On behalf of Virtual Investor Conferences, we are very pleased you've joined us for our Digital Asset Conference. Our last presentation of the day is from BNB Plus. Please note you may submit questions for the presenter in the box to the left of the slides. You can also view a company's availability for one-on-one meetings by clicking Book a Meeting. At this point, I am very pleased to welcome Patrick Horsman, Chief Investment Officer, and Joshua Kruger, Chair of the Board of BNB Plus, which trades on Nasdaq under the symbol BNBX. Welcome, Patrick and Josh.
Thank you. Happy to be here. Josh and I will give just quick bios on ourselves to kind of set the tone of why we're involved in this business, and then walk you through kind of what we've done over the last couple of months, creating this digital asset treasury focused on BNB and the Binance ecosystem. Why we chose BNB, what makes BNB Plus different from other dApps, the yield strategies that we're implementing, how we have some claims on Binance's earnings. And then we'll give you a quick summary of our DNA business, which was our legacy business, and then just some final closing remarks and Q&A. So I'm Patrick Horsman. I'm one of the founders of BNB Plus.
We started this journey back in June, looking at the digital asset treasury market, looked at different tokens and got very excited about Binance and the BNB ecosystem. My background, I've been a hedge fund manager for 25 years. I've raised $15 billion+ for myself and other managers, ran a litigation finance business for 15 years that managed $1.2 billion. JPMorgan and Blackstone are my largest investors. Got heavily involved in crypto, starting in 2015, launched my first crypto hedge fund, starting in 2018, arbitraging the Grayscale publicly traded trust for a couple of years.
And then, in early 2021, with Josh and our other partner, J.R., launched a hedge fund called Coral Capital, focused on decentralized finance. We made over 300 investments in different liquid token projects and venture deals. We sold that business in 2024 to a large crypto conglomerate, and then started working on the digital asset treasury idea in 2025, and did our PIPE transaction in September. So I'll turn it over to Josh for his bio.
I appreciate it. I have a computer science background, so not from finance, but I started in college, mining Ethereum when it was very early, and then, through that, got into high-frequency trading and sort of the fund that did high-frequency algorithmic lending. And this was very early, so the market was different then. Ran that fund through 2016 and 2017, and then I did a distributed compute firmware development for a little while after that, and then in 2020, came back to do a DeFi fund, which is kind of like the very seed of the strategies we're kind of running here.
I ran that until I met Patrick and his team, ended up folding my fund into Coral Capital, and then we ran Coral Capital till 2024, where we sold the DNA. Excuse me. And, we sold the, the DNA business at the end of 2024, and then we started BNBX here, as a, a digital asset treasury play, kind of capitalizing on the strategies we had developed through Coral and the previous funds, and now applied to public markets and the opportunity at BNB.
So I'll give a quick comparison to set the tone of what a, what a digital asset treasury company is historically. Many of you are probably familiar with MicroStrategy or, and MicroStrategy. That was really the first kind of publicly traded digital asset treasury company, where a software business started buying Bitcoin on their balance sheet. After that, there were some other Bitcoin treasuries, some Ethereum treasuries, some Solana, and there's been a couple of BNB launched. We really approached this business as, first off, looking for a token and an ecosystem that's productive, and what that means is you can generate yield from the ecosystem and from the tokens. Bitcoin, unfortunately, it's a great token. It's kind of the thing that got everyone started in the industry, but Bitcoin really doesn't have any native yield.
To us, it doesn't make a lot of sense to have a Bitcoin digital asset treasury. There are more effective ways, like just owning Bitcoin yourself or buying a Bitcoin ETF with a very low cost structure where you can get Bitcoin exposure. We don't feel that the dApps that own Bitcoin are really adding a lot of value. That's a little bit different for the ecosystems of Ethereum, Solana, and BNB, and we're familiar with all those. We traded all those tokens in our hedge fund lives. We are most excited about BNB and the finance ecosystem because the BNB token is actually part of Binance. If you're not familiar with Binance, it's the largest, most successful business in crypto. It's the 800-pound gorilla in the industry. Most U.S. investors are familiar with Coinbase. It's a great company.
