All right, hi, and welcome everyone. Today's seminar, my name is Albert Möller Broock . I work in the financials team here at ABG, and today we have CoinShares with us and CEO Jean-Marie Mognetti on a virtual link, so very welcome, Jean-Marie, and please take it away.
Hi Albert, thanks for having me and welcome everyone. I'm sorry I can't be in Stockholm today. So, let's talk about CoinShares. So can we go to the next slide, please? Thank you. So CoinShares today is a listed company on Nasdaq in Sweden. CoinShares is a listed leading European investment company specializing in digital assets. This is something. This is a journey we started as early as 2014 in digital assets, and our ambition is to transform this European franchise into a global leading investment company specializing in digital assets. And to do so, you know, we have a long story. As I said, we're starting in 2014. Our journey in Sweden started in 2016 when we acquired an XBT Provider from KnC. And since then, we have been on the trail of innovation and first to the market on many, many products.
Many of us know us in Sweden for XBT Provider. Many of us these days in Stockholm know us for the puppy campaigns where you have lovely dogs in the tube, lovely dogs in the streets, talking about XBT Provider and talking about CoinShares. CoinShares, on a bigger footprint, is about $7 billion of external client money. We're capturing about 50% of the European crypto ETP revenue and control around 40%-45% of the market share in terms of AUM. We have about 20 listed products, around four platforms. We have XBT Provider, which is very well known from you guys in Sweden. We have CoinShares Physical, which is much more focused on DACH. We have a joint venture of Invesco called the Blockchain Index, which is the biggest, and largest globally, crypto equity blockchain investment case. We manage around $1 billion in equity.
And finally, we have the franchise, which is building in the U.S. called CoinShares Valkyrie, which will become fully CoinShares by the end, by mid-year next year. The company has a very strong balance sheet, around GBP 300 million . Sorry, I'm just trying to not confuse with SEK. So, GBP 300 million . The company has a unique institutional position regulated by many regulators in Europe and in the U.S., audited and cybersecurity audited in many ways, and is very lean, only 85 employees or full-time employees, around four offices: Jersey, our headquarters; London, our main office; and Paris, one of our second biggest growing offices; and a small satellite we are building now in New York, growing, year on year.
So, when it comes to the next slide, please, and CoinShares key businesses, realistically, the way we think about CoinShares is like, not this one, the next one, please. Yeah, perfect. CoinShares key businesses are really focused on three different verticals: our asset management practices, so asset management, as we discussed, four platforms, XBT Provider, CoinShares Physical, our Invesco joint venture, and now, as I expressed in the U.S., through Valkyrie, which is an ETF business, which is managing around $1.5 billion in the U.S. only. Then there is Capital Markets. Capital Markets is really what helped CoinShares grow from strength to strength. Capital Markets is really the R&D, the innovation lab, and the, I would say, the investment arm of the company to be able to be at the forefront of innovation and stay relevant.
So, if you think about it in kind of in a different way, the capital market, and I know people don't like the word capital market, but unfortunately, it is what it is, and that's what makes us innovative. It's almost like a lab. It's where the magic happens, and once we are happy with what we are creating, we are able to productize it and push it to asset management. Over time, we are thinking there will be a demand appearing for hedge fund or a hedge fund product. You know, there are smaller companies in Sweden like Hilbert who are trying to go on that journey. We think it's a very nascent market. It's a very early stage market. So, we are preparing for it. Investors want to see long track record and a lot of things and bells and whistles ready for it.
So, we have some work around that, but realistically, over time, we're thinking our Capital Markets will more and more morph into a hedge fund solution, but that's kind of a transformative, long-term process. So, we're putting it out there as a frontier market between our Asset Management and the Capital Markets, which is at the forefront, which is at the, at the kind of merger of the two. If you can go to the next slide, please. Thank you. And so, the way—no, no, no, this one, the next one. Perfect. So the way we're thinking about, the way we think about CoinShares, really, is that CoinShares is like a non-cyclical operating system. So, the design here looks like a bit like a microchip.
And effectively, at the core of the microchips, we have the digital asset ecosystem on which we are building our research and innovation and our capital market activity. From there, we are stemming two key activities or three, our asset management practice, our capital market, and our hedge fund solution. In terms of revenue model, it's very simple. The passive asset management is driving management fees and staking fees, so it's a basis point on the AUM. The hedge fund solution, when it is live and ready, will stem, you know, management and performance fees. So, again, a very clear metrics on the AUM. And the capital market is the one which is a bit more tricky to appraise as an investor.
