DEFT

Before we begin, I'd like to remind everyone that certain statements made during today's call may constitute forward-looking information under applicable securities laws. These statements include, but are not limited to, comments regarding the expected financial performance, business development, strategic initiatives, market expansion, product growth, and future opportunities. Forward-looking statements are based on management's current expectations and assumptions and are subject to known and unknown risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied. With that, I'll turn it over to Johan.

Thank you, Curtis, and thank you everyone for joining us today. The second quarter was shaped by continued volatility across digital asset markets as lower crypto asset prices affected assets under management, which, together with the mark-to-market adjustments, weighted our reported financial results. While those market conditions impacted our financial numbers during the quarter, they have not changed our conviction in the long-term opportunity or the progress across the business. Our focus remains on executing our strategy, strengthening the platform, and creating long-term value for shareholders. More importantly, the underlying business continues to move in the right direction. Our core business is becoming more scalable and efficient as we invest across our existing businesses, pursue strategic opportunities, and advance product innovation.

We believe these efforts are strengthening the platform, enhancing our competitive position, and expanding all our long-term growth opportunities across all the business areas. Valour has listed over 100 listed ETPs and structured products across multiple exchanges globally, aiming for another eight more during Q3. During the quarter, Valour generated more than CAD 22.8 million on net inflows, reflecting continued customer demand for our products, despite the challenging environments for the broader digital asset industry. We view these positive net inflows as an encouraging sign, demonstrating continued demand for our product despite a weaker market environment and reinforcing our confidence in the long-term opportunities ahead. Beyond Valour, we continue to broaden our institutional platform product offering. The launch of our first hedge fund remains a key priority.

With all obstacles now removed, we are days or at worst, a week or two from the actual launch. We also expect to expand our arbitrage strategies during the second half of the year, with a goal of further strengthening our institutional capability and diversifying our revenue streams. While the Swedish Financial Supervisory Authority did not approve our initial UCITS structure, we have appealed the decision and are simultaneously working hard to establish a UCITS platform in another domicile within the European Union. Those efforts are moving ahead quite quickly. Development of the Valour custody platform also remains on track for a targeted beta launch in the second half of the year. The initial deployment will focus on bringing custody capabilities in-house, reducing third-party custody costs, and improving margins.

Over time, the platform is expected to support a broader range of products and services. AI is also becoming an increasingly important part of our business. We are leveraging AI to improve operational efficiency while developing AI-enabled investment products, which we believe complement our existing crypto product offering and support future growth. From a financial standpoint, the company continues to operate from a position of strength. Our balance sheet and liquidity provide the flexibility to invest through the market cycle, support product innovation, pursue strategic acquisition opportunities, while also maintaining a disciplined approach to capital allocation. Still maintain a strong momentum in onboarding larger clients and remains on track for a second record year of revenue.

As market conditions improve, we believe the business is positioned for asymmetric upside, supported by continued growth in key operating metrics that are not primary dependent on market volatility. Looking ahead, our priorities remain unchanged. We are focused on expanding our institutional capabilities, broadening our product offering, and building a more diversified business aligned with the long-term growth of digital assets. While near-term market conditions remain challenging, we believe the investments being made today are strengthening the business, expanding our capabilities, and positioning the company to capitalize on the next phase of growth. Our main focus during this market downturn is to aggressively take market share in our core markets. With that, I will turn it over to Paul to walk through the financial results.

Thank you, Johan, and good morning, everyone. I will begin with an overview of assets under management. Average AUM for the quarter was approximately CAD 471.5 million, and quarter end AUM was approximately CAD 397.2 million. Lower digital asset prices continued to weigh on reported assets under management during the quarter, consistent with conditions across the broader digital asset market. Our effective management fee yield was approximately 1% compared to approximately 1% in the prior period, primarily reflecting the larger weighting of Bitcoin-related products within our AUM, which carry lower or no management fees, as well as continued weakness across many altcoin markets. Within Valour, our effective staking yield of 2.4% also moderated during the quarter as lower digital asset prices, compression in lending rates for Bitcoin and Ethereum, and changes in the composition of staking assets reduced overall monetization.

Client activity remained encouraging despite these market-driven headwinds. Valour generated CAD 22.8 million of net inflows during the quarter, reflecting continued demand for our products despite the broader market environment. These inflows provide a solid foundation for future growth in assets under management as digital asset prices recover. Total revenues for the quarter were CAD 7.8 million, compared to CAD 11.2 million in the prior period, reflecting lower average assets under management and unfavorable mark-to-market adjustments on our digital asset holdings, which are recognized through revenue under our broker-dealer accounting structure. Excuse me. Company also maintained a fortress balance sheet, ending the quarter with CAD 60.3 million in cash and cash equivalents.

CAD 19.1 million of Stretch preferred shares and RWUSD financial assets, CAD 10.4 million of USDT/USDC tokens, and CAD 30 million of digital asset treasury holdings for total liquidity of CAD 119.8 million. For clarity for our investors about the obvious drop in our cash balance from Q1, we bought CAD 20 million of MicroStrategy Stretch preferred shares, or 200,914 shares, to achieve a higher yield on our treasury cash reserves. These preferred shares yield 12%, or CAD 1 per month. We also purchased a smaller position, RWUSD product. Our short-term U.S. Treasury bill holdings yield approximately 3.5%, so these other products yield significantly more. These investments are disclosed on the face of our balance sheet as other investments at fair value through profit and loss.

And again, management, we view these as essentially cash equivalents, but they are not classified as such under IFRS rules. We believe this strong financial position provides flexibility to continue investing in strategic initiatives while maintaining a disciplined approach to capital allocation. Turning to product activity, we ended the quarter with 102 ETPs and structured products across our platform. We continue to expand our institutional product pipeline and distribution capabilities while advancing several new investment products and fund structures. Stillman Digital maintained an important diversification component of the broader platform. During the first half of 2026, Stillman generated approximately CAD 5.4 million of revenue, representing 30.2% year-over-year growth. We remain encouraged by the business's trajectory and its contribution to the overall platform as it paces for a record revenue year.

We remind our investors that Stillman revenue growth is not dependent on cryptocurrency prices increasing, but rather on trading volumes and realized trading spreads. Turning to operating expenses. General and admin expenses and fees and commissions, which are our main cash costs, totaled CAD 8 million in the quarter, which represents a CAD 1.6 million reduction from the CAD 9.6 million incurred in Q1 2026 of these costs. We remain focused on disciplined cost management and continue working towards our targeted annualized cash operating cost structure of CAD 36 million to CAD 39 million while continuing to invest in our business. Our bottom line result was negatively affected by CAD 16.3 million negative mark-to-market adjustments on our venture portfolio, as well as our Stretch preferred shares.

Most of the negative adjustment is from the markdown of our 5% investment in AMINA Bank to reflect lower AUM and a compression in EV to AUM multiples across a valuation peer group. We are aware of publicly available information that AMINA Bank has engaged Cantor Fitzgerald to explore a potential public listing for it. With that, I will turn it over to Andrew.

Thank you, Paul. As we discussed last quarter, our focus remains on expanding the institutional capabilities, distribution relationships, and operating infrastructure needed to support the next phase of growth for DeFi Technologies. Throughout the quarter, we made progress across several strategic initiatives designed to broaden our product offering, improve monetization, and expand access to the platform. A key priority remains the development of regulated fund structures and institutional investment products. We are working to bring these initiatives to market in a disciplined manner with an emphasis on products that are fully operational, commercially ready, and available to investors. An organization like DeFi operates in a complex regulated space, which require the building of trust through relationships. Initiatives often require work months and years before the results are seen by the general public.

In our case, Q2 saw increased adoption by partner organizations globally of our DVO Index platform, which provides a strong, broad narrative to discuss the unique strengths of each product within the Valour platform. Q2 also saw us systematize and execute on approaches for interacting with institutions and onboarding institutional capital into our Valour products. Over 40% of this quarter's inflows are directly attributed to our institutional events and outreach. To give a clear example, deals that began as discussions at our Abu Dhabi event in December 2025 closed during Q2. We have built an institution-focused marketing and outreach strategy that uniquely and interestingly enables us to communicate the power of our products, the services offered by our portfolio companies and our pipeline of future products on our terms efficiently and economically to a global audience of bona fide investors.

We built this capacity, which has enabled us to be competitive and generate positive net inflows despite compressed digital asset prices and poor market conditions in less than 12 months. What we've created plays an important role. We finally have an all-important institutional sales platform. The beauty of what we do and how we do it is it is global and flexible enough to accommodate all the innovative products in our pipeline that have been discussed by Johan in his CEO letter and his earlier statement. In science and in finance, to be effective, we must categorize the factors we deal with as independent or dependent variables.

I remain heartened by our team's focus and our company's resilience in unfavorable market conditions. I am bullish on DeFi Technologies, Valour, and Stillman Digital because we are demonstrating increased efficiency and effectiveness with the dependent variables. These elements we have control over, like net inflows, visibility, product development, clarity of the financial story, optimization of our corporate venture holdings. Those areas we do not have full autonomy or control over, like asset prices and regulatory approvals, which can be impacted by anything from war, interest rates, holiday seasons, and broader asset prices, we monitor closely and have a dedicated team that responds quickly and professionally to all requests in an attempt to ensure we give ourselves the best shot at success.

I ask listeners and viewers to know when Johan speaks of creating a platform, these are not empty words. He's done it before, and the evidence of this is in our world-leading portfolio of over 100 digital asset underlying ETPs. Now we are entering into a new era of product with the objective of expanding our platform into structured instruments that have the potential for performance-based upside increases. It is not a question of if these products will be delivered. They will be, and when they come online, the nature of many of these products are higher returning with great potential for upside to the firm. These initiatives are important not only because they broaden our product offering, but also because they expand the ways we can monetize the platform.

Historically, our revenue model has been driven primarily by assets under management fees, and staking income. Over time, we believe these new institutional products and investment strategies can add performance-based returns, institutional mandates, and other revenue streams that are less directly tied to the direction of digital asset markets. Since November 2025, we have worked hard to develop our innovative business intelligence system that provides granular views of key competitive and operational metrics. This has grown into a system of proprietary data-driven tools that give unique insights as to how specific Valour single or index products interact with the financial world around us. Such research and development efforts leverage our infrastructure to provide unique insights.

This serves as a proving ground for potential new products that can be created for third-party asset managers for deployment by their internal risk desks or wealth management platforms. This new capability enables us to expand distribution through the provision of valuable insights, enables us to create new institutional partnerships, and improve monetization across products and assets already supported by the business whilst using data to define the products of the future. The positive net inflows generated in Q2 are proof that our model is working, demonstrating the strength of our product offering and our ability to attract institutional and other customer assets through challenging market conditions. We also continue to invest in the long-term capabilities of the platform.

As tokenization becomes more widely adopted across financial markets, we believe our technology and operating infrastructure can eventually support a broader range of financial products and asset classes, including tokenized real-world assets. As the new products come online, I am excited that the firm will be in a position to speak with institutional capital allocators worldwide. This is the platform and product diversification that will insulate the company from the exogenous shocks inherent in digital asset markets whilst providing new and larger opportunities for institution-focused revenue generation. That said, our focus is on execution. We will only communicate new products when they are operational and available to investors rather than before the necessary legal, regulatory, and commercial requirements are in place. We believe this approach will strengthen credibility, support durable client relationships, and create more sustainable value for shareholders.

With that, I will turn the call back over to Curtis for Q&A.

Thanks, Andrew. First of all, if you are an analyst, please do raise your hand so I can invite you on live to chat. Then I will go through the Q&A chat here for our retail investors. We will start with a couple questions there. I guess first question from Anne Schumann. When can we expect the smart crypto fund and hedge fund products? How is UCITS listing coming along? I think, Johan, if you could sort of give as much color as you can on our upcoming fund structures as a whole.

