Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Good afternoon, and welcome to the DMG Blockchain Solutions Q2 2023 update conference call. My name is Jules Abraham from CORE IR, the company's investor relations firm. Participants of this call are advised that the audio of this conference call is being broadcast live over the internet and is also being recorded for playback purposes. A website replay of the call will be available on the company's website. Joining us today from DMG Blockchain Solutions is Sheldon Bennett, the company's Chief Executive Officer, and Steven Eliscu, Chief Operating Officer. During this call, management will be making forward-looking statements, including statements that address DMG Blockchain Solutions' expectations for future performance or operational results. Forward-looking statements involve risks and other factors that may cause actual results to differ materially from those statements.
For more information about these risks, please refer to the risk factors described in DMG Blockchain Solutions' most recently filed periodic reports and the company's recent press releases, particularly the cautionary statements within. The content of this call contains time-sensitive information that is accurate only as of today, May 31st, 2023. Except as required by law, DMG Blockchain Solutions disclaims any obligation to publicly update or revise any information to reflect events or circumstances that occur after this call. It's now my pleasure to turn the call over to Sheldon and Steven. Gentlemen.
Thanks, Jules, thanks to everyone today who has joined the call. We have a lot to get through, including a large number of questions that have been submitted, which we will answer at the end of our presentation. As per our last quarters, I would like to start with a highlight of our recent achievements. On software, we realized our first Petra-based revenue for placing ordinals in the March quarter. Our initial revenue was small, as we placed a few high-profile large ordinals, we are building the foundational technology for this revenue to grow. We stated in our MD&A that we have built a new version of our Breeze Wallet for ordinals, which we call Multi-Breeze. We're applying this branding to a project we disclosed in April, where we performed the inscription of a large ordinal collection called Bitnips, with per ordinal rights transfer.
This is the Holy Grail for artists, inscribing in a carbon neutral manner, a collection sequentially within a block, and enabling the artist to transfer each ordinal individually as the content is sold. We also stated in our MD&A that we are exploring other revenue opportunities related to ordinal inscriptions based on the type of Satoshi, mainly creating an inventory of uncommon sats, which is the first Satoshi in a block. These and other sats, which may be valuable to collectors, could expand DMG's revenue opportunity with respect to ordinal inscriptions. We may be able to sell these collectible sats either individually or in combination with ordinals inscribed through Terra Pool. We've also increased our marketing of Terra Pool on a full pay-per-share, or FPPS, basis, which is currently the industry's preferred method of compensating pool participants.
On mining, DMG has realized a hash rate of 0.89 EH and mined 255.8 BTC. We also announced that we purchased 350 Bitmain S19 Pros, 350 Bitmain S19 XPs, and 850 Bitmain S19j Pro+, which totals an additional 1,550 units, contributing 188 PH. The 350 Bitmain S Pros were a spot deal and have already been delivered and arrived. The remaining miners will be added in the coming months to DMG's Christina Lake data center. The company is discussing further purchases with Bitmain and other suppliers. We are particularly interested in new offerings of immersion technology-specific miners, and are considering this for future direction in mining.
As we disclosed, we purchased the first set of long lead equipment that could provide up to 12 MW of immersion cooling capacity. Our goal is unchanged with respect to immersion, to cost effectively leverage the technology to enable increased capital efficiency and deploy it with miners that will have a long, useful life, especially as the Bitcoin halving, where 3.215 BTC will be the block subsidy amount instead of the current 6.25, is approximately 11 months away. We also announced that we have entered into a non-binding agreement that will result in development of a new data center site with access to low-cost, reliable, renewable energy located in Canada and a province outside of British Columbia. We have begun the project planning process and may be able to disclose more details this summer based on project reaching some key initial milestones.
