Hello and welcome to Virtual Investor Conferences. My name is Cecilia, and on behalf of OTC Markets, we're very pleased you have joined us for our next live presentation from Exodus. Please note, you can 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 through the Schedule Meetings tab found on the conference platform. At this point, I am very pleased to welcome James Gernetzke, Chief Financial Officer of Exodus, which trades on the OTCQX Best Market under the symbol EXOD. Welcome, James.
Hi, thank you very much. Appreciate everyone for being here and watching the presentation. Let's get started. Obviously, our forward-looking statements. Who is Exodus? We are a company that is working to empower individuals to control their lives in a digital world. For us, that translates into being a premier digital wallet that makes cryptocurrency, DeFi, and NFTs easy and secure for everyone. As you can imagine, right now, it's a very exciting time. As we're having this call and this recording, late last night, we just crossed the 100,000 Bitcoin barrier, that mark. It's for us in the industry that's a major psychological hurdle that we've gone through. If you forgive my voice, just from an industry perspective, we are all very, very excited right now, some of the political changes and things like that.
So please bear with me and all of the excitement today, but for Exodus, we've been OGs in the space, I guess, if you will forgive the parlance, the company was founded in 2015 in Omaha, Nebraska, of all places, and we've grown quite a bit since then. We have over 200 full-time equivalents. Obviously, we're traded here on the OTC, we are an SEC reporting company, and two-thirds of our users are international, so we are absolutely a 100% worldwide company. We have quite a bit of reach. We have significant numbers in terms of both what are our business numbers, revenues, volumes, users, et cetera, and our product has a very wide support. We have over 21,000 digital assets that are supported, and that's an industry towards the tops of the industry in terms of the amount of assets that we support. Some quick financial highlights.
Our operating model we have is rather fixed, and what that allows us to do is it allows us to capture, to manage our business in times of crypto market cycles, so bear markets, that fixed cost allows us to manage our expenses very well and be able to weather any bear market storms that might come by, or in periods like we're in right now, bull market allows us to really capture a lot of the upside and have very high margins in bull markets. We have a very healthy balance sheet as well. As a technology company and then also as a company in the digital asset space, we have to be very cognizant of our balance sheet. We do not have any debt, and we, again, as I mentioned earlier, we have a very fixed expense base that provides a lot of operating leverage.
In terms of why Exodus, why crypto in general, the digital asset market, I mean, it's rapidly growing, and recent events in the U.S. political space and other events are only really going to grow that. We expect to see that essentially the digital asset world, it will overtake and it will become the normal world. The normal financial markets will someday be digital financial markets. The two are merging, and the new technology, of course, will begin and has begun and will continue, and at some point, it will fully replace the old. Our product offering is self-custodial. What that means is right now, Exodus, we do not have the ability to even touch our users' funds.
So any of the concerns or worries that investors or users or other folks might have about things that have happened in the past, bankruptcies or hacks or shenanigans, that will not impact user funds because, again, we cannot touch user funds. It's kind of challenging for a lot of people to grasp because we are so used to a custodial world, whether that's because your stock is in a brokerage that's not hold paper stock certificates anymore, or whether it's because money is in a bank and you have to go and ask the bank to get your money out to make a withdrawal, et cetera. But the technology is really allowing people to regain that custody without having to sacrifice some of the experiences that we've grown accustomed to from a custodial solution. We are multi-chain. That is actually something that's very challenging for other companies to emulate.
So what that means is Bitcoin is on a blockchain. And on a separate blockchain is something called Ethereum. And on another blockchain is Solana. We support over 20 blockchains. And that is very challenging. A lot of competitors in the space only support one or maybe two blockchains. And we have 10x that. That allows us to service and be really picks and shovels, if you will. We don't necessarily pick which blockchain is going to be the gold mine. We'll service them all. And not all of them, but we'll service the vast majority of them, the ones that are going to be, and a lot more than our peers. And we will have that ability to capture the rents and the upside along with the gold as it appears in some of those blockchains. And then we have best-in-class security and user support.
