Good morning and welcome to this Q4 presentation for K33. My name is Torbjørn Bull Jenssen, and I'm the CEO of K33. Q4 was a great quarter for K33. A record quarter with increased revenue, 83% up from Q3, increased gross margin up almost 70%, and improved results. On the tech front, we have also had great progress, and we now launched the first application on our new platform in the form of research in beta, so users now can log in using Apple ID or Google ID and start using our platform. On the mining front, we are now mining at full capacity, producing an equivalent of around 32 bitcoins a quarter at current market conditions.
We really used this quarter to sharpen our focus and develop an updated strategy and mission, which I will share more of later in this presentation. If you look at the market development in Q4, it was also a great quarter. Although at the end of the quarter, prices starting to fall, Bitcoin during the quarter set a new all-time high. We got the first ETF approved in the U.S., and this showed both massive investor demand. It was the fastest-growing ETF launch ever, but it also shows regulatory maturity, where regulators now are ready to actually approve ETFs, although based on futures. We also had a lot of other great news, showing the adoption of Bitcoin and digital currencies, how it's becoming more mainstream.
Companies like PIMCO and KPMG has announced that they are holding Bitcoin and Ethereum as a treasury asset on their balance sheet. Mastercard has announced that they are allowing banks to offer crypto credit cards and debit cards on their infrastructure. If you look at some of the biggest tier one investment banks, they continue to double down on their initiatives in the sector, going on a hiring spree, particularly as seen in Citi and Goldman Sachs amongst some of the big banks. Especially this latter development is highly positive for Pure Digital, a project where we hold a 37.5% stake, building an interbank market for tier one banks to trade digital assets. In Pure, they're really seeing the momentum and the interest from these tier one banks.
Although a lot of you might have kind of wanted more press releases in relation to Pure announcements of the other banks, in addition to State Street and BNY Mellon that is kind of engaged in the process, you can still rest assured that there has been a lot of progress. The platform is now ready for test trading and, is now, being set up with Zodia as the first test trader, who in the previous quarter actually did some test trades and are now ready for testing with some of the banks. There's a lot of progress happening, mainly due to the banks experiencing strong demand from their underlying clients, which means that they themselves need this interbank market. The very interesting thing here is that there are no other projects in the world actually building out such an interbank market.
Pure is in a unique position to really capitalize on this institutional demand. Moving over to one of our other portfolio companies, LN Markets. They also had a great quarter, having a record trading volume north of SEK 1 billion. More importantly perhaps, they also continue to see strong growth in their user base, up 33%. LN Markets is a derivatives market platform leveraging the Lightning Network for instantaneous deposits and withdrawals of collateral. With the accelerated adoption of Lightning, LN Markets is in a great position to benefit. During the quarter, Cash App, the biggest kind of fintech app perhaps in the U.S., actually switched on Lightning for all of their users, really leading the way and showing that Lightning is the future for Bitcoin transfers. Then moving over to our mining business.
As I said, we're now mining at full capacity, producing around 80 petahash, equivalent to 32 bitcoins per quarter at current market conditions. We launched a mining operation at half capacity before Christmas and generated a revenue of close to NOK 8.5 million. Despite record high electricity prices, our average margin in Q4 on the mining was actually 65%. Earlier in the previous presentation, we expressed that we expected to be cash flow positive when mining at full capacity. However, since then, the Bitcoin price has more or less been cut in half. At current market conditions, we are hovering around cash flow neutrality with our current burn rate as is. That said, it's important to bear in mind that our mining operation is not something we have invested in for kind of one quarter or two quarters.
These machines are positioned in a special-built data center where the air is really dry, the temperature is cool, and they have great conditions, which means that we expect a lifetime for these machines way longer than four years. Over the long term, we are still very bullish on the Bitcoin price development and expect a strong kind of return on this investment. Also, looking at the futures market, the long-term expectation is for electricity prices to come back down. Some other news. I know that a lot of you has really wanted to be able to invest in the fund managed by Eric Wall through your normal broker like Nordnet or Avanza. Currently, the fund is only available to high net worth individuals, professional investors.