Our overall goal is to ensure DMG has access to sufficient amounts of competitively priced power for years to come. Now, a review of our strategy. First, Core+, our software. With respect to our larger strategy to develop software to monetize Bitcoin transactions, what we call Core+, we're encouraged by recent market developments. With nearly 10 million Ordinal inscriptions to date and over $40 million of related on-chain transaction fees, the Ordinals market has clearly established itself. Even as fees have significantly subsided from their recent peak, we believe 2023 represents an important milestone for the blockchain ecosystem, whereby the utility of the blockchain has significantly increased in a way that has been talked about for the last decade, and is now only being realized.
While some traditionalists may discount the value of placing art and other content on a blockchain that was intended to be the basis for a new decentralized financial system, free from control by central authorities, we are agnostic on these Bitcoin culture wars, and believe anything that increases the utility of the blockchain is good for the ecosystem. New blockchain utility ultimately should result in sustained higher fees, which supports our business model. As DMG's strategy is focused on monetizing Bitcoin transactions, we believe we are well positioned to capitalize on this new opportunity that may be looked upon years from now as an inflection point for the industry. As a reminder, our key objectives for Core+ remain. One, grow our terahash rate with a long-term goal of reaching 10% of the network share.
Two, actively transact Bitcoin in a carbon neutral manner for Terra Pool using our Petra technology, lastly, to create a carbon neutral BTC marketplace. In the near term, Ordinals has risen as a short-term catalyst for Petra, and our goal is to build upon initial success, even as we are continuing to work towards our long-term goal of enabling carbon neutral transactions for financial institutions. We believe achieving these goals will enable us to grow our Core+ revenue to be significantly larger in the long term. For DMG's core mining strategy, we have completed installation of our initial 1 EH of capacity and have disclosed purchasing of an additional 180 PH, and 40 MW of containers, which will exhaust our accumulated credits with Bitmain.
Going forward, for our next exahash of capacity, we intend to focus on deploying immersion cooling technology in a way that should enable greater capacity, efficiency versus air-cooled mining. Sorry, capital efficiency versus air-cooled mining. We will provide updates as we get closer towards our initial deployment. Even as we are focused on developing our Core+ strategy, we remain committed to growing our hash rate in the most capital-efficient way possible, as mining remains a foundational technology for everything else we do. I'll now hand over to Steven to review the company's performance.
Thank you, Sheldon. I'm Steven Eliscu, DMG's COO. A few words about the company's overall position. We are encouraged that our cash plus crypto balance nearly doubled sequentially, which is giving us more room to spend on capital equipment, so we can more rapidly deploy our recently purchased containers at our Christina Lake facility, as well as purchase the longest lead time items for our immersion cooling deployment. We expect to deploy immersion cooling technology in 12-MW tranches in our building, which can accommodate three tranches, each of which will provide 0.5 EH of mining based on current technology. We have not decided if we will deploy solely with new generation immersion miners, or some combination of existing equipment retrofitted to work in immersion and new equipment. Outside of new miner purchases, we do not expect significant CapEx in the near term.
When we decide to purchase immersion-specific miners, we do not expect the nameplate capital cost per hash to be materially different versus air-cooled miners. While Sheldon referenced that we have a non-binding agreement to develop a new data center site in Canada outside of British Columbia, it is too early to provide CapEx guidance on development of that site. While we're still being very cautious regarding spending, we will be hiring more developers for our Core+ business, as we see significant business opportunity that will require more resources. As discussed last quarter, we have been devoting resources mainly to our underlying software infrastructure. We're now transitioning from that to expand our capabilities to ensure we can properly support substantially more Terra Pool members, Ordinals clients, as well as financial institutions.
Finally, we continue to search for reasonable cost sources of debt to accelerate our hash rate growth plans. We are in active discussions with debt providers. Regarding revenue, in our March quarter, our revenue increased 6% sequentially to CAD 7.6 million, from CAD 7.2 million in the prior quarter. Our self-mining revenue increased 17% to CAD 7.8 million, from CAD 6.7 million on a 26% increase on the average price of Bitcoin from recognized revenue, which was partly offset by a 7% decline in mined Bitcoin to 255.8 BTC, driven by a 13% lower network production of BTC per exahash. You will also note in our financial disclosures, a new line in our revenue breakout called net pool revenue, which was - CAD 0.7 million.
