Good afternoon. Thank you for joining us this afternoon. I know we're sort of wrestling with PLC, otherwise known as post-lunch coma, but I'll do all I can to make this entertaining for you. I am Jeff Lucas. I am the CFO for Bitfarms. We are a vertically integrated self-miner. Our shares trade both on the Nasdaq and the Toronto Stock Exchange. If you go to the next slide here. Okay, I'm gonna run past the safe harbor information. Just to give you a synopsis of who we are. As I mentioned here, we are Bitfarms. We are a vertically integrated self-miner. Our shares trade on both the Nasdaq and the Toronto Stock Exchange. To give you a synopsis of who we are overall, we have about 10 mines or farms, we refer to it.
We have a 4.5 exahash that represents approximately 2% of the overall network, the hashing network here. We mine about 16 Bitcoin per day. We have currently about a little over 400 Bitcoin in our treasury. Excuse me. Our value of our BTC that we have in our treasury is almost $7 million here. We've mined about 5,200 Bitcoin over the past year, and we do that with about 50,000 miners here. We currently utilize about 188 megawatts. We've got capacity for 220 as we're ramping up on our growth mode pretty aggressively here. If you think about our comparable advantages and sustainable advantages here, it's really twofold. One of which is that we have cheap operating superiority.
We are considered and enjoy being considered one of the best operators in the business here. In addition, we are geographically diversified, and that insulates us from a lot of the volatility you otherwise experience with the harsh weather. As an example of some of our peer companies have experienced in Texas, and also a broader regulatory regime as well, which works in our favor and sort of diversifies us from that as well. As you can see here in the chart in front of you, we have 10 different farms, of which 7 are in Canada, primarily in the Quebec area, representing about 80% of our hashing power here. We also made an acquisition in Washington State about a little over a year ago. We have 20 megawatts there. We're building out an operation in Argentina.
We're right now in ramp-up mode and have about 10 megawatts there with the capability in our first of 4 warehouses for 50 megawatts. We'll be expanding that over the coming year to as many as 210 megawatts on top of that. Lastly, we have an operation in Paraguay as well here, where we have 10 megawatts. That's actually one of our lowest cost operations that we have overall. We've actually are in a pretty good shape here in Canada. We've actually just completed 2 of our new warehouses here. We've got 3 operations in the Sherbrooke area, which is actually some of our most efficient operations as well. If you go to the next slide here, just to give you a bit of a few visuals in terms of what it looks like here.
These are our operations that we have in the city of Sherbrooke, Quebec, which is about 96 megawatts of our total 188 megawatts overall. As you can see, it's a very neat and a very clean operation. We pride ourselves on having some of the most efficient operations and the highest level of uptime within our miners. We've been in the business now for about 5 years. We're actually on our 6th iteration of farm or miner, mine design here. That's actually worked in our favor in terms of our overall efficiency. As an example here, if you take a look at the photograph in the upper right, you'll see that we've got actually the fans, the cooling fans up on the ceiling here. That provides us a couple of benefits.
It reduces a lot of the noise and the sound, it maintains good favor within our residential communities in which we operate. Secondly, it leads to far better utilization of electricity. One of the measures of which we're proud of is called PUE, Power Usage Effectiveness. How much of electricity is actually being applied to the miners themselves versus a lot of the tangential ancillary operations like cooling fans and things of that sort? We've actually got one of the lowest ratios in the industry at about 102%. That means almost all of our electricity are going towards the miners themselves. This next slide here shows you our Rio Cuarto, Argentina operation here. We've actually got a terrific arrangement there.
We've got an eight-year contract, power contract with there, of which for the first four years, the price of natural gas in our energy is fixed at roughly $0.02 per kilowatt-hour for about 60% of our energy usage and 40% for the market. What makes Argentina very attractive for us, first of all, two of our founders are from Buenos Aires and they're serial entrepreneurs there. They have a lot of expertise and experience working in that country itself. That's been a great boon to us. Even more importantly is the low cost of energy in Argentina. Argentina enjoys a surplus in natural gas. Unfortunately for them, they don't have the infrastructure in place to really export that gas, would be it pipelines, imports, and things of that sort.
