BitFuFu Inc which trades on the NASDAQ under the symbol FUFU. It's a world-leading Bitcoin miner and mining services innovator who's committed to empowering the global Bitcoin network through its industry-leading cloud mining platform, rapidly scaling infrastructure, and innovative mining services. Happy to welcome VP of Investor Relations, Charley Brady. Nice to see you, Charley. What's your update today?
Yeah, thanks. Great to see you as well. This past Friday on August 15, we reported our second quarter earnings. I'm just going to cover that a little bit and then kind of go into what's the latest developments after the second quarter. This is our disclaimer page. I won't go through this, obviously, but typical safe harbor provisions here. Just quickly at the start to give you an overview of what BitFuFu is. We're a self-miner and a cloud miner. We're one of the largest cloud miners, probably the largest cloud miner in the world, and one of the largest self-mining companies in the world. As you can see here, 629,000 registered users on our cloud mining platform. From a mining capacity standpoint, as of the end of July, 38.6 exahash, 752 MW, and we held 1,784 Bitcoin on our balance sheet.
We're spread across the globe on five different continents. You can see the clusters are where we have data centers on these five continents here. Of the 752 megawatts, we control, from an ownership standpoint, 164 MW of that. The rest is leased capacity. What the company's really started to embark on over the past year or so is to acquire more data centers on an ownership basis and reduce the percentage of leased. We think that gives us a little more operational leverage to lower our cost base. We actually have seen our cost base decline as we've acquired more sites and upgraded some of the facilities that we've acquired with newer and more efficient mining machines. It also allows us to position ourselves down the road if we want to pivot into EPC or AI on the data center side.
Obviously, you have to own those data centers to be able to do that. That's also something that we're evaluating down the road. Right now, we need to acquire the data centers, and we've already started doing that over the past year. Just quickly on the second quarter, it was a pretty good quarter for us. You can see in terms of the cloud mining revenue, we really saw a high lift on that. We saw a substantial increase year over year. Even from the first quarter, we saw maybe a 70+% increase in revenues in cloud mining. It's interesting that over half of the cloud mining revenue in the second quarter came from new customers. We really saw an influx of new customers, and I think that really points to the demand. As Bitcoin continues to improve in price, demand for cloud mining is starting to increase.
The majority of our cloud mining revenues are institutional revenues. What we're also seeing now from the institutional side and the corporate side, you know, you see a lot of companies talking about doing a Bitcoin strategy. We're finding companies coming to us asking about using cloud mining as a corporate treasury strategy. Rather than buying Bitcoin off an exchange, to use cloud mining to acquire that Bitcoin as a treasury strategy. We think it's early days on that, but that has potentially some pretty good lift to it. You can see in terms of the number of sites we have and then how much hash rate we have, end of June, second quarter was 36.2. As of our July monthly operation update, that had increased to 38.6. Likewise, on the hosting capacity, at the end of the second quarter, we had 728 megawatts globally.
That had increased to 752 MW by the end of July. We also obviously saw an increase in that number of registered users on the cloud mining platform. The self-mining revenue year over year, not surprising. I think, you know, all the miners have gone through this. We did see a year-over-year decline really due to the halving that we saw in April, which happens every four years. We have been upgrading some of our mining fleet, though f rom a cost standpoint, our cost to mine has improved from the first quarter. As we continue to upgrade that fleet with more S-series, S21 XP miners, we'll probably see that cost basis continue to decline a little bit more. The more sites that we can go out and acquire, that helps us to also bring down that cost basis.
We did have some mining equipment sales in the quarter, about $5 million. These are resales to mostly existing customers of BitFuFu because we have access to miners through our relationship with Bitmain. We have a strategic framework we have with them for two years. We can acquire up to 80,000 S21 series miners. That access puts us really at the front of the line for those miners. To help facilitate customers who want to acquire miners for their own use, we do sell some of those miners to existing customers. Just quickly on the EBITDA results, see our pretty strong results here, $60.7 million versus $8.3 million year over year. Obviously, the EBITDA numbers, you know, for all the mining companies, there are unrealized fair market gains and losses, the mark-to-market on the Bitcoin held on the balance sheet, basically.