Yeah, for sure. We have actually right now much more visibility than we had only a few weeks ago. Unfortunately, it took also, I think, three months to onboard with some key trading partners because of different jurisdictional problems and other things. Now we've finally onboarded with everyone. There's no more obstacles for the smart crypto fund. We are in the final, yes, practicalities, so should be maybe a week or 2, hopefully, until three weeks the most. I would say it's possible within a week. There are no more actual formal obstacles. Everything is done. We're into practicalities and just some final integrations. We should see that within Q3 for sure. On UCITS, unfortunately, we got a no from the Swedish FSA.

They dragged it out longer time than they actually had a legal ground to do, and they actually, in the end, didn't even give a reason. They are quite anti-crypto activists in the Swedish FSA since a long time. We have actually both appealed that decision. We have also redone the application in Sweden, just to have to pressure on there. We also have come quite far in the Luxembourg structure, where they are quite neutral in terms of different asset classes. Yeah, if we don't get through in Sweden, we will get through in Luxembourg. If it's Luxembourg, it might unfortunately take another a few more months, so we can't give an exact date or clarity. I don't want to promise anything there, but within this year is my hope.

If we get through in Sweden, I have no idea what the probability would be. That could go much quicker. But unfortunately, uncertainty on the UCITS, but on the hedge fund, we have clarity. We are through with all the obstacles.

Next question. Our shares are one-fifth the price that they were when we initiated the capital raise. Should we not utilize some capital at this 80% discount to close out our current buyback?

Yeah, I can say what we said before on that matter, that our objective is to use the cash to grow our operation. We have done some investments this quarter, yes, to get a higher yield on the cash. But obviously we want to maintain it ready for some of the deals we continuously are looking at, which we think would have a much higher impact on the stock price, if and when we can get those or any of those done, than to just buy shares back. I also have the opinion that we should primarily buy back shares if we do, if we have a strong positive cash flow and use parts of actual earnings to buy back shares.

Obviously, you can do it by other reasons as well, but it's in a falling market, in a market where we don't see any change in the crypto market so far. I don't think it would have a lasting impact. I think what would have a lasting impact is for us to grow the AUM, get out with more products, and do structural deals, so that remains the focus. That's not a no to buybacks. It's just saying that we think we have better opportunities, better use of cash at this point.

To reemphasize again, when we do buy back shares, those shares are retired. It's not like buying shares on the open market and you hold them and they increase in value if the share price appreciates. So once we utilize that capital, the shares are burned, that capital is then dead. It's gone. We can't make it liquid again and go out and buy anything else or reinvest it anywhere else. From an operating leverage standpoint, especially during a bear market when we're not producing a whole lot of free cash flow, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense for the long-term revenue capabilities of the company.

Yeah. I think what is best for the stock price long term, what would drive the stock price in long term the most is obviously for us to grow the AUM, grow the revenues, and that remains our full focus with all the resources we have at hand.

Yep. Then a couple of questions on the Nasdaq compliance and applying for 180-day extension. I'll address this quickly. We will be applying for the additional 180-day extension on September 1st. We have had discussions with the team at Nasdaq. They have indicated that we do qualify for the additional 180-day extension, but they cannot give us an affirmative answer, yes or no, until the application is submitted. But we are very optimistic that the extension will be granted. Then of course, during that time, hopefully crypto winter ends and the company rerates during that time. So we'll keep all investors apprised as we proceed along this process.

The goal here is to get back over a CAD 1 organically through our own internal growth initiatives and quite bluntly, the market coming out of a crypto winter and back a stable run in Bitcoin and some of the other alts. I'll answer one more question, then we'll go to analysts and then I'll keep answering. We'll pop back and forth. Now that geographic expansion has slowed and institutional products have stalled in Europe, what does the company see as the biggest driver of AUM outside of increased crypto prices? Again, Johan. Yeah.

Yeah, I can start. I think obviously the new products we are launching now, the new smart crypto fund, the UCITS funds and so forth, where we address different markets. We have distribution, not just locally in our core markets, we have distribution globally for those products. I think that market, we have a lot of demand. There is not a lot of products to choose from. I think our products will be unique and address that market very extremely attractive way. We also will be listing a few innovative new products the next few months. I think two of them, hopefully within two weeks, that are unique. There is no competition for those. I think within the product portfolio, I do not want to get too explicit about what we are going to list here the next few months. That is something we will announce when we list.

Both the institutional fund type of products and also the other ETP products we have in our pipeline, I think will be unique. We will address a new market than what we are working with right now. I think a lot of on-top potential there and I think that will really drive our AUM once launched.

Thanks. Paul, before we go to Ed and Allen Klee and Hal, I guess could you clarify the use of capital to purchase the Stretch shares and the RWUSD?

Yeah. Okay. So for everybody, we keep our cash in U.S. dollars. We keep our cash in U.S. Treasury bills short-term, three months or less, on the yields on those are about 3.5%. So it is not great as we all know in this environment. The board approved $20 million of our cash pile, going to MicroStrategy Prefs, the Stretch, STRC, that I think most people are aware of. We did buy them at $99.50. They went as low as $85 at June 30th. I think they were actually in the 70s, but they were $85 on June 30th, so we marked it down in the financials that you are seeing today. Those shares have since recovered to approximately $95.

Michael Saylor and Phong Le have come out publicly repeatedly saying that their goal is to get them back to $100. We don't have any intention to sell our shares in the near term. They're just a higher yielding component of our treasury. We do pick up CAD 1 a share. There's no withholding tax. They're paid as return of capital. We do still consider them attractive.

Thanks, Paul. Ed from Compass Point. Analyst Ed, go ahead and unmute yourself and you have the floor.

Hey, guys. Thanks for taking my question here. I know you touched on some of the strength in the net flows being driven by institutional, but just curious, was it any specific product or was it just across the spectrum for those 2Q net inflows? I know, I think you guys called out one big sale related to Hedera, I think early in the quarter, but it seems like even since then things have had a pretty good pace.

Yeah, I can touch that briefly. There certainly was the CAD 11 million of HBAR, the Hedera, which was a big part of it. And just overall for people to be aware of our AUM that we're 46% Bitcoin and Ethereum, and 69.8% Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana. So 70% in three tokens. So the growth does generally reflect that there was the disproportionate HBAR inflow that we press released and you are aware of.

Yeah, but I guess even for the CAD 13 million of inflows, it is still your best quarter in a while. Just curious, what is driving that? Is it any geography? Is it anything specific, or was it lumpy, or was it generally broad based?

I can comment to that. It was actually quite broad. I think the distribution that Paul mentioned is correct, but we have just really been, over the past year, we have just been really hammering contacts with broker-dealer platforms, with institutional investors, and making sure that people are aware of our presence. They see that we are visible. There have been some strong marketing and publicity campaigns in the Nordics as well. We have a very granular system for being able to track which products money is flowing into and out of not only us, but our competitors too. So we are just maximizing efficiency. We were aware that it was a tough market, so we wanted to make sure to squeeze out every last drop of capital into our products, to attract capital into our products.

Yeah. A bit more color on that, too. Behind the scenes, Andrew, Jacob, Johan, and our marketing and sales team at Valour are doing an extensive amount of work to grow the brand, not only in the Nordics but across the E.U. I know a lot of folks have their own opinions on our symposiums or Capital Markets Series, but again, these are where you will see the seeds planted that will turn into net inflows and AUM gains. So there are a lot of tiny little things and face-to-face connections that our marketing and sales are doing, and these are things that we were not able to do because frankly, we were not in the position to do it from a financial perspective a couple of years ago.

But even in a crypto winter with an extensive or a robust balance sheet, we are able to be aggressive but also efficient in our marketing and sales tactics this time around. Then we have ran a couple of our larger campaigns in the Nordics, to attract additional inflows into our ETPs over the past few months as well. Even though things are a bit slower in the ecosystem itself, this is an opportunity for us to be aggressive and grow our brand, continue to plant seeds, and see those fruits of our labor when conditions turn.

Great. I think in the press release, you mentioned how, in the bear market you guys are pretty well-capitalized and there could be potential M&A. Obviously nothing specific, but I am just curious of what you are seeing. Are you seeing lots of potential deals and sellers here, or is that just a general comment that you might be able to execute on at some point?

Yeah, I can do a brief comment there. We see a continuous stream and pipeline of potential deals of different kinds in the M&A space. We have done the last six months, I would say, have been much more intense in that regard. We are obviously extremely picky, so even though we have done some really deep due diligence on some deals which were very close and could have been extremely good, if it is not a perfect fit, we do not go ahead. So we have done a lot of work on that. We see more and more in the pipeline. So it is very active. The M&A space is very active right now and a lot of interesting deals coming up and we are selectively approaching and looking at new deals.

But we obviously want to make sure it is a perfect fit for our long-term strategy, for sure. It is super exciting and a lot of interesting discussions are being held.

Great. Thanks for the color.

Any other questions, Ed?

No, that's it for me.

Cool. Allen Klee from Maxim? Allen, you have the floor. All right, I'll invite Hal from B. Riley. Hal, go ahead.

Yeah. My question's on the operating expense that you mentioned in the presentation, that operating expenses fell to about CAD 10 million from CAD 14 million. Is that a reasonable level going forward? With the AUM at quarter end at just below CAD 400 million, can you maybe give us some commentary on breakeven levels now with maybe the lower expense structure? Thanks.

Yeah. Thanks for the question, Hal. It is our goal to keep cash operating costs, which is the general admin and the fees and commissions, right? So excluding the non-cash share-based stuff, in the CAD 36 million to CAD 39 million range. We need about CAD 550 million of AUM at 4.25% monetization to be breakeven at that level, which we think is a reasonable monetization rate in a slightly stronger crypto market. That's something we, of course, continue to monitor and depending how long the crypto bear market goes down, we'll continue to reevaluate. But at the current time, we think that's where we'd like to operate.

All right. Thanks, Paul. If I could ask a follow-up to Andrew. Andrew, you mentioned on the inflows, was it 40% of new inflows were from institutions? I just want to make sure I heard that number right.

Yeah, it was approximately 40%. Well, actually no, it would probably be higher than that, but it was 40% from institutional deals. What happens is we have face-to-face meetings at our events. If they like it, we enter into discussion about how we can use the platform and institutions can invest in our products. Those particular deals, I am actually looking at some of the questions from some people, but those particular deals that were reached at these meetings and events that we have represented approximately 40% of the Q2 inflows. One could say that without these new vectors of communicating and institutional outreach and events, we may not have been able to close those deals or others like it in the future. That is using our existing product mix.

Whenever you factor in the fact that we are creating new products that are going to be less geographically restricted and have more of an appetite globally, and will also be very interesting to institutional investors, then that is where what we are doing hopefully will scale more and drive more AUM to our platform, as Paul and Johan have alluded to.

One follow-up to that is, what is an idea for a geographically less restricted product that might replace what you have been doing? What does that really mean or how is that constructed?

Well, for instance, some of the fund products that Johan has discussed, we have had interest and we have discussed with wealth management platforms, institutional allocators outside of Europe, and they can participate in those quite easily because they have an interesting theory behind them. They have an interesting investment philosophy, great Sharpe ratio, interesting Sortino ratio. So these are products that larger capital allocators outside of Europe would have an interest in and would be able to avail themselves of.

Thank you, guys.

Sure. Yeah, I think unless Allen comes back, I think that is all the questions we have from analysts. Allen, are you still there? I just invited you back. Allen, if you could unmute yourself. Okay, there we go.