As such, the market price of natural gas in Argentina is lower than it is in most of the rest of the world. That's what gives us the opportunity to really have our energy costs of roughly $0.03 per kWh that we're experiencing in Argentina. That makes it a very attractive area for us. As I pointed out, right now we're about 10 MW there as we're ramping up to 15 MW with the capability contractually and infrastructure-wise to go to 210 MW overall at roughly 6.5 EH. Here you see our Paraguay operation here. This is actually one, it's about 10 MW. It's also a very low-cost facility.
There's a lot of opportunity in Paraguay for mining if you do indeed know how to work the system and understand, you know, the challenges and the foibles of it. We're actually pretty seasoned and pretty experienced about that. The other big benefit of Paraguay is the fact that energy costs are very low. Around 30 years ago, they completed a major infrastructure facility building a dam called the Itaipu Dam. The debt service on that dam is just about coming to a conclusion after 30 years. As a result of that, there is the expectation of further reductions in energy costs in Paraguay, and we'll certainly be the beneficiary of that as well. A couple points about our production highlights here. We've got 10 farms in four countries, so we do enjoy geographic diversification.
188 megawatts overall with the capability for 220, moving up to far beyond that. Future upside potential in Argentina. Again, we're at 10 now, going to 50 very shortly with the potential of 210 megawatts overall. We have one of the highest average bitcoin per exahash rates in the industry. That's a testimony really to our uptime, and that again speaks to our operating expertise that we bring. Just to give you an example there of that, we have our proprietary software called the MGMT System. That lets us manage and monitor the performance of each of our 50,000 miners. If a miner goes down, we see that impact immediately, and then we know how and where to dispatch that technician to fix the problem within minutes versus days, weeks, or hours.
We are a licensed repair center for MicroBT, one of the major miner manufacturers, and that gives us the advantage that if, indeed we need to replace the cards on one of our miners, we can do that in a matter of days versus having to ship it off to China and losing the use of that miner for several weeks. A lot of things are working in our favor here. Last, I wanna point out that we are very efficient from the standpoint that we require roughly 40 watts or 40 joules per terahash. That's certainly towards the lower end of the range for our industry overall. Let me talk a little bit about the economics here. As you know, the price of Bitcoin has fallen dramatically over the past year and over the past several months here.
By virtue of our increase in our number of Bitcoin that we're mining here, we have actually been able to attenuate that decrease in revenues vis-à-vis some of our peers, that even though BTC price has come down quite a bit, the 21% increase in our production has, to a degree, made up, you know, for that decrease in our revenue. I'm sorry, decrease in the BTC price. That's certainly working in our favor. Even more exciting for us are the benefits, the cost benefits, and the operating efficiencies that we enjoy here. This chart shows you the direct cost of production that is on a per BTC basis here. You can see here that currently the electricity costs are large, about $9,400 per BTC. $9,400, excuse me, per BTC.
That's obviously that gives us a substantial margin here. As a matter of fact, we do enjoy a very healthy production margin. Even more importantly is that when you factor in the all-cash cost for us of mining BTC, that includes not only electricity, includes rent, technician salaries, and overhead, it's $14,300. Even with the low price that we're all experiencing now in BTC, we are still generating positive cash from operations. You can see that certainly on the next slide I'll go to in a moment. One comment I do also wanna make about this slide here is that we are 95% hydro. In addition to the ESG benefits of that, on top of that, we enjoy a very high level of stability of our electricity prices.
Whereas a lot of our peer companies have been subject to the vagaries of changing fossil fuel prices, as you can see in this chart here, for the past several quarters, our cost of electricity per BTC has varied between roughly $7,000-$9,900. It's been in a very stable range over that time. That is one of the key benefits certainly of hydro. In terms of how this impacts our profitability overall, you know what you see here actually is that even with the low price of BTC, we are still generating positive adjusted EBITDA. As a matter of fact, in the third quarter, we had about $10.3 million of EBITDA, well above I think those of our peer companies, and certainly pointing to continued profitability for us.
