Thank you everyone for joining our Q3 earnings call. How's it going, Johan?
It's all good.
It's all good. Yeah, let's have a look at the presentation, and we have some comments on the general market. Let's go to the first slide. Some key events in Q3. We introduced the withdrawal fees, the results of which were very positive, as you can see in our results. We introduced OTC services that we signed with Blockchain.com. We did the Do Your Own Research campaign, where we had posters all over Stockholm, where people had to guess what the DYOR stands for and go to the landing page. Going to the next slide. If you look at the numbers, we've been increasing our user base. That's the Q3 numbers that you see here.
We actually hit the milestone of 300,000 users. We did a separate press release around that. A big milestone for Safello, and I would say for the crypto industry, if you look at the adoption in a country like Sweden, and us as a market leader, hitting those numbers was a milestone to celebrate. We've also increased our orders by 7.6% again, if you look at the cumulative number. We're above SEK 2 billion in total trading volume. Next slide, please. Looking at the long-term trends, I've said this before publicly. You know, our growth journey did not start necessarily in 2013. It started in 2018.
We were able to significantly reduce the onboarding time for a customer to make their first purchase and really build kind of the end user experience to see that kind of growth alongside with kind of the implementation of Safello Widget at that time that we had to as a distribution channel. Yeah, looking at the long-term trend, obviously, it's been flatlining a little bit over the last quarters. That's not uncommon in this kind of bear market. I suspect the long-term trend to continue. A little bit of a, like, slower growth, but in essence, it's stabilized. Next slide, please. Key objectives. Last time, we already mentioned that we were working towards a path to profitability.
We significantly improved our EBITDA number, and we reduced costs as well as increased our revenue. Obviously that's still the main focus to move towards profitability. Product innovation, we're doing a lot of small changes, but we're also working on larger changes both to the app, as introducing new product on the web. Hopefully this will be something that we come out with in the next quarter. With that, we actually, the change to key focus area, we had the community, but our main focus as a third pillar is financial institutions again. Of course, historically working with the LOI around Avanza, we do see demand here and we are working on some interesting things.
Those are the pillars going forward. Not much changed. Of course, we have a long-term view on what we do. Market sentiment. This is confirming still the same trend line. We're outperforming relatively to the market. I think it shows relative strength. We don't see absolute growth, but we do see the relative strength in what we do as a company. I'm sure there's a bunch of questions, so I hope that you can already post your questions for the Q&A if you are watching this live. Volume, yeah, and the financials, I'll hand it over to Johan to comment on. Maybe you have some comments on this slide as well. Johan?
No, I think we've been on a pretty stable trajectory. Yeah, I think the quarter, given the turmoil in the market, I think we've done pretty well.
Yeah.
Did you want to say something about the general market sentiment, or shall I move on?
I can, yeah, talk about the general market sentiment. I mean, obviously the FTX downfall had an impact on how the industry moved forward and what kind of contagion we're seeing with a lot of other third parties. They are not connected to Safello in any way, neither Alameda or FTX, and so far, none of the companies that we work with have any exposure. The exception in one way is Digital Currency Group that is an investor of ours, but obviously we're not operating with them operationally. They have Genesis lending company that had exposure to FTX. We'll look at what that contagion means for Safello of course.
There's no direct operational connection to any of the things that happened this year, including Luna, including Three Arrows Capital, and yeah, the list goes on and on. Voyager Digital, Celsius. What it highlights is again that having proper checks and balances in place, working in a regulated environment and taking customer protection seriously is valued highly in this market where even actors that seemingly doing things right end up with their pants down, like obviously FTX was. It just strengthens, I think, our position in the market as a company that has the track record for almost 10 years now on working in a proper way with a recent audit FI confirming, let's say from an anti-money laundering perspective.