Oh, hi. Can you hear me? Sorry about that.

Yeah.

I had an issue. I just wanted to check. You said, getting back to cash operating expenses, you said you're shooting for your target is CAD 36 million to CAD 39 million. You were very disciplined this quarter. Your G&A plus the fees and commission was just under CAD 8 million. Which, if you annualize that would get you to CAD 32 million, which is lower than what you said, CAD 36 million, CAD 39 million. Is it reasonable that you could be running at a lower rate than CAD 36 million, CAD 39 million?

Yeah, you've got to look at we were a little higher in Q1, Allen, so hopefully we do come in at the lower end of the bar. We're trying to under-promise and overdeliver here. But yeah, we are running leaner now.

Okay, good. There were some issues on yield this quarter. But the normal assumption for coming up with the break-even AUM is using a 4.5% yield on AUM. Is there any reason to think that we should be using a lower yield going forward?

We did 5% actual in 2025. We were 3.6 in Q1, 3.3. Bitcoin was also $58,300 on June 30. We personally think it is dark days right now in crypto, and we are hopeful that the fall with the four-year cycle and if Bitcoin can get closer to its 200-day, let alone go through it will be better. The yields will come up. The yields right now are extremely distressed. We are still internally budgeting at 4.25. If you feel you want to use lower, it pushes the break even up, but you can see we are aggressive on the costs and trending on the low end as well.

Okay. Did you say you are budgeting 4.25 or 4 point?

Yeah. 4.25, hopefully, for the fall.

Yeah. The dynamic here is obviously that when markets go down, the Bitcoin dominance normally goes up. Our higher-yielding assets are a lower part of the AUM, and that is what drives down the average monetization rate. Even though we have been more efficient in getting higher monetization rates in assets across the board, the product makes changes when the market goes down, Bitcoin dominance goes up. When we mostly have Bitcoin and Ethereum, that is the dynamic that actually lowers the average monetization rate. Even though we do a great job in actually owning more per most assets than before, because a larger percentage of the AUM now is Bitcoin, Ethereum, where returns are lower, that is what is driving the average monetization rate down in a bear market.

That obviously reverses when the market goes up, and then what we have seen in all cycles before is that then the alts and other coins come back with a high beta and then the larger part of the portfolio they are, the more the monetization rate goes up.

This is very helpful. Thank you very much.

Cool. Thanks, Allen. With that, I will go ahead and wrap it up. If we were not able to get to your questions, please do email [email protected]. Thank you all for your time, your patience, and your commitment. As shareholders, we do value that greatly. We will see you next time. Thanks, everyone.

Thank you.

Our coverage analysts on to ask questions live. Before we begin, I'd like to remind everyone that certain statements made during today's call may constitute forward-looking information under applicable securities laws. These statements include, but are not limited to, comments regarding the expected financial performance, business development, strategic initiatives, market expansion, product growth, and future opportunities. Forward-looking statements are based on management's current expectations and assumptions and are subject to known and unknown risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied. With that, I'll turn it over to Johan.

Thank you, Curtis, and thank you everyone for joining us today. The 1st quarter of 2026 reflected a more challenging market environment across digital asset sector with softer market conditions impacting assets under management, staking related income and overall investor activity during the period. At the same time, we believe the quarter reinforced the strength and durability of the business we have built. Even what we view as the most challenging quarter of this recent crypto market downturn, with asset prices reaching their lowest during the period, DeFi Technologies generated revenue of CAD 11.2 million and positive net income of CAD 4.9 million, while further strengthening the balance sheet through a significant improvement in working capital. More broadly, the quarter demonstrated the resilience of our business model and the discipline of our operating approach.

We navigated a difficult market environment while continuing to manage costs carefully, support a product platform and advance several important long-term growth initiatives. Average AUM during the quarter was approximately $533 million, with through levels through the period reaching approximately $427 million. While lower than prior periods, these levels were broadly consistent with market conditions and visible through our publicly reported AUM disclosures. Importantly, our model continues to demonstrate durability even during weaker market conditions. Our management fee profile remained relatively stable, and our diversified monetization approach across management fees, staking activities and trading infrastructure and institutional initiatives continue to differentiate the platform. Across the business, we have demonstrated that DeFi Technologies is not reliant on any single product, revenue stream or market environment.

Our platform continues to benefit from multiple pathways for growth across asset management, trading and capital market infrastructure. We believe the company has never been better positioned to capitalize on the convenient convergence of decentralized finance and traditional capital markets. At the center of the group remains Valour. Today, the platform includes 100 listed products across multiple exchanges globally. We continue to believe the breadth of the platform, combined with our ability to monetize AUM across multiple activities, differentiates us in the market. We also strengthened our commercial leadership during the quarter with the appointment of Jacob Lindberg as Chief Revenue Officer. Jacob is focused on expanding distribution, deepening institutional relationships and accelerating revenue opportunities across our product platform. We believe this addition strengthens our ability to scale institutional engagement globally.

In addition, we continue to advance our institutional product initiatives, including our UCITS platform efforts, our hedge fund efforts, which we believe represent an important long-term opportunity to broaden access to regulated digital assets investment products across global fund platforms and institutional allocators. We move through 2026, we remain focused on expanding institutional product structures and other regulated vehicles while continuing to invest in the products and rails that support the future of digital asset investing. We also continue to see opportunities to increase monetization across the platform, particularly through the trading, hedging and market making infrastructure embedded across Valour's issue and stack, which supports our ability to earn additional income on AUM more efficiently.

From a financial standpoint, we ended the quarter with more than $103 million in combined cash and USDT, USDC, approximately $23.5 million in treasury holdings, and a venture in private portfolio valued at $29.1 million. For total cash, treasury, and venture portfolio value of approximately $156 million. We also ended the quarter with positive working capital of $47.3 million, a significant improvement from year-end 2025. That fortress balance sheet gives us the ability to be proactive rather than reactionary, and to deploy capital deliberately into growth initiatives, strategic infrastructure, and potential acquisitions that deepens our capabilities and strengthens long-term earnings power. Overall, while Q1 was a soft quarter from a market standpoint, we believe the business remains well-positioned operationally and financially with strong cost discipline, a resilient platform, and multiple long-term growth initiatives underway.

We are increasingly encouraged by improving market conditions as we move through 2026, which we believe would create a more favorable backdrop for the AUM growth, stronger ETP demand and revenue acceleration through the remainder of the year. We are already beginning to see early signs of that in the business with AUM now about CAD 530 million, and April 2026 net inflows of CAD 14.6 million, representing the second strongest monthly inflow in the last 12 months after September 2025 inflows of CAD 22.6 million, following a Q1 period in which flows were relatively flat. With a proven business model, expanding monetization, and the financial flexibility to operate from a position of strength, we believe DeFi Technologies is exceptionally well-positioned for the quarters ahead. With that, I'll turn over to Paul to walk through the financial results.

Thank you, Johan. Good morning, everyone. I'll begin with an overview of assets under management. Average AUM for the period was approximately CAD 533 million. At the low point during the quarter, AUM was CAD 427 million. While market conditions were challenging, these levels remained within a manageable range for the business and were consistent with the market environment investors experienced across the broader digital asset sector. Our effective management fee yield was approximately 1% for the quarter, compared to approximately 1.2% in prior periods, primarily due to the larger relative weighting of Bitcoin-related products, which carry lower or no management fees following the sharp decline in altcoin prices. Within Valour, our effective staking yield declined to 2.5% due to the significant price declines in the altcoins, which pay higher effective yields to Bitcoin.

Compression in Bitcoin and Ethereum lending rates, combined with lower effective staking of the AUM, given substantial market volatility, and the unstake during Q1 of previously locked Solana coins that became unlocked and distributed from our equity investments directly to Valour on April 3rd. Notwithstanding the lower monetization of 3.5% of our AUM, total revenues for Q1 came in at CAD 11.2 million, which is greater than the CAD 9.7 million in operating general expenses and fees and commissions, our primary cash costs, reflecting the cost discipline efforts to maintain positive core operations through the challenging crypto market conditions of Q1.

The company continued to maintain its balance sheet strength with CAD 87.6 million in cash and $13.1 million of USDT/USDC, for a total of CAD 100.7 million of cash in USDT/USDC on hand at March 31, 2026. Turning to product activity, we ended the quarter with 102 ETPs and structured products across our platform. During the period, we continued expanding our higher value offerings, including the leveraged bull and bear ETPs introduced in late 2025. We also continued expanding geographic distribution through cross-listings in markets such as London and Brazil. In terms of ETP flows, they remained relatively resilient during the quarter, with a small CAD 0.7 million outflow, given the challenging cryptocurrency price environment, which saw Bitcoin reach a low of $60,000 per token.

Stillman Digital continued to perform well during the quarter and remains an important diversification component of our broader platform. Stillman generated approximately CAD 2.9 million in revenue during the quarter, an increase in 38% from Q1 2025 actual revenue of CAD 2.1 million, and is thus far on track to meet or exceed its planned 15%-20% year-over-year growth. Turning to operating expenses, our Q1 actual operating general and admin expenses and fees and commissions came in at CAD 9.7 million, which on an annualized basis is CAD 38.7 million or slightly in excess of the CAD 36 million target we set for ourselves. Management will continue to strive to keep core operating costs at levels that maintain cash positive core operations.

Based on our current cost structure and monetization profile, we continue to believe the business remains positioned to achieve profitability during fiscal year 2026. With that, I'll turn it over to Andrew.

Thank you, Paul. As we discussed last quarter, our focus remains on building the distribution relationships and operational infrastructure required to support broader institutional adoption of our products across global markets. This process is ongoing, and in Q1, we continued expanding our distribution and onboarding efforts across Europe, Latin America, and Asia, following our launches in markets such as London and Brazil in late 2025. We continue to see these markets as important building blocks in expanding the global reach of the platform and strengthening access to new pools of investor demand. Our capital markets distribution work also continues to be executed with an eye towards supporting future UCITS distribution. We believe UCITS and other innovative fund strategies, as provided by our portfolio company, Neuronomics, remain an important opportunity to broaden access to our products through traditional fund platforms and institutional allocation channels.

The beautiful thing about the UCITS SICAV structures we have been working on are their appeal to and accessibility by large institutional capital allocators worldwide. Progress on that front remains an important strategic priority, and we continue to position the business to meet the operational, regulatory, and distribution requirements needed to support broader institutional participation over time. We have repositioned our Global Insight Symposia as the DeFi Technologies Capital Market Series in order to bring targeted visibility to our full range of investment products and OTC prime brokerage services via Stillman Digital to institutional investors globally. The first in our Capital Market Series is our institutional investor event being conducted at the Canadian Embassy in London in collaboration with the Canada-UK Chamber of Commerce in June. We've also proven our ability to onboard assets into our existing ETPs through our institutional outreach programs.

One such institutional allocation into our Valour ETP was highlighted in a press release and is reflected in these Q1 2026 financials. The other tranche of investment will appear in Q2 financials. This shows a resilient flexibility to the underlying DeFi Technologies business model, even in poor macroeconomic market conditions. We continue to build out the business intelligence infrastructure first referenced last quarter, including the launch and continued development of tools such as our DEFT Valour Investment Opportunity Index, or DVIO. These systems are designed to provide more granular visibility into product consumption, regional demand trends, inflows, and competitive positioning across markets. This information helps us improve product targeting, identify areas where institutional demand may be developing, and better position both existing and future products across our distribution network.

