DEFT DeFi Technologies Inc.

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DeFi Technologies Inc. Q2 F2026 Earnings Call Transcript

Friday, August 14, 2026

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Curtis Schlaufman
VP of Marketing and Communications
Hi, everyone. Welcome to the DeFi Technologies second quarter 2026 financial review and shareholder call. I'm Curtis Schlaufman, VP of Marketing and Communications. Joining me on the call today are Chief Executive Officer Johan Wattenstrom, Chief Financial Officer Paul Bozoki, and President Andrew Forson. We'll begin with opening remarks from Johan followed by a review of our second quarter 2026 financial results from Paul. We will then provide an update on growth initiatives and strategic priorities from Andrew and we'll open up for Q&A after that mix of retail from the chat and invite analysts to come on and ask questions live. Before we begin, I'd like to remind everyone that certain statements made during today's call may constitute forward-looking information under applicable securities laws. These statements include but are not limited to comments regarding expected financial performance, business development, strategic initiatives, market expansion, product growth, and future opportunities. Forward-looking statements are based on management's current expectations and assumptions and are subject to known and unknown risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied. With that, I'll turn it over to Johan.
Johan Wattenstrom
Chief Executive Officer
Thank you, Curtis, and thank you everyone for joining us today. The second quarter was shaped by continued volatility across digital asset markets, as lower crypto asset prices affected assets under management, which together with the market-to-market adjustments weighted our reported financial results. While those market conditions impacted our financial numbers during the quarter, they have not changed our conviction in the long-term opportunity of the progress across the business. Our focus remains on executing our strategy, strengthening the platform and creating long-term value for shareholders. More importantly, the underlying business continues to move in the right direction. Our core business is becoming more scalable and efficient as we invest across our existing businesses, pursue strategic opportunities and advance product innovation. We believe these efforts are strengthening the platform, enhancing our competitive position and expanding all our long-term growth opportunities across all the business areas. Valor has listed over 100 listed ETPs and structured product across multiple exchanges globally, aiming for another eight more during Q3. During the quarter, Valor generated more than $22.8 million on net inflows reflecting continued customer demand for our products despite a challenging environment for the broader digital asset industry. We view these positive net inflows as an encouraging sign demonstrating continued demand for our products despite a weaker market environment and reinforcing our confidence in the long-term opportunities ahead. Beyond Valor, we continue to broaden our institutional platform product offering. The launch of our first hedge fund remains a key priority. With all obstacles now removed, we are days or at least at worst a week or two from the actual launch. We also expect to expand our arbitrage strategies during the second half of the year with the goal of further strengthening our institutional capability and diversifying our revenue streams. While the Swedish FSA did not approve our initial usage structure, we have appealed the decision and are simultaneously working hard to establish a usage platform in another domicile within the European Union. Those efforts are moving ahead quite quickly. Development of the ValorCustody platform also remains on track for a targeted beta launch in the second half of the year. The initial deployment will focus on bringing custody capabilities in-house, reducing third party custody costs and improving margins. Over time, the platform is expected to support a broader range of products and services. AI has also become an increasingly important part of our business. We are leveraging AI to improve operational efficiency while developing AI-enabled investment products, which we believe complement our existing crypto product offering and support future growth. From a financial standpoint, the company continues to operate from a position of strength. Our balance sheet and liquidity provide the flexibility to invest through the market cycle, support product innovation, pursue strategic acquisition opportunities, while also maintaining a disciplined approach to capital allocation. Stillman maintains a strong momentum in onboarding larger clients and remains on track for a second record year of revenue. As market conditions improve, we believe the business is positioned for a symmetric upside supported by continued growth in key operating metrics that are not primarily dependent on market volatility. Looking ahead, our priorities remain unchanged. We are focused on expanding our institutional capabilities, broadening our product offering, and building a more diversified business aligned with the long-term growth of digital assets. While near-term market conditions remain challenging, We believe the investments being made today are strengthening the business, expanding our capabilities, and positioning the company to capitalize on the next phase of growth. Our main focus during this market downturn is to aggressively take market share in our core markets. With that, I'll turn over to Paul to walk through the financial results.
