Good morning, and welcome to this quarter presentation for Arcane Crypto. My name is Torbjørn Bull Jenssen, and I'm the CEO of Arcane Crypto. Last year was a pretty brutal year in the crypto sector. You had a lot of bankruptcies, and the Q4 in many ways was kind of the final part of this turbulent year, where FTX, one of the larger exchanges, suddenly turned out to have been running a scam and went bankrupt. As a result of the FTX collapse, the Bitcoin price fell sharply. Good morning, and sorry for the delay. We had some technical issues here in the studio, but now we're on. My name is Torbjørn Bull Jenssen, and I'm the CEO of Arcane Crypto. I'm excited to be here today to present our Q4 report to you.
The Q4 last year was a pretty rough quarter, mirroring the year in total. We had the FTX collapse, one of the largest crypto exchanges turning out to have been running a scam and going bankrupt. This pulled down the prices in the crypto market, and Bitcoin dropped down to $16,000 each. It also triggered a wave of new bankruptcies and filings from the likes of BlockFi, Genesis, and as a result of the lower Bitcoin price, miners like Core Scientific. Despite this volatility in the market, the volume for the quarter overall was really, really low and was down 34% compared to Q3 last year. One important lesson, though, from the FTX collapse, it has taught us the importance of custody and security. How you store your coins are really, really important.
After the FTX collapse, a lot of exchanges started publishing so-called Proof of Reserves. They shared their wallet addresses so that people could check how much cryptocurrencies they were holding on behalf of clients. However, sharing the addresses only shows half the picture. It doesn't show how much these exchanges owe, and also it doesn't show how much you actually own, whether your Bitcoin are still on that exchange or not. One solution that we actually offer, which helps alleviate these problems, is our vault product, where our clients today can validate on any blockchain explorer exactly the balances they are holding themselves.
We are leveraging the power of the transparent blockchains, dedicating a segregated wallet to each client having a vault service with us, so they can actually benefit from the transparency of the blockchain, validate themselves, and know that their 5 Bitcoins or 50 Bitcoins for that matter, stays in that address. That's actually super interesting to see that the appetite for this product has increased following the collapse of FTX and the realization that security around custody matters. Also interestingly, despite the collapse of FTX, institutional interest remained strong. We saw high volumes on CME, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, in Bitcoin futures.
We saw big banks like Goldman Sachs going out and commenting on the collapse of FTX, viewing it as a buying opportunity, seeing it as an opportunity to build up a larger stake in the ecosystem because they are certain that cryptocurrencies are here to stay. It also looks like the contagion has stopped. The market has regained prices and are now way above the price level even before the FTX collapse. There's a lot of indications that the bottom is behind us and that we are starting to face a crypto spring, leaving the crypto winter behind.
Of course, bear in mind that the spring comes with surprise falling kind of snowfalls, so that we are kind of facing a shift in sentiment doesn't mean that things can't be wobbly. There's a lot of strong underlying fundamental drivers that indicates that the future for the sector is bright. We in Arcane has really taken advantage of this bear market to position ourselves so that we are ready for the next wave of adoption. We restructured the company and optimized our operation, and we have done a brand split, where Arcane now has become, on the one hand, or soon will be Arcario, which will be the listed entity, the holding company, operating a portfolio of investments in the digital assets and Web3 space.
On the other hand, K33, which is our kind of active services, where we offer our brokerage, our research, our investment products. The thinking behind this split was to segregate the kind of tech and operational focus in one unit so that we can have kind of optimized operations for that in K33, and a more management approach, or portfolio management in the other unit so that it can be a dedicated focus in Arcario. As for the meanings of the names, a lot of people keep asking me about this. Arcario is actually the Latin word for treasurer, someone looking after the treasury, and is a fitting name for a holding and investment company in the space. Arcane originally means kind of, kind of hidden, secret.
When we launched the company, it was a good reflection of both kind of the crypto industry and also us being kind of a little bit more secretive about what we were doing. As we are looking forward, the last thing the crypto industry needs is more secrets, as proven by FTX. We figured it made sense to kind of change the name to better reflect exactly what we're doing. As for K33, a lot of people ask me about that name as well, and you can put it into ChatGPT and ask for an explanation, and it'll tell you something along the lines that 33 is the most powerful of power numbers. It signifies growth and transformation, et cetera, et cetera. The truth is actually much more pragmatic. We are building services for a global audience.
