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 ir@defi.tech or curtis@defi.tech 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, curtis@defi.tech. 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.