Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Hut 8 Mining Annual General and Special Meeting 2021 Conference Call. For everyone's benefit, this call is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Bill Tighe, Chair of the Board of Directors of the company. Please go ahead.
Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the Annual General and Special Meeting of Shareholders of Hud eight Mining Corp. My name is Bill Tighe. I'm Chairman of the Board of Directors of the company. We as the Board of Directors have asked our CEO and Director of the company, Jamie Leverton, Conduct the meeting as chair and she is accepted. So I will now turn it over to Jamie.
Thank you.
Thank you, Bill. Good morning, everyone. As Bill mentioned, my name is Jamie Leverton and I'm the CEO of Hut 8 Mining. As with last year, in light of the COVID-nineteen pandemic And in keeping with the advice of authorities and the practice of many other public companies, the company is conducting a virtual only meeting. You will hear me refer to the virtual platform throughout the meeting at various times.
This is the AccuTel platform through which we are conducting the meeting. At this meeting as this meeting is held virtually via teleconference, we want to first set out a few guidelines for your attention. The operator will announce each person 1 by 1 and open their lines to pose their questions. Number 2, for the purposes of the meeting today, Voting on all matters will be conducted by telephone through the virtual platform. The polls will open after the item of business is moved And all registered shareholders and duly appointed proxy holders can follow the instructions from the operator to vote.
Number 3, If you are a registered shareholder or a duly appointed proxy holder and you have already voted and do not wish to change your vote, please do not vote again. Number 4, you may record your vote for an item of business during the voting period for that particular item. Once the polls are closed, you will no longer be able to change your votes. Your votes will then be automatically submitted. Number 5, filing, while we hope to avoid any technological disruptions, these may occur unexpectedly.
Our service providers will assist as required. If you require assistance, please press star 0 on your touch tone phone from within the meeting for additional assistance. Your patience is greatly appreciated. Now on to the matter of business. First item is the appointment of Secretary and Scrutineer.
We will now proceed with the I appoint Penny Woods, General Counsel of the company to act as and to report thereon to me. To expedite the formal part of the meeting, I will move all motions and Shane Downey, CFO of the company will second all motions. We have previously mailed the meeting materials. Copies of the documents mailed to the shareholders will be kept by the Secretary. The business of the meeting is described in the management information circular dated May 21, 2021, which included a notice of meeting.
For purposes of the meeting, I will take all matters set out in the notice of meeting as having been read. Pursuant to the articles of the company, Business may be transacted at this meeting if there are shareholders present in person or represented by proxy who, in the aggregate, hold at least 25% of the voting rights attached to shares entitled to be voted at this meeting, irrespective of the number of persons actually present at the meeting. In light of the COVID-nineteen pandemic, the British Columbia government has issued an order stating that meetings of shareholders may be conducted by virtual means. Virtual presence is therefore sufficient for establishing quorum. Only registered shareholders and proxy appointees present at the meeting shall be entitled to vote on matters put forth before the meeting.
The scrutineers report has been received and it shows that there are present at this meeting an aggregate number of shareholders holding or representing by proxy At least 54,247,311 common shares or approximately 40 for the transaction of business. The first item of business is to receive and consider the company's consolidated financial statements for the period ended December 31, 2020, together with the auditors' report on these statements. Shareholders are not asked to take any action regarding The financial statements and auditor's report thereon were included with the materials sent out giving notice of this meeting. We will now take the The next item of business is the election of directors. As we did not receive any other nominations in compliance with the advance notice provisions of our articles, I declare the nomination Closed and I will now entertain a motion to consider a resolution to elect each individually in their own right and not as a single slate of directors, 5 directors to hold office until the next general meeting of shareholders or their earlier removal or resignation.
The following individuals have been nominated for election as directors: Bill Tighe, Joseph Flynn, Jeremy Sewell, Jamie Leverton, Alexia Hefty. I move that the 5 nominees named in the circular be elected
I second the motion.
We will now turn the call back over to the operator to conduct the voting by electronic poll, which will be done on an individual basis for each director nominee. Thank you.
The poll has now closed. The poll has now closed. Please proceed.
The next item of business is the appointment of the auditors of the company for the ensuing year and the authorization of the directors of the company to fix the remuneration. I move the appointment of Dale Mathison, Carr Hilton, Le Bonte LLP as auditors of the company until the close of the next We will now turn the call back over to the operator to conduct The voting by electronic pool.
The poll has now closed.
The next item of business is the approval of the amendments to the company's omnibus long term incentive plan as set out in the circular. I move the motion to approve the amendments to the company's omnibus long term incentive plan, all as set out in the circular.
I second the motion.
We will now turn the call back over to the operator to conduct the voting by electronic
The poll now has closed.
The final item of business is the approval of the new employee share I move the motion to approve the new employee share purchase plan of the company, all as set out in the circular.
The poll has closed.