This is the result of Terra Pool members selling hash rate to Terra Pool, and being paid according to the full pay per share or FPPS payout formula. Which was an amount greater than the amount of Bitcoin that Terra Pool actually mined in the March quarter. As we discussed in our financial disclosures, we expect this net pool revenue line results to be either positive or negative, depending on the quarter, with the resulting fluctuations to sum to zero over time. As Terra Pool's hash rate increases, we would expect the volatility of net pool revenue to decline over time as well. On margins, our margin on our revenue, less operating and maintenance costs, was 40% in the March quarter, up from 39% the prior quarter. Excluding net pool, the net pool revenue line, it was 45%.
As a proxy for cash flow from our business, assuming we're selling about 100% of our generated Bitcoin, our earnings before other items, excluding depreciation, amortization, and share-based comp, was CAD 1.7 million, or 22% on a percentage basis in the March quarter. It's up from CAD 1.3 million and 18% in the prior quarter. On our earnings before other items, what that was -CAD 4.6 million in the March quarter. This is a smaller versus -CAD 5.3 million in the prior quarter. Expenses, excluding depreciation, amortization, and share-based comp, decreased to CAD 1.3 million from CAD 1.4 million, as non-mining cash expenses remain relatively steady. Depreciation decreased 4% to CAD 5.9 million. Future changes in depreciation will depend on the rate of capital equipment additions.
Our net income loss narrowed to CAD 3.8 million, which is an improvement from the CAD 5.6 million loss in the prior quarter. Favorable Bitcoin pricing trends have provided a tailwind both for mining revenue, as well as the realized digital currency gain losses that show up below the operating income line. On our balance sheet, our cash plus digital currency holdings increased 98% sequentially to CAD 21.7 million, from CAD 10.9 million in the prior quarter, as the value of our Bitcoin held increased 65%. This asset increase was partly offset by a decrease in our property and equipment and long-term deposits to CAD 61.5 million, from CAD 66.9 million in the prior quarter, as our depreciation exceeded the amount of new equipment deployed.
Our total asset base increased 2% to CAD 94.3 million from CAD 92.1 million. Regarding our mined BTC, in the March quarter, we mined nearly 256 BTC, a 7% decrease sequentially, as a realized hash rate of 0.89 EH was incrementally up from the prior quarter, this was more than offset by a 13% decrease in the network BTCs per exahash. In the current quarter, we expect a modest decline in hash rate due to unseasonably warm temperatures, as a heat dome took hold in the Pacific Northwest. We have brought in additional cooling infrastructure to mitigate the ongoing warm temperatures for the remainder of the summer, we still expect challenges.
In the March quarter, DMG sold nearly 249 BTC, generating CAD 7 million of cash, an average price of CAD 28,270. Thus, DMG sold 97% of the Bitcoin amount it mined, versus the prior quarter of selling 60% of the Bitcoin it mined. Our hosting revenue declined 21% sequentially in the March quarter to CAD 0.4 million. We expect hosting revenue to remain near prior quarter levels, at least for the near term. As discussed above, we're looking for opportunities to raise debt to help us accelerate our immersion cooling build-out for our first 12 MW. I will now hand the call back to Sheldon to summarize our prepared comments and answer questions submitted prior to the call. Sheldon, you're muted.
Thank you, Steven, for unmuting me. As Steven described, the company is focused on tightly managing expenses and generating cash while still investing for future growth. DMG mined 256 BTC in Q2, down 7% from the prior quarter, which was more than offset by 26% higher Bitcoin price. In the near term, with our 1 EH installed and new miner orders on their way, yet not delivered, we should have in place 1.2 EH of installed mining capacity. Beyond that, we expect deployment of immersion cooling capacity to enable us to reach our 2 EH long-term goal. As a proxy for cash flow from our business, our earnings before other items, excluding depreciation, amortization, and share-based comp, was CAD 1.7 million, or 22% margin.
