Good morning, and welcome to this presentation in relation to our Q3 numbers in Arcane Crypto. My name is Torbjørn Bull Jenssen, and I'm the CEO of Arcane Crypto. This last quarter has been a pivotal quarter in Arcane. We've done, as I've said, started the process of developing a unified platform for several of our products, and we launched the very first iteration of the Arcane platform. Right now, it looks primarily like a new front end, but we've already done a lot of the heavy lifting on the back end, and I'll talk more about that during this presentation. We strengthened our team, hiring a great CFO, and we are also in the process of appointing new board members, bringing in a new and very experienced Chairman.
We are on track of becoming cash flow positive from the start of next year, and this is in part linked to our successful launch and entry into mining, using renewable energy to secure the Bitcoin blockchain. With the market development we're seeing, with increased adoption and increased interest from institutions, combined with the progress in some of our portfolio companies, we do see increased upside in both Pure Digital and in LN Markets. Looking at the market right now, it's very clear that the momentum is building. Most people pay attention to Bitcoin and Ethereum and other cryptocurrencies reaching all-time highs and appreciation. More importantly, however, is the accelerated adoption, and we see this on many, many different fronts.
One example is how El Salvador has rolled out Bitcoin as legal tender, meaning that you can go into a McDonald's in El Salvador and pay with Bitcoin, settled over Lightning. This is really important because it shows the world that it's actually possible. It debunks a lot of myths where people think that you can't use Bitcoin as a payment because it's too slow, too expensive, uses too much electricity. By showing that it's possible, and it's actually possible at scale, a lot of people start to revisit those ideas. We also saw Twitter rolling out support for Bitcoin as a way to tip where users can send money directly between each other, yet again using the Lightning Network.
We have seen increased institutional interest from the likes of BNY Mellon, State Street, Bank of America, JP Morgan, Wells Fargo, Citi, Morgan Stanley, and a lot of other big financial institutions. Institutions that used to say that they wouldn't touch this, but they're now competing to offer the best products to their clients because they see that there is real demand. We also see increased involvement from the payment companies like Visa and Mastercard doubling down on offering services to the cryptocurrency industry, making the whole infrastructure more mature, and ensuring future growth of this industry. We recently seen the launch of the first Bitcoin ETF in the U.S. This ETF is actually the biggest launch of an ETF ever, the fastest ETF to reach the $1 billion mark in AUM after just two days.
While this is very kind of bullish for Bitcoin because it gives access to a larger set of investors, it's also very bullish for the whole sector, kind of showing the maturation of regulation, showing how regulators are slowly but surely waking up to and dealing with the reality of Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. This is creating the kind of framework within which Arcane is operating and in which we are benefiting from this increased adoption. Looking at some of our portfolio companies, Pure Digital, this company building an interbank market for tier one banks where we hold a 37.5% ownership stake, had great development this quarter. They had their first test trade on the platform with a partner called Zodia, which is a custodian owned by Standard Chartered and Northern Trust.
In the Pure project, there are currently six different banks that have signed LOIs and are exploring this interbank trading, where State Street and BNY Mellon are the two that have been public about their involvement. With the increased institutional interest during the quarter and the progress on the product front in Pure, we see Pure as better positioned than ever to kind of execute on their promise of building an interbank market going forward. Another portfolio company of ours, LN Markets, this derivatives platform using the Lightning Network for instantaneous deposit and withdrawals, continue to see strong growth in the user base. The trading volume was a little bit down for the quarter following the generally lower trading volumes in the market in general, but it's the user growth that is really important.
The increased adoption of Lightning shows that LN Markets bet on exactly Lightning as a technology seems to be the right one, seems to be the future for Bitcoin transfers. On the product front, LN Markets are keeping, or keep pushing the development, and they're now in the process of launching options, having launched the first module of data visualization and are in the process of launching full trading going forward. Back to Arcane, one important thing that's happened during the quarter is, as I mentioned, the strengthening of our team. We recruited a new CFO, Linus Jönsson, with a strong background from fintech and software services.
Bringing this expertise of kind of online businesses scaling up into the management group will strengthen us going forward and put us in an even better position on executing, on our roadmap, the years ahead. We're also in the process of appointing new board members, and in relation to that, a new Chairman, Michael Jackson. Michael Jackson has a very interesting background. He's been board member in Blockchain.com for a long time. He's been operational in the management of Skype during their commercialization, and he brings a lot of experience and knowledge of how to really build successful, large, scalable, online services. During the quarter, we successfully launched our mining operation using renewable energy to secure the Bitcoin blockchain upon which we rely as the rest of the industry do.
This is really important because it's a way for us to contribute and making sure that the blockchain is also kept secure in the cleanest way possible. It's also very interesting in Arcane because it ties nicely into the rest of our portfolio. The trading we can do on the flow is something we're now working on using strategies involving derivatives to increase the profitability, and we are also exploring the possibility of productizing mining as a service, exploring the possibility of offering mining exposure to clients who want to buy that on our platform in the future.