For our research, our largest reader base is actually in the U.S., we really wanted a dot-com domain. We also wanted a name that was short, easy to remember, and easy to pronounce, we wanted a dot-com domain which we actually could afford, which wasn't kind of idiotically expensive. Out of a list of different candidates, K33 turned out to be the best opportunity for us, and we know that we can make K33 work as a brand because for any brand, it's not the name or the meaning that is important, it's what you fill it with. We're gonna fill K33 with solid substance and really, really strong products going forward. K33 is what most of you have heard about in the past under the kind of working name of the Arcane Platform.
It's our research-led brokerage with investment services, where we help high-net-worth individuals and family offices get access to digital assets. We help them understand how to invest in the space. We offer them the product, we offer them the research, and we offer them different types of funds and exposures, so they can get the exposure in a simple way. Today, we are working directly with the high-net-worth and the family offices as end clients. We're also in dialogue with wealth managers. Our plan over time is to build out the tools for wealth managers, so they can leverage the K33 platform and sell our products to their client base. As a part of the growth here, I'm really happy that we secured a partnership with Bloomberg during the quarter. On Bloomberg, we are now allowed to distribute our research.
For now, we're doing that for free to build brand awareness, over time, we will both distribute free content but also paid content through Bloomberg. This is really, really important, because this means that we can reach the more than 325,000 professional financial users on Bloomberg. We can reach our clients exactly where they are and make our research available to them where they are. This is really important because it means that our products can fit seamlessly into the working day of those who are in the traditional finance space and want to get into the crypto space. Furthermore, we recently launched a cryptocurrency index, a smart beta index, a quality-filtered top 30 index, together with an index provider called Vinter. I received some questions, why did we have to do this with a partner?
Are we not able to make the index? The truth is, you have to have a partner for regulatory reasons. When you develop an index, you have to have an external third party calculating the index and publishing the index, and this is kind of European regulation to ensure integrity and that the index is not manipulated. The really exciting thing about this index is that it's a way for us to take our deep knowledge and understanding of the crypto space, apply that to the different projects we see in a systematic way, filter away some of the weaker projects, and then offer an index for those who want a robust one-stop exposure to the sector. As of now, this is a reference index that you can follow on any terminal like Bloomberg, Refinitiv. Our intention is to develop financial products on this index.
In other words, investable products tracking the index. We're going to explore opportunities both in the DeFi space, where we can have a token that is backed by the underlying different coins, so that it acts like a fund, but on a DeFi protocol. We're gonna explore different type of fund structure, ETPs, ETF structures as well. Lastly, the content on the index. The reports describing which coins are in, which coins are out, why they're in, why they're out, will be available to users on the K33 platform. We anticipate that this is something that will help draw attention and draw in users through K33 from those who want to learn more about the index.
To summarize on K33, by taking the different services, the brokerage we had in Kaupang, the research we had in Arcane Research, and investments we had in our hedge fund, and bringing those together on a unified platform, we can really leverage kind of the synergies of having one brand, one user experience, one platform to help the users regardless of what their needs are. Operationally, by having this unified in the same company with a dedicated focus, it makes it much easier to draw on resources across the different teams and execute more effectively going forward. There's a lot of benefits from the operational side, to have kind of the distinction between the portfolio mandate, and operational mandate. In addition, having this separation where Arcario is the mother company currently of K33 also creates strategic flexibility.
We've recently seen a lot of interest, especially internationally, for both things we are doing in Arcario and things we're doing in K33. Having this distinction, enable us to act more opportunistically on different interests and strategic interests going forward, which means that we can bring in different partners for different parts of the business, actually for different parts of the portfolio in Arcario, and kind of build on that in a more flexible way. One of those very interesting dialogues that we've had, and interest we've seen, is from a Swiss-based crypto company called COWA. As we recently announced, we are now in M&A discussions with COWA. It's very early, so no details are ready yet. Meeting with COWA, we realized it was a meeting of minds.
We saw that there was a good match between the Arcario portfolio and what COWA has running. We realized that there are strong potential synergies here that really can pave the way for a great win-win transaction, kind of built around some type of merger of the two entities. COWA are actually a little bit similar to Arcane or Arcario in many ways. They have several different business lines in the digital asset space. They operate in mining and data centers powered by renewable energy. They have around 44 megawatts of capacity running in northern Norway, which kind of equates to around 1,000 petahash or 13,000 ASIC machines. They have a sizable mining operation running, and there's some very interesting possibilities that we can explore there. In addition, they have a venture portfolio with token investments.
