Well, good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for participating in this session of the WTR Insights Conference. This is featuring CEA Industries. The ticker symbol is BNC on the Nasdaq. My name is John Roy. I'm the Managing Director here for technology at Water Tower Research, and we're pleased to be hosting David Namdar, he's the Chief Executive Officer, and Brent Miller, the Chief Financial Officer today. Welcome, gentlemen.
Thank you, John.
Before proceeding, I must note that CEA Industries Safe Harbor statements are available on their website. Also, this fireside chat is not to be reproduced or may not be transmitted or distributed, certainly without prior written consent of Water Tower Research. As always, investor questions are encouraged. Please enter them into the chat box and we will address as many as possible in a follow-up email or within our forthcoming Management Series report. Those wishing to request meetings with CEA Industries can do so through the conference portal. With these items addressed, let's get right to the Q&A. David, CEA Industries is undergoing a radical transformation into the digital powerhouse. Can you reintroduce the new BNC?
Sure. Absolutely. I stepped in as the Chief Executive Officer in August of last year, and that was after we had completed a $500 million PIPE transaction really to introduce this new strategy, and this new next generation of CEA Industries. The business had been prior focused on agricultural equipment, and also had just recently completed an acquisition of a chain of vape stores in Canada known as Fat Panda. We still have those legacy businesses and we can get into them in a bit shortly. Since completing the PIPE transaction, which was $500 million, but an additional $750 million of warrants that could convert at a price of $15.15, then we've been executing on this BNB digital asset treasury strategy.
To step back and just as a little bit of a primer on what that is, Michael Saylor pioneered this concept of a digital asset treasury strategy, with MicroStrategy, now Strategy. What he had done and realized was that Bitcoin was a very special asset to accumulate on corporate balance sheets, and he utilized a number of different approaches to accumulate a significant amount of Bitcoin over the last five years. Really last year, that strategy started to proliferate, where we saw a number of other Bitcoin digital asset treasuries following that same strategy as Michael Saylor. We saw investors started to realize there was an opportunity with a number of other important digital assets.
For us, we decided to pursue a DAT focus on BNB, which was originally known as Binance Coin, because there's a number of merits to BNB that we think give it a chance to really shine compared to a lot of the other cryptocurrencies out there.
Great. Well, maybe you can give us a little bit on BNC versus ETH.
Sure. With BNB, I guess one of the ways when I think about the really important cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin has kind of won out as this digital gold narrative. I think it's pretty widely accepted. There's a lot of people that really look at it and see the merits of Bitcoin from a number of different perspectives. Ethereum, as the second-largest cryptocurrency today, it's not like a digital gold. It's much more a digital oil. People see the use that it has for burning transaction fees. One of the biggest things on it, and that people were focused on really, and Wall Street was introduced to last year was around stablecoins. There was a lot of stablecoin activity on Ethereum and as people were looking at after Circle's IPO and USDC had become much more widely known.
Now, BNB, what I tell people is it's much more of this digital infrastructure equity. Really, it's a cryptocurrency that touches the entire infrastructure of the crypto ecosystem. Now, when BNB was first introduced as Binance Coin, Binance, for those that don't know, is by far the largest crypto exchange in the world. Many might be familiar with Coinbase, which is publicly listed. Coinbase is around an $80 billion-$100 billion market cap today. Well, Binance has somewhere between 5x to 15x the amount of usage and volumes as Coinbase. If it was a public company, it might be worth anywhere from $300 billion-over $1 trillion today. It's an interesting situation where Binance itself is not a public company, and there's no opportunity for investors to get exposure to it.
Well, BNB is the token that is fully aligned with and linked to the Binance ecosystem. It was originally having a direct link to the revenues of Binance, where there would be a buyback and burn mechanism of the BNB. Now they've decoupled it from only being linked to Binance, and actually, it has its own thriving ecosystem, involving stablecoins, real-world assets, and a number of other areas really touching everything across the entire crypto ecosystem.
Excellent overview. Talking about resiliency, obviously, the crypto market's been a little volatile. Your third quarter results showed some losses there that were pretty significant, mainly based on the BNB price drop. In your shareholder letter, you were talking about structural resiliency, versus fleeting optics. I know your debt-free capital structure is important. Maybe you could give us some color on what you see there.
Sure. When I think about how this DAT opportunity has kind of presented itself, last year was a pivotal year where the capital markets were open to crypto in a meaningful way for the first time. I think one of the first things that I tried to do in the industry over 10 years ago, 12 years ago now, was introduce a Bitcoin ETF. Well, it took over 10 years for that to actually come to the market. Now, last year really was where this idea and concept of crypto assets being on corporate balance sheets really spread. I describe what was happening in second and third quarter last year as this accumulation phase, where a lot of DATs were out there trying to accumulate a lot of these meaningful crypto assets.
Now I'm proud to say that we have by far the largest BNB treasury of any public company and really are the only pure-play BNB digital asset treasury out there today. Now we're entering more of this operational phase where people are focused on what those assets really can do, what you can do with them, what they can generate, right? I think with us, what I'm really proud of is when I look at the whole DAT landscape, a lot of them in the mission and pursuit of accumulating a lot of the digital assets, they took on onerous convertible debt. They took on really other things that created adverse conditions between different investors in the capital stack to have claims over the digital assets.
For us, we have a very clean balance sheet, clean and resilient, where, as we go through the inevitable volatility in the crypto ecosystem, there isn't a price level where we would have to sell the digital assets. There isn't anybody who has a claim on the digital assets that we have on our balance sheet.
