Results related to HIVE's 2020 Annual General Meeting of shareholders. If we move to slide number two, I will briefly mention disclosure, which you can read in full after the presentation is over. Except for the statements of historical facts, this presentation contains forward-looking information within the meaning of the applicable Canadian securities legislation that is based on expectations, estimates, and assumptions as of the date of this presentation. If we move on to slide number three, I am pleased to welcome today's presenters, Frank Holmes, Interim Executive Chairman of HIVE, and Darcy Daubaras, Chief Financial Officer. As we begin the corporate presentation on slide number four, I would like to hand things over to Frank Holmes. Frank?
Thank you, Holly, thank you, everyone. I've just never seen in my life so many questions come in, Darcy. It's really quite remarkable. There's a concentration, you can see a clustering of questions that shareholders are inquiring about. I think we're going to try to answer all these questions. What I'd really like to start off with is, for those who were not able to make the AGM, is just for Darcy to give a recap of the positive news that came from the AGM. Darcy?
We held our AGM approximately two hours ago, as everybody knows with the COVID that we're experiencing, we had a lot of shareholders. We were very happy with the number of shareholders that voted electronically to keep everybody safe this year, I'm happy to announce that every one of the proposals that were put forward went through and were approved. All of the board members, we got re-sign off on our stock option plan, restricted unit plan, and also the auditors, Davidson & Company LLP, have been approved for another year. It was great. It was good to see the energy from the shareholders through their voting, that was a very exciting thing to see. Obviously, we're very happy with the mandate that we've been given going forward for the next year for those directors. We're looking forward to 2021.
As Frank has said, the number of questions that we're getting just shows how much energy there is around this sector right now. A lot of it has to do with the pricing, but I think it also has to do with HIVE as a company and how we've been a proxy for Ethereum in the past, and it's becoming even better moving forward.
I'll just add to that, Darcy. On December the 8th, The Motley Fool unexpectedly came up with this incredible bullish article on the industry, the ecosystem of crypto and blockchain mining, and they recommended HIVE as a proxy for those that do not want to open an account in an exchange and have a wallet and buy their own Bitcoins and Ethereum, that we're that proxy because we both hold an inventory, and we will sell enough coins to pay for our electrical bills and anything else we need. That really triggered off this sort of new surge of buying that we saw because of this sort of mining of Bitcoin and Ethereum, and we're the only one that really mine Ethereum on an industrial scale.
On the next visual, I just want to remind everyone that the DNA of volatility, it's a great opportunity for some, but for others, it's just too difficult to stomach. HIVE Digital Technologies' daily volatility can be plus ± 9%. That's how the data has been acting recently with big interest from institutions. They've said they've been buying Bitcoin. Predominantly, those institutions are going through the futures market, and that's the big part that was able to take Bitcoin through CAD 20,000, was predominantly a hedge fund, well-known, prominent, that started earlier this year buying. That volatility works both ways. It can go up 9%, it can fall 9%, and over a 10-day period recently, it's been surging and falling. There's these incredible corrections we're seeing. Compare it to the S&P 500, compare it to gold, you compare it to Bitcoin, and you compare it to gold stocks.
Clearly, we've taken on this new DNA of volatility as more people want to participate in the crypto business but do not want to go directly and buy a coin. I'm just going to go to the next visual to try to walk you through. This all started to take place just prior to the Bitcoin halving. To me, that was significant, it's interesting because Bitcoin really didn't move much, and there was like sort of, what's the word? Apathy towards the halving. I know from my experience of over 30 years in the gold mining industry, if you were to halve global supply of mining, gold would be over $20,000 also.
It would just explode when you have this embedded under growing demand, especially when you look at Asia and India and China and Southeast Asia, this proclivity to buying gold, which you're seeing with Bitcoin, has become a phenomenon that's global. So we had this, which to me was important, was a golden cross, and you can see where the 50-day went above the 200-day, and it hasn't looked back. Interestingly enough, this golden cross happened for gold a year earlier, and it's been going for a longer upcycle, but nothing like the movement that we're seeing in Bitcoin. In fact, I would say that Ethereum is lagging Bitcoin, and Ethereum could easily double, to put it in context, where Bitcoin and Ethereum peaked at the last surge in 2017.