So we have, especially on that user support, everyone who's anyone in crypto obviously takes security extremely seriously for obvious reasons. But I think the real differentiator is that user support. Because user support in the crypto space is generally, I mean, there are some exceptions here and there, but generally, it's abysmal. And we pride ourselves in our user support. From a transparency perspective, that's another thing you don't see a lot in the space, whether it's just because most of the, almost all, 99% of the companies in the space are private companies. So you don't have a lot of transparency into their financials or because they're small or less mature, et cetera, for whatever the reasons. And that really makes us unique because we're one of the few SEC reporting crypto companies that exist, especially if you don't include the miners. It's basically us and Coinbase.
So that makes us very, very unique. And having that transparency as a reporting issuer, obviously, being a public company has its cost, but we really embrace that transparency. And then in terms of growth catalysts, I mentioned briefly about multi-chain and about how difficult that is. What we've been able to do is obviously grow our base business and grow our wallet. And people love it. And it continues to grow. But we've also been able to take some of the things that were so challenging over the past nine, almost 10 years of building this business, we've been able to take some of the things that are very challenging, some of the challenges we've experienced, and some of the ways we fix them, and basically take those and white-label them, if you will, and provide those services to others in the crypto space.
And someday, also not necessarily in the crypto space, but right now into the crypto space and allow us to share our experiences, kind of like similar to, say, AWS. It started as an Amazon service for them internally. And they said, "Hey, wow, everybody needs this. Let's go out and share it to the world." So we're taking not an exact, but a similar type of approach with that. And then the other thing that we have going is we have an extremely strong balance sheet. And as the price of Bitcoin and the underlying assets, we have a large Bitcoin treasury and some other digital assets as well. But as that price increases, the power of our treasury increases as well. And we're not afraid to put that treasury to work, whether that's through M&A or marketing.
What is decentralized finance and what is blockchain, and why does it matter? If you think about traditional finance, you have these centralized systems, and that can be a single point of failure, if you will. Things can happen with one company. If you have your money tied up in one company or one entity, there's real diversification risk. We all know about inflation and the impact that it has on individual user and money printing, and just the availability of banks and markets, and blockchain and DeFi, it really solves all of these issues, which is why I said earlier, I believe, and we believe that DeFi will become what we call in the industry TradFi, so traditional finance. Traditional finance will become decentralized over time. In my mind, in my opinion, it's just going to be a matter of when, not if.
Why Exodus over some of the other wallets and platforms, et cetera, that are out there? Well, one, self-custody is a big one. And as I mentioned, it allows you to control your assets. And only you have access to it. So if Exodus gets hacked or somebody steals the money on Exodus's balance sheet, that doesn't impact you because Exodus can't touch your money. If we think about the range of blockchains and digital assets, we have a wide, wide range of assets that we support and chains that we support. So for example, there were companies that did not support Doge back in, I believe it was 2020, when Elon Musk started tweeting and talking about Doge and Doge just went through the roof. Well, because we have such a wide range, an array of assets and blockchains we support, we actually supported Doge.
And so, if you wanted to trade Doge in a lot of jurisdictions, a lot of countries, and a lot of areas of the world, you kind of had to go to Exodus to trade that until the others in the industry caught up. Again, that's kind of like we are agnostic around chains and assets. And if we see gold being mined, like Doge, for example, we're going to provide the picks and shovels. So how do we make money? Well, Exodus has this, and you can see in the middle there, Exodus has an exchange aggregator. What that means is, see all those little bubbles, all those circles around the aggregator. Those represent other companies, other exchanges, and DeFi platforms that we, over time, have taken and worked into and provided an API so that our users can interact with those APIs directly.
And it offers the ability for a user to have choice and for those exchange providers to compete essentially for their business, which helps provide competitive pricing, liquidity, and order fulfillment time. And it also allows multiple jurisdictions because not every exchange is licensed or chooses to operate in every country and every state, and every city. So by having a large number, that allows us to have that worldwide access and provide best customer experience and user experience when it comes to swapping digital assets. And we can get a little bit more into our revenue, but that is definitely our primary revenue driver. But we also offer staking and fiat onboarding. And those are growing businesses for us as well.