Binance is actually 7 times larger than Coinbase. Coinbase does 6% of global trading volume every day. Binance does 40%. So just some quick stats on Binance: 300 million active users, $145 trillion traded on Binance since inception in 2017, $34 trillion traded in 2025. There are 490 different tokens available to trade on spot and 584 tokens available to trade on future. One of the things we'll talk about is our yield strategy, but there's a component of Binance called the Launchpool, where if you hold BNB tokens and have a Binance account, they airdrop you tokens of other projects that are coming to be listed on Binance. Last year, they distributed $782 million in free tokens to BNB holders.
And additionally, there's 20 million merchants that use Binance Pay. So this is a very large business. Post the Biden administration's kind of crackdown on crypto, Binance stopped operating in the U.S., so it's not currently available to U.S. users, but we think that's something that may change over the next few years, and they may enter the U.S. market again. I really wanna focus on what makes BNB Plus different from other dApps, and then I'm going back to kind of the productivity around the token and the ecosystem.
So we have four different yield strategies that Josh will walk you through in a minute, but really the reason that you wanna own BNB Plus versus owning BNB directly is, with us and our team and our yield strategies, over time you'll end up owning more tokens per share than you would own if you just owned the token yourself. So we think BNB is one of the best ecosystems to, to generate yield and do it in a low-risk way, and I'll, I'll turn it over to Josh to walk you through the four different yield strategies that we're employing.
Yeah. So, the Binance ecosystem is pretty unique in the way that you can generate yield, primarily because a large number of projects and just companies in the Web3 ecosystem want to launch on the Binance platform. They have 300 million active users, so it's by far the largest launch platform. And so, you know, we have a couple core strategies, and some of them are unique that can only be done on Binance, and normal U.S. investors can't get access to them. The first, which is pretty common, is native staking, and it's kinda like Ethereum. And BNB was originally a fork of Ethereum or a fork of the code of Ethereum, and that's about 2% estimated on a look-back.
The second, which is Launchpool. Launchpool takes advantage of that dynamic, where teams want to launch their tokens on Binance, and in exchange for the ability to do that, Binance will take some portion of the token supply and then distribute that back to BNB token holders, which is us. On a two-year look-back, that's, like, 9%-14% annualized returns, and that's like a, you know, selling the granted tokens pretty much immediately after getting them. So there's some variability there.
The third strategy is providing liquidity on PancakeSwap, which is the leading DEX, which is very similar to Uniswap to similar volume, with you know, BNB token and a staked derivative of that, in this case, Lista DAO, and we think that on a look-back can do about 7%-9%. And that's basically automated market making on the BNB chain. And the last is we would be... this is kinda looks back to our hedge fund days, but collateralize the BNB, borrow against it, and then take advantage of kind of more or less delta-neutral strategies on with the borrowed capital against the BNB.
And that, there's a lot of availability in crypto for that, and they kinda come and go, so that'd be a opportunistic stance we would take if something like that were to present itself, which it regularly does. So those are the four core yield strategies. We think, you know, 8%-12% annualized is a good target and very achievable and attainable, and seen in the wild, so we think we can do that on the entire treasury that's liquid.
Josh, do you wanna talk through some of the tokenomics around the BNB Chain as well?
Yeah. So BNB also. You know, another, another thing that makes BNB unique and attractive to investors in this context is, the, the way they've configured the tokenomics. And I'll go back up here to the Binance slide or part of the site. And this is our, this is our live site, bnbx.io, if you just wanna go there, directly. But, so being that Binance is the largest exchange in the world, and they don't have an available equity, CZ owns pretty much the entire thing, BNB kind of acts as their faux equity or pseudo equity. And so what they've done with BNB token is kind of configured it in such a way where if the exchange does really well, then the token does really well. And they've.
For a while, they had it to where, when the exchange would burn tokens commensurate with the revenue of the company. Later on, it became more algorithmic, but they've burned 62 million of the 200 million tokens. They're gonna bring that down to 100 million, which is $54 billion. So it's systematically deflationary by design, and they've committed to continue doing that, and so that alone, you know, is more deflationary than Bitcoin, Ethereum, or pretty much any of the other major cryptos.