Based on the preliminary report provided by Scrutinyer, I can confirm that the following resolution has been overwhelmingly approved by the required percentage of shareholders as set out in the circular. Number 1, each of the 5 nominees have been elected as directors of the company to serve until the next annual meeting of shareholders or until their successors are elected or appointed. Number 2, the appointment of Dale Mathison Car Hill LeBon LLP as the auditors of the company has been approved and the Board of Directors of the company has been authorized to fix the remuneration. Number 3, the amendments to the company's omnibus long term incentive plan as described in the circular have been approved. And number 4, the company's new employee share purchase plan as described in the circular has been approved.
The company will announce by press release the precise voting results of the meeting in due course. As there is no additional business, I will now move that the formal part of this meeting be terminated.
I second the motion.
I declare the motion carried and the formal part of the meeting is terminated. Now before we turn over to the Q and A portion, I just wanted to take a moment to thank you all again for taking the time to join us this morning. I'm truly hopeful that the next ADM will find us together in person. I also want to take a moment and thank our shareholders for their support as we grow and scale and for their patience during periods of volatility. This has truly been a team effort and I'm grateful to the Hut 8 team for their persistent dedication and expertise that enables me to do my job and execute on our plans to build Canada's next big tech story.
My passion is transformation and growth. I love cutting edge technology and building great innovative companies in Canada. I joined Hut 8 because I saw an opportunity to transform, Innovate and grow an incredible emerging technology business. I saw an opportunity to bridge the gap between nascent and traditional high performance compute. And my goal over the past 6 months has been to create a diversified strategy for Hut 8 accordingly.
We are focused on building out 3 profitable business lines, Diversified digital asset mining, hosting and the generation of revenue from our incredible Bitcoin holdings. These are the pillars of our master plan to grow shareholder value regardless of market direction or cyclicality of Bitcoin. Our mission has been to do this with a balance sheet first Business management approach at the forefront of every decision we make, while being mindful of our planet and the shareholder values and priorities that we serve. I just wanted to touch on some of the highlights that we have announced to date. Hut 8 was only was one of only 3 global customers to acquire a limited fleet of Cutting edge NVIDIA GPU miners that were not available on the open market.
Our plan is to mine alternative blockchain networks beginning with Ethereum to expand our mining business while maintaining the benefits of payout in Bitcoin. At current network difficulty rates and pricing dynamics, This would equal an additional 2 to 3 bitcoin per day using less than 4 megawatts of power, which equates to a cost per bitcoin mine of less than CAD3 1,000. We have received the test cards in the 1st batch of miners shipped this week. We are expecting the full fleet to be up and running by the end of August as planned. In addition to the NVIDIA cards, we also procured Tier 1 traditional high performance compute servers manufactured by Dell from Amulet.
This deal is significant for Hut 8 as it unlocks enterprise quality hardware, technical support and a plethora of monitoring and control tools for the company that opens up the opportunity to pursue additional HPC applications in the future. We solidified the terms of our deal with Validus Power for another 100 Megawatts at one of the lowest electricity costs in the Western Hemisphere. We continue to grow our hosting partnerships, which is incredibly timely given the recent exodus of miners coming out of China. Hosting provides us with significantly higher cash flow certainty with less volatility and less capital intensity than the self mining side of our business. Providing hosting facilities to strategic partners is a compelling means of creating a source of stable income and offsetting our Fiat based operating expenses to reduce the selling required of the bitcoin that we mine.
We continue to source meaningful yield and revenue generating strategies on our HODL Bitcoin. I was also proud to act as a founding member of the Bitcoin Mining Council as we work together to promote transparency, share best practices and educate the public on the benefits of Bitcoin and Bitcoin Mining. And last but not least, we were the 1st Canadian miner to start trading on the NASDAQ And we're thrilled to be able to launch on the top tier of the exchange. We also look forward to sharing a corporate strategic update by the end of next week, which will go into further insights on our expansion plans. And with that, I ask that all registered shareholders or duly appointed proxy holders who would like to ask a question Follow the instructions from the operator.
We will answer as many questions as time permits. In the interest of time, kindly keep your questions short and to the point.
First question comes from Scott Watchman, an investor. Please go ahead.
Hi. Could you quickly explain what motivated the decision to do the direct offering before the Nasdaq Up listing, please?
The offering was done, really based on where the market conditions were at that time. We Bitcoin, as I think most of you know, Has been incredibly volatile and trading between, well, 28,000 yesterday Up to $40,000 And on the day that we did the offering, Bitcoin was close to the $40,000 mark. We had seen significant appreciation in our stock and the we were presented with an opportunity to do a deal at a valuation that we thought was very reasonable. The discount It was just around 4% discount to our 5 day weighted volume average. And we felt like the market conditions were very much in our favor at that point in time.
And we saw a lot of uncertainty in the future, which we've experienced over the last week and getting the capital that we need to drive Growth plans for our business is obviously a priority. Thank you for your questions, Scott.
Thank you. There are no further questions on the line.
Okay. With that, I would like to thank everyone who attended our Our teleconference of today's meeting and on behalf of the company, we pass along again our sincere best wishes that everyone continues to keep well during these challenging, albeit improving times. Thank you so much and enjoy the rest of your day.
Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes your conference call for today. We thank you for participating and we ask that you please disconnect your lines.