Paul Bozoki
Chief Financial Officer
Thank you, Johan, and good morning, everyone. I'll begin with an overview of assets under management. Average AUM for the quarter was approximately $471.5 million and quarter end AUM was approximately $397.2 million. Lower digital asset prices continued to weigh on reported assets under management during the quarter, consistent with conditions across the broader digital asset market. Our effective management fee yield was approximately 1% compared to approximately 1% in the prior period, primarily reflecting the larger weighting of Bitcoin-related products within our AUM, which carry lower or no management fees, as well as continued weakness across many altcoin markets. Within Velour, our effective staking yield of 2.4% also moderated during the quarter as lower digital asset prices, compression in lending rates for Bitcoin and Ethereum, and changes in the composition of staking assets reduced overall monetization. Client activity remained encouraging despite these market-driven headwinds. Valor generated $22.8 million of net inflows during the quarter, reflecting continued demand for our products despite the broader market environment. These inflows provide a solid foundation for future growth in assets under management as digital asset prices recover. Total revenues for the quarter were $7.8 million compared to $11.2 million in the prior period, reflecting lower average assets under management and unfavorable mark-to-market adjustments on our digital asset holdings, which are recognized through revenue under our broker-dealer accounting structure. Excuse me. Company also maintained a fortress balance sheet, ending the quarter with $60.3 million in cash and cash equivalents. 19, sorry. Hmm. 19.1 million of stretch preferred shares in RWUSD financial assets, 10.4 million of USDT USDC tokens, and 30 million of digital asset treasury holdings for total liquidity of 119.8 million. For clarity for our investors about the obvious drop in our cash balance from Q1, we bought $20 million of MicroStrategy Stretch preferred shares, or 200,914 shares, to achieve a higher yield on our treasury cash reserves. These preferred shares yield 12% or $1 per month. We also purchased a smaller position RWUSD product. Our short-term U.S. Treasury bill holdings yield approximately 3.5%, so these other products yield significantly more. These investments are disclosed on the face of our balance sheet as other investments at fair value through profit and loss, and again, at management, we view these as essentially cash equivalents, but they're not classified as such under IFRS rules. We believe this strong financial position provides flexibility to continue investing in strategic initiatives while maintaining a disciplined approach to capital allocation. Turning to product activity, we ended the quarter with 102 ETPs and structured products across our platform. We continue to expand our institutional product pipeline and distribution capabilities while advancing several new investment products and fund structures. Stillman Digital maintained an important diversification component of the broader platform. During the first half of 2026, Stillman generated approximately $5.4 million of revenue, representing 30.2% year-over-year growth. We remain encouraged by the business's trajectory and its contribution to the overall platform as it paces for a record revenue year. We remind our investors that Stillman revenue growth is not dependent on cryptocurrency prices increasing, but rather on trading volumes and realized trading spreads. Turning to operating expenses, general and min expenses and fees and commissions, which are our main cash costs, totaled $8 million in the quarter, which represents a $1.6 million reduction from the $9.6 million incurred in Q1 2026 of these costs. We remain focused on disciplined cost management and continue working towards our targeted annualized cash operating cost structure of $36 to $39 million while continuing to invest in our business. Our bottom line result was negatively affected by 16.3 million negative mark-to-market adjustments on our venture portfolio, as well as our stretch preferred shares. Most of the negative adjustment is from the markdown of our 5% investment in Amina Bank to reflect lower AUM and a compression in EV to AUM multiples across a valuation peer group. We are aware of publicly available information that Amina Bank has engaged Canto Fitzgerald to explore a potential public listing for it. With that, I'll turn it over to Andrew.