Yeah, none of the other crypto tokens do this. Everyone else is issuing more tokens or getting diluted, and here the token supply is actually shrinking significantly every quarter. For the last four quarters, it's been over $1 billion that they've burned each quarter.
Yeah. It's very substantial, and the network still does emit tokens to grant security, but at the same time, the deflationary burns are so large that it just completely overshadows that. Users also. So when you trade on the Binance platform, you get discounts in fees on the platform, which are material as well. So every large fund in crypto and every large participant that does any kind of material trading will have a stock of BNB, not only to get the Launchpool, Launchpad stuff, but also just to discount their trading fees because it is material. And they have a VIP system that is tiered directly proportional to how much BNB you have. And so that locks up a lot of the float with people wanting to trade on the platform.
Additionally, if you're on the blockchain itself, Binance Smart Chain, when you issue a transaction, part of the BNB that was used to issue the transaction gets burned permanently, so that adds another deflationary mechanism by which supply gets taken offline per usage. And I think, you know, all those things put together, the tokenomics of BNB are very much favorable to investors, just given that the supply is going to be reduced so dramatically down to at least 100 million with the larger burns, and then it'll go below that over time with the smaller burns from the real-time gas burn. So those things kind of get
Just to give you a sense of the size of the ecosystem, BNB is actually the fourth largest token after Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Tether. So this is the top, top five token, $120 billion-$130 billion total market cap.
Yep. It's extremely large, and Binance is, like Patrick said, the absolute biggest player in crypto. It's the biggest company. It's if it were on the market, it'd be $hundreds of billions if it had equity, and the token is $100 billion-plus market cap.
Josh, why don't you pull up our dashboard, and we could walk through kind of how we're providing transparency to investors, and we can talk through kind of why we think that's extremely important? And some of the other dApps have not done this, but we've done this from day one. We built this dashboard internally, and it provides a lot of metrics that are useful to investors, a full cap table. Every time we purchase new BNB tokens, we list the purchase dates on here and the prices. This shows our current stock price, the BNB price, the BNB market cap. It shows our market cap a couple different ways. When we did our PIPE transaction in September of 2025, we had several large investors come in that needed to stay below 4.99 for SEC regulatory purposes.
So we issued what were called pre-funded warrants, and those are essentially pre-purchased shares that haven't yet been exercised and converted into shares. So we show our M-NAV, which is the measure of how much crypto we have per share of stock. The proper way to look at that is to include the pre-funded warrants. So we're currently at about a 0.85 M-NAV, so we're trading about 15% below our fair value based on the assets of the company.
This also doesn't include the value of our DNA business, which I'll talk about separately. But this is one of the best, most transparent, updated in real-time dashboards in the industry. We're very proud of it, and we encourage you to go check it out, bnbx.io, to learn more about the company. Down here at the bottom, Josh is showing our full cap table that shows all the outstanding warrants, et cetera. And then down at the bottom, are all the different BNB purchases that we've made.
Patrick, do you wanna quickly run through LineaRx?
Sure. So prior to us getting involved with the company, the company was called Applied DNA Sciences. They've been around for about 25 years, have an extremely large IP and patent portfolio around the manufacturing of DNA and mRNA. Everyone remembers kind of the COVID vaccine, and that was one of the first to use mRNA in a big way. The company was heavily involved in COVID testing as well, has manufacturing facilities in Long Island. The company had really been doing very interesting work but kind of had a bloated cost structure.
Some prior management wasn't really running the company properly, and we came in and helped the current management team, Clay, who's our CEO, and Beth, who's our CFO, kind of reduce headcount to a manageable level, get costs under control, change some legal firms, just kind of right-size the cost structure for the company of where we currently stand. When we came in end of September, October was actually the company's first profitable month in its history for that operating subsidiary. So we've gotten that business to break even to slightly profitable. We've gotten some big orders from some of the biggest customers. And it's a solid business. We're cautiously reinvesting in it, and hopeful that that will contribute earnings over time to the company, which can be reinvested in BNB and additional yield strategies.
Perfect.