So I mentioned earlier about how we've taken some of the challenges that we've seen over the past nine years in this industry and building our business, and how we've taken it and applied it and gone out and white-labeled or helped other businesses by giving them access to some of these tools. So two examples in here you see are Magic Eden and Ledger. And the interesting thing about Magic Eden was they are an NFT, so non-fungible token exchange, if you will, or marketplace. And as the crypto industry has developed, these NFTs really started on Ethereum, and then Solana's and other blockchains, and there were a lot of NFTs on that as well. And Magic Eden started in Solana. And then they moved to supporting Ethereum chain, NFTs on Ethereum. And then in the past year or so, big.
And NFTs related to or NFT-like assets that can be traded on Bitcoin. And so to do that effectively, what Magic Eden needed was a wallet that could support all of those blockchains and support it well. And we helped them with that. Ledger, what that is, is our exchange aggregator. We have a partnership with them where we allow them to access our exchange aggregator. And so that their seven million users, I believe that's their account, get access to our revenue-generating exchange aggregator where we share the revenue with them. And they and their users get access to our battle-tested, industry-leading exchange product. And then Passkeys from a growth perspective, Passkeys at a technology perspective, this is some just really amazing technology that we just launched recently and are developing. And we have some pretty interesting plans for. But that's a brand new one.
And we really believe that we can help the industry with all of these different areas and at the same time, obviously, generate some revenue and return for our investors. Our leadership, especially JP Richardson, our CEO and co-founder and Chair of the Board, and Daniel, our two co-founders, they've been around for a long time in this industry. And it really speaks in terms of digital assets in the crypto space, the work and the trust and the brand name that we have built, it has a lot more meaning than it does in other industries. And so we're really proud of our user base and what we've done, and how much and how much our users love us and how loyal they are. Again, we are an SEC reporting company. And because of that, we're preparing.
We really appreciate OTCQX and OTC Markets and the work that they've done and the products and services they've provided us, but we are looking to uplist to a national exchange, and we are prepared, so we have an independent board of directors. We have a Big Four auditor, and we are ready, and we're working actively towards an uplisting, but this is a real differentiator in this space. I mean, we mentioned the transparency of our financials and our operations, just the transparency of being SEC reporting, but there also comes with it the responsibilities of being SEC reporting, so having an independent audit committee and having actual audited financial statements, you just don't find that all that much in the crypto space, so the revenue model is that exchange aggregator. What happens is Exodus is not in the flow of funds, so we don't actually touch user funds.
The way we make money is a user will access through the API one of those exchanges through the exchange aggregator. And then they'll do a transaction. The exchange will take their fees. And afterwards, at some point, the exchange will pay us a fee. You could, in theory, think of it as a referral fee from that transaction. Now, most of our revenue is exchange aggregation. Through that point, through Q3, it was only we had 9% from other areas. I expect that exchange aggregation, just because of the nature of our business, will continue to be our main revenue driver, even as we add and increase product offerings in other areas because it's the central component of our platform. And being able to move between offerings almost always creates an exchange transaction. So it's a very virtuous cycle, if you will.
Here's a little bit more detail about our revenue and category. I'm going to skip that for now. Talk about our exchange volume and our MAUs. As you could see, we have 1.6 million MAUs at the end of Q3, and that's a 60% increase from what we saw a year earlier at the end of Q3 of 2023. Our operating income, as I mentioned earlier, our costs are generally fixed. Our main costs are going to be salaries and cloud services. And those do not fluctuate all that much with. There is some fluctuation, of course, but it doesn't fluctuate all that much with volume. So as we see volume spikes, like as we saw in Q1, for example, we don't increase. It is very. There's very good operating leverage, and we don't see linear increases in our expenses. Here's our strong treasury.
We had 1,800 Bitcoin on our balance sheet at the end of Q3, so we are absolutely one of the leaders in retaining Bitcoin on our and having Bitcoin in our treasury and on our balance sheet. We also generate our income and pay expenses in Bitcoin, so we look at ourselves, our goal is to continually generate Bitcoin for our investors and for our treasury, and that is so if we did an M&A transaction, the thought process is, "Okay, will this M&A transaction allow us to get more Bitcoin and add it to our treasury or help distribute that?" We don't have any plans for dividends, but that's a general idea.