The next visual is just highlighting the number of addresses holding greater than or equal to one Bitcoin share, and that's been growing. There's a great piece of research years ago on Metcalfe's Law that explains that as more people adopt to a system of supply which is shrinking, then you get these exponential moves on the upside. I think that's what we're witnessing. There's been so much positive news this year on the crypto space. The next visual is showing you the total Bitcoin options and open interests as they've been expanding, and this is part of the institutional and have come in there. A big thing that happened a couple of weeks ago was MassMutual Insurance, and they bought Bitcoin in cash, and they basically put in what they call a cold wallet. That also ignited of this industry.
The next visual is dear to my heart because I always get pulled in this debate, gold versus Bitcoin. I think that they're both unique alternative asset classes, and the drivers behind Bitcoin are similar as an alternative asset class as it is to a Picasso art to Andy Warhol. It's just the way you see that more people want to have a limited number of prints, the higher the price goes up for those prints or those original paintings. Gold's different. Gold you wear. You really don't wear your Bitcoin, and you need electricity to enjoy it, to be able to convert it to something that you could. Gold has many more applications besides being the fourth most liquid asset class in the world. I'm a big advocate that having both is just wise for that person that has a bigger appetite for risk.
This is another visual to try to put things in perspective of how Ethereum and Bitcoin have been sort of tracking for the past two months in this sort of huge move, and they're moving in tandem. The other part is just recognize that HIVE is moving in tandem by the hour. If Ethereum is up or Ethereum is down, HIVE Blockchain is moving exactly in tandem, and I've been told it's quant funds that have algorithms that trade off of it, and that also accelerates volume. This is another visual to give you a highlight when you look at the MSCI All Country World Index, how it's performed. Now, it's come back from the wipeout that took place in March, an April bottom, and it's now positive for the year, but nothing like Bitcoin.
It's just really quite remarkable, and the Bloomberg Galaxy Crypto Index, it too, is also far outpaced. This is what millennials are coming into, and this is a very important part we have found for our funds in the ETF space is millennials and price discovery. By going to these various websites where they can trade securities at no commission, they're also, for many of them, like the Robinhood and the Acorns, they can buy Bitcoin and Ethereum. What we're seeing is that this price discovery by millennials all of a sudden brings in bigger players. HIVE has been such a wonderful recipient of that, but there's some rational reasons behind it. This is giving you an idea of how we both perform the Galaxy Crypto Index, the S&P Composite Index, the Nasdaq Index. The Nasdaq's spectacular being up 42%, but nothing like HIVE has.
I think it's just the imagination of HIVE replacing a much bigger universe of buyers that want to participate, but they're reluctant to buy the Bitcoin and Ethereum directly. They're using HIVE as a proxy. That is why HIVE is positioned to maintain coins in inventory. We've traded them out when we've needed them on a quant model and for capital expansion. The next is we hit CAD 1 billion in market cap. We've seen that Riot has also done a phenomenal job this year in its growth. A lot of it has been able to, with their ATM, we call it at-market trading, been able to raise capital to be able to fund their future needs. What is interesting for us is that we've not used that mechanism as of yet.
We've used it with cash management, sort of an active treasury management that Darcy and the team have done a great job in managing. We've been able to, and we'll talk a little bit more, maintain where we've been growing. This is another visual of looking at how this year we've done as a stock, and there were so many doubters. This is not so much to boast to everybody, but really the issue is that we maintain our education to the shareholders of what the company was doing and what the landscape was. We talked about it over 18 months ago, what was called the crypto winter. We explained what our experiences were and how we were managing it.
I think what happened for a lot of the other crypto companies, they had other problems and/or their executives, they were not maintaining the rapport with the public. Bear market or bull market, we have consistently been giving quarterly updates and doing communication and educating how and what we're doing in this sort of very volatile crypto ecosystem. Since November, which I thought was interesting, basically Thanksgiving, when we announced around our GPU1 acquisition how we performed, and that ignited interest because I think we want to control our destiny. Darcy can tell you many stories that just having control of your destiny is just so important, not dealing with landlords that are greedy, landlords that try to take advantage because they're in the crypto business. That's why we've entered into a purchase agreement to buy GPU1 and to fulfill.
Part of the terms of that were to complete their campus. They ran low on capital to complete their facilities, and we made that commitment by issuing shares. Actually, a very modest amount of shares of the company, and more the investment was to complete it out for the 50 MW so we can complete our vision for the next 12 months. This is the other visual that's really simple. Ethereum has had a great move this year, but HIVE has participated more. A lot of people can't understand it, but I'm going to explain to you in the next visual what I think is a real key factor. In the world of quantamental research, of looking at stocks, and that is any stock where you can see revenue the last quarter is above the four-quarter average on a per-share basis.