Andrew Forson
President
Thank you, Paul. As we discussed last quarter, our focus remains on expanding the institutional capabilities, distribution relationships, and operating infrastructure needed to support the next phase of growth for DeFi technologies. Throughout the quarter, we made progress across several strategic initiatives Designed to broaden our product offering, improve monetization, and expand access to the platform. A key priority remains the development of regulated fund structures and institutional investment products. We are working to bring these initiatives to market in a disciplined manner, with an emphasis on products that are fully operational, commercially ready, and available to investors. An organization like DeFi operates in a complex regulated space, which require the building of trust through relationships. Initiatives often require work months and years before the results are seen by the general public. In our case, Q2 saw increased adoption by partner organizations globally of our DVO Index platform, which provides a strong, broad narrative to discuss the unique strengths of each product within the Velor platform. Q2 also saw us systematize and execute on approaches for interacting with institutions and onboarding institutional capital into our Velor products. Over 40% of this quarter's inflows are directly attributed to our institutional events and outreach. To give a clear example, deals that began as discussions at our Abu Dhabi event in December 2025 closed during Q2. We have built an institution-focused marketing and outreach strategy that uniquely and interestingly enables us to communicate the power of our products, the services offered by our portfolio companies, and our pipeline of future products on our terms, efficiently and economically to a global audience of bona fide investors. We built this capacity, which has enabled us to be competitive and generate positive net inflows despite compressed digital asset prices and poor market conditions in less than 12 months. What we've created plays an important role. We finally have an all-important institutional sales platform. The beauty of what we do and how we do it is it is global and flexible enough to accommodate all the innovative products in our pipeline that have been discussed by Johan in his CEO letter and his earlier statement. In science and in finance, to be effective, we must categorize the factors we deal with as independent or dependent variables. I remain heartened by our team's focus and our company's resilience in unfavorable market conditions. I am bullish on DeFi Technologies, Velour, and Stillman Digital because we are demonstrating increased efficiency and effectiveness with the dependent variables. These elements we have control over, like net inflows, visibility, product development, clarity of the financial story, optimization of our corporate venture holdings. Those areas we do not have full autonomy or control over, like asset prices and regulatory approvals, which can be impacted by anything from war, interest rates, holiday seasons, and broader asset prices, We monitor closely and have a dedicated team that responds quickly and professionally to all requests in an attempt to ensure we give ourselves the best shot at success. I ask listeners and viewers to know, when Johan speaks of creating a platform, these are not empty words. He's done it before. And the evidence of this is in our world-leading portfolio of over 100 digital asset underlying ETPs, Now we are entering into a new era of product with the objective of expanding our platform into structured instruments that have the potential for performance-based upside increases. It is not a question of if these products will be delivered. They will be. And when they come online, the nature of many of these products are higher returning with great potential for upside to the firm. These initiatives are important, not only because they broaden our product offering, but also because they expand the ways we can monetize the platform. Historically, our revenue model has been driven primarily by assets under management, management fees and staking income. Over time, we believe these new institutional products and investment strategies can add performance-based returns, institutional mandates, and other revenue streams that are less directly tied to the direction of digital asset markets. Since November 2025, we've worked hard to develop our innovative business intelligence system that provides granular views of key competitive and operational metrics. This has grown into a system of proprietary data-driven tools that give unique insights as to how specific Velour's single or index products interact with the financial world around us. Such research and development efforts leverage our infrastructure to provide unique insights. This serves as a proving ground for potential new products that can be created for third-party asset managers for deployment by their internal risk desks or wealth management platforms. This new capability enables us to expand distribution through the provision of valuable insights Thank you for joining us today. We also continue to invest in the long-term capabilities of the platform. As tokenization becomes more widely adopted across financial markets, we believe our technology and operating infrastructure can eventually support a broader range of financial products and asset classes, including tokenized real-world assets. As the new products come online, I'm excited that the firm will be in a position to speak with institutional capital allocators worldwide This is the platform and product diversification that will insulate the company from the exogenous shocks inherent in digital asset markets whilst providing new and larger opportunities for institution-focused revenue generation. That said, our focus is on execution. We will only communicate new products when they are operational and available to investors rather than before the necessary legal, regulatory and commercial requirements are in place. We believe this approach will strengthen credibility, support durable client relationships and create more sustainable value for shareholders. With that, I'll turn the call back over to Curtis for Q&A.