As announced earlier, we are working with Valour to launch an ETP based on the fund, an exchange-traded product which would enable access to any investor through their normal broker. During Q4, Valour, our partner in this, received an approval from the Swedish FSA on the prospectus, which means that we are now one step closer to launching this. With these types of regulatory processes and kinda launching new financial products, things take time. We are working hard, and there's no kind of bottlenecks or blockers stopping us from launching this, but it takes a little bit of time. With the main kind of milestone being reached now with the approval of the prospectus, we expect to be able to launch this ETP during Q2. Then over to the main focus in Arcane.
This unified platform that I started talking about in the previous quarter, where we take the different business units that has been operating independently in many ways and bring them together on one unified tech stack, under one unified brand, one platform where users with one account can learn, trade, and invest. During the quarter, we really sharpened the focus and really worked on exactly how we're going to do this in practice. As a part of that process, we also updated our strategy. I really want to share some of the highlights of that work with you so that you can really see and understand where we are headed with this platform. Our mission is to enable the adoption of digital assets worldwide.
That doesn't mean that we'll take users for all our services globally from day one, but it means that we are clearly positioning ourselves to compete on the global stage. Research is already getting users all over the world, and for the more financial services like exchanging and investing, we will initially target the European market and the EEA region. Our strategy is twofold. First, we are really working hard to position Arcane as an organization that both the regulators and institutions can trust to handle and manage digital assets. We are working to be a compliant company.
We are in a part of discussions, both on the European level and the local level, with regulators working to both establish trust but also influence the work that is now happening on the regulation front to ensure that the regulation that is put in place becomes balanced and meaningful. Secondly, we are going to build, and already started doing so, the infrastructure that is necessary to make it easy, safe, and reliable to access the digital asset ecosystem. To do this, we have a kinda four-step plan, which has been with the company since the inception.
When we launched Arcane in 2018, the aim was to position the company as a center of gravity, attracting some of the most interesting projects and people to build a portfolio spanning the value chain for financial services, investing in and acquiring companies with key capabilities within the digital asset ecosystem. Now we come to the second phase, where we take this portfolio, and we bring it together. We create a unified Arcane brand and a unified tech platform to really realize the synergies, centralizing a product team and shifting the focus from an investment focus to a tech and product focus. To really bring users to this platform, our key tool is our research arm, which is read all over the world and getting a lot of eyes.
Through research, we can really build trust both in the sector, in Arcane, and we can acquire users. It's our unique advantage which will allow us to have a lower customer acquisition cost than a lot of our competitors. Finally, as we're building up this tech stack, we're doing so in a way where we are building all of the services so that we can expose everything as an API to third parties. In Arcane, we believe in a future where every financial institution have a digital asset offering. They will not develop that themselves. They will find partners, and we are positioning Arcane to become the preferred partner by having the best APIs and the best compliance. We're also building our platform with the intention of letting others sell to our users.
When we are now in the process of building out a user front end for our fund investors, we are doing that for a fund that we are also ourself managing. There's a lot of other fund managers out there, and there's no reason for us to only offer our fund. What makes sense when we've built a great user experience to get access to a fund is to also invite in other fund managers, so they can distribute and reach our user base, and we can take a cut from that. Then to really work towards this, and to really bring the different teams together and really make sure that the whole Arcane team is on the same page, there are some very, very important guiding principles that are shaping all of the work we are doing.
I think the most important one is perhaps in many ways the most obvious one. Make something people want. On the surface, it would be ridiculous not doing that. If you look at the cryptocurrency sector, you find a ton of companies that are rather focusing on the engineering tasks. Do the most advanced thing you can do with this technology. Make it as decentralized as possible for the sake of it. Make it as anonymous as possible for the sake of it. We are not doing that. We are building on the work of these engineering-focused companies, and it's great that they are pushing in these directions, but our core focus is our users.
