Welcome back, everyone. We have an update from GeoVax Labs, trades on the NASDAQ under the symbol GOVX. It's a clinical-stage biotech company developing novel vaccines for many of the world's most threatening infectious diseases and therapies for solid tumor cancers. Happy to welcome back Chairman, President, and CEO David Dodd. Now, David, this is a good time to have an opportunity for an update on GeoVax, so please remind us of your business goals and your focus.
Thank you, Anna. It's a pleasure to be here, and I appreciate everyone's interest in GeoVax. Just to remind you, we're a clinical-stage biotech company. We develop infectious disease vaccines against such conditions as COVID-19 or Mpox, formerly known as monkeypox. We also have a clinical program underway or in process related to solid tumor cancer therapies. We're initially working on head and neck cancers now, so that's what we're focused on. We thought we differentiate ourselves, or at least we believe we do, through having a very strong patent portfolio. We just announced, in fact, a new patent being allowed today, a very broad patent in support of our multi-antigen next-generation COVID-19 vaccine. We target populations that are either unserved or underserved because we think that gives us an arena to really differentiate well.
By doing that, we focus on achieving expedited registration pathways for being able to get to commercialization, and we work towards business collaborations. I'd say from an investor standpoint, we believe that the manner in which we run the business, in which we focus on our developments, we have a de-risk approach towards value development. We have the three programs advancing, the priority programs. One is GeoMVA, which is our candidate as a vaccine for Mpox and smallpox vaccine. Actually, it's addressing a global market opportunity that exceeds $11 billion, so there's a lot of opportunity there, but that size of it also underscores how important it is and the need for such a product. GEO-CM04S1 is our multi-antigen vaccine for COVID-19.
That, again, is addressing even a much larger opportunity, primarily those patients around the world, not only just in the U.S., who have weakened immune systems because they may have blood cancers or other medical conditions. They just simply do not respond to what is currently authorized: the mRNA vaccines, the Novavax vaccines. Over 40 million adults fit that category in the U.S. alone, 400 million people worldwide. Finally, Gedeptin is our solid tumor cancer. We're focused initially on head and neck, but this technology allows us to go after a very broad array of solid tumor cancers. We have milestones coming up throughout the remainder of this year, mostly in support of these three programs, but also our advanced technology. We're moving forward to be able for infectious disease vaccines to produce products much faster, with greater yield, and at a lower cost.
We have a lot of exciting things to go forward with. What I also wanted to mention, because people have asked us throughout with the new administration, do we align well with what is going on in the new administration out of HHS and others? In fact, we've actually mapped out how we align not only with just one particular political party, but across the board. When you look at the bipartisan focus towards America first, towards ensuring that we have multiple and more diverse platforms for vaccine development, and also that we have long-term safety behind them.
This slide basically is our response that demonstrates, in our opinion, that we align very well with the current administration, as well as those, regardless of the party, that are focused on seeing more diverse, more transparent sort of development communications regarding the progress towards vaccines and making sure that more is being done as it should be done in the U.S., and we're not dependent on foreign entities. That's sort of where we are in terms of our business goals. The milestones address that. The alignment shows where we are. I'll turn it back to you right now for Anna.
Wonderful. David, did you want to talk a little bit more about how GeoVax Labs is adjusting to the new Trump administration and the HHS Secretary, or are you complete with that?
Thank you for bringing that up. The issue of transparency has been one that Secretary Kennedy and others have talked about since even before they were confirmed, and that is something that we have been very involved with and believe very strongly. I authored an op-ed that was published in late January in Genetic Engineering News about the need for transparency among vaccine leaders and those of us in the industry. Multi-antigen vaccines is something that the Secretary of HHS has come out publicly during early April in favor of, saying we need more multi-antigen vaccine approaches rather than the single antigen. Single antigen are like mRNA and such as Novavax. Our whole technology is built around delivering multi-antigen vaccines, so we align very well. If you look at the other elements that have been espoused about accelerated U.S.
manufacturing, making sure that there's equitable access to vaccines, we think that we align very strongly and well with the new administration, as well as others in Congress of different political ideologies, but still feel very strongly in this regard. Thank you for bringing that up.
Great point. Thank you for answering that. Now, talk a little bit about your objectives, plans, and strategy related to capital development.