I'd also like to touch briefly back on a couple of the things around kind of BNB tokenomics and some of the yield strategies and kind of how those relate to potentially claims on Binance's earnings. So since Binance isn't public, there really is no way for public investors, private investors, to get exposure to what is one of the best businesses in the crypto space. So the BNB token is kind of your best way to get exposure to the ecosystem, and it does link up directly with kind of the performance of the business in a couple different ways, and I'll reiterate those. The first is through the burn, the burning of the token. So as Josh mentioned, that used to be directly tied to the actual revenue.
Now it's just kind of a more systematic algorithmic number, but it's, it's significant. It's over $1 billion per quarter over the last four burns. So BNB holders are directly participating in Binance's earnings through that burn mechanism. The second is through the launch pool, where when Binance lists a new token, they charge a listing fee that could be 2%-5% of the total token supply, charged in tokens. And that, rather than putting in their pocket and keeping for the business owner, those are distributed to the BNB holders.
And last year, that was 782 million of tokens that were distributed. You don't have to make any investment to get those. You just have to hold BNB, and you get the pro rata amount based on your BNB holdings. So since we're a large BNB holder, we'll be getting those airdrops on a regular basis. It's generally our plan is to sell those, turn them back into more BNB, and keep reinvesting in the BNB strategy. I think that's most of our presentation. Josh, do you have anything else you wanna run through before we open up for Q&A?
I think just the takeaway for people that are not familiar with Binance itself is, and just the nature of this opportunity is. Binance is an international company. Like Patrick said, it is the largest crypto company in the world, but in the United States, awareness is very low. They had an offering here through some regulatory stuff. The last administration got kind of taken down to an insignificant amount. But we think, you know, there's a large chance that they could reenter the U.S. in a meaningful way. And you know, if you've been in the crypto space a long time, you'd know that Binance is the juggernaut. And it's an exceptionally run business, and that's the reason it's so big.
It's not just, you know, big for no reason. And the main entrepreneur, CZ, is a phenomenal entrepreneur, and you really shouldn't bet against him. You know, the tailwinds here are for us, our, you know, access, really, this is just now becoming available to U.S. investors. I mean, there's only two things on the public market you can only get access to here. It, up until recently, wasn't even listed on major exchanges. It's still not listed on Coinbase, so U.S. investors really don't have the ability to purchase it unless they are kinda more sophisticated. You know, and so we're early to the trend for the best company in crypto. They haven't entered the U.S. in a meaningful way in size yet.
Their token is kind of best-in-class in terms of the tokenomics and the tailwinds it creates for investors and alignment between the company and investors. And then also, you know, this is all pre-Binance, kind of pivoting institutionally and going after the institutional business. Up until now, it's been basically a retail business. And I think, you know, all those things combined with the timing, and the access of our vehicle, then you layer on our yield strategies, where you're actually increasing your exposure systematically over time to this, through, through us underlying compounding yield. It's, you know, a very... It's, it's the best way to play the Binance and BNB ecosystem trade.
Really the only way to play it. So we think it's one of the best ecosystems to generate yield, and the 4 yield strategies we ran you through are all non-directional. And what that means to a layperson is we're not adding additional risk. So the Launchpool, for instance, we're being given free tokens that we're selling and turning into more BNB. The staking natively, that's just staking tokens to a validator to secure the network. We're not taking directional risk there. When we provide liquidity on a decentralized exchange, like PancakeSwap, we're just maintaining our 1x long BNB exposure. We're not adding more risk there. And when we collateralize the BNB and borrow stablecoins, again, we're not taking any directional risk with the stablecoin.
So given our hedge fund backgrounds, we definitely could add strategies that actually add risk and have potentially higher returns. But given this is a public company and our priority is to preserve the principal, and to generate nice, consistent yields without adding additional risk, I think that's an important piece for investors to understand. So we're starting to get some questions coming in. I'll read off the first one here: Strategically, how do you see the nucleic acid IVD business fitting in with BNB treasury story over time? Core pillar, cash generator fund, BNB, or something you might monetize or spend at some point? So our goal initially was to get that business under control from a cost standpoint so that we weren't eroding the treasury. We've accomplished that.
