rather a strategy and this is where we find our renewable energy but it's also cold climates where we can use the cold air to cool our uh equipment we have a lot of equipment in sweden which is where i spend most most of my time we get temperatures of minus 30 in the winter time but we have 17 000 miners at the facility or computers we have over 100 000 gpus the chips the computer chips that are used to mine ethereum and many of you also know that those are the same computer chips that are used for hpc for gaming for rendering artificial intelligence and i'm mentioning this also because it's a new area for hive that we're investing in that we're looking at and very excited about this opportunity at this particular data center we use 32 megawatts of power and this leads me and then to our esg strategy here you see a photo of the power hydro power plant that is located 500 meters from our facility in the northern part of sweden and provides us with all our green power most of our power is derived from hydro and for for example in this area this is all stranded energy if we weren't using it it would not be used so it's an area that has a lot of excess renewable energy and that's why we're located right there we also use a bit of geothermal energy in in iceland and a bit of wind so i wanted to address some of the fud the fear uncertainty and doubt that is spread about the bitcoin mining industry particularly um bitcoin mining actually stands only for 0.16 of the the energy the world's total energy use and um as late as or as recently as the the first quarter of 2022 uh bitcoin was 58 the bitcoin miners used 58 renewable energy and this is something that's on everyone's mind so it's something that is um increasing we are a public company our shareholders are requiring this uh many are following our model and going that way so what's very interesting is that data centers such as ours can actually help support the local grid by uh providing the stability to balance supply and demand and this is more and more important as we're shifting more to renewable resources and as society is is demanding more more electricity so in in sweden uh and why data centers are so good at this is because we have a stable a high stable power supply 24 hours a day seven days a week 365 days a year and we can share that supply with the great because we're we're mining for our own wallet now so that we can decide exactly when we want to shut down our miners and provide that power to the regional grid and we're participating we're the biggest participator in a program uh in in sweden where we get called there's a technology that literally calls us when the regional grid needs extra power in five seconds we have to power down 50 percent of our fleet in 30 seconds we have to commit to to power down the next called power supply and provide a to the grid so that it becomes stabilized what's also interesting is that we get paid for this so it's truly a win-win situation we stabilize the local grid we get reimbursed for that and for example a data center like like amazon probably would not be able to do this because they then could interrupt workflows for their customers but we like i said can just shut down our mining operation share the the power and then quickly power back up again and so i want to conclude because i'm out of time with some really nice projects that we're doing because obviously with so much equipment we are also producing heat and in these northern locations that excess heat can be if harnessed correctly can really be a good asset for the community and so at our location in la chute quebec we're heating simply by transferring the hot air that we generate to the neighboring facility it's a 4 000 square meter factory we're heating their entire facility we're also participating in a research project with rice the research institute in sweden and we're doing r d with intel so that our mining equipment keeps getting more and more efficient and lastly this is one of my pet projects we have been participating in a co-creation project in a community in in the northern part of sweden to understand what their needs are and the result of that project is that we will be providing the the heat for a 1 000 square meter greenhouse that is expected to produce more than 200 tons of cucumbers every year making that region basically self-sustainable in cucumbers and phase two of that project is another greenhouse that would produce up to two to eighty tons of tomatoes each year and it's really quite significant when you see the location of our data center we're way way up north where you see the reindeers a few people and very close to the russian border so you can imagine that food sustainability at this time is something that's on everyone's mind and so i want to thank you for this opportunity and let you know that the mining community is aware that we need to improve i think hive is really taking a lead in that making sure that we have a green footprint that we're improving meanwhile obviously also providing shareholder value but those things are totally correlated and and very important to keep in mind so thank you very much gracias