Our cash BTC on hand at the end of the quarter was CAD 21.7 million, nearly doubling sequentially, with total assets of CAD 94.3 million. We are pleased that we have made progress, know that Bitcoin mining and software development are both challenging to do well. We know where we want to go, we're solely focused on execution. Now, as I introduced at the beginning, we have a long list of questions that came in for our Q&A, I will read out the questions and answer them. I'll defer a few of them to Steven may make a few comments along the way. Our first question is a timely question. I read that Foundry USA Pool is now charging fees. Do you see this benefiting Terra Pool?
Yes, of course, we see an increased receptiveness towards Terra Pool now. We're encouraged so far by the conversations we've had with like-minded carbon-neutral miners. We believe that the fact that Terra Pool is now charging fees versus a no-fee pool is allowing people that are fee-conscious and carbon neutral to make the switch over to Terra Pool. Next question. Software revenue has been very low this year. How are you going to turn this number around? Okay. Our focus is on bolstering our Core+ strategy with increased Terra Pool share and hence pool fees, as well as capturing as much of the Ordinals business as we can. We're finding that customers want Ordinals to be inscribed using a carbon neutral pool and carbon neutral energy, although they may not understand all the mechanics of how this works.
Our prior year numbers were listed by licensing deal with a particular customer, which we're no longer recognizing on our books, as we do not expect recurring revenue from that deal. We'll have a bit of a low in our software revenue. However, with the bolstering of Ordinals revenue and the signing of new agreements to bring on more Ordinals, we believe that we can turn this number around in the next few quarters. Next question. I have heard in the past that DMG is trying to enable carbon neutral transactions with financial institutions. Is this progressing or not? Great question, the answer is yes. Originally, we were working with a couple of financial institutions to kick off our software called Petra. Petra is now reliably operating on the mainnet, continuously placing transactions.
It's placing Ordinals transactions, as that's the most demand we have. We do see this as a long-term opportunity, working with financial institutions to place their transactions in a carbon neutral way, especially as European regulation is moving in a direction to reduce carbon emissions associated with use of cryptocurrency. We expect financial institutions to perform extensive testing of our platform, and we see this as a long-term opportunity, which will have perhaps little impact in the current quarter or two, finishing this financial year, but we see it uplifting in the next financial year. Steven hasn't jumped in yet, I'll keep going. Discuss DMG's relationship with NFT minters and the opportunity that presents the company going forward. DMG, we've currently placed many high-profile Ordinals or NFTs on the Bitcoin blockchain.
Going forward, we are setting up partnership agreements with marketplace providers to ensure that DMG has a steady stream of Ordinals for its Terra Pool and Petra to place. We recently signed our first partnership agreement. That's actually recently, as in a few days ago. We have three others out being negotiated with other marketplaces, so we're hoping that, you know, we end up with four or more signed partnership agreements in the coming weeks.
Yeah, I would just add that in fact, we have had direct discussions with artists as well, and they're excited about it, but they have really no idea how the Bitcoin Ordinal inscription infrastructure works, especially for the large Ordinals, which are larger than 400 KB. They are really excited to work with us. We have both , we have relationships with both artists directly as well as indirectly with partners who have access to lots of artist content.
There's a bit of a learning curve there that we're helping them overcome and figuring out the best way for them to use the Bitcoin blockchain. There's definitely more to come for DMG placing large Ordinals. Next question: With all your talk about immersion, what mining equipment do you plan to use or purchase? As most of you know, Bitmain has so far declined to design the equipment for immersion cooling. Specifically for fluid immersion cooling, not hydro equipment, which is water cooling. MicroBT is the furthest ahead, and we have units of its first immersion miners in-house that we've run and test. Canaan also has announced an immersion cooled miner.