When a company's issuing shares faster than they are growing their revenue, then it slows down their overall. The quants immediately indicate that, and they don't buy those stocks. What did HIVE do during the summer? It demonstrated to the public, as the first quarter where we were independent of Genesis Mining, we were able to show that our sales per share grew at 85%, and the EBITDA was up another massive amount, which was the number two best performing company. The company that's made the most press releases on expansion of equipment has been Riot. In fact, their sales were negative. This is according to FactSet using that database. Darcy, do you have any comments on that?
Yeah. It's definitely interesting to see how the market is reacting to some of those announcements for equipment. As we know within this industry, the availability of equipment coming out of China is getting very scarce. It's controlled by a couple people and you've got Riot making major commitments. From what I understand, the days of delivery are quite a ways out, but it's showing to the market that they're able to put a press release out and the market reacts to it. On the GPU.One side, I want to echo what Frank was saying, is that memorandum of understanding that we have with them to try to work out a deal. We're continuing to work on that, and that is very much being able to control our own destiny, as Frank had mentioned. To be able to talk directly with landlords, talk directly to the electricity providers.
A lot has changed at least, especially in the last two years since I've been with the company. When I started out, we were very much having to take what we were given. We didn't have a lot of power. Over the last two years, I think with the work that Frank and I have been able to achieve, we're getting more transparency and being able to control our own destiny, and that's been a great benefit to the company and to our shareholders. I'd much rather see the train coming with the transparency and be able to react to it than to be in the dark and have the train hit you right away.
This is Darcy and myself, also has been Tobias, a director, who's our concert violinist and tax lawyer that has been in this industry for, I think, over six years. He knows a lot of the issues, and he's been very critical for us in getting control of the assets in Sweden, Iceland, and controlling our own destiny away from the other strategic partner we had. On the next visual, it's shown up. This idea of communicating on a regular basis, good news or bad news, how you're managing sailing in the storms and the winds of the crypto space. We've continued to do that, and it shows up in liquidity. Darcy, why don't you sort of comment on these numbers? I think as you said, it's over CAD 2 billion have traded so far this year.
Yeah. To the end of December, we're always very excited about the amount of volume that we get on the venture exchange. We just did a quick evaluation, and at that time, at the beginning of December, we had traded over 1.5 billion shares on the TSX and the other associated exchanges within Canada, whether it's the NEO or some of those other alternative ones. When we take in the amount that's down on the OTCQX in the U.S. and our exchanges in Frankfurt and Berlin, it pushes us over 2 billion in trades worldwide.
The next visual is another sort of idea of looking at that volume that's been expanding and liquidity. It's not just here. You have these numbers up and from when Darcy commented the first time, I think it's 1.7 billion shares have traded. When we look at in Canada, another 420 million in the U.S., we're talking about a 400% increase from previous year. We've really not issued many shares during that time period, and we've demonstrated the growth in our revenue and earnings. I highly recommend that you go, if you haven't and you're a shareholder, is listen to the recap we gave on December 1st when we made the earnings announcement of the first true quarter that we were independent of the previous partners, the previous partner that was with the company. We've been able to give much more transparency to the shareholders.
With that, we've been able to re-look at the agreements we had at cost of electricity, cost of everything is down. I think we just negotiated 50% of Swedish energy at less than CAD 0.02, at CAD 0.016. That's the cheapest of all the crypto companies. Darcy, do you recall that?
Yeah. No, no, absolutely. Yes. Through 2021, we've locked in with our electricity provider, Vattenfall to hedge 50% of our electricity. This is something that we like to do and we did during calendar 2020, just to try to take the uncertainty out of the electricity because as we all know, the electricity is the largest single cost of production that we need in the data centers. If we can lock some of that stuff in, it assists us in budgeting and just to take away one of those extra variables in the business.
It's really important when you have these big downdrafts and corrections. In the beginning of this year, we had Ethereum surge to CAD 280 and then quickly fall back to CAD 125. Then do a nice steady march up after the halving took place, to over CAD 600. It's those downdrafts. I mentioned before, we apply our quant model. When these things were up two standard deviations, Ethereum was over 60 trading days, and over one year, we would take profits to be able to expand. Then we would mine. When it went back to CAD 125, we said, "Okay, well, let's just keep mining and rebuild our inventory position to get us back up to a satisfactory level." We never know when we're going to need those coins for, something is going to expand.