Even more importantly, what you see here is that if you look at the margin itself, we have 31% mining margin. That means that for every dollar of revenue, roughly $0.30 of that goes to the bottom line. Overall, we enjoy a low-cost environment, a low cost and a very effective infrastructure, and a higher level of margins as a result of that. Now in terms of what's happening from a financial standpoint overall, we launched an initiative in the May timeframe here to deleverage or re-leverage ourselves, I should say, and bring down our overall debt that we had outstanding. As a matter of fact, in the late May timeframe, we had about $165 million of debt. Today, we brought that down to $47 million. That's part of our overall capital strategy here.
We really have sort of three thrusts in terms of our capital strategy. One is that we are no longer so aggressively HODLing or holding the Bitcoin that we mine. We're using the Bitcoin that we mine to meet our production expenses. A lot of our peer companies, and even more last year at this timeframe, were using our ATM or at-the-market financing, you know, to meet some of our operating expenses. To us, with the cost of capital in the industry of around 25%-35%, that doesn't make sense. We felt a better application of our Bitcoin holdings to use that as a means of deleveraging, and we've done that pretty dramatically over the past several quarters here. First of all, we use our BTC that we mine for operating expenses and to pay our debt service.
We use the BTC in our treasury to deleverage, as we've done very effectively over the past several months. Lastly, we do use our ATM very judiciously. Our raising activities very judiciously for our capital growth needs, particularly for example, Argentina and elsewhere, in so doing to really minimize the dilutive impact that that would otherwise have. Overall, from the standpoint of how we've done in financial flexibility, we find ourselves very well positioned to continue with our profitability stream, but also to begin looking at a lot of the acquisitive opportunities that are out there in the marketplace now. It's been an interesting couple of months. I think we've seen a lot of distressed assets come across the transom here. The challenge has been that the prices haven't yet reflected those distressed, you know, those distressed assets.
Now I think you have some adjustments coming to play, and we're seeing a lot of opportunities here where there are assets that may be not operating very efficiently yet, but given the expertise that we bring, we find we're positioned actually to make them profitable and they're seeing those at fairly attractive pricing. It is indeed a good opportunity here for us and for the industry overall in terms of achieving growth. Overall, let's look at the business really from two standpoints. One is operational strength and the other, or operational excellence, excuse me, and the other is our financial strength. In summary here, we have 188 megawatts, 4.5 exahash. Our growth is certainly above that of the industry overall.
As a matter of fact, the number of Bitcoin that we mined in 2022 is almost 5,200. That's a 50% improvement from the number of Bitcoin that we mined with a lower level of difficulty in the year before. We're about 2% of the overall network for BTC, and we've got diversified production in 4 countries, giving us lower cost energy, diversification of energy costs, and also diversification of the regulatory risks as well. On the financial side, we maintain a very low cost of production. Again, our direct costs are $9,400. Our overall costs are roughly $14,300. We are generating positive cash from operations at $10.3 million of EBITDA or a 31% EBITDA margin.
We've decreased our financial leverage overall over the past seven months, bringing our overall debt down from $165 million to roughly $47 million at the end of December. In summary here, in terms of our investment highlights, we're faced with a huge market opportunity ahead of us. You know, growing our hash rate ahead of the network, there's a lot of great opportunities not only to expand in our own territories in terms of what we're doing in Canada, in Washington, in Argentina, a lot of very attractive acquisition opportunities where we can bring our operational expertise to bear and truly make a difference. Secondly, you know, we are the benefits of being geographically diversified, and that gives us a lot of benefits overall. Thirdly, we do have the scale and the expertise.
We are one of the largest miners out there and bringing some of the lowest costs. We're vertically integrated, so we don't rely upon the hosting services of others, and in so doing, we get all the profit that's engendered by our mining activities. We're a very efficient producer, as you commented, and some of the lowest operational metrics in the business. Lastly, we've got a very sharp entrepreneurial team, a lot of number of very talented individuals overall. That's pretty much it. I'd be more than glad to entertain any questions that anyone has. Go ahead, please.
Yeah. The 3 cents a kilowatt-hour in the Argentina facility, as you guys ramp that and get closer to that 200 megawatts, should we be expecting 3 cents a kilowatt-hour at scale or is there any, anything that would push those prices higher?