Curtis Schlaufman
VP of Marketing and Communications
Thanks, Andrew. First of all, if you're an analyst, please do raise your hand so I can invite you on live to chat, and then I'll go through the Q&A chat here for our retail investors. We'll start with a First question from Anne Schumann. When can we expect the smart crypto fund and hedge fund products? How is USIT's listing coming along? I think, Johan, if you could sort of give as much color as you can on our upcoming fund structures as a whole.
Johan Wattenstrom
Chief Executive Officer
Yeah, for sure. We have actually right now much more visibility than we had only a few weeks ago. Unfortunately, it took us, I think, three months to onboard with some key trading partners because of different jurisdictional problems and other things. But now we finally onboarded with everyone. There's no more obstacles for the smart crypto fund. So we are in the final, yes, practicalities. So it should be maybe a week or two, hopefully, until three weeks the most. But I would say it's possible within a week. We have no more actual formal obstacles. Everything is done. We are into practicalities and just some final integrations. So we should see that within Q3 for sure. Unfortunately, we got a note from the Swedish FSA. They dragged it out a longer time than they actually had a legal ground to do and they actually in the end didn't even give a reason. They are quite anti-crypto activists in the Swedish FSA since a long time. But we have actually both appealed that decision. We have also redone the application in Sweden, yes, to pressure on there. but we also have come quite far in the Luxembourg structure where they are quite neutral in terms of different asset classes so yeah if we don't get through in Sweden we will get through in Luxembourg so but it will if it's Luxembourg it might unfortunately take another a few more months so we can't give an exact date or clarity I don't want to promise anything there but within this year is my hope. If we get through in Sweden, I have no idea what the probability would be. That could go much quicker. Unfortunately, uncertainty on the usage, but on the hedge fund, we have clarity. We are through with all the obstacles.
Curtis Schlaufman
VP of Marketing and Communications
Next question. Our shares are one-fifth the price that they were when we initiated the capital raise. Should we not utilize some capital at this 80% discount to close out our current buyback? Again, another question and thoughts on our view on buybacks.
Johan Wattenstrom
Chief Executive Officer
Yeah, I can say what we said before on that matter, that our objective is to use the cash to grow our operation. We have done some investments this quarter to get a higher yield on the cash, but obviously we want to maintain it ready for some of the deals we continuously are looking at, which we think would have a much higher impact on the stock price if and when we can get those or any of those done than to just buy shares back. I also have the opinion that we should primarily buy back shares if we do, if we have a strong positive cash flow and use parts of actual earnings to buy back shares. Obviously, you can do it by other reasons as well, but it's in a falling market, in a market where we don't see any change in the crypto market so far. I don't think it would have a lasting impact. I think what would have a lasting impact is for us to grow the AUM, get out with more products and do structural deals. So that remains the focus. That's not a no to buybacks. It's just saying that we think we have better opportunities, better use of cash at this point.
Curtis Schlaufman
VP of Marketing and Communications
And to reemphasize again, when we do buy back shares, those shares are retired. It's not like buying shares on the open market and you hold them and they increase in value if the share price appreciates. So once we utilize that capital, the shares are burned. That capital is then dead. It's gone. We can't make it liquid again and go out and buy anything else or reinvest it anywhere else. So from an operating leverage standpoint, especially during a bear market, when we're not producing a whole lot of free cash flow, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense for the long-term revenue capabilities of the company.
Johan Wattenstrom
Chief Executive Officer
Yeah, I think what is best for the stock price long term, what will drive the stock price in the long term the most is obviously for us to grow the AM, grow the revenues, and that remains our full focus with all the resources we have at hand.