Our CEO, Clay and Beth, have done a fantastic job, working through some of the challenges there that had been around for the company for a long time with prior management, and the business is now stabilized. We've gone to a lot of the key customers, and worked with them to get orders. And there is the potential to potentially spin it off at some point. That's not in the cards right now, but it's definitely a possibility down the road. All right, next question. You've said LineaRx is expected to narrow losses and approach profitability following restructuring. What are the key milestones or margin targets you would give confidence this business is structurally profitable, not just benefiting from a few large orders? So the biggest thing is we rightsized the headcount.
There was way too many people at this company that had been here a long time. Great team of people, but just wasn't the proper headcount structure for the business, given its current revenues. I can't comment on specific milestones or margin targets, just that we've now rightsized the cost structure across both this division and the public company itself. We're in a much better position to be profitable. There remains a strong interest from our existing customer base and new customers in this business line. We think that it's one that can work well with the BNB treasury strategy, but it's possible this business will be divested at some point, and we bring in a new operating business. All right, next question. Digital asset treasuries face evolving regulatory tax and accounting rules.
What are the main regulatory or accounting changes that could impact your BNB strategy in 2026, 2027, and how are you positioning ahead of them? So there's been a lot of positive, crypto-related bills. There's another very positive one that's currently going through the House and the Senate that we expect to be approved. And really, what those are doing is establishing a proper regulatory framework, for crypto and crypto-related businesses to operate in in the U.S.
That's in sharp contrast to what was happening during the Biden administration when there was just an all-out war against the industry. So we're, we're excited from a regulatory standpoint. I don't think there's any specific tax concerns that we're worried about. The yield strategies we're generating, are pretty, pretty normal, don't have any specific tax considerations. We don't see any near-term challenges from a regulatory or tax standpoint, related to the current business model.
Next one. There are several companies offering Bitcoin or crypto exposure. In one sentence, how is BNB Plus economically different for the shareholder, both in risk profile, potential upside from a typical BTC on-balance-sheet story? The biggest difference for us is the ability to generate yield. I mean, given the background and our hedge fund experience and having done these strategies before, you know, we expect to be yielding, you know, 8%-12% is what we kind of back tested at, on the underlying treasury. You know, in those Bitcoin balance sheet stories, they don't have any yield on their Bitcoin, so it isn't actually a profit-generating business for them.
Yeah, it's probably a negative yield with the expenses of running the company, so that's the big differentiator. We intentionally chose a very productive asset from an ecosystem that's one of the best in the world, that's growing, that has one of the best businesses in the industry associated with it. And because of that, we're able to, even in a flat environment for token prices or slightly down, still generate positive returns for investors. And that's something that Bitcoin just doesn't offer, and I would say Bitcoin, digital asset treasury companies really don't add value, and there's better ways to hold Bitcoin. Some of the other ecosystems, Ethereum, Solana, et cetera, also offer opportunities for productive yield, but we think they're lower than BNB.
Given the stock's
Given the stock's current trading range. Go, go ahead, Josh.
Given the stock's current trading range and volatility, what is your philosophy on using the equities as a currency for growth versus protecting existing shareholders from further dilution? Generally speaking, we're only really looking to do things that are accretive to shareholder token per share value. And that's kind of the guiding principle at this time. And so we're gonna take action based on that. You've launched BNBX.io dashboard to show real-time treasury metrics. Do you see a future where those same data feeds power on-chain tokenized products and oracles, effectively making your treasury composable in the BNB DeFi ecosystem? That's definitely something that we are looking at and have thought about in the past, but nothing to announce right now.
How do you think about jurisdiction choice? If you were to launch tokenized vehicles, would this need to be strictly U.S. domiciled because of your listing, or could you see offshore structures that still benefit equity holders? So the company, prior to us being involved, actually had BVI subsidiaries to hold IP. And as we mentioned, Binance does not allow U.S. persons or U.S. investors to operate on the exchange. They do, however, allow U.S. beneficial owners, and what that means is, a U.S. person can have an offshore entity that they're the owner of. They have to set up proper offshore structures. They have to hire an offshore team to run that division, and we've actually implemented that here, where we've got a BVI structure set up and an offshore trading team to manage that entity and manage the yield strategy.