In terms of capacity, we currently have around 38,000 TH of computing that is live and working day in and day out, and we have another batch of miners, around 36,000 TH, that we recently ordered and that will arrive for the start of next year and that we'll put to work then. In addition, the mining is also something that really helps us strengthen our financials. We launched the mining actually after the quarter, so it's not reflected in this quarterly, in these numbers for this quarter, but it'll come into our financials in the quarters going ahead. With the mining, we actually see that as a key part of the driver, which will put us on a track to become cash flow positive from the start of next year.
During the quarter, we strengthened our balance sheet with an equity issue of approximately SEK 61 million, most of which we have invested in the mining, and this is a great way for us to actually put that capital to work right away with a short payback time and actually, currently a pretty substantial profitability. In terms of, kind of the gross margin for the quarter, we continue to see growth, reaching SEK 7.5 million, primarily due to a good result from, our asset management and research arm. As I said, we launched Green Data, but that was after the quarter, and we are on track to become cash flow positive from the start of next year.
Looking at our balance sheet a little bit more in detail, you can see that we have almost doubled our total assets and our kind of book equity. This was both due to the equity issue, but also due to the finalization of the acquisition of Trijo, this Swedish retail exchange that we now have fully acquired. The revenue is a little bit down for the quarter, landing at around SEK 81 million, and this is primarily due to a little bit lower trading volume in Kaupang, following the, kind of the more calm market, the lower volume we saw in general, during Q3. As for the result, EBITDA, we have a loss of around SEK 6 million, which actually is more or less in line with what we had in the previous quarter.
However, the numbers for the Q2 report was impacted by some accounting technicalities around offset in relation to warrants, which I commented on in the previous. There's no major changes there. Kind of with the cash position we have, with the balance sheet we have, we are in a good position to continue to invest and continue to grow our business going forward. On that front, one of the really key focus or the key focus going forward is the Arcane platform. As I said, we are now launched the very first iteration of this platform where we are unifying a lot of our services. When we founded Arcane, we looked at the industry, and we found it to be extremely fragmented.
We see this as a problem for end users because it means that if you want a full set of services in this industry, you have to have five, 10, 15 different accounts with different companies. We believe that users would prefer, in many circumstances, a one-stop shop where they could learn, trade, invest, and get a lot of their financial services linked to cryptocurrencies with one player, and that is what we are in the process of building. To execute on that, we started by building up some business units ourselves and acquiring some companies. In that process, Arcane in many ways became as fragmented as the industry itself, having separate tech stacks, separate user databases, separate interfaces, and separate teams for our research, our exchanges, our asset management.
That is what we are addressing right now, where we are transforming this list of portfolio companies into this cohesive kind of product platform where you as an end user eventually won't care about what subsidiary is delivering you what service. What you'll care about is the products you choose from the menu on the platform. Today, you'll be linked out to the different services. Today, it's no big change to you as an end user, but that will change quickly.
On the back end, we've set up a lot of the infrastructure already for dealing with login, for dealing with the user database, for dealing with the content management system, and this is what will enable us to quickly roll out new features iteratively in the quarters to come. The process of building this unified platform for our services will take time, but it'll not be a situation where we kind of go into the black box and stay there for a year and then push out the product. It will rather be something that we iteratively, continuously update, upgrade, and push out. Also, in relation to setting up this new infrastructure, we made sure to kind of follow the best practices in terms of flexibility, in terms of data monitoring, so that we can easily run experiments as we develop.
We can run two different versions of a call to action and see what works the best and quickly gonna have a data-driven approach to how we tweak our product and how we identify our way to generate value for our users. The way we see it, there are no ways to really truly realizing the synergies of having this portfolio without also having a unified tech stack. Because this unified tech stack is what will allow us to use the full breadth of our offering to reduce the customer acquisition cost. We can, for instance, use the visibility and credibility of Arcane Research to bring in masses of users that comes to learn. Once they're already in, maybe they want to trade, maybe they want to invest in the fund, maybe they want to buy some mining exposure.
We will then be able to offer that to them. Maybe they'll want something else that we will develop in the future. By having this unified platform, we will actually be able to increase the value to our user and increase the lifetime value from cross-selling across these services. That also gives Arcane an important level of robustness. As this market matures, it's likely that different business models will come and some will go. The margins on brokerage might go down. If you only have one offering, that puts you at risk. What do you do if what you're offering, like, what if your product is the one that's becoming cheaper? By having this broader portfolio, we can always pivot and kind of monetize in different parts of the value chain. Also, by having one unified platform, we can really reduce the operational cost.
There's a lot of overhead, there's a lot of complexity of operating many separate tech stacks, and by having one, we get the returns to scale. We've set up our infrastructure on Google Cloud, leveraging their superior platform as a service, meaning that we can seamlessly scale up without the need of hiring a big team of DevOps, without the need of spending a lot of time configuring servers and boxes, and setting up the infrastructure. We can instead focus on product and roll out that and let Google use their expertise to keep our services running safely and efficiently. The real interesting thing here, of course, is the long-term possibility. We're building up this infrastructure for ourselves so that we can offer the best possible end-user experience.