Excellent. Let's talk about warrants a little bit. The BNC WZ, I guess, is what the warrants are called, and I think you just listed those on the Nasdaq. Maybe you could talk to us a little bit through that and what it means for shareholders and what it means for your broader capital structure.
Sure. The warrants were a key mechanism when we went and did the PIPE offering last year. One of the key reasons for that, as many of the other DATs were utilizing convertible debt, what I saw and was trying to share with investors at the time was that when you have convertible debt in the DAT structure, the investors in the converts don't actually care about the underlying digital asset. All they care about is that they have a claim on it. Whether it's Bitcoin, Ethereum, BNB, or any of the other various digital assets, the convertible debt investors just want to make sure they're first in line. If the asset value goes down, their money's protected, and they can get it out.
It also, with converts, it introduces a mechanism where those investors are incentivized to short sell the stock to hedge out their position. I was trying to explain this to a lot of the investors at the time that were going into these other deals. With us, the warrant structure is interesting because it allows for, as the value of our balance sheet grows, that warrant capital that comes in gives us significantly more capital to accumulate more of the digital asset. I think it gives us a strong kind of tailwind behind us that as the market and the industry grows, as the value of the BNB grows on our balance sheet and overall, it gives us an opportunity to really meaningfully expand our balance sheet even further with the capital that comes in from the warrants.
Got it, m akes sense. Brent, you're the recently appointed new Chief Financial Officer coming in, and you're stepping into a BNB ecosystem that's seeing some drops in airdrop income. Maybe you could talk a little bit about that. Also maybe give us a little bit of your background, since you're new to the company and some people know you.
Sure. Tackling the second part first. I come from Figure Technology Corporation, which just completed their IPO last year, and I helped them through that. Prior to that, I had worked with some mid-cap companies in the finance space and, prior to that, through some asset managers, KKR and Fortress Investment Group, which are all interesting in parallels to the strategy insofar as we have financial assets that we can use in a lot of different ways. Coming from a position of strength on the balance sheet gives us a lot of optionality and levers, where we can pick our points as we go through these cycles and try to create as much accretive value to shareholders as we can. On the airdrop, that is one component of the overall strategy. Certainly, we have seen the contraction there.
As we look at the market, as it evolves and grows in the BNB ecosystem, it may return. There are other avenues that we've taken. We've seen some interesting things that other DATs have done. We've discussed some items which I'm not at liberty to say, as we're a public company and haven't disclosed anything as of yet. I would just say that there is a lot of optionality in the structure. There are levers that we can monetize, and we're actively pursuing those.
Excellent, excellent. Welcome certainly to the latest iteration of the [world] here. David, you're obviously with the hiring of Brent, you're starting to build out the management and leadership team a little bit. What's the organizational roadmap look like from here? What are the capabilities you're really looking to bring on board?
Sure. I think, first of all, I've been incredibly happy to have Brent on board, and it's been a phenomenal start for him. For us with the team, we've also had a number of changes at the Board level. We've really strengthened kind of a number of the Board members who've come on board. I think we'll continue to see and plan on having a couple of changes there to continue to improve our governance, our operating ability, all of that. Kind of what Brent was touching on, look, I think the business has been around for a long time. Our business in this latest iteration and our new kind of evolution really has been around for less than a year now.
There still are a number of operational things that we're going to do to continue to strengthen the Management Team, strengthen the Board, and a number of things that we're going to do to focus on unlocking the value of our balance sheet and delivering the value to investors, right? To me, when I look at this opportunity and when I speak with investors, I've been through many cycles in the crypto space and I've seen how it's almost perfectly correlated. When the market is in a euphoric phase, that's when the calls are nonstop and everybody wants to get in when things are at all-time highs. When the market's going through a kind of drawdown, that's when nobody wants to talk about crypto, nobody wants to look at anything. One of the things I try to do is always just open people's eyes to the opportunity.
Even right now, what I try to point out is for people that believe in the crypto opportunity and the cycles and where this may be headed, like we do out on the team here, this could be a generationally good entry point into the crypto ecosystem, where for the first time, really, investors have a chance to buy into meaningful crypto exposure at a significant discount to the value of the underlying assets. There are no guarantees on where the markets are going to go from one month to the next, even one year to the next, but I have very high conviction in the growth of the crypto markets, and I think we're well-positioned to capitalize on that and deliver strong value to investors.
Yeah, you were talking about the discount to NAV. Certainly that's the position of the company where BNC trades today. Are there levers you can pull? Is it part of it just that it's such a new model? What's your thinking of things you can do to get it closer to trading higher?
Sure, I think we're constantly exploring all of the ideas that any other DATs and similar companies are doing. There's a range of activities from buybacks to tender offers to utilizing derivatives and different mechanisms to generate more yield. Some of it's a communication approach of just showing investors the value and showing investors the plan, and some of it's actual corporate mechanisms to actually unlock that. What I would just say is we've telegraphed to investors in the past that we've been active with doing share buybacks. That's something I think it's reasonable for investors to assume that that's one of the levers that we utilize. I think what I would try to share is just we're very thoughtful, the same way we have been so far in our approach and how we think about our balance sheet.
We're thoughtful about how to keep the balance sheet clean, but also we're very committed to deliver the value to investors and unlock the value of the balance sheet. You could expect that we would be utilizing interesting mechanisms in order to do that.
Excellent, excellent. Well, I see we're running near the end of our time. I want to thank you, David and Brent, so much for spending time with me, and looking forward to chatting a lot in the future. Really do appreciate your participation.