They're running Lightning Node infrastructure, the scaling solution for Bitcoin. They have developed a staking platform and software called REStake, which is already live and running. By combining this potentially with some of the assets we have in Arcario, where we have mining, we have a small venture portfolio, and where kind of our private clients on K33, for instance, could be interested in staking in the future, we can unlock, potentially, kind of these synergies. In addition, to be able to focus on the conversation with COWA, they put in place a financing structure of up to $2 million because they were really keen on having this dialogue with us.
We have several different interested partners and players that we could work with, we see the COWA discussion as the currently most promising and decided to enter into this loan agreement, a convertible loan agreement, for up to these $2 million, that we could kind of really prioritize exploring the possibilities of a potential merger. These were the main operational updates. If we move over to look at the financials, those were, for obvious reasons, impacted by the rough year and the fall in crypto prices. One thing I'm actually super happy about is the fact that our brokerage actually saw a small increase in volume rather than a decrease against a backdrop of a 34% drop in the Bitcoin volume in the market.
That is very good and is a reflection of us systematically bringing in clients that are happy with our service and trade with us in size. Our gross margin dropped sharply, mainly due to poor mining conditions during Q4. Electricity prices in Northern Norway skyrocketed because there were three different nuclear plants that were, you know, on pause for being kind of fixed up, and there was limited wind production, and rivers were freezing in. Electricity prices in Northern Norway has now come down, and we're mining at full capacity again with very favorable energy prices in Northern Norway. We expect a much stronger kind of gross margin contribution from the mining for next quarter. In addition, in research, we are now preparing for launching our paid subscription, taking $50 a month for pro users on the platform.
During Q4, we put all the focus on that pro offering, which we believe will be very scalable over time, and therefore passed on some opportunities to sell, you know, more one-off industry reports, which then reflected in a small drop in revenue from research during Q4. As for the rest of the balance sheet, and development, we took a small hit in relation to FTX. It was the fund that had a trading account with FTX, with a tiny balance compared to the overall AUM of the fund, but which added up to around NOK 3 million. We decided to compensate the investors of the fund from future fees, which is something that we booked now, which contributed to a one-off extra cost of around NOK 3 million for the previous quarter.
Lastly, we ended the quarter with around NOK 5 million in cash, a little bit lower than what we anticipated due to the poor mining conditions. With the financing structure in place with COWA and a lot of interest from other potential investors, I'm very confident that we are actually in a great position to keep building going forward. We have done the restructuring, we have sharpened our focus, we have a clear goal, and with the operational distinction between Arcario as the listed entity, as the portfolio investment company, and K33 as the operational company, I feel like we're in the best possible position to really build for the new crypto spring and eventually crypto summer that we see ahead. On that, we can open for some questions.
Okay. Thank you so much, Soren. We have a few questions today. One from the audience is asking about a reverse split. Is that something we are considering at the moment?
A reverse split would mean that we would kind of take, say, 10 of our shares and combine them into one, so that the unit price per share would be higher. Given that we are entering an M&A discussion, if those discussions continue and we eventually end up with a transaction, it would be natural to look at that in relation to such a discussion. Apart from that, changing how many slices you divide the pizza in is not high on the agenda right now. We build shareholder value by executing and building our services, solving problems for our clients, and not by splitting or reverse splitting the number of shares we have.
Thank you. A related question, are you still working on getting listed in the U.S.?
We have still most of the paperwork done for the OTC Markets dual listing. We put that on pause, both due to actually the low unit price per share, but more importantly, the collapse in activity around crypto shares in the U.S. and especially on OTC Markets. It's something we will re-engage once we see the timing and market conditions improving. With the recent development or since actually since New Year, that looks more likely to happen in the near future.
Good. A final question. Can you say something about the potential expansion to a London office which have been discussed previously?
Yeah. We have a company incorporated in the U.K., and as I said in the previous presentation, we initially are going to use that for a Stripe account, where we, with a U.K. entity, can actually use Stripe Identity as a part of our platform. In addition, we see London as an important hub for private wealth. The plan is probably to scale that up towards kind of after the summer this year and kind of really gonna expand geographically from the autumn and onwards.
Okay. Thank you.
Thank you so much, and have a great day.