Our catalyst for growth here, again, just to reiterate, the partnerships that we've done, the Ledger, the Magic Eden, taking the hard tools that we've built internally and leveraging them externally, and basically helping the industry, and at the same time generating revenue for us. The overall market is going to grow. I mean, Bitcoin hitting 100,000, some of the different political things that have happened. We expect to see some regulatory clarity and things of that nature in the future. And we also have plans. We have a strong balance sheet. There's definitely things we can do there. And yeah. And so I'd say those are the big drivers. With that, let me get into some questions. I see there's actually quite a few here.
The first one is, on December 4th, you provided an update on your SEC registration progress and mentioned we received a request for confirmation from the staff and filed our confirmation. Can you provide details on what the request for confirmation was and what the response was provided? This is a fairly new practice for the SEC. Essentially, it is a reiteration of a confirmation that the SEC, even if they have decided that they are done commenting on your process, they will give you a letter that asks you to confirm that you understand that that doesn't prohibit the SEC from any actions in the future. It is not an approval from the SEC. Rather, it's just that they are indicating that they've decided to stop commenting on your filing.
I see another one. Another question is, "Most of transactions on New York say not available." Thank you. That is true. As I mentioned, the exchange aggregator, it covers by having a number of different exchanges who can service different geographies. One of the things is New York State has very challenging, I think might be a good way to say it, regulations and rules around crypto and digital assets and exchanging them and licensure requirements. And it really prohibits a large number of exchanges from actually servicing that state. So right now, we just don't have a provider that can service assets in the state of New York. Go just about anywhere else. We got you covered.
Are we providing revenue guidance for 2025? No. We have not historically and do not at this time plan on providing revenue guidance. What is Exodus's monthly cash burn rate? We are cash flow positive and have been for a number of years. We generate cash. We don't burn it. I should say generate Bitcoin.
And do you anticipate a similar revenue by category in 2025 versus 2024? I would say yes. I think that the partnership and the partnerships and we're just getting started with our partnerships. So as we sign more partnerships in different areas and for different products, there is potential that it would change. But I would expect that revenue mix to generally be the same. I can't say for certain that it will, but I would say my expectation is that, yes, generally expect exchange aggregation to drive 90% or so of our business in 2025. Next question. If someone hacks your wallet and moves Bitcoin back, I'm not quite sure what that means.
If someone hacks Exodus, would that impact an individual user? The answer is no, because Exodus is self-custodial, so if you, as an individual, have an Exodus wallet, Exodus cannot touch the money in your wallet, and because of that and the systems that we've set up or because we've set up the wallet that way, a hacker would not be able to hack Exodus and then go after your individual wallet. Next question is, "Are you flowing any returns to shareholders, dividends, and buybacks?" We have no plans currently for a dividend. Buybacks, we had a buyback plan back in 2021. There were challenges with that based on the volume that was traded on the platform that we were on then, so we don't currently have any buyback plans.
Generally, our thought is we want to use our capital that we don't need for working capital. We want to apply that to internal growth initiatives or M&A. Are you monitoring the third-party vendors? I'm not sure exactly when this question came in, so perhaps it's a question around the exchanges and the exchange aggregator. I think the way I would explain it is when one of our users interacts with the exchange, we do see the flow of that interaction, so we are able to tell if, for example, a user was going to swap Bitcoin for Ethereum and the API provider never sends back. The user sends their Bitcoin to the API provider, but the API provider, the exchange, never sends the Ethereum back to the user. We are able to see that.
Of course, if we see any type of indication that that might be a pattern or that there is a pattern developing, we would turn that off, API off, in order to protect our users until we figured out what was going on with that exchange. Just one of the other advantages that we have and the things that we've learned over time from just being in this space for so long and operating this exchange aggregator for the past nine-ish years. The next question is, there is a challenge. It looks like there's a challenge with someone moving their shares from our Reg A into their brokerage. Yes, I just want to say that this is a known challenge with the current status of our shares.
When we make a move to a national exchange, my understanding is that that will be a status change that will allow broader access to brokers for our retail investors. So with that said, I think we're at time and I think we're out of questions. So I just want to say thank you, everyone at the OTC. Thank you, everybody, for listening. Have a great holiday season and happy New Year. Take care, everybody.