Even backing out the unrealized fair market gains, we saw a pretty strong EBITDA improvement here. That points to the fact that we did see a strong lift in the cloud mining revenue. We did see a lower cost basis on the self-mining revenue. That second quarter really just continued kind of what we've been seeing for the past four years since the company's been founded. You can see here, every year, the company's had an increase in revenue, increase in EBITDA. The company's been profitable on a net income basis every single year it's been in existence, which, you know, I think you look at a lot of miners out there and that's not going to be the case.
You can see on the right side here how we compare and stack up against, from a revenue and a net income basis, some of the peer groups out there in the mining space, the public miners. We're certainly near the top tier of that. Just really quickly on our strategy here, vertical integration and horizontal innovation. We have the self-mining business where we're mining for our own account. We have mining rigs. We host them at various data centers around the globe. You can see that we have 164 MW of secured capacity. That's the own centers I talked about. Our average kilowatt electricity cost there is on average about $0.045 kW hour, so very competitive. We are looking to expand our capacity out to adding over a gigawatt of capacity by the end of 2026.
There's more upside still there to come on the self-mining side as well. On the mining services side, that includes our cloud mining business, which again in the second quarter was 80% of our revenue. It's kind of moved anywhere from 60%- 80% depending on the quarter where we are in the year. The second quarter was pretty strong because of that demand. More registered users are signing up for that site. We also did introduce a few months ago our own mining pool, BitFuFu Pool. The amount of users on that has grown to 20 EH as of end of July. From basically zero a few months ago to 20 EH in a few months, we're benefiting from that using our own pool. Obviously, our cloud mining customers are benefiting from having that BitFuFu Pool as well.
The rates on that pool are extremely competitive, probably some of the best you'll find out there. We also have our own operating system that allows our customers and ourselves to tweak the machines to really monetize them as best possible and optimize the mining of those machines depending on temperature and electricity costs. We've rolled that out not only to existing customers, but new customers coming into the hosting side where they have their own machines and they want to host at our sites. They now have access to our own operating system. On the horizontal side, it really is a one-stop mining service platform. Anything you want to do with Bitcoin mining, whether it is having your own machine hosted, cloud mining, purchasing a mining rig, leasing a mining rig, using an operating system, using the pool, it really is a full-service soup-to-nuts service that we're now providing.
We've integrated it all into one stop. I think that that's been a part of the growth that we've seen as well, as that brand becomes more recognized and people realize it's a one-stop shop. We are seeing a pretty good increase in interest in some of those other services that we provide beyond just the cloud mining business. I'll just stop there. This is obviously my contact information and our CFO's contact information. Let me just stop there. If there are any questions anyone would like to ask, I'm happy to take them or f eel free to reach out. My email is obviously on the back of the deck.
Yeah, Charley, you can close with this question from Morgan. Where do you see the most growth? Is it from individual or institutional investors?
We've really seen a pickup in institutional investors. The majority of our cloud mining revenue is institutional. That's high net worth, family offices, hedge funds, some small private corporations. On the private corporations side, we've seen a pickup there. The treasury strategy piece of it is really starting to get a lot of interest from folks. Cloud mining is, I think, given that we're the number one provider in the world, leading brand on that, we're really attracting the companies that want to get involved in that and are gravitating towards BitFuFu to do that.
Wonderful. Charley, thank you so much for your update. We look forward to seeing you again real soon. Appreciate your time today.
Great, thanks very much.
All right, everyone. We'll be right back. Welcome back. We have an update from Impact Minerals Limited Trades on the ASX under the symbol IPT. Driven by a commitment to excellence and a vision to harness as well as mineral wealth , it is establishing itself as a key player in the HPA industry through careful project selection, rigorous evaluation, and profitability focus, while aiming to create lasting value for shareholders while contributing to the sustainable growth of the mining sector. Please welcome managing director Mike Jones . Welcome back, Mike. We're looking forward to hearing your update today.