Well, generally, we are expecting those prices largely to remain. Just to revisit the pricing structure that's in effect, 60% of the cost of energy there for the first 4 years is fixed at $0.02. The other 40% will vary certainly with the cost of natural gas in Argentina, but that's actually been fairly stable and hasn't had as dramatic swings as we've seen in other parts of the world.
What happens to the economics after the halving, after the 2024?
As you know, the cost of mining Bitcoin is gonna go effectively double for all of us that are in the space here. We are very sensitive towards that, and that's why we've been working very hard to continually bring our costs down, and that's one of the great benefits, I think, of Argentina. Right now, our overall cost of electricity is about $0.04 per kilowatt-hour here. As Argentina comes on and plays a greater role at that lower cost of electricity, that's certainly gonna work in the favor. You know, at this environment and in this current pricing structure, again, we are generating cash from operations. That story could change dramatically for a lot of us here, you know, when the halving event happens at some point in the April-May timeframe of 2023.
One other point I do wanna make in reference to your question here. In contemplation and anticipation of the halving, when we actually entered into the various debt facilities we put in place over the past year, we did so with the eye of these facilities maturing before the halving event. As a matter of fact, all of our debt facilities do indeed mature by February of 2024. Hopefully, well not only hopefully, but in fact, we'll have that debt service behind us at that point in time. That'll certainly help our economics as well.
The halving event doesn't occur until the spring of 2024.
Yeah, around the April-May timeframe is what the current expectation is. Go ahead, please.
Just with regard to, you know, you just mentioned, you know, you pay off debt by exposing some of your BTC production. Do you see that as a long-term strategy then to, you know, sell some of your production in order to, you know, either continue further build-outs or just, you know, pay off?
Sure.
All the debt then?
Well, I think at the current levels of the cost of equity in our industry, in our opinion, it makes sense. Part of our thinking behind this, if you look at what is the value proposition for investors? We felt that the investors attach more value to our operational capability and our growth strategies than they do to our holding Bitcoin, which any investor can do on his or her own as well. That's largely the thinking behind it. What we are looking into now, actually, is I recently hired, actually, someone for VP of Risk Management to help us with our hedging activities.
'Cause a lot of the folks in our space have not been very involved in hedging in the past, and we're just sort of starting in that space right now because there's a lot that can be done, I think, to both manage your top line and to manage your overall expenses. Your financial performance with those hedging activities. The thinking being that while we may not enjoy the upside if BTC price escalates very dramatically in terms of our BTC holdings, there'll be other means in which we're gonna capture that benefit instead. Go ahead.
Another one. You mentioned the acquisition strategy. We've heard from a few other miners at this conference that despite kind of being in a bear market, these distressed assets aren't quite as on sale as many folks were hoping for or thinking. Could you provide any color on that?
When you say quite as on sale, you mean the prices haven't come in to reflect the actual value of the assets themselves?
Yeah.
No, we've been watching that carefully. We've been seeing that actually for the past, I think, probably the past 12 months or so. Because we actually have a team led by our VP of Corporate Development who goes and looks for acquisition opportunities. Indeed, we were seeing that the performance of the assets were certainly distressed, but the prices that they were asking for them were not, particularly in the private sector. What we are seeing now is that some of those prices are starting to come into line, whether it's because of recognition that this is gonna be around for a while, these difficult times that we're in, or whether it's just the need for cash or funding. We are starting to see finally some of these prices coming more into alignment with the operational performance of the assets themselves.
Why that's very attractive to us is the fact that given our operational focus here and operational emphasis, we can go into a lot of these money-losing assets and make them far more profitable than they would be otherwise. Any other questions? Go ahead, please.
Just on that same kind of line of questioning. If the halving event is gonna happen in early 2024 and double your cost of production, how can you confidently buy assets from others without knowing whether the Bitcoin price is gonna clear your production costs in the middle of 2024?
Well, one of the most important things that we look at when we make an acquisition is what are the energy contracts or what are the energy agreements in place. I think in an environment like this, you need to see energy prices anywhere from maybe $0.03-$0.04, and with the expectation that at some point BTC prices are gonna be increasing. We really can't say how much. I think within that context and with that very sharp eye on future energy costs, that's kinda how you can manage that process pretty carefully. The other thing that can be done here, and actually we communicated in our latest press release that we do on a regular basis, is that we also engage occasionally in underclocking.