I think it strengthens our position, and we're seeing that as well in sort of the interest again on the financial institution side. I guess high-level expectations are that we're going to see this play out a little bit longer. There's gonna be a little bit more contagion exposed to the market. Once that's settled, I think we're gonna find more strength in the market, and we're gonna see hopefully some new growth trajectory. I also think it means that we're gonna see a sentiment from a user base to move more towards DeFi, decentralization again, which we also saw in the rise in Ledgers, the hardware wallets sold to the market where they had record days selling the hardware devices.
I think that's overall a positive sentiment. It sharpens the regulation that will come out. It also is both reflective of MiCA regulation. It just highlights that the market will welcome that, at least from a financial institution adoption point of view. Any other thoughts, Johan?
No, I think you've got it covered, Frank.
All right. Good. Over to you.
Yep. Next slide, please. Just a few brief comments on the financial performance in the quarter, comparing to last year. Net turnover decreased in 5% in the quarter, and we had net turnover of SEK 138.8 million. It's also down from Q2 by the same order of magnitude. Given the market we've been in, I think that's a pretty strong performance. Gross profit increased by 11% comparing to the same quarter last year. Of course, the introduction of the withdrawal fees contributed by around SEK 2 million of that gross profit. Operating profit, EBITDA, we reported negative SEK 0.9 million compared to negative SEK 1.5 million last year. Operating profit, negative SEK 1.9. I think our cash balance remains strong with SEK 21.7 million at the end of the quarter.
We also have liquid crypto holdings that are classified as long-term investments sitting at SEK 4.9 million in the balance sheet. That was SEK 5.6 million at the end of the quarter. Of course it fluctuates, and it's slightly below the SEK 4.9 million at this point in time. The total cash balance of around SEK 26 million I think is good, particularly considering the recent operational changes we've done. I think we can take the next slide to illustrate the performance quarter-by-quarter instead. We announced that we are considering or being cost-conscious. We've renegotiated contracts. We've tried to minimize the reliance on external advisors in the quarter, and that will continue.
Of course, if we have ongoing projects that require external advisors, these numbers may fluctuate a bit from quarter-to-quarter. Comparing Q2 to Q3, we decreased OpEx by 22%, which I think is pretty good. The personnel costs at the same time went down by 26% quarter-by-quarter, and that's due to the well announced staff reductions, and that is still panning out. Clearly, vacation also contributed to a lower cost, but we, yeah, we're quite comfortable at this level. Going forward, we will still focus on operational excellence, streamlining our operations and maintaining a strict cost focus. If we hire, we will hire where it hurts. In general, we're mainly focusing on streamlining the operations.
I'm not going to comment much more. The next slide just shows the cash balance over the quarters, and we see the steep decline has stopped. Clearly, we are dependent on what the general market does. I think we have good control of our costs at this point in time, and yeah, we're monitoring the development going forward. We can take the next slide. Yeah, not so much to comment on these coming slides, so I think I will just hand it over to you, Frank, with the last caveat that, or comment rather, that we haven't capitalized any internal development work for the quarter. We're taking the costs upfront for any development work we're doing at the moment.
That may change, but we prefer to err on the cautious side of things. Thank you.
Right. We can maybe have a look at what we also launched today is the Proof of Reserves page. In response to the events around FTX, we've been quick to actually release this page. It's safello.com/proof-of-reserves where we transparently show our customer crypto funds. We have the exact balances there that are fetched in real time from Block Explorer. You can independently go to the links there in the page as well, and then we have a section beneath that just showing our group, like, holding structure as a reminder that, you know, we have a very clean and simple holding structure compared to some of the organizational charts that have been floating around from some of our competitors.
We hope to just again provide additional transparency to our end users in order to showcase again that we have, you know, we've nothing to hide, and we're here to move first in showing how we operate and what we have in holdings in this case in crypto. This is starting point. We might find ways to improve it, but hopefully this is appreciated by our end users as well as any stakeholder in the company. With that, I think we can move to our Q&A. Let's see. Question one. There's Mark. Hey, Mark. Good report. Redeye Mark. How have you streamlined your organization?