It was fortuitous that we did that after the correction took place. Here is an important part in visual. The next one is showing you that HIVE reported September 30th, record Ethereum mining production driven by DeFi demand. It was an unprecedented DeFi demand. The next visual is basically saying, the Ethereum miners generated all-time high fees in that second quarter of CAD 17 million. For this quarter, it's less. It has impacted us, the sheer number of benefits we've got from it. I think approximately from Ethereum mined by blockchain, I'm rounding these numbers off. Just please, they're not exact numbers. Darcy can probably highlight and comment on the change in the numbers.
Yeah, as we've had announced and talked about in Q2 of fiscal 2021, the one that we got there at 32,000 Ethereum mined and received. There was a huge push and a huge jump in DeFi during that period. As a result, there was a lot of demand, and the transaction fees went up astronomically during that quarter. When we get our rewards, part of it is, I'll call it the base Ethereum, and the other part is driven by the transaction fees we get. There were times where on a daily basis 40% of the fees you're receiving were attributable to transaction fees. That's dropped off quite a bit, as you can see in the third quarter year to date, down around 20,000. That's just because it's fallen off a bit. The DeFi is still there. We're still getting pieces of that.
It's just not as robust and hasn't exploded as much as we had some of those peaks as we had in September of 2020.
The other thing is just to bear in mind is that during this period, because the fees were so high, a lot of people started jumping in on trading and mining Ethereum. You can see the difficulty rate rose in this past quarter by 22%. That means just more people trying to get the sort of fixed number of coins being mined, just makes it more difficult. We think that this is going to drop off here going into the first quarter of 2021, with what's called a DAG file. That is, the memory chips are going to need eight gigabyte memory chips. We're going to talk a little bit more about that which we think is going to drop off dramatically. On a positive note for Ethereum coming off to that degree our Bitcoin mining has been improving for a couple of reasons.
We mentioned previously that Lachute was a slow go. We bought that during COVID, which has made it very difficult. Now even buying GPU.One, the challenges when you can't even go across provincial lines and that they stopped the flying over to Europe out of Canada it's made this difficult. We're still pursuing and going through the data. The expansion we anticipate from Lachute, the halving impacted all the S9s we had. As you can see, the June 30 quarter we had none. For the March 20 quarter. We exploded up to 153, and then the halving took place. That impacted our older chips, the S9s, and we sold so many of them, and we kept on stream ready to go. We turned on the electricity running through them, and we kept them on the shelves.
We made an acquisition, which we announced. Darcy, can you comment about that? We expect to be a record Bitcoin production this year.
Absolutely Frank, when we acquired the Lachute facility in Quebec in early April, we had about a month and a half. Half of that first quarter that you see of the 153, we were running S9s very consistently leading up to that happening because we all knew that there was going to be some issues after that. Continuously through there, we made some capital investments as part of our expansion to put some new generation miners in there. When we did hit that mid-May on [halving], we unplugged a lot of those S9s because they weren't profitable. On the back end of that first quarter, we were running without the S9s, and then through most of the second quarter that we see there with the 88, that's that effect of the halving because of that, the S9s weren't profitable, so we weren't running them.
We had a lower number of machines running, but they were the new generation miners that are much more efficient and can make money at the prices that they were running at, which was around, I think they averaged around CAD 340 off the top of my head for that quarter. As we've seen, we've seen a huge or sorry, I was thinking of Ethereum there. They were down. As we've all seen, there's been a huge spike in the price of Bitcoin. We've plugged those S9s in that we had remaining, tried to get them all running on their three cards, and we're seeing that right now up until yesterday, 140 coins. We expect that to be around 160 by the end of the year. We still are very bullish on where we think that Bitcoin is going just internally.
We're managing the sale of those coins. We're being fairly conservative and we're actually when we're needing to sell coins to pay for our operating, a lot of that is coming from the Sweden Ethereum side. Just following up a little bit on what Frank was talking about in terms of Ethereum and that decrease that we did see and that we are experiencing this quarter. I know Frank is going to touch on it a little bit, but that DAG file issue is a huge impact on our GPU miners. Throughout the third quarter, we've been spending a lot of money upgrading those rigs. The vast majority of them had four gigabyte cards, and that was sort of the line where these DAG files were coming out. The chips have a harder time to manage a DAG file that size.