What's not known to a lot of folks is the fact that if you clock a miner or a computer at a level lower than its rated capacity, it's actually more energy efficient. We showed in a previous slide that our overall energy efficiency is roughly 40 watts per terahash. If you have a miner that you're not using, you know, the full 100 terahash, for example, a lower level there, you're certainly getting less output, but you're actually getting it at least utilizing even less electricity than it would be at normal capacity. There are opportunities here in terms of how you can lower your overall cost structure as well. Go ahead, please.
How does the uptime with, you know, 95% of your operations are hydro-powered, how does that uptime compare to, you know, one example being solar or wind, and then also just what you're able to figure out?
Naturally, you have erratic issues with solar and wind. No surprises there. I can speak for us more than I can speak for the industry overall. You know, there have been situations where some folks have either been required or found it advantageous not to take in energy or to sell it back to the grid or caught elsewhere. For us, we've been very, very stable in our electricity. We do have some provisions where there is some curtailment that's put in place, where, for example, if there's a tremendous demand due to very cold weather or very hot weather, we have been asked to cut back on some of our electricity, and we will occasionally do that. It hasn't had much bearing on us. Our uptime is 98.9%.
We've actually been able to maintain a very high uptime. That even includes those times when we've accommodated and been asked to incorporate some curtailment activities. The beauty of hydro, you know, look at where we operate, we're not in California. We're in places where there's more than a surplus water and, you know, and the water table is null, really, it hasn't been an issue for us. Any other questions? We have a few minutes left, we're glad to entertain. Go ahead, please.
I was just gonna ask you on the hedging. How far out can you hedge?
The instruments right now generally don't go out for more than 1 year. I think as we're exploring this, I don't think we would You know, we would probably have in mind a 6-9 month context. It really depends on the instruments, the premia, and the opportunities out there. We do truly like the fact that we can actually have visibility and predictability to our revenue stream. That comes at a cost, of course, because if you do that, then you have huge upside, you're gonna miss out on some of that upside as well, unless you can synthetically address that otherwise, which we'll be looking into. Generally, I think we'll be looking at actually pretty shorter term initially. As we get more comfortable with it, we then will be expanding that and expanding the timeframe or the tenor.
Just to piggyback off that. What kind of instruments are they? Are they hash rate futures, or is that market not really-
Well, there are some of those out there. We get some attention. We haven't really looked too much at those yet, but there has been talk about hash rate futures. I think there is a little bit of that. I would expect over the next 8 months, you're gonna see a lot more about that happening out there. Yeah. Right now, a lot of the activity really centers around, of course, the price of BTC. There's energy hedging going on, which doesn't really apply to us given the fact that we are over 95% hydro and have a very stable energy cost here. Hash rate futures is something we want to explore, but make sure that we and the industry overall are settled in and comfortable with first. Go ahead, please.
Just out of curiosity, very hypothetical, but, you know, what are your thoughts on if you were to have to, or just thoughts on committing to hosting miners? I mean, what would that take for you guys to do if you know, in a hypothetical?
We've actually given a fair amount of thought to hosting. Hosting is attractive to us for a couple of reasons. First of all, infrastructure is right now greatly in demand. There's a surfeit of miners out there. You know, obviously, the pricing reflects that, but infrastructure is a different story. Infrastructure speaks to our sweet spot because we are operators. We're the ones who designed our farms. We really know how to make infrastructure very, very effectively. The other benefit of hosting is the fact that that actually brings a more stable revenue stream and profit stream, which I think to the investing community has an element of appeal. Again, you avoid some of the large upside that you might get by being vertically integrated. Hosting does bring an element of stability in place here. We've actually explored that. We're open to it.
As we look at some of our acquisitions here, we both look at not only for integrating our own mining activities here, but also as a means for us hosting to others as well. It has an element of appeal to it. Any more questions? I know I covered this a lot very fast here. I'm from Boston. I tend to speak a little quickly, so I apologize for that, but I'm hoping I was able to address a lot of your questions. Okay. Well, if you have further interest, I do encourage you to reach out to me or anyone else within our organization. Thank you very much.
Appreciate it.