Yeah, thanks very much, Anna, and great to be here again on emerging growth. Most of this presentation will just be a bit of a review. There might be some new viewers out there and tell you what we've been up to in the last few weeks, and also what our immediate plans are going forward. High-purity alumina is a little known but very important mineral that's an incredible part of the energy transition and also the emerging AI industry. Not many people know about it, but our intention is to mine our high-purity alumina from this lake in Western Australia. This is about 500 km East of Perth. The important thing here is that in the top two meters of that lake is something in the order of about $15 billion worth of high-purity alumina. Our plan is basically very simple.
We're going to dig that material up, truck it into Perth here in Western Australia, where I am, and process it using a technology platform that we have recently acquired a 50% interest in. It's a very simple, straightforward process. Solvent extraction is also located here in Perth. As an example of what HPA is used for, this is the Las Vegas dome that many of you might be familiar with. On that dome is something in the order of about 1.8 million light-emitting diodes. Behind every LED and all the other lights that you can see in that area is a piece of artificial sapphire. Sapphire is a form of high-purity alumina, and that market is growing very dramatically.
We believe that with our lake and this new technology that we have, we can transform the production of high-purity alumina and be the lowest cost producer of high-purity HPA globally by a significant margin. I've mentioned LEDs. I also mentioned semiconductors. The HPA is used to help polish some of the silicon carbide that is used in semiconductors. It's also used as a cap on each of those little squares, the little semiconductors there, because HPA is also thermally inert. It also acts as an insulator, and it stops the heat buildup in these large data centers. In electric vehicles, it's used in batteries, lithium-ion batteries, again to prevent heat buildup and stops the batteries from catching on fire. The market, as I mentioned, is growing at about 20% per annum.
In the blue here on the upper parts of the graph there, we see the projected demand. We're looking at something that's growing at about 20% per annum. By the end of this decade, the market, which is not very big, but it'll be about 120,000 tons. We aim to be a major supplier of that. There's a tightening of supply because the market's growing so rapidly. High-purity materials are difficult to make. We're seeing a rapid increase in the number of people interested in getting HPA. We're expecting a tightening of supply and an increase in the price that we can charge within the next couple of years when we hope to get into production. Currently, the purity of alumina is what controls its price. You can get anything from 3N or 99.9% pure right up to 6N, which is ultra-pure material.
The bulk of the demand is in the 3N and the 4N, which is 99.99% pure. They're selling between $15,000- $30,000 a ton. You can get better margins on ultra-pure material, 5N and 6N, but those are more limited volume markets. We'll be tackling the 4N market as our first entry point, which is currently selling between $15,000 and $30,000 a ton. This is how much alumina we have in the lake. We've got at least 450,000 tons of alumina. That's for more than a 40-year mine life at an average benchmark production rate of about 10,000 tons per annum. There is no shortage of material. It's all about the method by which we can convert it into the high-purity material. This is how we drilled out $15 billion worth of material with a rubber mallet and a plastic push tube. It sounds very simple, and it is.
That's one of the keys to the low production cost. It comes out very fine-grained, which needs no beneficiation on site. Our plan is very straightforward. We're going to truck the material into Perth. We're going to drive it off the side of the lake, three months of the year, stockpile it, and then truck the material into Perth. We've already got clearance for mining on the lake from the local native title group, the Naju peoples. We've also done baseline environmental surveys, which indicate that there are no threatened or priority species there. Lake Hope is here's a map showing where it is. It's about 500 km East of Perth. It's going to be a very simple operation to get it into the center of town. We've recently completed a pre-feasibility study. We have a very excellent, world-class team.
We've got sort of over 50, 60 years' experience of alumina from people who've worked at Alcoa, one of the world's largest alumina and aluminum companies. We've also got experienced offtake people as well who are starting our offtake program. I won't dwell on this, but this is the economics from our pre-feasibility study that we put out in June. Some key numbers there are that for the benchmark of 10,000 tons per annum, we're going to be able to, it has a NPV of about $720 million. Very good capital ratio. It's only going to cost us about $160 million to build the plant. The most important number here is our operating cost. We believe that we're going to be able to produce HPA at less than $5,000 a ton when we take into consideration our byproduct.