You know, the key way to look at it is a spread on volume we're turning around on the businesses, and it's a function of market term structure, market volatility, and price action. It is important to note here that the Capital Markets has no directional turning component. It is a purely algorithmic activity, which is focusing around market inefficiency, arbitrage, and all the things of this nature. If we can move to the next slide, please. You know, the key interesting point here is like to see this slide, which is, say, okay, well, CoinShares has a growing AUM. CoinShares for a long time was, you know, I said earlier, the external AUM at the end of November, which is all public information, is around $7 billion of AUM.
The key message here is like for a long, long time, CoinShares was very dependent on XBT Provider as its sole product line and its sole kind of like source of revenue. And over time, we are adding more AUM from more diversified sources to start to bring a mix of AUM, which entails also a mix of profile of revenue, which is diversified and bringing some kind of more solidity to the market. This solidity is allowing us, as we can see in the next slide, to expose a growing EBITDA. The numbers are in sterling. This EBITDA is growing year on year, and CoinShares is one of the rare companies which is able to make money in down market and in up market.
Obviously, our profitability is lower in down market, but we're still a growing company in terms of, in terms of EBITDA and revenue since, or revenue and EBITDA since 2016, and that's visualized very well by a slide we're going to see later. But if we try to understand why CoinShares has this capacity, I think the next slide is allowing us to understand that a bit better. So, CoinShares, let's see the next slide. Thank you. Not that next slide. Okay, no. Is there a next slide? Okay, we have a technical issue.
Yeah, it's a technical issue. I don't know if we have any technical.
That's fine. Don't worry. I can keep talking. If you have no more slide, or that's all you got.
There seems to be some stop here in the slides. Maybe we can remain on the last visible slide, and you can talk on, Jean-Marie.
That's fine. I can keep talking. Don't worry. Let me keep talking. So the way we think about CoinShares and like, you know, and as illustrated by this EBITDA number, we don't see revenue, but basically what it's highlighting is like it's a powerful margin. And the powerful margin is coming mainly from two segments. One, the capacity to have an operating cost advantage. And I think we are at least 50% better than our competition when it comes to our operating cost. And we also have a pricing power advantage. And, you know, we control 50% of the European crypto ETP revenue. The 50% better on the operating part comes from our deep relationship with custodians. We now have a custodian investment since 2018, for instance, with Nomura and Ledger.
We also have a staking relationship, which allows us to have the best staking reward in the market. And we finally get some exchange relationship, which allows us to really, really compress our cost of driving operation. On the pricing power advantage, you know, we have a lot of goodwill. We are an authoritative brand equity. We have indisputable reputation. We are well-regulated. We are a robust tech platform. Our market share of AUM is quite important and makes us authoritative again. And then we have a very strong product differentiation. We were the first to do physical product. We were the first to do staking product with zero management fees. We were the first to launch indices where we were the first to do a lot of things in the market, effectively, when it comes to asset management.
That's kind of over time, solidified the strength of the brand. The solidification of the strength of the brand means that CoinShares is becoming a growing annuity business with a very strong upside optionality. What does that mean by that is like CoinShares, you know, based on the number we are seeing is basically at the end of Q3 making GBP 76 million EBITDA. This is the highest EBITDA, you know, we went only GBP 56.9 million in 2023, GBP 37 million in 2022, and GBP 21 million in 2017. If you extrapolate where we are at the end of Q3 just by pure extrapolation, no public information, no non-public information being disclosed here, we should be able to cross the GBP 100 million EBITDA for 2024. With that in mind, you can see how CoinShares is growing.
But it's an interesting case because people keep talking to us about, oh, well, why can't I just buy crypto instead of like buying CoinShares? Well, CoinShares gives you a very unique, equity story, which you don't have in all the, crypto. First of all, if crypto goes to zero, which a lot of people tell us all the time that, oh yeah, crypto can go to zero, it's true, it can go to zero if something very, very nefarious happens. But the same way, any stock can go to zero. But CoinShares has a very strong balance sheet of GBP 300 million. So, at the very least, a shareholder is left with a very, very strong balance sheet. However, if crypto doesn't go to zero and crypto gets embraced much more, like we're seeing today in the U.S., CoinShares has some very, very strong, I would say, complexity case.
And by that, I mean that the CoinShares margins are able to grow very strongly, with our AUM. Why is that? Because our cost base is not growing in any kind of linear fashion with our AUM. So, right now, we're probably operating around 70% margin. If Bitcoin goes to, I don't know, whatever price and our AUM goes to, I don't know, right today, it's like $7 billion. If we were to manage $ 20 billion, we can keep the same team pretty much, to manage to still manage, twice or three times more AUM. So, it's not an issue at all. And so, the margin for our shareholders will keep increasing. On a side note, CoinShares is also paying a dividend. It is the first time this year CoinShares is paying a dividend. We pay a quarterly dividend.
