Blockmate Ventures Inc (TSX-V:MATE, OTCQB:MATEF) earlier this week told Proactive it had launched a dedicated Bitcoin Treasury division to complement its “mine and hold” strategy.
The company said the move aligns with its broader Bitcoin mining initiative, announced several months earlier. Chairman Domenic Carosa stated that once fully operational, the company expects to mine Bitcoin at a 40% discount to the current spot price. He said this would provide a strong commercial advantage over simply purchasing Bitcoin from the market.
Proactive: Domenic, very good to speak with you. Could you start by telling us what's the strategic thinking behind launching a dedicated Bitcoin Treasury division and how it complements your mine and hold model?
Domenic Carosa: Absolutely. We've decided to launch our Bitcoin Treasury division, which is really complementary with the Bitcoin mining operation that we announced a number of months ago. We're big believers of Bitcoin. I think you can read the press and there’s all sorts of, both organizations, companies and governments now moving much more strongly in the Bitcoin space. And for us, this was just a natural step forward in starting to build our own Bitcoin Treasury.
How do you plan to balance holding Bitcoin for long-term growth versus using it as a source of liquidity or capital for future ventures, Domenic?
Our objective is really being able to mine and hold the Bitcoin, or in this case, buy and hold the Bitcoin. One of the unique strategies around Blockmate is when we have a specific division like the Hivello division—I’m wearing the shirt today—that was a company that was originally set up by Blockmate. And then we raised money within Hivello, so within the subsidiary, so we didn’t dilute Blockmate shareholders. So that’s effectively our capital raising strategy. We're looking to do the same thing with the Bitcoin mining operation. And we’ve got a number of discussions going on, both with listed and unlisted groups out in the marketplace.
But long-term strategy is to buy and mine Bitcoin, hold them, generate a yield, and there’ll be some announcements coming out shortly around how we’re looking to generate yield with our Bitcoin and then ultimately letting that grow over time.
But you have some great projections for how many Bitcoin you plan to produce going forward. Take us through that and how soon you expect to reach the scale that you're aiming for?
The Bitcoin mining operation that we announced a couple of months ago—we secured a site in Wyoming, USA, power at $0.03, which is very, very competitive on a global basis. And it’s a 200 megawatt facility. And just to translate that into dollars and cents, if we were at full capacity today, we would be mining around 200 Bitcoins a month. So we’re talking, you know, $20 million plus US of revenue a month. That’s at scale. But most importantly, just given our cost-effective electricity costs, we will be able to, when we are fully operational, be able to mine Bitcoin at roughly a 40% discount to the current spot price. So it makes a lot of commercial sense for us, not only just to go and buy Bitcoin and hold; but to actually mine it, because we can mine it at a price that’s got a very material discount to the current spot price.
Domenic, with the Treasury now announced, what are the next milestones that your investors should be watching out for?
We’re obviously going to start increasing and improving, and building on our Treasury. That’s really point number one. Then point two—we’ve got a number of joint ventures and partners that we’re talking to around our Bitcoin mining facility. And we’ve got 200 megawatts, so we’re looking to break it down into 50 megawatt components. And, by way of example, it was yesterday we were in some fairly deep discussions with a Nasdaq-listed company around joint venturing, partnering on a 50 megawatt part of that facility. So that’s how we’re thinking about that. Because we’ve got 100 acres right opposite a substation in Wyoming. So we’ve got a lot of flexibility. Longer-term though, we will look to move from Bitcoin to AI in terms of that infrastructure that we have. But as we say—baby steps, one step at a time. We start with Bitcoin and then we can move on from there.
Quotes have been lightly edited for style and clarity