They don't drop off a cliff and become completely useless, but their profitability drops. We're experiencing that right now. We've been going through a very aggressive replacement program there, putting in eight gigabyte cards, and we're well on our way, and we've got a great system set up to be able to replace those fairly quickly over the next little while. Part of that is what we're experiencing there with the lower, but with these 8 GB cards, we're trying to mitigate that as much as we can moving forward.
To further just complement what Darcy was sharing with you is that we look at our Bitcoin, we're over 300 petahash now, and our vision, and we've mentioned this before, is to get to 1,000 petahash this time next year. The GPU.One opportunity would allow us to fast track the build-out of that to have that footprint. We're also looking at opportunities here in the U.S., in Texas. I think it's interesting how it's evolving and it's inexpensive electricity here, and it's always green energy. That's all we'll focus on. We think that this time next year, our goal is that we'll get this up to 1,000 petahash.
Coming back to Ethereum, what I mentioned earlier is that during the quarter, many people with 4 GB memory cards jumped on the bandwagon after the Ethereum fees came out, and now they're going to have to leave. We think that we're going to see the difficulty in our speculation is going to decline over the next quarter as we ramp up our 8 GB. Just to give you an idea, we're a major force in that end of it, having 107,000 GPU cards in Sweden. That's like 13,400 rigs. We have to take these from what's called an RX 470 chip and upgrade to an RX 580. We have been moving chips as they come in, move them back to China. We get back a credit for them.
It's a rotation that was running 4,000 cards a week, I think it's up to 10,000 cards a week so that we can get to the sort of 80% of the way there by the end of January. We've ordered almost 100% of the cards. I think it's over like 90% or so that number so far. It's just in process of being improved, the memory chips and then coming back and installing them. In Iceland, we basically had RX 380s, and they were replaced in, I think it's what, 3,800 rigs. As Darcy said.
That's correct, yep.
we spent a lot of money of our cash, and we sold some of Ethereum at these price levels to help pay and accelerate so that we wouldn't be caught behind this DAG file challenge. Any additional comments there, Darcy?
No, I think it's been a, I'll say a challenging quarter for the spend. As I call myself the guy with the calculator that's taking a look at the forecasting and the budgeting. It's necessary capital investment that we need to spend, and it gets a little bit nervous because of COVID and everything else going on. You run into challenges where the factory might be able to put everything together, but now you've got shipping. My fingers are crossed that worldwide, that this pandemic can get under control and shipping can become a little bit back to normal. The other thing that we run into that's a bit of a risk, and it is every year for any miner getting stuff out of China, is the timing of Chinese New Year, which I believe was scheduled for sometime in February.
There's been reports that they might move it up. I'm hoping that with the work that we've done and the investments, that we can get as much as we can in before that Chinese New Year shutdown happens, and get up to that 90% level so that we can keep mining and take advantage of this bull run that we're having with the Ethereum pricing.
I think coming on the next visual is to show you that the enthusiasm as crypto prices are rising, not only does HIVE then benefit from the enthusiasm, but the ecosystem of coders. There's something like 30,000 in the ecosystem around the world, and this has been growing this year which is positive because a lot of places are losing jobs. The interest in mining or new DeFi projects where you convert your Ethereum into a securities lending Ethereum, and you're going to get Ethereum yields. It's really interesting to me because what I've seen is that the supply of Ethereum is being soaked up with many of these new decentralized finance mechanisms to generate yields.
We have Ethereum 2.0, so the trend running parallel with proof of work and proof of stake, and this proof of stake is that you have to contribute your Ethereum, which you'll get a yield on, and basically that supply is gone. I think the numbers we're adding up close to 5% of the Ethereum supply this year has gone. That's sort of a very bullish tone for the industry. As Ethereum, I think will be a key growth sector next year. Most often they use Ethereum as a backbone for these DeFi ideas, these concepts, et cetera. That just creates a demand for us. I think that last time, as I said, Ethereum hit 1,500 when Bitcoin hit 19,000.
Ethereum is way behind, and we're in a very advantageous position as we fast-tracked our build-out over the next month to six weeks. Our next visual just showing the industry, just not only people coming back into it, but the spending. Blockchain spending is anticipated to grow. As more people spend time and money and effort on it just helps the overall ecosystem and the digitizing of money. More countries are looking at it. The Bank for International Settlements has talked about it. There's so many white papers about the idea of digital money, and we're in this sort of big groundswell within it, and HIVE is there mining Bitcoin and Ethereum.