The quarterly dividend is basically an annual dividend calculated for the previous year paid in four installments. So, we look at the result of 2023. The board of directors said, okay, for 2023, we're going to pay a dividend in 2024 paid in four installments at the end of each quarter, give or take. So, we already paid three. The fourth one is coming, I think at the end of January for December 31st. And that's a unique thing for CoinShares. We are unique. There is no other crypto company, which are still trying to grow, while also making sure their shareholders are being rewarded for their loyalty. So, we're very proud of doing it and very happy to do it as a company. So when it comes to CoinShares future, the question is like, okay, well, what do we do from there?
We talk about the fact that we wanted to grow the company into a global franchise. The other stuff which is important to note is like, sorry, the fire alarm now. Okay, now it's over. Just testing. The other thing, the growing the AUM is very important. Growing the global franchise is very important. What we tend to realize is like in asset management, if you look at traditional finance, there is a winner-take-all kind of phenomenon where the big brands are tending to get most of the AUM. We absolutely want to keep growing our brand so as we can keep collecting most of the AUM in the market by being different from all our competitors and also by being kind of innovating.
More importantly, we also believe that CoinShares, beyond this kind of organic growth capacity, has built a platform, which is quite remarkable in terms of operating costs, which allows us to be the perfect integrator for a lot of non-performing assets we are seeing today in the market, and we will look very carefully at all this kind of M&A activities and all these M&A opportunities to figure out which, I would say, opportunities are worth adding to the CoinShares stable. So, on that note, Albert, I know we don't have much more slide left on your slide, but I don't have much more to say. So, if you want to take over, it's up to you.
Move to some Q&A then. So, first of all, you have an asset management business on which you are on a fee. And I think most of us can grasp that, as crypto prices rise, you will have a larger AUM and therefore larger earnings. But I thought we would start by discussing some other ways that your AUM can grow. So, could you maybe talk a little bit about inflow to ETP products? You know, you have a 40% market share in Europe, but you have recently entered a much larger U.S. market. So, could you maybe talk a little bit about that?
Yeah, I think, you know, it's a, there is two ways to grow, or there are three ways to grow. Like in traditional finance, there is, where there is kind of like 10% volatility, there is kind of only two ways to grow AUM, you know, short of like the performance, you either buy AUM by buying competition, and who is trading at a lower, multiple than you, or you are able to, have a very good sales team who bring AUM into the house. And in CoinShares case, we have done both. But in CoinShares case, you have, as you said, Albert, the third case, which is the price action. So, price action needs to be a clear statement here, and I can't hide myself behind it.
Price action will always dwarf in crypto any kind of, I would say, capacity from our sales team to, defend AUM or to bring new AUM or even the acquisition model. So, if Bitcoin goes from wherever it is now to 250,000, which is some numbers we're seeing today, in the press, clearly our sales team won't be able to match that with like new inflow. It would be price action. When it comes to, inflow from organic growth, i.e., from our sales team development, it is very interesting to see that, our sales team in Europe, is pretty much, ranking number one this year against the big franchise like Fidelity and WisdomTree.
But in the U.S., where we don't have a strong visibility, we in terms of like, the sales force on the ground, because we took over a business we acquired in March and like restructuring it, so we were very much into a defense mode. We took our AUM from $10 million to $1.3 billion or $1.2 billion. So in some ways, our sales team has been doing a fantastic job, but it's beyond the sales team. It's also the marketing, the branding, the ticker game, has been very, very powerful in the U.S.. As an illustration, our ETF in the U.S. is, or the Bitcoin ETF is bigger than the VanEck one, is bigger than the WisdomTree one, is bigger than the Invesco one. So, we did some interesting stuff, and we attribute it to the fact that we play the meme culture.
We play the American story very strongly and appeal to retail investors, I would say, particularly by being able to embrace a meme culture. So, our ticker for the Bitcoin ETF is BRRR, effectively, which is the noise that you can find on Twitter when the money printer goes out of control. And that kind of resonates a lot with retail. The same way our Bitcoin mining ETF in the U.S., which is the first and unique Bitcoin miners specialized ETF in the world, is called WGMI for We're Gonna Make It. And again, resonates a lot with the investors in general. I think at some point, we even went as far as trying to get a ticker called BTFD. We at that point went too far, and our marketing team said that was maybe one step too far.
We're trying to be innovative, trying to just bring some stuff which is a bit different, to be able to grow our AUM, not only in a traditional way by just having the sales team on the road. The sales team was on the road in Germany this week. They are in Dubai next week. The U.S., we have people on the road in the U.S.. It's kind of like growing and growing as we every week we are much more active on the road, but also by doing some kind of marketing, and some kind of like outreach, as you can see these days in the street of Stockholm.