Rather than just assuming that we know what they want, we are formulating a hypothesis, testing it on our users, validating that it's true, and then scaling up once we have market traction. As I said, our ambition is to kind of enable the adoption of digital assets worldwide. That requires that all of us in Arcane has a global view, that we think globally. This means that we are making tech decisions that will allow us to scale to millions of users. This means that we are finding third-party providers that have, say, identity or KYC procedures that is not only working in Norway, but it is working on a global and international level. We are really building to be a main competitor on the international scene, and that shapes a lot of the decisions that we're making in everyday business.
Then all our services will be built simple first and then powerful. This ties back into making sure that we make something people want. By piloting in the most simple way, by having only one feature, we can validate whether that feature is the relevant one or not. When we identify a feature that is relevant, we double down on that, and then we expand. We will also remove features that are not great. We will not just keep a feature just because we developed it, because that way we could quickly end up in a situation where we don't know exactly what is it that makes our product desired by our end users.
By making it simple first and then grow it only when we know that we have traction, we can ensure that we're not wasting a lot of money building out something that is maybe two years too early or maybe there is no real end user demand for. There's a ton of really big companies out there, companies that have raised $182 million who built it powerfully first and completely missed the market and got no traction. Lastly, we will build openly. We are building open source. That means that you as investors can actually check our repository and see our development. It means that you as a user can validate how we manage your data. You can see how the service is set up so that it becomes easier to trust us. That way, we can earn your trust.
We will be extremely transparent in how we use our end users' data, and they can validate it themselves. Also, by building open source, we make it much, much easier for other companies, for engineers out there to discover, our APIs, to play with our tech, to integrate with it, without even having to call us. This is important because when companies are choosing with whom to partner and integrate with for third-party services, engineers typically have a major say. If it's easy to integrate with, if they can even play around with it before the decision is made, that's a great benefit. Where will this take us? What does success look like for Arcane? What is it that I'm working towards? Why am I holding a lot of shares in Arcane?
We are working towards a future where over the couple of, say, three, four next years, we will bring in millions of users on the Arcane platform. We will have thousands of corporate clients using our APIs, consuming different parts of our service through the APIs as a SaaS. Based on this, we will generate revenue which can substantiate and defend a billion-dollar valuation. This is the journey we are working towards. This is our goal, and this is our North Star for all of us working in Arcane. Where are we now? We are in the process of setting up this unified platform. We're building it out on Google Cloud using something called Google Cloud Run, which enable us to have a unique setup where we have a service that becomes very scalable.
We can piggyback on all of the heavy lifting that Google has done, and we can really leapfrog our competitors who've set up infrastructure on way older technologies 5, 10 years ago. It's very interesting to see how Google is actually committing a lot of resources to building out the tools for the cryptocurrency industry. Everything from blockchain data availability on the platform to kind of, special features on security. In the future, all our services will be built on Google Cloud. All our APIs will be made available on Google Cloud. We believe that this decision is something that will allow us to scale fast and, have a platform that can really handle the throughput as we grow. Right now, as I said, we've launched research in beta. If you go to arcane.no/research, you can start browsing through articles.
You can quickly and easily with one click sign in using your Apple ID or Google ID. The beautiful thing now is that everyone who's signing in are now becoming a user on the platform. We're starting to build that Arcane user database, which will form the basis for kind of all the services, whether it's trading, investment in the future. We're live, we're running, and we are going to add more and more features this quarter, next quarter, this year, next year, and you'll be able to follow this in real time as we roll out these new features. Shifting the focus over to the financial. Q4 was a great quarter.
We continued to grow our gross margin, reaching SEK 12.5 million, and our tangible assets has increased with around SEK 30 million, mainly due to investment in our mining operation in Green Data. At a more thorough look, you can see how the revenue is substantially up. This was largely driven by the success of Kaupang Krypto, pivoting from serving a broader user base to really targeting high net worth individuals, really targeting the premium segment and offering a white glove service, which we have seen strong demand for. The margin improved mainly due to the profit from mining, and the result of this is also an improved result with an EBITDA loss of just a little more than SEK 3 million. On the balance sheet side, there's no major changes.