The DVIO Index and the analysis-based visibility it provides was critical to our ability to close the investments into our ETPs. Just this week, we released an improved index calculation engine which updates daily. This lays the groundwork for our ability to create innovative instruments based on our Valour ETP platform. Other innovations that have made considerable progress in Q1 include the work we've done to restructure our venture capital portfolio to bring more value to DeFi Technologies shareholders, as well as the continued development of the in-house digital asset custody technology. We spent Q1 researching and building proprietary tech and scaling our sales and distribution networks. All of this hard work during weak market conditions is designed to help us minimize costs, enhance marginality, and deliver new products that have broader accessibility globally and within the world of DeFi.

Our results reflect the resilience of our business model and operating approach despite a challenging macro environment. Looking ahead, we will continue to build strong European and strategic global distribution networks and the necessary operating infrastructure to support wider adoption of our products. At the same time, we continue to believe the work underway today will better position DeFi Technologies to capture institutional demand, improve monetization opportunities, and support long-term growth as market conditions improve. With that, I'll turn it back over to Curtis for Q&A.

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

I think this is two different subjects. The buyback of shares is something we might do in the future. It depends on our cash flow. We don't buy back normally from our cash at hand, but rather from strong cash flow. It has no connection to the listing on Nasdaq. There is no risk of us getting delisted from Nasdaq. We have 180 plus 180 days to get over $1. If we're over in 10 days, I think, to over $1, it resets. Obviously, we will do a reverse split if needed, not if we don't need to do it, but if needed, we will do it.

I know a lot of people are really scared about reverse splits, but I think that's uncalled for. The statistics that shows bad performance after a reverse split includes all the companies that do reverse splits. Most of those are companies in distress. If you sort those out, there's no actual negative impact. We can also, obviously, if we do a reverse split, make use of the buyback program to support through those days to make sure there's no negative impact. Yeah, I guess in short, there's no risk of us being delisted. We have plenty of runway, and in the worst case scenario, we can do a reverse split.

When it comes to the buyback program, we have a lot of really, really high potential investments and usage of funds to actually make more money, and that's the primary use. We obviously keep that as an opportunity, as an option if we need to. In worst case, yeah, we could do it, but it would never be for Nasdaq's purpose because that's not simply a real risk. Any information to the contrary is false information.

I think, just to add to that, we also do have would qualify for another 180-day extension if needed. Effectively that gives us about 1 year to regain compliance. Hopefully, as we mentioned, we're growing more optimistic about coming out of this crypto winter. If there's additional catalysts to underlying asset prices, that should push us in our AUM or AM much higher and also, over CAD 1. On top of that, we do have growth initiatives coming up that would, you know, we hope help the share price. There's, I would say, nothing imminent right now in terms of risk or even a reverse split. It's certainly like if you're hearing that we're gonna be delisted, that's absolutely not true.

Number 2: When do you plan to re-release your annual goals? I think, you know, we've talked a lot about our institutional fund structures that UCITS actively managed certificates, fund-to-fund programs. That's our primary focus for this year. I think I can let Andrew and Johan speak on that further, but we've talked at length over the past few months about what our goal is for this year in terms of diversifying our product sets towards more institutional focus.

Yeah, absolutely, Curtis. I might comment on that. I think people should take comfort in the work that the company is doing to launch these products. The fact that we're being so rigorous, meticulous, and doing it the right way to build out a full and complete fund platform, it's also an indication of the moat that there is in this industry. Some time ago, Johan indicated that one of the strategic objectives of DeFi Technologies and our Valour asset is to become one of the world-leading asset managers. In order to do that, we have built an infrastructure for these, a broad range of fund products.

What makes me particularly excited about these fund products is it actually changes the revenue profile of the business in terms of being able to generate higher returns than a standard hurdle rate, also in terms of being able to distribute our products globally without needing any particular new type of listing. The upshot of this is these are very valuable structured instruments in terms of the capital markets, and it means you've got to do it right. This is something that DeFi Technologies and Valour has consistently done. I mean, in the heart of macroeconomic uncertainty with a lot of volatility in digital asset prices, I have to remind people that we generated nearly CAD 100 million in revenue on a profitable basis, when many in the Web3 industry either don't generate revenue at all or certainly don't do it profitably.

We're taking this same safe, consistent, structured approach to building out a new fund platform that will enable us to scale consistently and quickly and globally with a range of new instruments that will also provide us higher marginality and higher revenue potential.

Thanks, Andrew. Next question. "Hey, Curtis team, hope you're doing well. If you guys are optimistic over crypto price action, how optimistic will guidance be for next quarter, full year?" I'll start and then Paul, you can wrap this up. We've technically issued guidance for Stillman. We're guiding for 15%-20% growth. Last year, they did just around CAD 10 million in revenue. The 15%-20% growth puts them at CAD 11 million-CAD 12 million. They had a really great first quarter with over 30% growth from year-over-year, so hopefully they can continue to execute at that level. In terms of Valour, from a technical standpoint, we haven't broken out through a bear market trend.

I think that comes around breaking past $83,000 for Bitcoin. It's 200-day daily moving average. We'll see there. I think it's We're taking a more conservative approach this year in regards to guidance on that level. If you look at Q1, and if you believe, like we're very optimistic about right now, that Q1 was the lows in this bear market, we came out profitable. At these levels, you can assume that we'll continue to be profitable through the course of this year. Paul, if you wanted to add any additional color.

Thank you, Curtis. Okay, for everybody, let's, you know, again, let's start with Stillman because it's easier to get your head around. You know, they did about CAD 10 million in 2025. We've said CAD 15 million-CAD 20 million. 20% would be CAD 12 million. People, if you look, they did CAD 2.9 million in Q1, it is tracking to do CAD 12 million this year. There's CAD 12 million. You look at Valour. valour.com has our AUM real time every day. Our monetization in 2025 was 5.2% for the full year. Q1 was low at three and a half %.

It was, we think, a pretty crazy quarter in Q1 with crypto prices in general, and we are crypto bulls, so we're suggesting 4.5% as a conservative monetization rate for the year, and then put that on an AUM number for the year. Our AUM has moved around a lot. It does generally move with crypto prices. We've been over CAD 1 billion, as people know. You know, now we're just over CAD 530-ish. You hear about all the initiatives we've got Andrew, Johan and Jacob working on to bring in new money. In terms of providing guidance, like with those numbers, you know, you can kinda get to a core safe revenue.

We're declining on putting out a formal guidance for the entire company because we need a little bit more time on UCITS and the fund structures, which we think can really drive big numbers. Until there are a little bit more visibility, we're gonna hold off on giving a consolidated kind of fixed number. That is what I'd suggest people watch for and that hopefully would really, you know, spark up the company once we get those things going.

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

I think as a public company too, we have to be very responsible and mindful of what we put out publicly, especially in matters that can be this sensitive. Unfortunately, we can't speak openly and freely about it publicly. Can you speak to your stablecoin strategy? You have small investments in the Stablecorp and CCNN. The potential there of collaboration, integration into your stack. Fire Labs in-house development update. Andrew.

Yeah. Our strongest assets are part of our venture portfolio, and as the questioner correctly identified, we have investments in Continental Stablecoin, which is the CCNN, and in Stablecorp. We consider these very valuable, and they will be increasingly, their value will be increasingly accretive to DeFi as our fund structures come online. Now, one of the things I alluded to in my remarks is that we are working on innovative ways to generate more, actually revenue-based value for the DeFi Technologies group from our venture portfolio. You can believe having access to our stablecoins, these stablecoin projects on which we sit on the cap table alongside Circle and Coinbase Ventures in both. The objective is to leverage these partnerships, leverage these companies, explore potential liquidity, products.

Of course, they are already in the process in both instances of working or onboarding to Stillman, which is significant, being that these stablecoins need access to markets, need trading pairs in order to generate liquidity. From our perspective, I think these are anchor products to the future of our venture portfolio, which we believe will be quite innovative and will actually leverage our core fund platform.

Thanks, Andrew. Have you all considered bringing custodial services in-house given the SOC 2 issue? I think 1 answer is yes, but I'll let Johan explain more about our custody plans.

Yeah. On the custody, obviously we have an internal custody technology stack, which we are developing now to productify and release to the public as a service. I think we have a very unique offering in this area. One of the reasons I believe it's very important to build on this and release it, is that we don't wanna pay any other middleman for this type of services. Also our needs are on a different level than what we can see the other offerings are in the markets. It will provide a foundation for other things we're building in DeFi, in capital markets infrastructure in decentralized finance.

Once we have this productified and launched, we will go after both institutional retail, deposits and money into this, tech stack. We have already quite a lot of infrastructure we will stack on top of the custody offering. I think if you wanna build and be active in building infrastructure in decentralized capital markets, you should have a really robust and innovative offering on the custody side. That's what we're aiming to do, and I think we probably are aiming to have something ready end of Q3, definitely this year for public release. End of Q3, it would be ready for using with all our internal needs for custody, for sure.

It's a bit early to say when we have a date for public release, but it's not just about the custody stack. It's because this is foundation for other things we think are unique and we can bring to the market for sure.

We'll move on into some analyst questions. We'll get Allen Klee from Maxim. You're on, so go ahead and unmute yourself. Allen?

I think you're on mute.

Okay. Maybe he's stepped away for a second.

Oh, I'm sorry. Can you hear me?

Yeah, we do. We hear you, Allen.

Sorry. Yeah. Can you expand on your new institutional structures a bit and the feedback that you're hearing from potential customers?

Yeah, I'm happy to, you know, be in on that. Basically, historically, as you might know, I think 95% of our AUM has been in ETPs from retail, the retail side. On the, I would say the last 9 months, we have seen and heard a lot, a very strong demand from both institutional clients in our core markets, EU and Switzerland, and UK. Also on a global scale from other types of funds and institutional platforms. To meet this demand, we have accelerated our efforts to build globally available and more institutionally targeted type of products.

Part of this is the UCITS fund, also Valour, the other funds in Valour funds, which constitute quite a few hedge funds we have in the pipeline that will cover needs both from normal pension funds and alternative investment funds, but also from fund to funds, both in crypto and outside of crypto. Family offices, I would say is also a strong driver. We have got some commitments, and we have got some really strong demands from participating in this space. Obviously, I think the upside in terms of AUM is larger for this area than for the retail side. Obviously every ticket size is much higher.

I think those products are the first to meet this demand. We're also looking to do a few more actively managed ETPs, but also some asset-backed ETPs to meet some another part of this demand that would be volatility targeted ETPs, for instance, that has been seeked by a lot of asset allocators that do not want to re-weight their allocation to crypto continuously. Yeah, you will see innovation both on the fund side, normal hedge funds, SICAV funds, UCITS funds, but also in the asset-backed ETP side for that purpose. Also, I think maybe a little bit longer time horizon, a few of these will be very well suited for tokenization as well.

Thank you. One last question. It didn't seem like you put too much into staking, in Q1. I'm just wondering, how much of the AUM do you think can be put to work in staking and lending?

I First, a comment at first, maybe let Paul comment on the levels then. I think we are actually continuously increasing the levels, the percentage of AUM we put into staking. I think a fortunate thing, temporarily in Q1, where we already see improvement, is that with the lows of the crypto market, the Bitcoin dominance and also dominance for Bitcoin and Ethereum increased quite a bit. As you've seen, the falling prices in SOL, Sui, all the other altcoins has been much deeper. Obviously, the overall AUM constitutes a larger proportion of Bitcoin, Ethereum, where the, where our margins are the lowest.

This basically, once the market pop up back, we've seen a lot of movement already in Sui, in TON and BNB and so forth. We confident that the market is bouncing back. With that, you will see a much higher percentage of the AUM being in higher yielding, higher staking yielding assets. I think it's mainly been driven by the relative steep contraction of values in the altcoin markets.

