K33 AB (publ) (ARCNF) Q4 2025 Earnings Call Prepared Remarks Transcript

2026-02-26 04:07:46 ET

K33 AB (publ) (ARCNF) Q4 2025 Earnings Call February 26, 2026 2:00 AM EST

Company Participants

Torbjorn Jenssen - Founder, CEO & MD

Presentation

Torbjorn Jenssen
Founder, CEO & MD ...

Good morning, and welcome to this Q4 presentation for K33. My name is Torbjorn Bull Jenssen, and I'm the CEO of K33. Most of you might know K33 really well. But for those who don't, we are the crypto exchange for businesses and investors. What is unique with K33 is that you get a named client manager from day 1. You get access to deep institutional liquidity, competitive pricing and ability to execute both small and really large orders without worry. And you get access to reliable banking infrastructure. We natively support 8 different fiat currencies where clients can deposit, trade and withdraw in their preferred fiat currency. And this combination is really what makes K33 ideal for businesses and investors and institutional clients seeking to interact with the digital asset world.

Talking about the digital asset world, the market right now is a bit perplexing. On the one side, the institutional adoption continues at full speed. Underlying drivers have never been stronger, yet we see Bitcoin and Cryptocurrencies falling in price. Last year, Bitcoin ended up with a fall and market activity was really dampened. This is creating a lot of fear and uncertainty among many market participants. But if you look underneath the surface, you see the continued institutional adoption. You see the regulatory maturation continuing at full pace, and this is what makes us extremely optimistic for the future.

Bitcoin right now is actually in a better position than it was back when it was at $120,000. So if you like Bitcoin at $120,000, you should love it at $66,000 because the relevance of a digital programmable, censorship resistant and absolutely scarce money, that is more relevant today than ever before. U.S. debt is growing out of control. And so is also debt across the world. This will drive inflation and push investors towards inflation-hedged assets like Bitcoin.

Geopolitical tension will push the world towards a neutral alternative. And I strongly believe that Bitcoin is in a great position to potentially emerge as the future global reserve currency, not tomorrow, not next year, but perhaps over the next decade. And the question to ask yourself when you want to look ahead and figure out if Bitcoin is going to grow or fall is to ask yourself, do you think the world will be more digital? Do you think there will be more conflict? Do you think the young population today will inherent wealth? Will get more important positions in society and will bring with them their experience with Bitcoin and Cryptocurrencies into their adult life?

If you answer yes to all these questions, the recent price fall is not a reason for despair, but rather an opportunity to act. What is not falling, however, is the activity on K33. 2025 was a transformative year. We substantially strengthened our balance sheet, and we more than doubled our activity on the platform, seeing revenue passing SEK 2 billion. We're still a tiny player, and we're just getting started, but it's really great to see that we are able to grow and win market shares in an otherwise bearish and flat market.

We're doing this by delivering value to our corporate clients, to our investors, private individuals and institutional partners. That is what is enabling us to grow despite the market falling, and this puts us on a great trajectory looking ahead. Volatility should be expected from quarter-to-quarter, but the underlying growth trend is very much intact. Looking at the result or the net result for the period, you'll see a pretty sizable negative result. But this is mainly due to the fall in Bitcoin price, leading to a SEK 36 million unrealized loss.

If you were to sell the Bitcoin today and call it a day, well, that would be a real loss. But if you are long term, like we are in K33, we're going to hold on to these Bitcoins. We are using them in our operation to scale our business and generate operational yield, and we're going to hold this long term and anticipate that, that unrealized loss eventually will turn into an unrealized profit.

Zooming a bit more in on our trading activity, it's great to see that despite volatility month-to-month, quarter-to-quarter, our growth trajectory continues to be strong also going into 2026. And we've seen a really strong start of the quarter in Q1 with more than SEK 600 million traded so far, putting us at a 12-month rolling volume of around SEK 2.7 billion and growing. So as I said, fluctuations from month-to-month should be expected. At the same time, longer term, our growth trajectory is very much intact and painting a very positive long-term future for K33.

Moving the focus then over to our Bitcoin holding. We are right now in the process of increasing our exposure substantially. We own 141 Bitcoin that we bought last year. And we're right now in the process of closing a deal where we are becoming the largest shareholder of a Canadian listed company called Sixty Six Capital. Through that acquisition and through becoming the largest shareholder in Sixty Six, we will effectively increase our Bitcoin exposure with around ironically enough, Sixty Six Bitcoin. This is great because we think this is really the time to increase your Bitcoin exposure if you are -- if you have a long-term horizon. But it's also great because we don't only get the direct exposure to extra Bitcoin, we get an even larger exposure to the full balance sheet of Sixty Six.