What kinds of project are still key areas, and what other projects were discarded or put on waiting shelf in the near to medium term? Actually, I think we haven't lost innovation capacity or speed there. We had a change on the leadership side on the engineering. It took a little bit of time to adjust the organization there. I think we have an even more streamlined organization there. We've also done a lot on how we manage projects to reach efficiency. There's no specific project we had to drop because of the cost. Yeah, I don't know what to say.
I don't really think we lost any speed. If anything, we're more nimble and more focused and with that are able to accelerate there where we need to accelerate. Johan, do you have any words of wisdom there?
No. I think it's more sort of small improvements in how we operate around things and trying to be more efficient.
Yeah. I think in a way we had a little bit too heavy of a management, so we cut costs particularly around the management, which meant that, you know, as a culture, our team has to be more self-reliant. We actually found that that works better in a way. Yeah. All of that from my point of view. We certainly didn't go bare bone is if that's the question on the resources. Yeah. Any other step you can make to lower the barriers for business institutions to use your service more seamlessly? I think if you look at Safello Business, that's our third iteration, so it's a continuous effort to improve that.
It's also in how we handle that from a customer perspective or, like, a support perspective, where we've made improvements in being fast with the onboarding and being quick to follow up. We've automated that process significantly. When it comes to institutions, yeah, we're working on a product that fits the institutional market better. This is which is different from what we were doing or we're looking to do with Avanza on API level. This is more towards a portal that people can have access to that fits the institutional use case. We're working on that, and I think once we go live with that, we will do a press release around that product. Are you planning on adding any new coins in 2023?
What speaks for and against? We are working on this, and it's continuous work as well to look at additional coins. I think the important part here is that, and we said that all along, is that we still see Safello as a gatekeeper for protecting our customers to a certain degree. We have been very conservative with what kind of currencies that we add. Now, always something can go wrong with cryptocurrencies that we add for reasons out of our control. So far we've been able to avoid kind of the obvious, the problematic cryptocurrencies.
Like, in this case, it would be FTT, and by extension Solana has taken a beating because FTX was holding a lot of Solana that they then were selling to the market to fill the liquidity gap that they had. I think we are extending our matrix to assess different cryptocurrencies that we support, so we have a framework by which we look at what cryptocurrencies we can support. Certainly we're not gonna stop adding additional crypto assets, because it's what our users demand. We're actively looking at adding additional cryptocurrencies, yes. Have you received questions following the FTX collapse from Swedish authorities and business partners? Not really. Like, I mean, yes, we have users reaching out and concerns.
I think there is going to be a roundtable with the regulator generally about talking about MiCA, but not specifically any questions relating to FTX as such. That might come. Dialogue might come, but we haven't really had any, you know, major concerns from our business partners. Yeah, obviously we're not affected. We made statements pretty quickly to showcase that we aren't affected. That may have contributed to that there've not been a lot of concern from the business partners that we have.
More the other way around that obviously we've done the inquiries to our business partners that we work with particularly on the liquidity side to make sure that they don't have the exposure that could hurt us. Luckily all of the liquidity provider that we work with have been explicit in that there's no exposure whatsoever. We feel pretty confident in the partners that we work with. Johan, anything to add on that one?
No, I think the Proof of Reserves also served to sort of mitigate those.
Yeah
Those questions.
Yeah. Nothing to add there. Do you have any other questions? No? Okay. I'm checking. One, two, three. No more questions. Okay, well, short and sweet then. Everybody can go to lunch early. Thanks for those tuning in. If you've any other questions, then you can find us on our Discord channel. We have a questions for management channel there as well, where we tend to respond within 24 hours if there's any concerns there. We're here to be accountable for anything we do with Safello, and you can always reach us. Thanks for tuning in, and until the next quarter.
Thank you.