Yeah. I want to add to it. Yeah, that's Johan gave you why the staking yield is down. It's just, you know, altcoins pay more than Bitcoin and Ethereum, but we staked 59%. It's a little bit on the lower side, and it's because of this, there was a lot of volatility. There was, you know, February, there was some very sharp sell-offs. There is unbonding periods to get coins released, so you can sell them. You know, we do try to hedge. The staking was driven a bit lower. In theory, it could get up to about 80%. I think low 70s would probably be more realistic in terms of if you were modeling it. But yeah, that's my view. In a, in a volatile market, it's in the high 50s, low 60s.

In a normal market, 70s, and then, in ideal times, up to maybe 80.

Yeah. We're seeing that come up now, both with the market volatility, but also structurally as we pushing how much we can stake safely without being in danger of not being able to hedge 100%.

Thank you very much.

Okay. Mike from Northland.

Hey guys, first question, I'm just curious, you are sitting on this, you know, slightly over CAD 100 million in cash. How much cash do you need to run your business? You know, with all the trading, with new products, you know, if you look out in 2026 and 2027, what is a minimum level of cash you need to run the business? Just trying to think through how much you truly need the next couple years.

Yeah, for sure. I can start with and leave over to Paul for extra comments afterwards. For our own market making, where we also, by the way, will try to make it more visible, our profits on our own market making, it's now kind of hidden in the realized and unrealized P&L. For our own market making, I think the demand has been between $20 million and $35 million in that realm. There's obviously a scenario where we could go down to zero. We do have external market makers in all areas, but we think it's strategically very important to hold the control of all the order books, so we can have tighter spreads and higher quality prices than all our competitors, which we do have.

The I would say it's around, yeah, say CAD 25 million-CAD 35 million or so, that we need to have. Obviously we have a few other needs for capital right now that will go down with time. When we're launching our funds, and other structures, we will use some of the cash to seed these funds to make it easier to go out and do roadshows and sell it, 'cause we do need a substantial AUM to get big tickets in the beginning, and it will be easier to accelerate that phase early on with seed money in those. We have been looking and we are looking at the different acquisitions.

We are very careful about it. We won't see a lot of that, but there will probably be some good opportunities and we in this market still, it's some push against consolidation, and we are good positioned to take advantage of that. We do not want to opt out of that opportunity to act quickly if there's a really great opportunity out there.

Got it.

Nice.

Maybe just secondly, where should the market's expectations be on you guys showing a ramp in revenue from new products? Is that second half of 2026, first half of 2027? When should we expect to see some of that?

I would say the first half for sure, maybe towards the end of Q3. Second half for sure. I would be very surprised if we don't see a significant contribution. Something I don't think we maybe commented on, but something we're very excited about in our venture into alpha-type products with our funds and active managed certificates, is that those will have, at least the first fund, and I think the second and third one as well, will have the 1.5% management fee plus 15% performance fee structure. Besides our Valour core business and Stillman, this will be a third, I would say, very much uncorrelated leg of revenue streams.

As the type of strategies we will launch can have some really great years. If we look historically and simulate from that, we The 15% performance fee could be something that's totally uncorrelated to market levels or activity, whilst still being significant even from not huge AUMs. Because this these strategies has a great Sharpe ratio, very interesting performance dynamics and low maximum drawdowns. I think from how that return profile looks, it will actually give us a third uncorrelated way of earning potentially a lot of money for a lot of months. I'm really excited about that.

Obviously, it depends from month to month when we see those returns monthly. I think anyhow from end of Q3, we should see a significant the income start picking up.

Got it. Thank you.

Thanks, Mike. Any other analysts? Raise your hand and I'll invite you on. Okay. We'll go back to a couple questions in the chat in the meantime. This one for Andrew. Next steps in Brazil to get more Valour traffic on that exchange.

The Q1 was a very tricky quarter in the digital asset space, for starters. What we did for most of Q1 was frankly focus on setting up a very efficient, lean capital markets team. We weren't focused on selling in January and February, but I think we had our kickoff event. Any of you that follow us on X or LinkedIn will see that we actually created a DeFi Tech Brazil. We had our kickoff event there. What followed in the next month was we ended up beating our next, I'll call them an expat competitor in terms of total turnover within that market. What we wanna do is make sure that we're really well-positioned, not just for the ETPs, because the ETPs wrap our existing products.

We also wanna make sure that they understand what is coming in terms of our institution-friendly products on the other fund platform. Right now we have a team, effectively a capital markets, or I guess in fund parlance, an investor relations team. We also have PR and publicity, and we have met. I actually just returned from there, where I did no fewer than three meetings a day, which were long meetings with institutional investors to build our brand, make sure people know that we are available, and also make sure people are aware of the services at Stillman, of course our five ETPs that are listed, and our future fund products coming online. With each visit that we make, with each month, we get more traction. I want to highlight something.

We're in this for the long term, and we're in this to build strong distribution for not only our existing products but our future products, which may have higher marginality and higher uniqueness. Brazil is a market of 200 million people, but they currently have a very high risk-free rate of around 15%, and we are a new entrant into the market. It's important that people get to know us, and in the process of getting to know us, they get more comfortable with our existing products and our future products. We'll just be very steady. I was pleased with our 1st month results, but obviously we need to get more. We have to remember that a lot of the institutions that we're dealing with, they don't necessarily buy exclusively through the B3.

Many of them get access to our European ETPs through offshore structured instruments and offshore buying. That might not show up on the B3, but we certainly don't want to restrict how people decide to spend money on Valour or DeFi Technologies products. We're just gonna grow the business across the board.

Allen Klee, did you have another question?

No. I don't know what happened.

You had your hand raised again. Let's see. Next question. Paul, I think I probably need your help with this. Please elaborate on what the next CAD 150 million in AUM growth means to our bottom line and to our forward valuation of the company. Please also reiterate how swiftly a $150 million bump in AUM would mean since we are already profitable. Please outline our cash burn for the year.

Okay, thanks. Yeah, for everybody, that's a great one. We have a ton of operating leverage in this business, okay? What operating leverage means is just our costs are relatively fixed. You know, last year our operating general and fees and commissions were CAD 40 million. We've told you we've targeted CAD 36. On an annualized rate, we're at CAD 38.7. If we do CAD 550 million of AUM in Stillman, like we're positive. We're breaking even to positive. Any additional AUM, it all flows to the bottom line. You know, assume 90%. There's, you know, a little bit of slippage on some extra fees and commissions for trading, maybe a little bit of SG&A to go with it.

We don't need to really roll out the team or add more bodies or rent more offices to manage another, you know, few hundred million CAD of money. Our existing infrastructure can do it. You know, put a 4.5% monetization on it and assume that 90% of it comes to the bottom line.

Yeah. I think, adding to that, as we, I think Paul discussed, Bitcoin consisted of the higher allocation of our ETP makeup in Q1. Since we don't charge management fees on Bitcoin, that did decrease our monetization levels. If we see alts run, which have much higher yield allocations, that will increase our monetization levels as well. If we can continue to grow Solana, Cardano, XRP, and some of these longer tail alts which offer higher yields, that will also help our monetization levels increase. Just in case that wasn't clear.

Fully agree. Thank you, Curtis.

Yeah. Another question, covered monetization. Any plan to accelerate the stock price? Again, I think if you listen to context that what we're talking about here, our current business model, looking to increase monetization where we can. New products, hopefully some help with the macro backdrop and Bitcoin and on altcoin prices as well, and some other things that we haven't talked about at the moment. Again, typically in a bear market, crypto equities are hammered. When we enter into a bull market, then crypto equities have consistently re-rated. And we are a crypto equity. Our primary business is a cyclical business as of now.

We are working on new fund products and structures that would be market agnostic, meaning they're not significantly impacted by the underlying crypto price movements. That'll bring more stability to our AUM, that'll bring more stability to our revenue and ultimately more stability to our share price. What do you think the biggest misconception the market currently has about DeFi Technologies? I think I have a lot of those. One of them, people think we're gonna be delisted. We're not going to. People think we're a digital asset treasury company. We're not. We have 2+ real operating businesses that produce real revenue and will compound earnings year after year. I don't know if anybody from management wants to take a stab at that, maybe Andrew or Johan.

What are you hearing about misconceptions about the company, if you are?

Well, I think you hit the nail on the head. I guess I have a slightly different perspective. I think that the actual fundamentals of the platform and the company are quite strong. The beauty of it is I don't have to just say that being optimistic. I can say it based on the money that we actually make. The reality is, there'll always be negative soothsayers, but at the end of the day, our focus is on keeping costs down, generating revenue, and being profitable. We had a war. We had spiking oil prices. We had absolutely everything bad happen. There have been currency fluctuations, macroeconomic factors, and we still made money. This is a platform that is being prepared for the future to be a real infrastructure company in the world of digital finance.

I'll add something. Johan talked about custody. That custody represents more than just a service line. From an accounting perspective, it helps us minimize our cost without a doubt. We don't have to pay other people to store our digital assets. From an infrastructure perspective, every time you see a news article that talks about an RWA, think Valour Custody. Every time you see a news article that talks about tokenization or securitization or stablecoins, think Valour Custody because anything that lives on chain is going to need a quality custodian. The next thing is we are the predominant avenue for structuring instruments so that digital assets can get money from traditional capital markets. We're the best at that. Foundations come to us for that. Other institutional investors come to us knowing that we've done it for a long time.

Johan, our CEO, created the world's first Bitcoin ETP back in May 2015. We just have to understand that, yeah, there's been macroeconomic volatility in Q1 2026. While we remember that in September 2025, when we were at CAD 1.2 billion in AUM, if we had the infrastructure that we have now, our numbers based on the improvements that we made would be that much better. We all know that the infrastructure and finance for tokenized assets, digital assets, it's just increasing. It's getting more and more, and we're gonna be there to help it grow and to service that demand.

Thanks, Andrew. Do you all have any offering product plans to integrate into TradFi institutions?

Well, yes. I mean, our funds. I think most of the institutions that would be consumers of our funds are actually the largest banks, the largest capital allocators that are looking for specific strategies to offer their private wealth management divisions or their proprietary trading desks. People have to remember, I think people don't understand the power of Stillman Digital. These prime brokerage OTC firms are how these large institutions make bulk buys. This is why Stillman is growing, whether markets are good or not good. It's based on transaction fees, transaction volumes, and what they do is they enable large institutions, large holders of digital assets or stablecoins to take bulk positions in and out with effectively predictable pricing. I leave the rest to Johan to elaborate.

Yeah, I can only agree with that for sure. It's, I think all the new initiatives we're doing now are intended for institutional and institutional investors, but also for the traditional infrastructure in terms of banks, prime brokers, and so forth, from Stillman's services to these type of companies to our funds or users funds, which all are instruments that they are used to service and products that they are used to utilizing and to allocate into the new asset class of through.

I think our whole new and all, not to forget the custody side, obviously, that's the foundation for building our integration with traditional finance and introducing new types of products from crypto to them in a form that they can and will understand in the way we will structure this. Yeah, I think we covered everything I had in mind.

Cool. If I didn't get to your question. Thanks you guys for the great call. I think it is less of misunderstandings, but rather historic change to the financial ecosystem and DeFi Technologies is all now inside and laying on the shifts. I'm grateful investor who knows that the path you're on is the right one. You're a beacon to the industry. I think there's a bright future for DeFi Tech. You've made the right investments to Stillman and Valour. Within the next cycle, we will see the growth in returns in your anti- knack. Great job. No question there. Thanks, Jason. Everything else in the chat has been effectively addressed. If you want something more specifically addressed, please email me at [email protected]. Thank you so much for your time today.