Curtis Schlaufman
VP of Marketing and Communications
and then a couple of questions on the NASDAQ compliance and applying for 180 day extension I'll address this quickly we will be applying for the 100 additional 180 day extension on September 1st we have had discussions with the team at NASDAQ They have indicated that we do qualify for the additional 180-day extension, but they cannot give us an affirmative answer, yes or no, until the application is submitted. But we are very optimistic that the extension will be granted. And then, of course, during that time, hopefully crypto winter ends and the company re-rates during that time. So we'll keep all investors apprised as we proceed along this process. And the goal here is to get back over a dollar organically. through our own internal growth initiatives and quite bluntly the market coming out of crypto winter and back in the stable run in Bitcoin and some of the other alts. I'll answer one more question. We'll go to analysts and then I'll keep answering. We'll pop back and forth. Now that geographic expansion has slowed and institutional products have stalled in Europe, what does the company see as the biggest driver of AUM outside of increased crypto prices? Again, Johan, yes.
Johan Wattenstrom
Chief Executive Officer
Yeah, I can start. So I think obviously the new products we're launching now, the new crypto fund, the usage funds and so forth, where we address a different market. We have distribution, not just locally in our core markets. We have distribution globally for those products. I think that's not as... That market, we have a lot of demand. There's not a lot of products to choose from. I think our products will be unique and address that market in an extremely attractive way. We also will be listing a few innovative new products the next few months. I think two of them hopefully within two weeks that are unique there's no competition for those so I think within the product portfolio I don't want to get too explicit about what we're going to list here the next few months that's something we will announce when we list but both the institutional fund type of products and also the other ETP products we have in our pipeline I think we'll be unique, we'll address a new market than what we are working with right now. So I think a lot of untapped potential there and I think that will really drive our AUM once launched.
Curtis Schlaufman
VP of Marketing and Communications
Thanks. And then, Paul, before we go to Ed and Alan and Hal, I guess, could you clarify the use of capital to purchase the stretch shares and the RWUSD?
Paul Bozoki
Chief Financial Officer
Yeah. Okay. So for everybody... We keep our cash in U.S. dollars. We keep our cash in U.S. Treasury bills short term, three months or less. The yields on those are about 3.5%. So it's not great, as we all know in this environment. The board approved $20 million of our cash pile going to MicroStrategy Prefs, the stretch, STRCs that I think most people are aware of. We did buy them at $99.50. They went as low as $85 at June 30th. I think they were actually in the 70s, but they were $85 on June 30th. So we marked it down in the financials that you're seeing today. Those shares have since recovered to approximately $95. Michael's, Saylor, and Fong Lee have come out publicly repeatedly saying that their goal is to get them back to $100. We don't have any intention to sell our shares in the near term. They're Just a higher yielding component of our treasury. So we do pick up a dollar a share. There's no withholding tax. They're paid as return of capital. We do still consider them attractive.
Curtis Schlaufman
VP of Marketing and Communications
Okay, I'll add from CompassPoint, analyst. Ed, go ahead and unmute yourself and give the floor.
Ed
Analyst, CompassPoint
Hey guys, thanks for taking my question here. Do you mind, I mean, I know you kind of touched on some of the strength and the net flows being driven by institutional, but just kind of curious, was it any specific product or was it just kind of across the spectrum for those 2Q net flows? I know, I think you guys called out one big sale relate to Hedera, I think, early in the quarter, but it seems like even since then, things have had a pretty good pace.
Paul Bozoki
Chief Financial Officer
Yeah, I can touch that briefly. There certainly was the 11 million of HBAR, the Hedera, which was a big part of it, and just overall for people to be aware of our AUM that we're 46% Bitcoin and Ethereum and 69.8% Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana. So 70% in three tokens. So the growth does generally reflect that. There was the disproportionate HBAR inflow that we press released and you're aware of.
Ed
Analyst, CompassPoint
Yeah, I guess even for the 13 million of inflows, it's still your best guess. I'm just kind of curious, what's driving that? Is it any geography? Is it anything specific? Was it lumpy or was it generally broad-based?