Not only with that, we have a very strict policy of being green energy only, the electrification will be seen in Sweden with our software being able to slow down or accelerate the use of our electricity during peak periods. The government is turning around and participating with that, we get paid. We slow down, we're mining less Ethereum for an hour, we're going to get compensated for it. It really helps the community, it helps the overall infrastructure, capital spending for power lines, et cetera. We're very excited about seeing this, how it's going to grow. We have people looking at the Lachute facility, new landlords, they're looking at taking the heat from our thousands of, think of hairdryers. Having 10,000 hairdryers blowing at the same time, that's a lot of heat giving off.
That heat is now to heat a building in the snow and the cold. These are the positive parts that we see that are very unique for our business model, to have an ESG footprint. We mentioned earlier that Lachute, it's been a slow build-out due to COVID. We're seeing, like I mentioned earlier regarding Darcy said about China, we're seeing that moving people from Croatia to Iceland to Sweden, along with getting equipment on a timely basis. It's just ongoing as we navigate through COVID. We're just not stopping. We just may get slowed down, but we're not stopping and to upgrade our facilities and to expand our facilities. Our goal is in this next year is not only to get 1,000 petahash for Bitcoin mining, but it's also to build out our facilities in Sweden and Iceland.
When you take a look at Sweden, it has the capacity for us in our leases that add something like 13 MW. We have that ability. If the electricity is cheap enough, well, that would be another 10,000 rigs and 80,000 cards. We have to plan that, and I'm really happy to share with you that we've done that all internally. We have not taken on expensive bank debt. We've not taken on expensive loans. We've negotiated, tried to look at it, to do it, etc . So far, we have managed our growth internally so far. It doesn't preclude us from putting on, if that's some type of a debt, but we have found it's been cheaper to manage the volatility.
Like I said earlier, when Ethereum has these huge explosions on the upside, we'll take profits off the table to help our expansion. These are some of the visuals for 2020 where HIVE's opportunity is the data center campus in New Brunswick, Canada, giving the company access to an additional 50 MW of low-cost green energy. The biggest headwind we hear all the time is Ethereum 2.0. We think it's three years out. We think there's lots of opportunity. We think the supply side. Just like we're seeing in copper hitting an eight-year high. Well, why is that? During a global slowdown. Copper going up. Why? Because supply is shrinking. Having a Bitcoin along with Ethereum's DeFi and Ethereum 2.0, they're taking supply out of the system. I think that there's much more upside.
We'll take a look at, I've been asked so many questions about going into putting up or doing your own node and posting some of your own coins to earn an income. Right now, it's much more profitable for us to mine the coins and sell them if we want to get income. Darcy, we got lots of questions.
Yeah. I now would like to open it up to questions. As Frank mentioned, a lot have already come in, and as a reminder, you can enter any questions in the control panel on your screen, and if we don't get to you today, we will be following up. The first question I have for Frank and Darcy is, after you mine the Ethereum and the Bitcoin, do you immediately sell it in the open market?
Well, no.
No. Not necessarily.
That's right.
What we do is once we mine it goes into our cold wallets. A lot of them are held off-chain with Bank Frick, and also we're moving over to a company called Fireblocks. What we do is we mine just enough to pay for our operating expenses and try to inventory the rest of it. In times like now, when we have high crypto prices, we don't have to sell as many coins to cover our operating costs. We're really lucky that there was a period there where we're really building up our Ethereum and Bitcoin reserves so that when the prices tanked, for lack of a better word, we had that inventory to do things like we've gone through this quarter, is to fund the upgrade of our GPU chips within Sweden.
Okay. Thank you for that. Another question says, does HIVE's current expansion plan include building the Kolos project?
That's interesting. For the shareholders who are not aware, we spent money early on this expansion in the Nordic countries, and that was a big air ball. Because just as we bought this land, the government politicians were anti-crypto. They increased the taxes. They made the investment just commercially untenable. You just could not make money with it. Just recently, they changed those terms. They now want to have Bitcoin miners to come back to the country because they have a surplus of electricity. Inexpensive green energy, hydro energy. They built dams all through the fjords, all through Norway. We will explore that. We kept it on our balance sheet, and we still look to resolve that. Right now is for us is to focus on the opportunities in Sweden, which we have an existing intellectual group. We help with the Boden industry.