If there, again, if there wasn't anything that you want addressed, please reach out [email protected] or ir.defi.tech. With that, we'll wrap up the call today. Thanks again, and see you guys on the next one.

Thank you.

Joining me on the call today are Chief Executive Officer Johan Wattenström, Chief Financial Officer Paul Bozoki, and President Andrew Forson. We'll begin with opening remarks from Johan Wattenström, followed by a review of our fourth quarter and full year 2020 financial results from Paul, and then an update on growth initiatives and strategic priorities from Andrew. After that, we'll open up the line for Q&A. Investors can enter their questions in the chat throughout the call. We won't be able to get to everything, and if we don't get to it on this call, please do email [email protected] or [email protected] and I'll get to your questions as soon as possible. We'll invite some of our analysts on the line to ask questions of the management team.

Before we begin, I'd like to remind everyone that certain statements made during today's call may constitute forward-looking information under applicable securities laws. These statements include, but are not limited to, comments regarding expected financial performance, business development, strategic initiatives, market expansion, product growth and future opportunities. Forward-looking statements are based on management's current expectations and assumptions and are subject to the known and unknown risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied. With that, I'll turn it over to our CEO, Johan Wattenström.

Thank you, Curtis, and thank you everyone joining us today. As many of you know, as a co-founder, I've been very much involved in the business since its inception, and stepped into the CEO role during the fourth quarter. I'm very encouraged by where the business stands as of today and by the foundation we built for the next phase of growth. Our 2025 results reflects the strengths of the platform we have built and the progress we have made over the last several years. If you look at our IFRS revenue trajectory, the scale of that process become very clear. In 2021, revenue was CAD 15 million. In 2022, it was a CAD -14 million. In 2023, it was CAD 10 million. In 2024, it increased to CAD 31 million, and in 2025, it reached a record $99 million.

That progression is important because it shows how far the business has evolved. We have built DeFi Technologies into a much broader, more durable, and more scalable platform. We are not reliant on any single product, revenue stream, or market environment. We have built a business with multiple pathways for growth, and we believe we have never been better positioned to scale the platform and capitalize on the opportunities ahead. At the center of the group is Valour, our digital asset management business. Valour gives investors regulated access to digital assets through traditional financial infrastructure, and today the platform includes more than 100 listed ETPs across multiple exchanges globally. That geographical reach, combined with the breadth of products we offer, continues to set us apart in the market. What makes a model especially compelling is its vertical integration. We do not simply earn management fees on AUM.

We monetize those assets across multiple activities, including staking, lending, and market making. That gives us multiple revenue streams from the same base of assets and allows us to monetize more efficiently than a traditional asset manager. The capital we raised has strengthened the model even further. It has enhanced our ability to increase monetization across the platform and across the balance sheet, particularly by expanding the trading, hedging, and market-making infrastructure that supports Valour's issuing stack and allows us to earn additional income on AUM more efficiently. During the quarter, we continued executing against several important priorities. First, we expanded the Valour product platform and ended the year having achieved our goal of reaching 100 listed ETPs. That milestone reinforces our position as one of the most diversified digital asset ETP issuers globally. The product expansion continues into high value-added products, including more institutional investment exposures.

Second, we remain focused on broadening the investor base that can access the platform. Today, the majority of our AUM is still driven by retail investors, but a major priority going forward is increasing institutional participation for structures such as UCITS, AMCs, hedge fund structures, fund of funds, on-chain distribution, and other investment vehicles that can access larger pools of capital. Third, geographic expansion remains an important opportunity. Europe remains the core market and main focus. We continue to see significant growth potential in jurisdictions across Europe. Outside Europe, we continue to expand into select regions where access to regulated digital assets investment product remains limited. Brazil is an example of that. We also continue to advance our discussions in the other locations in Latin America, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Finally, our financial position remains a major strategic advantage.

We have never been better positioned from a balance sheet perspective. We ended the year with approximately $178.7 million in total cash, treasury, and venture portfolio value, and effectively no debt. That fortress balance sheet gives us the flexibility not only to support the business through volatility, but also lean into opportunities and aggressively pursue our business goals in any macro environment. Even in a prolonged crypto winter, that financial strength allows us to continue increasing monetization across our AUM and balance sheet, invest through the cycle, diversify revenue streams, accelerate strategic growth initiatives, and pursue attractive acquisitions or investments in assets that may become available at compelling valuations. In other words, we believe our balance sheet allows us to be proactive rather than reactionary, and position us to emerge even stronger as the digital asset markets recover.

More broadly, we are building for the convergence of decentralized finance and traditional capital markets. We see a significant long-term opportunity to create the products, infrastructure, and institutional rails that we believe will transform capital markets over the next five to 10 years. We are entering 2026 from a position of strength with a proven business model, optimized monetization, and the financial flexibility to invest in the next phase of growth. We believe we are still in the early stages of building the institutional gateway to the future of finance. With that, I'll turn it over to Paul to walk through the financial results.

Thank you, Johan, and good morning, everyone. I'll begin with an overview of assets under management. DeFi closed December 31st with AUM of CAD 622.3 million. Average AUM throughout fiscal 2025 was approximately CAD 809.9 million. During the year, Valour also achieved net inflows of CAD 110.1 million into its ETP products, reflecting continued investor demand despite market volatility. Turning to revenue, DeFi generated record full year revenue of CAD 99.1 million for fiscal 2025. For the three months ended December 31st, 2025, revenue was CAD 20 million. On the profitability side, net income and comprehensive income for fiscal 2025 was a record CAD 62.7 million. For the fourth quarter alone, net income was CAD 28.9 million. These results reflect the earnings power of our platform and the resilience of our diversified model across market cycles.

Within Valour, our Q4 effective staking and lending income was 4.7% on the CAD 728.3 million average Q4 AUM, an increase from the 3.4% realized during Q3. While we staked approximately 44.4% of our AUM at the end of Q4, our average staking during the quarter was approximately 70%, which contributed to the higher earned staking yield. Staking was reduced at December 31st, 2025, to allow for coin transfers for audit purposes to verify our ownership. We adapt our staking percentage in sync with market conditions and internal risk management policies to ensure we can meet ETP commitments on a timely basis, and we generally stake between 60% and 70% of our AUM. Our Q4 effective management fee yield was 1.2%, consistent with earlier quarters in 2025.

We remind investors that we do not charge management fees on our main Bitcoin and Ethereum products, which reduces our effective management fee income from the typical 1.9% we charge on most altcoin ETPs. We closed Q4 with 102 products and reached our 100 product goal during October 2025. Stillman Digital is also an important part of the platform. That business is not dependent on cryptocurrency prices being strong, but rather on trading volatility and institutional activity. Stillman had an exceptional Q4 with revenues of CAD 3.3 million, up from CAD 2.2 million in Q3 2025. Stillman's full year 2025 revenues totaled CAD 9.6 million, and we expect the business to grow by 15%-20% in 2026, irrespective of whether crypto prices increase.

This growth is expected to be driven by a combination of more effective monetization of existing flows, enhanced customer acquisition workflows, leveraging AI for outreach and customer onboarding, and expansion into new geographies. Stillman Digital is positioned well both domestically in the United States, where the majority of business is, and in international markets through its regulated Bermuda entity. As previously discussed, the timing of DeFi Alpha transactions remains opportunistic and is dependent on market conditions, and some of these opportunities have been deferred. Turning to operating income, Q4 operating income was CAD 7 million, and operating income for the 12 months ended December 31st was CAD 46.5 million, reflecting our continued focus on profitability. Operating income declined by CAD 2 million from Q3 2025 due to lower crypto prices and lower average AUM in the fourth quarter.

Q4 IFRS net income after tax came in at CAD 28.9 million, with full year IFRS net income after tax came in at CAD 62.7 million. In terms of our crypto investments, the company's venture portfolio now consists of 12 private investments, with the largest being our 5% stake in AMINA Bank, which makes up 83% of the portfolio's fair value. AMINA Bank continues to perform exceptionally well. Although its AUM did decline to CHF 2.7 billion at the end of Q4 from CHF 3.5 billion at the end of Q3, in line with the fall in crypto prices during the fourth quarter. To reflect the compression in EV to AUM multiples and lower crypto prices, the company recorded an approximately CAD 11 million non-cash mark-to-market negative adjustment for its investment in AMINA Bank. Our most recent investment was in Stablecorp, the issuer of the QCAD Canadian-dollar stablecoin.

Following a multi-year regulatory approval process, we were pleased to hear that in Q4, Stablecorp received a final receipt for its prospectus, qualifying the distribution of QCAD tokens under Canada's current regulatory framework for stablecoins. This milestone establishes QCAD as Canada's first compliant CAD-denominated stablecoin and represents an important step in expanding regulated digital asset infrastructure in the country. We're proud to be early backers of this project alongside the likes of Coinbase and Circle Ventures. The company did not make any new investments during the fourth quarter. We continue to believe Amina will be a successful long-term investment, and the addition of Stablecorp further strengthens the strategic positioning of our venture portfolio. Turning to the balance sheet, as of December 31st, 2025, the company held $113.8 million in cash and USDT/USDC, including $91.2 million of cash.

Digital asset treasury holdings totaled approximately CAD 35.5 million, and the venture and private portfolio was valued at approximately CAD 29.4 million. Together, total cash, treasury, and venture portfolio value stood at CAD 178.7 million at year-end. That financial position gives us a high degree of flexibility. It supports continued investment in platform growth, product expansion, strategic infrastructure, and opportunistic capital deployment, while also reinforcing the strength and durability of the business. As we look ahead, our focus remains on scaling the core drivers of the platform, expanding monetization across AUM, supporting institutional product development, and maintaining disciplined capital allocation. At this point in time, the company is declining to provide guidance for 2026, given the general market volatility caused in part by the war in Iran, and in particular, volatility in crypto prices since Bitcoin peaked on October 10th, 2025.

The company reminds investors that its exceptional financial strength, with $113.8 million of cash in USDT/USDC on hand at December 31st, in the event of a prolonged market volatility, to focus on executing its objectives as outlined by our CEO, Johan, earlier to build long-term shareholder value. With that, I'll turn it over to Andrew.

Thank you, Paul. As Johan mentioned earlier, one of the key opportunities ahead of us is continuing to deepen engagement across our ecosystem and provide greater transparency into how regulated capital is positioning across the digital asset market. We spent considerable effort building our brand and generating institutional visibility for DeFi Technologies and Valour in global investor circles. In 2025, we onboarded buyers from regions as far-reaching as Saudi Arabia, Hong Kong, Japan, Brazil, and more. This process continues. Our focus is to ensure our companies have adequate visibility in all potential markets where our existing ETPs and future UCITS, AMC, and custody solutions will be distributed. We have also put great emphasis on building systems to onboard investor capital to our existing ETPs, as well as any potential future structured instruments we create.

Lastly, we wanted to ensure that DeFi Technologies, our platforms, our data, and our operations are able to communicate their value and offer unique takes on the massive amount of data we generate to media, digital asset issuers and foundations, investors, and the growing world of AI. Some of the tangible steps we have taken over the course of 2025 are as follows. In October 2025, we launched two products on the London Stock Exchange. In December 2025, we successfully listed five ETP instruments and the DeFi Technologies DEFT shares on the B3 exchange in Brazil, which represents the first time in the history of the company we have products listed outside of Europe. These products were launched in a period of declining digital asset prices and significant market instability.

In the instance of both London and Brazil, in March and April of 2026, we defined the processes and teams required to steadily attract capital to our products listed in those markets. Our capital markets distribution work is being executed with an eye toward supporting the distribution of our UCITS products. This is especially the case in Brazil and Latin America. To drive inflows and AUM growth in our core Nordic and European markets, in March 2026, Valour engaged a chief revenue officer who is focused on growing the AUM distribution networks and institutional adoption of the full range of Valour products. In Q3 2025, we introduced our own events, marketing, and communications platform that enables us to interact directly with institutional investors in a low-cost, cost-efficient manner.