And we can unlock synergies between K33's operational model where we're able to generate yield from a strong Bitcoin balance sheet with Sixty Six strategy of only holding Bitcoin. This way, we can deploy and use the full balance sheet of Sixty Six to the benefit of both companies and win double. And I really, really have to stress this point. In K33, we are strong believers that Bitcoin will be the best-performing asset long term. That's a key reason why we're building our balance sheet in Bitcoin. But the reason why we are building a balance sheet in the first place is not that we are bullish on Bitcoin. Because investors could easily buy Bitcoin themselves.

The reason why we are building a strong balance sheet is because we have a business model where we can put that balance sheet to work. We use it for liquidity provision. We use it in our exchange operation, and we're now actually building out more directly balance sheet linked products like crypto collateralized lending, all products and services where we can generate a yield from having a strong balance sheet, where the balance sheet becomes an enabler and a way for us to support revenue generation. That is the key. And that is what truly differentiates K33 from most other Bitcoin treasury companies out there.

And then talking about products, we've had great progress during Q4. We launched smart limits, giving better execution options and flexibility to our clients. Just after the quarter, we now released a new front end. The main change is not in features today, but in the tech stack, enabling higher frequency and iterative product development at a higher pace in the future, an important shift, which will improve our trajectory and improve our efficiency.

We launched crypto-backed lending, enabling us to not only deliver better value to our clients, but also starting to build up an AUM-driven revenue model. So right now, our main revenue driver is trading activity. And the challenge with that is, of course, that we don't control when the clients want to trade. It's an extremely volatile revenue source. There can be a quarter with absolutely no activity in the market. Volumes in the market generally can fluctuate with 90% up and down without much kind of structural shifts, just changes in activity.

Lending on the other hand, that's a business model where you build up a more AUM-linked recurring revenue basis. That's much more persistent. As we are slowly but surely building up a loan book, that will slowly but surely build up a substantial kind of base revenue, which will complement the more volatile transaction-oriented revenue. And this is an important part of a strategic repositioning in K33, where we are focusing on building up recurring revenue models alongside the transaction-driven exchange fee model.

So to summarize, 2025 was an extremely transformative year for K33. We strengthened our balance sheet. We invested in Bitcoin. We more than doubled our activity, and we are on a great trajectory to really make 2026 another transformative year for the company. We are now waiting for our MiCA application to be processed and approved, and we expect that to be done during Q2 this year. We've initiated our first partnership with a traditional financial institution in Pensum Asset Management, and we expect to build out more partnership models through the year.

And the main focus this year is not on a new license, not on platform. We have all that we need to scale and grow and the full focus of 2026 will be on exactly that growth. We will scale both directly with our private wealth clients, corporate clients and through institutional partnerships. We will build out our lending business with a very disciplined risk management. We're starting with overcollateralized lending, securing our own balance sheet first while building up the business model and evolving into this space. It will take time, but by the end of the year, I expect revenue from loans to start to become a substantial part of the total revenue mix.

And we will continue to improve our operating leverage as we scale and really start to harvest returns to scale. The business we are running is extremely scalable. Right now, we are very close to plus/minus cash flow neutrality, fluctuating from quarter-to-quarter from Q3 to Q4. But every new trade, every new kind of dollar or SEK or euro or Norwegian krone in volume adds directly to the result. We can add 10x, 100x the volume on the platform and barely see a change in cost, which means that as we scale and grow, over time, investors should really expect growing profitability. Shorter term, we are investing in that growth, and we'll do so in a balanced way such that results are fluctuating quarter-to-quarter.

Our goal is not to maximize profitability in Q1 or Q2, but to maximize profitability over the longer time frame. And lastly, we are very much on track on converting our strong balance sheet into yield generation. And through our acquisition of shares in Sixty Six, we've also started our initiative of scaling our balance sheet further through accretive M&A.

So to summarize, K33 is a crypto exchange for businesses and investors. We've proven that we can grow in a flat and a bearish market, and we are ready to run full speed ahead when this market sentiment turns and we get wind in the sale as well. Thank you so much, and have a great day.

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