They have a complex, they have a university program for training encoders and gamers. Boden used to be the military center for the Swedes at the back against the Russians. It was the important NATO site. It's now basically for a technology center and inexpensive electricity. You have a complete ecosystem there. We have Facebook has the data centers there, and other major users of data centers are in that area. The opportunity in Norway will go as a back burner, and then we have for Iceland. We have opportunities to expand in Iceland, our Ethereum footprint. It's just massive what the opportunity is for us in New Brunswick and in Quebec. Darcy, would you agree with that?
It's definitely been a challenging situation there, it's sort of been a, I guess, a bit of a holding pattern. The great thing is just the focusing on those facilities that we've already got in place and being a part of the community there in Boden is really important to us because it's been our flagship, at least since the company started.
Okay.
Great.
Another one says, approximately how many Bitcoin will 1,000 petahash produce on an annual basis?
Well, that's going to depend on the difficulty. That's going to be a big factor.
Yeah.
If you think today, we have approximately, I'm just giving round numbers, not exact, but approximately 300 petahash, and that's generating two and a half coins a day. Darcy, roughly, ballpark?
Yeah. It's so volatile, as you say, Frank, with the difficulty from day to day, but yes, it's around two and a half a day.
Taking that up to 3.3, that would take it up to about eight coins a day.
Okay.
Based on the difficulty today, it's really important to recognize that as more people come into mine, it's a fixed number of coins. It's like a piece of cake. There are 60 people going to enjoy the cake. Another 60. Guess what? There's less there to share.
Sure.
The only way to crowd out those other hungry eaters is to have a faster chip. What we see is the difficulty, the delays. There's a real technology problem in Asia of getting not just memory chips, but just overall chips that are going to Bitmain and going to the other manufacturers, then selling into this space. I've been told that there's been a big demand by telecom companies around the world for DRAM, and if you look at NVIDIA chips they've picked up, and a lot of that has to do with the growth for 5G. 5G is very important for us. You can see the entertainment business. Disney's announced it, Warner Bros.. Everyone's going to streaming. They're trying to go B2C from not B2B, but that Disney's not going to movie theaters, they're going basically trying to get to you directly.
Warner Bros. doing the same part, and that's all because of the growth in 5G is going to allow that, and so you need to have better memory chips. This has put a stress on the deliverables. Today, there was a story that Bitmain, a dispute between the two owners of the company was supposed to be settled for hundreds of millions of CAD. Who knows. All I know is it's not just the issues of Bitmain. It's the issue of getting a good quality technology and equipment. We know that we went to buy some of the stuff, Darcy, you remember, we didn't get delivered. We still are owed some S19s that were ordered in the summer. Weren't they in June?
Yeah. No, we put an order in with Bitmain through a broker for about 12 petahash, and we still haven't received our full petahash allotment. Bitmain has still got some challenges in their delivery. I guess part of the arguments from what I've heard is Bitmain sort of goes, "Well, we sent you something. You should be happy." It's like, well, no, we purchased not necessarily a number of miners, but I purchased a certain amount of petahash of miners, and we're still working with the broker, and he's working with Bitmain to try to get resolutions for it. Right now, I'm not holding my breath completely. I'm glad it was a small order and not a multimillion-dollar order with Bitmain.
Just think, you shell out for a brand-new car, and it's supposed to deliver it next week, and it's not delivered for 3 months, and then you get a notice, no, it's six months. You can see the orders now that people are making press releases on. It's not going to come for a while. I think that some of the aggressive data centers, like Core Scientific, have used their balance sheet and gone and purchased big orders. If you want to get those machines, then you have to use their data centers. Those data centers are expensive. As a miner like ourselves, a lot of your margin gets evaporated away. We're very focused on looking for opportunities, which we've been able to do, and building out Lachute.
Darcy, just recently we bought 1,000 machines. As opportunities pop up, you have to have the cash in your balance sheet to be able to do them when they come. That's what we will continue to do.
Great. Thank you. I believe you discussed this question in the last webcast, but several people are asking again. It says: What is the outlook for HIVE listing on a U.S. stock exchange such as Nasdaq?
Well, it's a great question. NASDAQ will provide you with more visibility and et cetera. It's unprecedented. We trade a half a billion shares in the OTC. It's pretty liquid. We're exploring all these various exchanges. Of greater interest is to get listed somewhere in Asia so that we can get this long-term vision of trading 24/7 around the world. We can't turn around and say we're going to go list on the exchange because that's promissory, and the regulatory world exchanges do not like promissory statements like that. We have a vision. We said to get to 1,000 petahash next year and to be listed where we can trade globally.