We have used this platform to promote our stock to institutional investors, interact with foundations, promote our ETPs, engage with our portfolio companies, discuss listing opportunities with regulators, and build our mailing list, which now numbers over 40,000 entries. For the first time in the company's history, our sales, marketing, and growth initiatives reach all inhabited continents. We are a global company. Our approach serves the dual purpose of promoting our core Valour products, making strategic introductions to Stillman Digital, as well as helping communicate the DeFi Technologies vision and DEFT stock opportunity, which is widely available internationally given our Nasdaq uplisting. Our growth activities identify listing opportunities for our ETPs and distribution and partnership opportunities for Stillman Digital and our prospective products like UCITS. In Q4 2025, we built out a complete business intelligence system that provides granular views of our inflows, competitor analysis, and product consumption.

This information helps us to make better product and sales targeting decisions while helping us understand exactly what is selling and where. Our work with data and international expansion, events, marketing, and visibility has enabled us to create innovative data-driven products like our DEFT Valour Investment Opportunity Index that have helped, and we anticipate will continue to help, us directly attract capital to our existing suite of 102 ETPs. Our work with our data, events, and listings enables us to provide a compelling narrative to foundations and large holders of digital assets to invest them with Valour in a manner that directly increases our assets under management. This approach is appreciated by foundations and institutional investors since we are able to show how their investment provides a positive impact and signal to capital markets for their chosen digital asset.

These innovations also lay the groundwork for the development of tokenized products, which will help us to introduce new pools of capital to our existing portfolio products. Our strategic priorities remain clear. We are focused on continuing to expand distribution, entering new markets, broadening our institutional product set, and strengthening the infrastructure that supports long-term monetization across the business. We believe DeFi Technologies is building not just products, but the broader institutional infrastructure and framework that will support the next phase of digital asset adoption and integration with capital markets. We are better positioned than ever to provide global visibility and execution support to the vision outlined by our CEO, Johan. With that, I'll turn it back over to Curtis for Q&A. Curtis, I believe your audio might be on mute.

Yeah, sorry. Apologies for that. We'll go into a few questions from the chat, and then, to our analyst friends, please do raise your hand so I can invite you on live after we answer a few questions here from the chat. First question from Nico Grasek, "What do you plan to do with the big amount of cash, Johan?"

Yeah. I think we have communicated consistently since we raised the money, but I'm happy to repeat here. We obviously are focusing on organically building our business vertically as before. We are in the process right now of productifying, and say, a lot of the IP and tech we already have in the group. We are building our own, the Valour Funds is a new business unit we are launching, Valour Custody and so forth. We are basically taking technology we already have in-house, and we are productifying it in terms of, for instance, the fund units that will incorporate both the UCITS funds, other types of funds in Europe, hedge funds for different types of strategies geared towards different types of investors. We will use some of the funds toward seeding those. We are always keeping some cash at hand for opportunistic opportunities that pop up.

We have historically seen some really good opportunities, like with Stillman. We're always reviewing new opportunities like that. I will show that also, we are actually monetizing that cash at the moment. They're not just lying around. We are actively working with that money. The cash also enables us to do alpha trades in a more efficient fashion and also to go after alpha trades we could not go after without the cash. It's kind of a multitude of use cases from seeding, investing in our own organic growth, looking at opportunities. We're not really actively looking for anything. We're obviously looking for something that really fits into our structure with high synergies, but we're always looking at new cases. We will probably not do a lot of new venture capital investments. It's mainly to drive organic growth, geographic expansion, and be able to trade more efficiently.

We do a lot of high ROI trading in our treasury. We are incubating trading strategies and so forth, which is a great use of cash until we need it for actually building the business. We are not using it to throw money at new markets, new products we don't really see any traction from really. I think maybe that's enough. Yeah. For now, so.

Yeah. Yeah, just to provide a bit more context, last crypto winter bear market, the company was $40+ million in debt, and we were effectively working for survival to bring the company out of those trenches. This time around, of course, robust balance sheet. We can be a shark or more aggressive on the potential acquisitions of cheaper assets this time around. Then, of course, as Johan mentioned, we are using a lot of that cash to ramp up our monetization levels to increase revenue of our current core operations. We're putting in all the work, and we'll continue to look for opportunities that will continue to grow the business and add additional revenue streams.

Second question from Simon Partington. "Why was AMINA Bank taken down so much? You bought it when it was $1 billion in assets, and you are now holding it at cost. There has to be value creation from $1 billion-$2.7 billion since purchase." Paul?

Yeah. Remind everybody, we bought it in 2020, 2021, which was also a large run-up in crypto, and now we're in a pullback. EV, enterprise value to AUM multiples have compressed. Just for everybody's benefit, AMINA is doing very well in growing its AUM. As we said, its CHF 2.7 billion is down in the quarter in line with Bitcoin. There's been a compression for valuations of asset management companies, as we've seen in DeFi stock.

I think all crypto investors that hold the usual names are well aware of the compression in the crypto equity. AMINA Bank, even though it's private, is not immune to that, and our valuation reflects that. Likewise, we do carry it at fair value, so to the extent crypto prices come up, there AUM increases, and there is an expansion in EV to AUM multiples. We would, of course, write it up. Non-cash adjustment. I'd like to remind people of that, and we're long-term holders.

Got a few questions about the Nasdaq listing status. I'll go over that really quickly. We do have 180 days to regain compliance of trading back over a dollar. We do think we're extremely undervalued here and should already be trading well north of a dollar. If you look at this sheet here, we took effectively the average trailing P/E of Bitcoin miners, crypto exchanges, and other businesses, Nasdaq-listed companies on the S&P 500 and New York Stock Exchange. The average multiple, though, many public companies are trading at is 24x. We're trading 4.8x at a $300 million market cap on a trailing P/E basis. Even if you were to cut our earnings in half, we're still tremendously undervalued. Based on our balance sheet and our revenue, we would qualify for an additional 180-day extension.

It's effectively giving us well over a year to regain compliance over $1. I think we're still of the mindset that we want to continue to increase our revenue and revenue generating capabilities and let our balance sheet and revenue speak for the share price. It's a matter of just getting our story back out there and turning around the narrative in that sense. If we have any other announcements regarding that, we will make that known to the public. As of right now, it's just getting the name of the company out there. Hopefully, crypto prices turn around here, Bitcoin and the rest of digital assets recover, and that'll be much more helpful for the broader picture.

Let's do another question from Andrew and Johan. "Can you comment on when we can expect ETP volume and traction in Brazil? What's nice to see are the 1Valour staking ETPs on Frankfurt showing some buys, for instance, the ICP staking product. When can we anticipate breakthrough in Brazil?"

Yeah. Thanks, Curtis, and that's a great question. We have taken an approach of being very conservative, in that we do not want to be throwing massive amounts of capital at expansion efforts at a time of extreme macroeconomic volatility and compressed digital asset prices. Now that we have had an opportunity to see how the markets have settled, we believe that there is somewhat of a bottom associated with digital asset prices, subject to the current macroeconomic environment. We've taken the approach of building the organic teams in each one of these markets so that we are ready to grow adoption of our ETPs and primarily be in a position so that we can have long-term quality distribution partners in markets like Brazil, the U.K., and Germany. What that means is. It will take time to grow, but we are already seeing growth.

We just initiated our capital markets activities in these markets pretty much last month, in the month of March. Had we not listed at the time that we did list, and this is a critical point, it is possible that given the change in digital asset prices, that if we had delayed the listing, we may not have been eligible to list today. So it was a prudent choice to list when we did list, and now we are working through with the understanding of what the market is now with building out the teams. We have the people in place very economically, in a very cost-efficient way, and we're well-positioned for long-term growth. That growth does not just factor in our ETPs.

In every one of these markets, we also try to attract buyers for DeFi Technologies' DEFT stock, and we have also been forward-looking to ensure that our partners in the form of Stillman Digital, our subsidiary in the form of Stillman Digital, and our future products will also have proper distribution networks. Our perspective is slow and steady, be cost efficient, focus on prudent business, not allocating capital in a way to get a quick hit in markets that are not necessarily beneficial in the digital asset space in terms of market values. We are committed to doing a good job in all of these markets, and we're already seeing traction, particularly within the last month.

Great. I'll invite Ed Engel, Analyst at Compass Point, to ask a few questions. Ed, your floor.

Hi, thanks for taking my question. Couple question for me. I think in the past you've talked about, you've got about CAD 44 million of core OpEx, that's if you exclude Stablecorp. At what AUM level do you need to be at on a fee basis to reach break even?

Great question, Ed. Something we've looked at closely as a team, so I can run you through it. That CAD 44 million for 2026 we feel is now CAD 36 million. 30 million of operating general and admin is the target for the year, plus CAD 6 million for the fees and commissions. That translates into CAD 425 million for the AUM, assuming I get CAD 11.5 million from Stillman to get the numbers. 425 million at a 5.8% monetization, plus 11.5 on Stillman will cover us, so the break-even. Yeah. Long-winded way of saying 425. We're fine. It's on our website for everybody. We're at CAD 460 million as of yesterday of AUM, and that's on the Valour website. Any investor can see at any time.

That was very helpful. Thank you so much. I know sometimes reporting prelim stuff and non-prelim stuff, it gets a little hairy, but at the end of the year, you disclosed that you had CAD 138 million of net inflows in 2025. I think yesterday you said CAD 110 million net inflows. In the fourth quarter, did you still have net inflows? I know that the numbers were prelim versus not-

Yes.

Were there still net flows in the quarter?

Yeah. Plus six.

Okay, perfect. Okay.

110 is the right number for the full year.

Yep.

Our cash. Yeah.

Okay. That's great. Thank you so much. I guess on DeFi Alpha, just is it fair to assume that in a crypto winter, there's probably less near-term opportunities for that business?

Yeah, I think it's fair to assume, I think for at least a few of them. I think there have been new opportunities on our radar here, which might be actually doable in this climate. I would say in general, we are also on our side, less keen to do it because we have a certain capacity per coin to pursue these trades without any market risk. Obviously with higher markets, we will make much, much more on the trades. Yeah, there's less opportunity. There is still opportunity. Some new opportunities have come up. I would say we are less aggressive at these levels and, obviously would the market come back, we will be focusing very hard on these transactions.

it's from both sides, not only the counterparties. It's also from our side, because if we do a trade here and Solana then goes up 4x to the former high, then we lost. Yeah, we only own 25% of what we could do, for instance. Yeah, in general, it is true. It's less opportunity because of these reasons, but also it doesn't mean it won't happen. We have other opportunities at these levels that we are looking at at the moment.

Very clear. All right. Thank you.

Thanks, Ed. Mike Grondahl from Northland.

Hey, thanks guys. I just want to circle back to, I think it was CAD 44 million of OpEx that it sounds like you've reduced. Are you saying it's good to think about that level, Paul, that CAD 36 million for 2026. What would push it higher? Any chance of pushing it lower?

Yeah. Great question, Mike. We're cutting the marketing. Just for everybody, in our MD&A, I've got the detailed breakout of the CAD 34.2 million full-year operating general and admin costs. In 2025, we did spend CAD 8.8 million on marketing. That is most of the savings. That's going to get the 34 down to 30. Our professional fees in 2025 were CAD 5.3 million. We also think we'll do a bit better, but I will caution people that we're still dealing with the class action lawsuit, and that's not inexpensive. I'm not counting on large savings there. The savings will come out of the marketing spend that went along with the Nasdaq listing last year.