Andrew Forson
President
I can comment to that. It was actually quite broad. I think the distribution that Paul mentioned is correct. But we've just really been, you know, over the past year, we've just been really hammering contacts with broker-dealer platforms, with institutional investors, and making sure that people are aware of our presence. They see that we're visible. There have been some strong marketing and publicity campaigns in the Nordics as well. And we have a very granular system for being able to track which products money is flowing into and out of, of not only us, but our competitors too. So we're just maximizing efficiency. And we were aware that it was a tough market. So we wanted to make sure to squeeze out every last drop of capital into our products to attract capital into our products.
Curtis Schlaufman
VP of Marketing and Communications
Yeah, a bit more color on that too. It's like behind the scenes, Andrew, Jakob, Johan, and our marketing and sales team at Velor are doing an extensive amount of work to grow the brand, not only in the Nordics, but across the EU. And I know a lot of folks have their own opinions on our symposiums or capital market series, but again, These are where you'll see the seeds planted that will turn into net inflows and AUM gains. So there are a lot of tiny little things and face-to-face connections that our marketing and sales are doing. And these are things that we weren't able to do because, frankly, we weren't in the position to do it from a financial perspective a couple of years ago. Thank you for having me. to attract additional inflows into our ETPs over the past few months as well. So even though things are a bit slower in the ecosystem itself, this is an opportunity for us to be aggressive and grow our brand, continue to plant seeds and see those fruits of our labor when conditions turn.
Ed
Analyst, CompassPoint
Great. And I think in the press release, you kind of mentioned how in the bear market, you guys are pretty well capitalized and there could be potential M&A, obviously nothing specific. But I'm just kind of curious of what you're seeing. Are you seeing lots of potential deals and sellers here? Or is that just kind of a general comment that you might be able to execute on at some point?
Johan Wattenstrom
Chief Executive Officer
Yeah, I can do a brief comment. We see a continuous stream and pipeline of potential deals of different kinds in the M&A space. The last six months have been much more intense in that regard. We're obviously extremely picky, so even though we've done some really deep due diligence on some deals which were very, very close and could have been If it's not a perfect fit, we don't go ahead. We've done a lot of work on that. We see more and more in the pipeline. It's very active. The M&A space is very active right now and a lot of interesting deals coming up. We are selectively approaching and Looking at new deals, but we obviously want to make sure it's a perfect fit for a long-term strategy for sure. So, but yeah, it's super exciting and a lot of interesting discussions are being held.
Ed
Analyst, CompassPoint
Great. Thanks for the call. Any other questions, Ed? No, that's it for me.
Curtis Schlaufman
VP of Marketing and Communications
Cool. Alan? Lee from Maxim. Alan, do you have the floor? All right, I'll invite Hal from the Riley.
Hal
Analyst, Riley
My question is on the operating expense that you mentioned in the presentation. The operating expense has fell to about $10 million from 2014. Is that a reasonable level going forward? With the AUM at quarter end at just below $400 million, can you maybe give us some commentary on break-even levels now with maybe the lower expense structure?
Paul Bozoki
Chief Financial Officer
Thanks for the question, Hal. It is our goal to keep cash operating costs, which is the general admin and the fees and commissions, right? So excluding the non-cash share based stuff in the 36 to 39 million range. We need about $550 million of AUM at 4.25% monetization to be breakeven at that level, which we think is a reasonable monetization rate in slightly stronger crypto markets. So that's something we, of course, continue to monitor. And depending how long the crypto bear market goes down, we'll continue to reevaluate. But at the current time, we think that's where we'd like to operate.
Hal
Analyst, Riley
Thanks, Paul. I'm going to ask a follow-up to Andrew. Andrew, you mentioned on the inflows, was it 40% of new inflows were from institutions? I have to make sure I heard that number right.
Andrew Forson
President
Yeah, it was approximately 40%. Well, actually, no, it would probably be higher than that, but it was 40% from institutional deals. So what happens is we have face-to-face meetings at our events. If they like it, we enter into discussion about how Thank you very much. What one could say that without these new vectors of communicating and institutional outreach and events, we may not have been able to close those deals or others like it in the future. And that's using our existing product mix. Whenever you factor in the fact that we are creating new products that are going to be less geographically restricted, and have more of an appetite globally and will also be very interesting to institutional investors, then that's where what we're doing hopefully will scale more and drive more AUM to our platform as Paul and Johan have alluded to.