We've been following Chain Reaction, and we are always excited about the potential for a new mining company to enter the market, just as we were hoping Intel would stay in the market. We hope that at some point there will be additional immersion choices. However, of all the products on the market currently, from our research, MicroBT has one of the most competitive products, and we'll be following what they do closely, along with others, as they release more information.
I just want to emphasize, part of our key goal here is to have the highest capital efficiency. This is achieved by being able to overclock the miners. We're gonna be doing extensive testing to ensure we can sufficiently overclock the miners, such that when you combine the use of the miners and the purchasing the miners and operating them in the immersion environment, that it's actually less expensive than an air-cooled solution. We still believe that's the case, and we're excited about new generation equipment, potentially gives us a leg up, especially as we look at the halving coming up in the not-too-distant future.
Thank you, Steven. Next question: What power prices has DMG seen? How is the power contract structured, and what guarantees does the company have on pricing and availability? DMG, we use a fixed tariff price with our utility. That fixed price is for everyone in our territory. That is a large commercial operating substation, which is usually us and lumber mills and pulp mills and the site and places like that own their own infrastructure. As such, using the a utility tariff, we're not subject to swings in market prices for energy, so we're not on a wholesale price. Our price monthly is the same whether or not the market price of power is extremely high or extremely low. We found over the last two years that this approach has been beneficial.
We've not needed to curtail power when prices are high. We don't get to take advantage of prices being really low, but in our region, we haven't really had really low power prices in the past year or so. As well, you know, for curtailment, you know, we are on fixed power with our utility, so we're not really subject to curtailment without consent by DMG, unless it's an emergency. We have had calls from a utility where they were interested if we would curtail power. We have the ability to do it. We have the software that controls our unit subs and our substation that we can remotely turn power on and off. To date, we haven't had to use it.
Right now, when you talk about pricing availability, I mean, availability power is available to us, you know, close to 100% of the time, depending on the transmission lines not being affected or shut down by any sort of storms or lightning. On price, we believe we're getting the best price through our utility, as we don't have to ride up and down the market prices and have to curtail and lose hash rate when market prices are too high. A very long answer to a very short question. Next question: Where does DMG's mining control software stand in development? Does it include functionality that would allow overclocking or underclocking in a curtailed environment? Very similar to a little bit of my last answer. Our mining software is called Helm.
It continues to work and it's evolved over the years. We started building Helm, I would say, five years ago, something like that. It does allow overclocking and underclocking. The way the Helm works is that it actually goes into every miner in our operations, has an API, it understands what miner it is, what firmware it is, understands how to talk to each miner, and we can write these scripts that automatically overclock and underclock as we see fit for our mining needs. The Helm software works quite well. It also creates heat maps and efficiency maps. Basically, we have a map of the mine, and we can see hot and cold spots in the mine. As well, we can see where we're hitting 100% nameplate or under or over.
We can see miners that are overclocked or in low power mode. It really gives us a lot of versatility in how we manage our mine and our mine operations. Helm also inter connects with our power management, and so it pulls all the data from all of our unit subs and our substation, and this is how we have the ability to curtail. As I said in the previous question, we've have, but not needed to curtail our utility yet. We have the ability to do it. If we did need to curtail, we can do it in chunks of 2 MW at the unit sub or the entire substation, if need be.
We, we can basically curtail in seconds just by hitting a button that will open a breaker, and we can hit another button and close that breaker and be back up in seconds. We, or I, in the previous company of Steven, designed this almost 10 years ago, this system, and we still use it today.
I would just add with the capability we have in Helm, this will work really well as we move to immersion, to be able to dynamically update miner profiles and change the amount of overclocking or underclocking, depending on the conditions. This will become a key competitive advantage for us in our immersion deployments.
Exactly. Did you want to take the next question, Steven?