In Arcane, we believe in a future where every bank, every broker, every fintech app, every asset manager will have cryptocurrency-related services. We don't believe in a future where every bank builds that out themselves. Instead, what we expect is that they'll find partners through which they will be enabled to offer those services. To do that in the best possible way, you will have to develop APIs that other partners can consume. When we're designing the architecture of our platform right now, we're having a very clear idea that we want to open our APIs to third parties in the future, so that when a large broker wants to offer its clients access to cryptocurrencies, they can do that with Arcane as an underlying infrastructure provider.
A lot of the companies that have now become big players in this space didn't have this in mind when they built out their services 10 years ago. They didn't have access to the best, most modern tools on the kind of cloud services available when they built out. They're already struggling with technical debt. We have the benefit of learning from their success while combining that with the best possible tools right now and building for a future where we can use this technology as a springboard and as a way to have faster product development and as a way to position ourselves as someone that can really become a true infrastructure player connected to others. This is very similar to how Amazon has been very successful.
They built out their infrastructure for their own needs, but they did it in a way where Amazon Web Services could become a product eventually and one of their really successful products. We're taking inspiration from that, but doing that for cryptocurrency and cryptocurrency-related financial services. To summarize, this quarter has been extremely important to Arcane. It's not fully reflected in our financials. I mean, we continue to grow the gross margin on sale, but the most important changes has been what's happened operationally.
The launch of the new platform, the very first version, the strengthening of the team, both in management and on the Board, the revenue potential from mining and how that puts us on a track towards cash flow positivity from the start of next year, giving us financial flexibility and freedom, our successful launch in mining, and increased kind of upside we see following both market development but also internal development into our portfolio companies, Pure Digital and LN Markets. On that, I can open for questions.
Thank you, Torbjørn. That's a really great and interesting presentation. We've got a couple of questions coming in. Here is one. With the mining, what are you going to be doing with the Bitcoin that you actually mine? What is Arcane's view?
Arcane is bullish on the sector. We are also bullish on Bitcoin, but we are not going to build a big inventory of Bitcoins. We are not in the business of building up a large balance of Bitcoins. We're rather looking at profitable ways to use derivatives to get more return out of the Bitcoin mining, to pair the flow from Bitcoin with the flow we have from other parts of the business to be able to do internal netting and through that kind of increase the efficiency of our kind of prop trading, if you like. For those who want to see a bit big Bitcoin exposure in Arcane, it's worth mentioning that we have the machines.
That itself is, in a way, a derivative exposure toward Bitcoin, but we're not going to HODL those coins. We are going to find ways to profit optimize from on that flow.
Great. Thank you very much. Another question related to mining here is the whole focus on electricity costs and actually renewable energy. Can you speak a little bit more about that?
Absolutely. The electricity cost currently in Norway is on record highs, but even with that price level, the operation is highly profitable. Both the Bitcoin market and electricity market are very volatile markets, so these types of swings are expected. It's not something that's threatening our business model. That said, for the longer future, we are also exploring the possibilities of having mining in several different geographies to have more robustness towards the electricity prices in just one geography. We will always stay true to the ambition or true to kind of using renewable energy, contributing to securing the Bitcoin blockchain in the cleanest possible way.
Excellent. Another thing that's been in the news, obviously you even mentioned it in the report, is the noise around exchange-traded funds and, you know, exchange-traded products and all these kind of rumors around them coming and how they come. Is Arcane doing anything in that space? What's your view?
We are working on an ETP, exchange-traded product, ourselves, and while it's a process that takes time because there's a lot of regulatory questions, we do see good progress on that front. This would be an ETP linked to the fund that we currently have, and it looks currently like we might be able to get that off the ground, towards the, or kind of early next year. That is something I've talked about in earlier reports. That is something that's very much still on the agenda, and it's something that's very much still going ahead. The beauty of having kind of ETFs, ETPs, is that it allows for easy access to investors. It makes it easy for them to get access to these investments through the normal brokerage.
Longer term, however, we do see a massive interest from brokers to partner with cryptocurrency companies. We've already been approached by some of the largest brokers in the Nordics who want to explore partnership with us because we have local licenses, and we believe that in the future you'll both be able to get exposure through these exchange-traded products, but also through buying cryptocurrencies directly on these platforms, not because the platforms will do the heavy lifting of setting up that infrastructure themselves, but because they will partner with companies like Arcane in the future.
Okay, with that, I think we can wrap up. There are a few more questions, and we'll commit to getting back to everybody at some point. I think we've run out of time now, but do you want to round off with a final comment?
I think, regarding the questions, we're kind of going to look through that list, and find good ways to answer as many as possible of those.
Great
If there are any other questions, feel free to send them to ir@arcanecrypto.se.
Perfect.
Thank you. Thank you so much, and have a great day.