Yeah, a comment on the marketing. I think we've become more aggressive on the marketing and PR. It's that the spend goes down, it's just that we stopped doing some bad marketing that we have looked, analyzed in the past and seen that the effect is really low, but it's super expensive. I think we are actually doing more marketing, more aggressive in the market that matters, but we do it at a much lower cost.

Yeah. Just to support what Johan is saying, that reduction in marketing costs is really enhancing efficiency. We have our own platforms for communicating directly with institutional investors without having to allocate a lot of money. As a matter of fact, in some instances, we get sponsorship revenue to run some of our events where we speak to people. And with the addition of a chief revenue officer in our core markets, I just got off a call with him. We're doing very direct-to-market communications with brokerages and platforms to enhance our visibility, and all of this is at minimal to no cost. The marketing is strong. It's how the allocation is happening that we'll realize significant efficiencies.

Okay, thanks. Just maybe one more. The CAD 114 million cash balance, I'm trying to understand how much of that you use in operating the business month-to-month, and how much of that is extra, if you will, or a little bit of excess capacity. Is there a way to frame that?

Mike, the CAD 36 that we just talked about, that's cash burn that needs to be covered. The rest of the money, the rest of it is really working capital on the balance sheet.

Got it. Paul, another way of saying that is you do need about CAD 100 million to run the business.

Well, okay. For everybody, just our burn rate is CAD 36 million, and we talked that if we have CAD 425 million of AUM, and Stillman Digital's good for 11.5, we're break even, okay?

Yep.

That's break even. We're at 460, so we're making a little bit of money even today in the bear market. Managing the AUM, and we've talked with the analysts, they'll know, there's about 5% of the AUM is needed in working capital. On $400 million, that's $20 million. Why does the AUM need some working capital? It's because we're collecting mainly Swedish kronors in Sweden. We've got to convert that to U.S. dollars, get it to a crypto exchange, buy the crypto, and then similarly-

Sure.

People want to cash out, you got to sell the crypto, USDT, send it to the broker, convert to Swedish kronor, pay them out. You need some flow for that. That flow is about 5%, right? On a billion, ideally, you have $50 million of flow.

Got it.

When we raised the CAD 100 million, that was also one of the things we put in the prospectus, is more working capital so that we can grow.

Got it. I love that.

You have to generate. All the trades take working capital. You need working capital in the business.

Yep.

No, that's helpful. I just wanted to understand.

Mike, just additional that we don't need $100 million for that, and also it's not linearly going up with the AUM. If we have a super high AUM, that doesn't mean if we double the AUM, that does not mean that the turnover or the inflows, outflows double. We might go up from $20 million-$30 million or so. It's not that it doubles if the AUM goes up. If it's at $5 billion, we still don't need more than probably $50 million in working capital for the trading. We also have third-party market makers, so we have a lot of ways of managing that besides our own working capital. It's obviously nice to have, but it's not a must-have with this type of working capital.

When we have this access to working capital, there's other things we can pursue in type of different trades, opportunistically and so forth, but it's not a must-have for running the business.

Got it. Thank you.

Cool. Mike, that's it. All right. Allen Klee from Maxim. Allen?

You can unmute.

I'm sorry. You talked about how you wanted to get more institutional flows and products. Could you expand on that a little bit, like the type of products that you're thinking about for 2026?

Yes, of course.

What am I thinking?

The demand we have from the institutional side is basically, some of them can invest in ETNs as well, other than normal ETNs, exchange-traded notes or the asset-backed ones.

Yeah.

A few of them prefer funds, either of a SICAV type or a UCITS type within Europe. A lot of them also can invest, obviously, normal hedge funds, Cayman-based funds. The most of the demand is for those types of vehicles. Yeah, some of them even wants to invest through tokens or vaults on chain. That's something we also obviously are looking at developing. It's most of those vehicles. Some of them already can invest in what we have for sure, or the competitors have, like the ETNs, but we see a lot of demands for the UCITS, for the SICAV, and for the normal hedge funds. That's what we're building right now and soon we'll have available.

Would these products be available on the exchanges that you work with, or is this outside of the exchanges?

These will firstly be marketed to fund platforms globally. The UCITS funds are eligible for listings, but we will probably do that in phase two. There's still a bit of a pushback from the regulatory authorities in Europe on this area. We can't really push too quickly to not make ourselves enemies. They will first be available on fund platforms, be available also for retail to save for pensions and so on, but on fund platforms with broker-dealers, banks, and so forth, then all the major fund platforms in Europe and globally, where we can get in. The hedge funds, obviously, it's a little bit of a different game where we will get into the major databases of hedge funds. We will also be talking with a lot of fund of funds, and it will be more of a roadshow type of marketing.

For the other types of funds, there are a lot of really big platforms with access for both retail and institutions.

Thank you. My last question, you were talking before about the cash you need to run your businesses and could you just touch on regarding to Stillman, kind of the cash you need to support the trading there?

They are actually self-supporting. We don't need to support them with additional operational capital from DeFi's end. We are supporting them in growth initiatives that they're working on to get more licenses state-wise in the U.S., to get licenses in the UAE and so forth, areas where they already have an established base of clients. Yeah, they are growing, but they're also making a lot of money, and we don't need to. So far, if they have more opportunities, we can allocate to them, but so far, they've been self-sufficient in working capital in regards to the group.

Great. Thank you so much.

Now, Kevin Dede from H.C. Wainwright. Kevin?

Can you hear me now, gents?

Yeah, we can hear you.

Great. Thank you.

Hey, Kevin.

Curious to know if you have an ETP launch target for this year versus the 100 or so you expected to have at the end of last year?

Yeah. The quick answer to that is no, we do not have a target. I think the explanation is that last year we thought as a strategic goal to have a really broad portfolio of ETPs. The broader the portfolio of single underlying assets we have, the more alpha-type trades we can pursue without any market risk. The more connection we get, obviously, with the foundations and the broader ecosystem within those assets. It was a strategic goal at that point. I would say we'll cover most of the high-quality top 100 assets as of today. We're not listing, there's no more that we just need to list, like we had to have 25 for half year or something.

It's more just driven by what type of business deal opportunity we see and what type of different type of ETPs, more value-added types of ETPs, where you could see leverage ETPs. It could be volatility target ETPs, it could be total return and others with a dividend for some foundations and so on. Also actively managed, everything from funds to actively managed certificates to tokens. We're now pursuing just products that we see, from a qualitative standpoint, as high value added where we can have good margins that takes us where we want to be from a product standpoint, from a qualitative perspective. We don't have any quantitative goals for this year. I think we cover what we need to cover.

Now it's more focus on creating high value added type of strategies and investment exposures plus also making all the ones we have available in other new types of vehicles to provide access for new pools of money. No, we don't have a quantitative target.

Okay, thanks, Johan. Paul, I may have misunderstood some of your comments. I understand no guidance, but I also thought I heard expectations for 15%-20% growth, and I was hoping you could straighten that out for me. Are you talking about AUM, revenue, earnings, or did I just mishear you completely?

Yeah. I guess you got us, Kevin, that we are a little bit. There's some inconsistency there. We are suggesting that Stillman will grow at 15%-20%. That, just for clarity, is Stillman. We're not providing on the consolidated company, which is Valour, right? It's the balance, given crypto prices and the outlook. We're waiting on that before putting out a number on where we think Valour is going to go.

Do you think you'd be able to zero in on it?

I think what we want to tell people is.

About the timeframe you talk about March quarter?

I think probably the summer, guys. March quarter's here in a month.

Right.

I don't personally believe anything will change in a month. We understand that the analyst community would prefer guidance. To the extent we're comfortable in putting out a number, we will likely do so. Okay, guys? Likely not in a month, but.

I don't want to step beyond my bounds here, but I think the analyst community is facing the same variables that you are, and the market's highly volatile. Appreciate the feedback on that, Paul.

Yeah.

One last thing, just on marketing.

Kevin, just a little-

I'd like to-

Sorry.

Clarify expectations on spending. Understand that you're winding it down, but you're also trying to address the institutional market. I heard comments regarding more efficient spending, but it's not clear how that happens.

I'm sorry. Kevin, is this with regards to market spend?

The marketing spend. Yeah.

Yeah. Well-

Yeah. You go ahead.

No, I was just going to say that as opposed to using a broad brush large expense program, as Johan was discussing the fund programs, for instance, if we are going to speak to institutions, we don't necessarily have to allocate significant capital to a newsletter program. We can actually invite the institutions into a room and speak to them directly. We can find that that costs us a great deal less, but gets us more direct interaction and helps us to close deals, which is something, I'm not just saying that anecdotally, it's something that we've done. I think we actually have deals closing, well, today.

This sort of thing, of course, we can leverage broad-based investor type marketing, but given the new products that we're looking at, given the volatility in the market, given the fact that we do have 102 digital asset underlying ETPs, which is the largest portfolio of such a product mix in the world, our next phase is to not only prepare the groundwork for our new products that are going to be made available on institutional platforms, but also make institutions more aware and help them to onboard their capital directly. It's a little bit more of a focused and a soft touch direct approach, and that also enables us to work globally and within different countries within Europe. It's slightly different. Instead of a media spend, it's more targeted, direct, face-to-face with investors and allocators.

Yeah. The cost we see is much less for the institutional approach where we're in databases, we are on the platforms, and we do a lot of road shows person to person. That costs very little in comparison with some unrelated promotion campaigns that might have happened in the past that we will not repeat. That's very different. When it comes to social media marketing on ETPs, on how we market in our core markets for the products, we also deploy AI to a huge extent right now in a lot of these, the creation and distribution and research. It's basically a few very high-cost promotion campaigns that were done in the past that we don't like and will not do again. That cost a lot of money.

We expanding the campaigns to promote our brand recognition and also for the individual products to retail as well. That is expanding. Also, the institutional outreach expanding a lot, obviously, but the cost is much lower. I think it just reflects that we paid far too much for campaigns in the past for basically in North America.

Okay.

Yeah, I think.

Very good, gentlemen. Thank you for clarifying.

... I think I can equate it to more of like a, it was throwing paint at the wall. Over the past few months since then, we've gotten a lot leaner and more targeted in our marketing efforts.

Less just spilling paint and more Banksy.

Yes. More Banksy.

Yeah. Curtis and Kevin, now when we meet with people, we have their contacts, we're able to follow up. We are actually able to have face-to-face discussions, figure out what their capital allocation plans are going to be two quarters hence, and follow up. That can result in a multimillion-dollar deal as opposed to just putting something out there that may sound good and feel good, but it costs so much money and it's hard to measure the return. It's also hard to ensure that investment happens. Going forward with things like UCITS and whatnot, this sort of efficiency with distribution, UCITS is a gold standard that has applicability internationally. Now we know who we can speak with in different markets once these products are launched, and it also gives us the opportunity to explore different markets for our existing ETPs, but more efficiently so.

Thank you very much, gentlemen, for the clarification. I appreciate the detail.

Of course. All right. I think that wraps up the analyst questions. Any final analysts that didn't get a chance? I'm not seeing any. I think we're all set here. We'll let you go about a couple minutes early. If we didn't get to your question, please email me, [email protected]. I will get to it as soon as I can. Thanks again for everyone who joined. We do appreciate your time, and we do appreciate your continued support. Again, Andrew, myself, Johan, Paul, any questions you have, we make ourselves widely available. If you need clarification on anything, please do reach out. I think most of you know me pretty well by now, so I don't really say no to answering any questions. There should be no excuse for folks saying that we're not paying attention. Curtis at defi.tech. Thanks again, everybody.

Enjoy the rest of your day, and we'll chat with you again in a few weeks.