Yeah, certainly. Thanks, Sheldon. The next question is, somebody is asking: What's so unique about this Multi-Breeze wallet? The whole thing is, everything about Ordinals is new, and any specific implementation that we do, is likely to be unique by definition. I think we've put together something that's really interesting in terms of enabling this per Ordinal rights transfer. This gives the artist full control of selling each piece of art on the Bitcoin blockchain, and being able to parse that out as they're able to be able to have the art sold. We've also, Sheldon mentioned about having the Ordinals placed contiguously in the same block without adding carbon. All of these pieces together have create what is an amazing value proposition for these artists.
We're now just in the first Ordinal. The first one we did, there was a lot of manual work, and what we're doing now is to make it so it's more automated, and we can service a lot more customers. I'll take the next few questions as well. Why did our cash balance jump so much to CAD 4.8 million, and do we expect our cash balance to grow from here? The short answer is we got, at the end of the March quarter, a refund on our provincial sales tax of CAD 3.4 million that was owed to us. This was on our amounts recoverable balance. That you saw on our balance sheet dropped.
We are still bullish on the price of Bitcoin. In April, we reported that we had 534 BTC on our balance sheet, and we're likely, going forward, to continue to sell as we need to fund operations and CapEx. You probably shouldn't expect our cash balance, at least in the near term, to significantly grow. We got this, as a former equity research analyst, got a really interesting question asking about the revenue potential for Petra and how to model that, and be able to provide some commentary as to how we're working to create volume for Petra. At this time, it's just early to provide specific guidance, but let me give some idea of the mechanics, how you could model Petra revenue for the longer term.
First of all, we plan to charge a premium versus the market rate for transactions, and also have a built-in floor price. At least it's what we've done to date and what our expectation is to be able to charge more for, be able to have Bitcoin transaction fees that are higher than what are being realized on the network. We've seen transaction fees grow from low single-digit percentage, the overall block reward, to a much higher %. This recent rise, given the popularity of Ordinals, should give some indication of the potential for Petra fees. If you think about our goal of Petra share of 10%, that translates to about 15 blocks a day. Think about it as the supply for placing Petra transactions.
On demand side is, as Sheldon was talking about Ordinals partners, to really work with them and with financial institutions to have that supply, or have that demand to fill that supply of blocks that we're creating. When you think about growing Terra Pool and think about Petra, these are really these are very closely related, and in our view, it's self-reinforcing because the benefits that we get from higher revenues in terms of Petra, should benefit the miners who are on Terra Pool and really create a self-reinforcing cycle. That is, in a nutshell, how we expect it to grow, and over, in the coming quarters, we can give you more specifics as to what we're achieving to help you update your model.
Another question, explaining this, about Terra Pool with this negative revenue and this idea of what happens if net pool revenues continue to be negative. This is theoretically possible, but statistically unlikely. We have experience being part of large pools, generally, pool luck. Think about the ratio of blocks won to the ratio of expected blocks, which should be 100% over time. Because it's based on the statistical nature of the Bitcoin protocol, we would expect net pool revenue to be zero over the longer run, when all the quarters are summed up.
Part of also what we're doing is just beefing up our infrastructure to make sure we don't have any disadvantage, so we're at least always at least 100%, and just the fact that when we can grow Terra Pool, that the volatility of Terra Pool's luck should decline. In the near term, we have sufficient BTC balance to fund any of those negatives. The question we always get is just the raw costs to mine a Bitcoin. In terms of utility costs, it's under $12,000 . As we've stated in the past, that for us, because as Sheldon was describing, our power cost is really steady, our cost to mine a Bitcoin is really, ends up being a function of network difficulty. Sheldon, did you have anything else you wanted to add here?
No, that was it for our questions, and we're coming up to the end of our call. I did want to note for everyone that DMG will have a booth again in Mining Disrupt in Miami on July 25th to 27th. Please feel free to come by and see us. Last year, myself and Steven, we were both there. We'll be there again this year, maybe a few others from DMG at the booth. A great way to come and talk to us in person, we gave out a lot of T-shirts and hats and other things last time, if you're looking for merchandise and you wanna come to Miami, that's one way to get it. That ends our call. I thank everyone for attending. Our call will now disconnect. Thank you.