Mm-hmm. And, obviously we touched on price increases, which are important for your business. And we have seen very large price increases recently, partly due to the Trump victory. So, you also mentioned that scalable margin. So if crypto prices go up, could you maybe talk a little bit about your margin on the asset management business should rise, as you said? How will it affect the capital markets? Is rising crypto prices good for your R&D?
Yeah, so it's a very good point you mentioned, Albert, because people tend to struggle to see, okay, how do we modernize the capital market business? And I kind of like came to the realization that thank God we have enough data points to start thinking about it a little bit differently. And if you look at data since 2016, which are all available upon request, the capital market and asset management, despite being said by many people, obviously will never scale, that will never go anywhere, have kept growing hand in hand. It's like, so one year you get 40% margin or sorry, 40% EBITDA contribution from the asset management and 60% from the other business, and the year after is 60/40. It's like kind of flip. So, over time, it's kind of growing hand in hand on average 50/50.
And this relationship, you know, remains true. This relationship is an interesting one to keep an eye on. And so our margin, in asset management, in capital market will keep, you know, our revenue will keep growing. Our margin, you know, if we have access to more credit facility, will also improve and will keep growing. So, it's all kind of, it's all going in the right direction, effectively. So, in terms of how the capital market contributes to the asset management and the overall, P&L and EBITDA of the company. Does that make sense, Albert?
Yeah, it does. And then, you mentioned a little bit about M&A, and I think this is a, an interesting point because, in traditional industries, you're usually a profitable, profitable company buying profitable companies, but you have a different industry where you are one of the few profitable companies. So, could you maybe explain a little bit how it goes when you acquire a company and how you always manage to turn them profitable?
It's an interesting point. I think the crypto industry, to a wide degree, so you can die from two things, feast or starvation, effectively, a lot of crypto companies had the benefit to raise a lot of money early on and by raising a lot of money early on, started by putting the cost first and the revenue later, so you are in 2024 where Bitcoin price is, you know, trying to break $100,000 and some of these companies are, I would say, barely making money or barely break even with Bitcoin at $100,000, so the question is like, what kind of price do they need to be absolutely profitable and like make a killing, and our shareholders should be happy to put more money, so you have two cases.
You have the case of companies which are bankrupt, because they kind of run out of runway and shareholders don't want to put more money into it because it's like, when are you going to be profitable? And then there's companies which are barely profitable, which are the ones difficult to acquire because the management team has a lot of ego and believes that they're running a fantastic business. So, CoinShares was born on the ashes of our hedge fund business. We ran from 1998 to 2012 a very successful hedge fund business specialized in commodities. We returned the money to our investors and kept the infrastructure and decided to run from there. So, we were kind of like running our own company with our own money, no external investors to start. We raised $1 million in 2016 to accelerate our journey, and that's about it.
We have to raise a bit of money when we listed on Nasdaq, which was compulsory, but we didn't really need the money. So, it was really a question of like, how do we maximize the return on investment and the return of capital for our own shareholders? And if we can't justify that well enough, we need to be very careful about what we do with the money. Hence why sometimes we also feel the right stuff to pay a dividend. So, all things being considered, we are running our company with some kind of, I would say, Protestant orthodoxy when it comes to our balance sheet and our income statement to make sure that we are maximizing the shareholder value and not just maximizing the Twitter value or the Facebook value.
It's very easy to spend all our money on external advertising and external feel-good kind of marketing. What we are focusing on is like what kind of ROI can we achieve? That one makes a difference between CoinShares and most of our crypto-native competitors who went the other way around. You know, it gave us the opportunity over the years to acquire several businesses. We bought a business called Elwood. We built a business in France. We bought this business in the U.S., and we bought an XBT Provider from KnC Group. XBT Provider, which is kind of the kernel of what we built and where we start from, was acquired in 2016 by the very same management team, or at least by me and the chairman at the time, for $200,000 of cash and $600,000 of debt.
So, the question is like, how do we turn non-performing asset into performing asset? The CoinShares team has demonstrated over time through a number of operations that we have a strong understanding about this market, a strong understanding about this industry, and how to turn non-performing asset or asset which are not performing good enough into performing one. What we're doing in the U.S. right now is starting to show the sign of a successful turnaround, and we hope the platform will be, in its first stage, break even by the end of the year.
All right. Sounds exciting. Unfortunately, we are running out of time. So, Jean-Marie, thank you so much for participating, and thank you all for coming.
Albert, thank you very much for having me. Have a great day.
All right.
Good luck for the conference. Bye-bye.
Thank you. Bye.