We're going to be able to produce potash as well as part of our process. Very strong cash flows. As a result, this is an excellent project. Low CapEx and moving into a high margin business. I mentioned that our operating cost, this is a cost curve analysis. Most of the production at the moment is dominated by the Chinese and the Japanese. There's some new entrants into the marketplace, but Impact has the lowest cost of production down around about sort of $5,000 a ton. When you consider we're selling it at sort of an average price of, say, $22,000 a ton, that's what gives us the very strong NPV and the ongoing cash flows once we get into production. What our work has focused on in the last six weeks, we've been getting over the barriers.
We've learned that there's lots of barriers to getting into high-purity minerals, and high-purity alumina is no different. It's all about the purity. You need your own laboratory. You need to be able to regenerate your assets. Really, it's all about client engagement and then financing your scale-up. We did recently announce that we have a project going with one of the universities here in Perth. They have world-class researchers in membrane technology. We've now made a significant start since we last spoke into implementing these membranes into our flow sheet. We believe they're going to have an incredible effect on the nature of our acid recirculation and also our wastewater treatment in particular. The guys at the university have got already some really fantastic patents for lithium and rubidium. We think we're going to be able to do the same thing very soon with our alumina.
As I mentioned, we purchased recently a share of a technology in Perth, and we believe that's a very natural bolt-on for our Lake Hope project. We have a high-purity laboratory. Since we spoke, we've now got that laboratory up and running. It is now fully functional, and we're getting rapid assay turnaround to work out how pure our materials are as we put material through the second thing that we bought, which was our pilot plant. We took possession in May. We've now basically started to commission this plant. We're taking material through the different parts of the process in batch form, and we should be able to get to high-purity alumina within the next few weeks. That's a very exciting time.
That will actually put us into a unique position where we're actually the only other company, we're only the second company on the entire Australian Stock Exchange that's capable of producing any commercial quantities of HPI. That company is Alpha HPIs, pointed out here on the right-hand side. With the acquisition of our pilot plant, we're now in a position to move forward into modest scale production in the next 18 months. The other thing about the technology is that it's modular, and we've now made some first significant inroads into talking to potential North American offtakers and in America and the U.S. in particular, battery technology companies. We believe that we're going to be able to build a small-scale plant there starting probably in something like 2027, which is only two short years away. A lot of growth to come in that time.
We have ourselves protected now by patents, and we're very close to patents in several other countries around the world, the key marketplaces. The big news in the last week is actually we've now appointed a chairman to the subsidiary company that owns the technology. This is a gentleman by the name of Mr. Tim Netscher. He is extremely well regarded throughout the mining industry, and he's currently the chairman of Gold Road Limited, which is under a $3.5 billion takeover. He's been on many boards, and he's actually a chemical engineer by trade. He is going to add huge depth and credibility to our process, and he also very much validates our business plan. Our business plan is very straightforward. At the moment, we're commissioning the plant. That should be done within the next month or so.
It will take a few months to get it up to scratch, producing material of consistent quality. We've already started our customer engagement program. Next year will be the feasibility studies, working out where and how and what to build in the U.S. in 2027, where we hope to scale up to production into the many thousands of tons per annum. Since we last spoke, we've had a very good response in the share price. We're up about 40% or 50% since we last spoke. The market is certainly getting out there. The story is starting to be understood. We have very strong support from our German shareholders. We have just over $2 million in the bank currently. Where are we going to head? I talk about the other company, Alpha HPI, that is the other producer now on the ASX, has AU$1 billion valuation, sorry, Australian dollars.
That's about a 25 times uplift from where we are now. They also have a price tag on them of $2 billion over the next couple of years as they bring their big plant into production. There is a lot happening in the background. We're still on track to be one of the lowest cost producers of HPA globally. We have this unique deposit in Western Australia and now a unique technology, which is starting to fire up, which is going to drive our low cost of operation. That is really going to help our entry into the HPI market space in 2026. We're certainly building out our capabilities and end product specifications as we talk to more customers and find out what it is that they want.
We hope to get our timing right that by 2027, we'll be in modest scale production, which is a time when the supply is tightening. That's the story. We are very happy to answer questions.
Wonderful. Thank you, Mike. We are out of time. We have to get to our next presenter, but we do have lots of questions for you. We'll send them to you. You can answer them on your own through your email. Thank you for this update. Congratulations on all this progress. We look forward to seeing you again real soon.