Great. We have time for a couple more questions. This one says: How does HIVE plan to handle Ethereum 2.0 and its reduced mining profitability? Will there be a heavier focus on Bitcoin mining going forward?
As I mentioned earlier, I don't think it's for a while that's going to happen. I think that you're going to see margins expand after this next quarter. When most of the world has been mining on four-gigabyte memory chips, if they don't have the money and they haven't upgraded to eight, they're going to no longer be profitable, and we'll be quite profitable. We think that it's a big CapEx.
Okay. Lastly, maybe both of you can comment on this. What is the ultimate goal of HIVE's management, and where do you envision the company in the next five years?
Wow.
Five years.
Well, I think-
I've seen-
One year.
Yeah, I've seen the evolution of the company in the last two years, and it's gone just leaps and bounds. Five years, I think, is a bit of a stretch, at least in my mind. I think from my standpoint is for HIVE to continue to expand in the Ethereum side. I know Ethereum 2.0 is out there, but we feel that there's going to continue to be some demand for that for the coming years. It's not something that's going to fall off the cliff. Also as we've been working with our acquisition in April of Lachute, is to expand and diversify with our Bitcoin mining. That's a big thing to have some diversification in. We've got some opportunities in Sweden. There's other data centers that potentially could be available, and I know we've got some expansion in the current hangar we've got.
I think the next thing would be looking at more high-performance computing. That's sort of the next thing for these GPU chips after we get past the Ethereum side, is what are the other opportunities, whether it's gaming or providing stuff for Disney or whatever, Warner Bros., whatever the companies might be, to provide that back end. We need different miners, higher capacity. Those are the kind of things that we're looking at into the future in terms of how do we make sure that we Recession-proof is the wrong word, but what's the next thing? 2.0 will happen. We think it's still going to be a couple of years, but we've got to make sure we position ourselves for that next step.
As HIVE has been the largest publicly traded Ethereum miner, to have that as our backbone and also expanding into Bitcoin, we got to make sure that we're continuing to keep our eyes open, not put on the blinders, and look at the expansions that we can do. Frank?
I think that in five years from now, if you were to follow through on some of these forecasts for Bitcoin, where it'll be and what we've done, we could be CAD 10 billion. We can move up tenfold in a year. We can move up tenfold in five years. That would be predicated on the growth in Bitcoin pricing and Ethereum, and the growth in DeFi. We're going to take a greater interest in DeFi. We made one small investment. We're going to look at that space as it grows, and we think that it could easily be that. That's the real. It's hard for me to say that, but if Bitcoin can go to CAD 100,000 a coin, then just think of that as a fivefold increase from where it is today, approximately. Why can't we go for up to CAD 5 billion then?
You're making a forecast on the price of the commodity or the currency when you think of that. I honestly feel that this company could be CAD 10 billion, and I honestly feel that HIVE's brand is just so well known as the go-to stock. If you haven't read The Motley Fool's article, I just think it gets it down to very simplistic terms that we mine coins and we sell and we save. We sell when we need to expand or upgrade, but we always want to make sure that we're putting coins net in our balance sheet as at play. I remain bullish from that end. Internal cash flow, we've been able to manage so far. We may tap the capital markets, but we do not want to take on any of this funky, expensive debt.
We've explored it, we've been through it, and it ends up being not only expensive debt, it's an expensive, time-consuming process Darcy can tell you about. You just have no idea that going back and forth, the negotiations, et cetera, and you just scratch your head and you say, "Look, how do I get the capital? What can I do internally to expand into Bitcoin and Ethereum, that footprint?" as we go further down with software next year to improve our software skill set, its ability to much more quickly move between Ethereum Classic, we did that for a while. We sold that, the margins got high. We used those proceeds to buy more chips, so we will be able to move using software. I think that's what a wrap, Holly and Darcy. Do you have any final notes, Darcy, to comment on?
No. No, I don't. I came in two years ago, and markets didn't look too nice, and I started coming in at the bottom. I think, putting that aside, what we've been able to achieve over the last two years of taking control of our destiny, reducing costs everywhere we can, and it set us up for where we are today, where even though cryptocurrency prices are a lot higher than they were two years ago, we've got the stability and try to be the lowest cost provider, lowest cost company, so that when we do have to go through the doldrums and lower prices, we've got the correct cost structure to make it through those challenging times.
Right. Good. Thank you, everyone.
All right. This concludes today's webcast. Thank you, everyone, for tuning in, and merry Christmas.