Hal
Analyst, Riley
One follow-up to that is, what is an idea for a geographically less restricted product that might replace what you've been doing? What does that really mean, or how is that constructed?
Andrew Forson
President
Well, for instance, some of the fun products that Johan has discussed, we've had interest and we have discussed with wealth management platforms. and institutional allocators outside of Europe. And they can participate in those quite easily because they have an interesting theory behind them. They have an interesting investment philosophy, great Sharpe ratio, interesting Certino ratios. So these are products that larger capital allocators outside of Europe would have an interest in and would be able to avail themselves of. Thank you, guys.
Curtis Schlaufman
VP of Marketing and Communications
Yeah, I think unless Alan comes back, I think that's all the questions we have from analysts Alan, are you still there? I invited you back Alan, if you can unmute yourself Hi. Can you hear me? Sorry about that.
Alan
Analyst, Maxim Group
Yeah, I just wanted to check. So you said getting back to cash operating expenses, you said you're shooting for your target is $36 to $39 million. You were very disciplined this quarter. Your G&A plus the fees and commission was just under $8 million. Right. If you annualize that, that would get you to 32 million, which is lower than what you said, 36, 39. Is it reasonable that you could be running at a lower rate than 36, 39?
Paul Bozoki
Chief Financial Officer
Yeah, I mean, you got to look at what we were a little higher in Q1, Alan. So hopefully we do come in at the lower end of the bar. We're trying to under-promise and over-deliver here. But yeah, we are running leaner now.
Alan
Analyst, Maxim Group
Okay, good. And then... There were some issues on yield this quarter, but the normal assumption for coming up with the break-even AUM is using a 4.5% yield on AUM. Is there any reason to think that we should be using a lower yield going forward?
Paul Bozoki
Chief Financial Officer
So we did 5% actual in 2025. We were 3.6% in Q1, 3.3%. Bitcoin was also $58,300 on June 30th. We do personally think it's dark days right now in crypto and we are hopeful that the fall with the four-year cycle and if Bitcoin can get closer to its 200-day, let alone go through it, it'll be better. And then the yields will come up. So the yields right now are extremely distressed. We We are still internally budgeting at 4.25. If you feel you want to use lower, it pushes the break even up. But you can see we are aggressive on the costs and trending on the low end as well.
Alan
Analyst, Maxim Group
Did you say you're budgeting 4.25 or 4.5?
Paul Bozoki
Chief Financial Officer
4.25 for hopefully for the fall.
Johan Wattenstrom
Chief Executive Officer
Yeah, the dynamic here is obviously that When markets go down, the Bitcoin dominance normally goes up. So our higher yielding assets are a lower part of the AUM and that's what drives down the average monetization rate. So even though we've been more efficient in getting higher monetization rates in assets across the board, The product makes changes when the market goes down, Bitcoin dominance goes up. When we mostly have Bitcoin and Ethereum, that's the dynamic that actually lowers the average monetization rate. So even though we do a great job in actually earning more per most assets than before, because a larger percentage of the AUM now is Bitcoin and Ethereum, where returns are lower. That's what's driving the monetization rate, average monetization rate down in the bear market. But that obviously reverses when the market goes up. And then what we've seen in all cycles before is that the alts and other coins come back with a high beta. And then the larger part of the portfolio they are, the more the monetization rate goes up.
Alan
Analyst, Maxim Group
This is very helpful. Thank you very much. Cool.
Curtis Schlaufman
VP of Marketing and Communications
Thanks, Alan. With that, we'll go ahead and wrap it up. If we were not able to get you to your questions, please do email ir at defi.tech. Thank you all for your time, your patience, and your commitment as shareholders. We do value that greatly, and we'll see you next time. Thanks, everyone. Thank you.