There's a small increase in total liabilities due to a small loan linked to the investment in the mining operation, but no major changes. To summarize, Q4 has been a record quarter when it comes to financials. Strong growth in revenue, strong growth in gross margin and improved results. More importantly, we've sharpened the focus. We had progress on the tech front, launching research on the platform, and we've really kind of started the journey and really solidified the journey we're on towards bringing in millions of users on this platform in the future. We have launched the mining at full capacity, generating around 32 Bitcoin per quarter. With improved market development over the longer term, which we expect, we expect this to be a good source of revenue in the company. On that, I can open for some questions.
Yeah, we got some great questions now. This first one is from Owen. Hello. Congratulations on a great quarter and a year. Can you please provide an indicative date for when the ETP will launch?
Unfortunately, I can't give a precise date, but as I said in the presentation, we expect to launch it during Q2. These processes are a bit slow because it involves regulators, exchanges, kind of box-ticking exercises in terms of approvals. We strongly believe that we'll be able to get this off the ground during Q2.
Okay. The second one is from Saif. Can you please share more info about the tier one banks that are interested? Where are these tier one banks located? Can we expect some concrete go live news? Is there anything you can say about the pipeline?
It's very hard to say for sure. With these banks, they are moving. Well, they're like a tanker. When they are moving one direction, they are really going, but it's moving slowly, but it will not turn. It's really hard to predict when they will be ready to go public with their name and when the next kind of concrete milestone will be announceable. That doesn't mean that the momentum isn't there. It doesn't mean that they're not interested in this. Sorry for not being able to be more precise. I think the main thing to pay attention to is who are the big banks internationally who are committed to this sector. That will give you a good indication of who the kind of the other four banks might be.
I mean, with BNY Mellon and State Street, that kind of puts the level of the banks you would expect to see there. Also with the institutional interest, the need for an interbank market becomes kind of clearer and clearer every day. Since there are no other project and also that Pure has this great position, kind of whether it's a press release or not this quarter or next quarter shouldn't be the main worry. The main focus should be on is the institutional interest continuing? If so, Pure is in a great position to capitalize on this.
Okay, the next one is from Christopher. Have you discussed doing a reverse stock split?
Well, to be honest, my focus as a CEO is really on building value, solving the problems for users, generating revenue, and building a great business. How you slice the pizza doesn't change the size of the pizza. How you slice the pizza doesn't really make much of a difference. It is a topic that I see investors are asking from time to time, and something that's being discussed. Unless we see a real benefit from doing so, a concrete, tangible benefit, that is not a big focus of ours.
Okay, here's one from Lars Erik. How have you financed the last batch of miners you got in Q1?
It was mainly equity financed. As I mentioned, on the financial slide here, we also did a small loan of NOK 50 million to ensure a strong liquidity for the company.
Okay. Here's the last question. It's from Richard. What will happen to Bitcoin and the cryptos if the U.S. throw Russia out of the SWIFT payment system?
This is the million-dollar question. A lot of people in the Bitcoin community speculates that Russia would embrace Bitcoin as a way to circumvent sanctions. I think it's important to realize that if the U.S. and the West blocks SWIFT, they will also make it illegal for Western companies and individuals to do business with Russian entities. Then you have to ask yourself, if you're the CEO of a big industrial company in the West, would you be willing to use Bitcoin as a workaround mechanism? No, because you would still be identifiable as someone doing business with Russia. Even though you could actually transfer the money, you as a company would still be easy to sanction.
If you're operating a small web page or a web shop, would you be willing to risk going to jail by continuing to doing business with Russia? Probably not. If you have a grandmother that you want to send money to, you probably would do that. The question is, those who will continue to do business with Russia in a scenario where the sanction becomes even tighter, that is those who don't care about the sanctions. The question is, those who don't care about the sanctions, do they have an alternative to Bitcoin? Most likely, they would maybe use Chinese yen. There are other currencies they are more likely to use.
Of course, some people might use Bitcoin as a workaround for this, but I don't think Bitcoin is ready for kind of that prime time use case just yet, and there are other alternatives for those who are willing to break sanctions. At the end of the day, the sanctionability is not only dependent on the possibility of freezing funds, but also identifying players who are doing business or not. Good?
That's it.
Thank you so much. Have a great day, and see you all soon.