So we actually have put that in place, and you could do that in Cayman or Bahamas or other places, but we chose the BVI. Across the digital asset strategy and the LinearDNA growth, how much additional equity or debt capital do you think you need over the next 12-24 months under your base case? So we would like to raise some additional capital just to grow the balance sheet. We are starting to generate yield, and that will provide some in-house earnings to run the business and cover expenses. But we'd like to be a $200 million-dollar company base case. So we're looking at strategic alternatives, potential M&A. I think there are some other dApps that have some issues. Maybe they've lost investor confidence.
And joining together a bunch of other digital asset treasury companies is something that we're definitely interested in. We don't have anything to announce, but we're out talking to other companies and looking for good partners who think similarly to us, where we could combine our balance sheets and come together with a bigger, stronger company. You recently added 3,349 BNB to the treasury for about $3 million. How do you decide when to deploy additional capital into BNB versus holding cash or other opportunities?
We look at the token price, and opportunistically, when we think it's traded down based on Trump tweet or some other news, we're more inclined to purchase it. That being said, we're long-term holders, and we're averaging it over time. So when we have cash to deploy, we typically are deploying it. But when there are kind of dips in the price, we're more excited about adding tokens to the balance sheet.
If you look out at the end of 2026, what would you personally call a win for BNB Plus in hard numbers? BNB yield held on the treasury or revenue and profit. I think hard numbers for us for end of 2026, we'd like to actualize 8+% yield on the treasury. We think we can do 8%-12%, but it's the beginning of the year, and I think realizing that number on our liquid BNB would be the big win.
Yeah, and I think, I think that's what the best way to measure our performance. We'd obviously like to grow the balance sheet, but that's more opportunistic. But, the true measurement of how we're performing will be how the yield strategies perform and how we can grow your tokens per share and compound those over time.
One of your directors, Elizabeth, just resigned. Has it led to any governance or board changes that are relevant for how you oversee digital asset risk and capital allocation? You know, the... It's important that the board be knowledgeable on crypto and aware of the space and have the connections and network to really facilitate this strategy. So the board is kind of looking how best to have manpower that can do that, and I think these are opportunities for us to, you know, go that direction and find those people that can really help us out.
Josh, I think we missed one question. You've just announced the $1.2 million LinearDNA order, the largest in company history, and expect over $1.5 million in LinearDNA shipments in first half 2026. How should we think about the sustainability of that demand versus it being a one-off transaction? We've gone back to some of our largest existing customers and are in talks with lots of new customers as well. I can't really comment on kind of potential orders that are coming, but given the revision in the cost structure and headcount of the company, we're in a much better position for that division to be profitable on a go-forward basis, and we're excited about the prospects for that business in general.
I know we hit the 30-minute mark here, should we keep going?
I guess, yeah, let's do a couple more questions.
Okay. What are two or three new things about your BNB strategy that you want most investors to take away that aren't obvious from past releases? I think we outlined exactly, you know, the key points. I think the market's not too aware of what, what we are capable of with the BNB. And I think when you take a look at that amount of yield, on hard liquid assets, and the tailwinds of this ecosystem and the chain and the company behind it, I mean, all the... Really, if you take all that together, that's where the real opportunity is. It's, it's the fact that all those things are positive.
And I have friends that are running Ethereum and Solana dApps, some of the best guys in the business, and they're targeting, I think, for Ethereum, Ethereum's like 2% staking and then maybe a little bit of DeFi, maybe they can get to 6% yield. Solana, the base staking is a little bit higher, 6%-7%. They'll do a little bit of DeFi on top of that, and maybe they'll get to 8%-9% yield. So I think BNB is the best opportunity where natively you're getting to 9%-12% potential, and you're doing that without adding additional risk.
I think that's all the questions we got.
Thank you for listening. Josh and I are open for one-on-one meetings for the next couple days. Please click the link on the conference website to schedule meetings with us. We'd love to talk to you in more detail and answer more questions. Thanks for listening.
Appreciate it.