Yes. We target on an annual basis, and people are always interested about—we're pre-revenue. What that means is we continuously are looking to raise money. On an annual basis, we target approximately $30 million. You know, maybe $25 million gets us there, or either $20 plus, but we like to target to have more. Last year, we brought in in excess of $25 million, and that enabled us to continue to progress and move forward. That's our target. We do that through the combination of not only just the sale of equity, but also non-dilutive opportunities. On the equity side, we have multiple banking relationships and those with high interest in continuing to work with us. We believe that's because we continue to deliver on our milestones, to progress the company as we hope to.
We also are focused on high net worth, family offices, and individuals from a non-dilutive type aspect. We continue to focus on working with either federal government funding or non-government organizations such as CEPI, Gates Foundation, etc. Finally, we look for collaborative or partnering relationships that could also bring capital in as we reach agreements on how we might work with others in developing our products in a more accelerated manner. Bottom line is our philosophy is to raise as much as possible whenever it's available on reasonable terms. It's not that we sit back and say, okay, this is the schedule we're going on. We're looking to raise capital virtually every day, but always as we raise it, we look at it.
We may have sort of a period of time in which we're not going to be raising it because of the agreements we achieve with the investors and all, but basically on reasonable terms, continue to pursue that target of approximately $30 million. $30 million will enable us to continue to drive forward with those priority programs and to do that in a manner we believe that will enable us to reach the milestones sooner rather than later. We work to try to accelerate our paths to milestones and catalysts.
Perfect. Finally, recently it was announced that Bavarian Nordic, currently the only supplier worldwide for the Mpox MVA vaccine, was being acquired for $3 billion by a private equity firm. With your focus on ending that existing monopoly, what does this acquisition mean relative to GeoVax?
It's a very good question because right now there is one company worldwide, Bavarian Nordic, a Danish company, that has now recently announced that they're being acquired by a private equity firm. The entire world, in fact, the United States and all of our colleagues around the world, are totally dependent on this monopoly for the preferred vaccine known as MVA. In their case, it's MVA-BN for Bavarian Nordic. We think that's a situation that is untenable because first of all, they don't have the manufacturing capacity, and monopolies do nothing but seem to go in the wrong direction when it comes to cost and pricing and all. Our GeoMVA is now accelerating. We've already manufactured our first clinical batch. It's been released. It'll go into the final stage of putting it into the glass vials in October. It'll be completed in November.
We're planning to initiate in the beginning of the second half of next year a phase three trial, the only trial that we've been told that we are required to move forward with. It'll be an immunobridging trial, and we think that'll go rather quickly, and that will then lead us to revenue generation. In the interim, we hope through pre-qualification with WHO, we'll be able to begin to distribute and provide product that is greatly needed around the world sooner than later. We think that at least within three years, we will be generating and transitioning into a revenue-producing company. Exciting times ahead of us. We look forward to updating all of the listeners and those interested parties over the next several months.
Wonderful. Thank you, David. We are out of time, so we will send you the questions that our viewers have asked to you directly so you can answer. Thank you for this great update. We appreciate you.
Thank you.
All right, everyone. We'll be right back.
BitFuFu Inc., which trades on the NASDAQ under the symbol FUFU, is a world-leading Bitcoin miner and mining services provider, committed to empowering the global Bitcoin network through its industry-leading power mining platform, rapidly scaling infrastructure, and innovative mining services. We are pleased to welcome Charlie Brady, Vice President of Investor Relations. Nice to see you, Charlie. 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 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 EH, 752MW , and we held 1,784 BTC on our balance sheet. We're spread across the globe on five continents.
You can see the clusters are where we have data centers on these five continents. Of the 752 MW, we control, from an ownership standpoint, 164 MW of that. The rest is leased capacity. What the company has 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 HPC 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, but 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 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 were at 728 MW globally, and 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 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. From 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 where 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 that's held on the balance sheet, basically. Even backing out the unrealized fair market gains, we saw a pretty strong EBITDA improvement here.
Again, that points to the fact that we did see a strong lift in the cloud mining revenue, and we did see a lower cost basis on the self-mining revenue. That second quarter really just continued 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 a kilowatt 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 from 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 interested users are signing up for that site. We also introduced 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 to new customers coming into the hosting side where they have their own machines and they want to host it 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, but let me just stop there. If there are any questions anyone would like to ask, I'm happy to take them, or feel free to reach out. My email is obviously on the back of the deck.
Yeah, Charlie, 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 in there. As I mentioned, 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 are gravitating towards BitFuFu to do that.
Wonderful. Charlie, thank you so much for your update, and 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.