Managing Directors' Report 2025

Join a live presentation by George McDonaugh and Keld van Schreven, joint Managing Directors and Co-Founders, on KR1 plc's Full Year results, followed by a Q&A this Thursday 30 April 2026 at 12:00 BST.

To attend the event, register here.

On 25 November 2025, KR1 plc became the first, and to date, only diversified digital asset company listed on the London Stock Exchange. This was a historic moment in the digital asset industry and for public markets in the UK, and a pivotal moment for the Company.

The demands of the listing process, including the ongoing dialogue with the FCA, and active policy engagement, meant the transition from the Aquis Growth Market to the LSE Main Market was a significant undertaking, absorbing substantial management resources and operational capacity. This limited the capacity of the Company to materially expand business operations, strategy and investments. KR1’s diversified approach sets it apart on the public markets, a distinction we believe will become increasingly significant as institutional demand for onchain infrastructure exposure grows.

The financial results for 2025 reflected both the operational demands of this listing process and the difficult market conditions that prevailed throughout. The surge in institutional inflows that drove Bitcoin to successive highs via ETFs proved narrowly contained. Ethereum benefited to a degree, but capital largely stopped at the ETF wrapper and did not rotate meaningfully into the broader innovation digital asset ecosystem, leaving the rest of the market and the majority of our holdings largely behind. The broader digital asset market also suffered from the 10 October 2025 liquidation event, from which many participants are still recovering.

Throughout the financial year, our Net Asset Value per share fell from 78.76 pence to 27.93 pence over the course of the year, and total Net Assets shrunk from £139.4 million to £49.6 million. Infrastructure income, from staking activities, compressed from £12.8 million in 2024 to £4.8 million in 2025, reflecting a loss of investor appetite in risk-on assets as the economy stalled, Trump's tariffs took effect and geopolitical tensions persisted. We weren’t alone, every major digital asset investor and operator felt the strain of the broader market climate.

Now, in 2026, with confidence returning to the market, we are operating from a position of real momentum. As the first diversified digital asset company operating on the LSE, with our operations around Technology and Financial Infrastructure alongside the Venture and strategic investments facing-side of the Company firmly in place, we are in the strongest position of our decade-long history.

We enter this next phase not as a new entrant, but as an established operator with deep domain expertise, extensive network relationships and live infrastructure operations across a range of networks and protocols with a diversified balance sheet of productive digital assets actively shaped to reflect where we believe the most significant wave of demand has yet to arrive. Unlike passive Digital Asset Treasury companies or Exchange Traded Funds (or Notes) that rely solely on market movements, KR1 is an active, operational and income-generating operator at the frontier of the onchain economy that we believe will define the next decade.

With the launch of our Financial Infrastructure operations since the start of the year, KR1 entered a new and important phase of its evolution, establishing a dedicated and growing stream of income that sits alongside our Technology Infrastructure operations, where we have been powering decentralised proof-of-stake networks since 2019 as well as our venture activities since the Company’s inception. Initially anchored in Bitcoin and Ethereum yield strategies, this operation is building toward and operating what we believe will become the essential layer of global asset movement, activities we refer to collectively as ‘Onchain Infrastructure’.

As part of our operations, the Company has utilised an allocation of its existing Nexus Mutual holding to participate in staking pools, supporting a select group of established and rigorously vetted protocols within Ethereum’s decentralised finance ecosystem to generate income from this holding. However, this represents just the first steps on the Financial Infrastructure front, we are not stopping with Nexus Mutual and are working on adding additional income streams across other protocols in the near future.

The convergence of AI with onchain infrastructure is, we believe, a structural demand driver of a different order of magnitude to anything we have previously observed. AI agents, autonomous systems capable of managing capital and assets without human intervention, require programmable money, verifiable data and tamper-resistant execution environments that centralised financial infrastructure is fundamentally ill-equipped to provide.

Blockchains, and Ethereum in particular, are purpose-built for the agentic economy. Ten years mature, global and permissionless, Ethereum carries the strongest network effects, the largest developer ecosystem and the deepest application layer of any smart contract network. It is the settlement layer of choice for machine economies, with developments such as the x402 micropayment standard and a growing ecosystem of onchain agent frameworks cementing that position. KR1’s substantial Ethereum holding (through Lido Staked ETH) already provides meaningful exposure to this theme, and we are building on that foundation deliberately. It represents the natural next step for a company that has spent a decade at the frontier of decentralised networks, and we believe the timing, as autonomous agent activity and compute begins to scale onchain in earnest, could not be better.

Further, through our Zee Prime II specialised fund holding, we already have existing look-through exposure to Gensyn, a decentralised AI compute network aggregating idle GPU and CPU resources into a single verifiable compute layer, an early and considered entry into machine learning infrastructure at the heart of the agentic AI boom. Networks like Gensyn are important as they remove single-point-of-control risk from the intelligence layer, critical as global reliance on AI deepens.

On the broader AI and crypto convergence, we are actively evaluating and researching opportunities and operational strategies. It is worth noting that distributed compute is not a new theme for KR1. Shortly after KR1’s inception in 2016, we backed Golem, one of our earliest investments, and our renewed interest is a continuation of long-held conviction. What is new is the convergence of decentralised compute alongside agentic AI, and the scale of the opportunity it presents. We are fully focused on this convergence, and we have rarely felt more energised about what lies ahead. As AI grows in global importance, the imperative to decentralise it, to eliminate fragility, reduce single points of failure, and return power to open networks becomes ever more urgent. This has been KR1's core thesis since 2016, now applied to what may be the defining technology of our time.

As this new frontier develops, AI demand directed at the digital asset settlement layers, oracle networks and data availability protocols that KR1 already participates in and operates could represent a wave of adoption that is, today, difficult to fully anticipate. Against this backdrop, we are in the final stages of launching KR1’s dedicated network infrastructure operations in the form of validators on Ethereum. As onchain activity scales across tokenisation, stablecoin volumes and decentralised AI, validator rewards and fee generation follow, and this infrastructure expansion positions KR1 to capture that upside directly. It represents the natural next step for an operator that has spent a decade at the frontier of decentralised networks, and we believe the timing, as autonomous agent activity and compute begins to scale onchain in earnest, could not be better.

With RedStone, the fast-growing oracle provider we supported through both seed and follow-on funding, we are exploring opportunities for KR1 to take an active role in the network as a RedStone operator. The pace and quality of RedStone's recent integration wins speaks for itself: primary data feed infrastructure for Canton Network, an institutional RWA blockchain backed by Goldman Sachs and Citadel Securities hosting over $6 trillion in tokenised assets; core oracle provider for Tempo, the payments blockchain co-developed by Stripe and Paradigm which also houses their Agentic AI Machine Payment Protocol; and the purpose-built HyperStone oracle stack powering over $1.5 billion in trading volume across Hyperliquid's permissionless perpetuals markets. Spanning institutional RWA, global payments and highperformance derivatives, Redstone is the common thread across three of the most significant oracle integrations in the space. With the additional launch of CLARA, its agent-to-agent communication and marketplace layer, Redstone is positioning itself as foundational plumbing for the new onchain economy in its entirety, and our relationship and potential operator role places us well to benefit from that trajectory.

We are also evaluating opportunities in the data availability space, including operations with Celestia and other protocols we hold, where we see a meaningful opportunity to operate as active infrastructure participants rather than passive holders.

After navigating a challenging 2025 we believe the 2026 macroeconomic environment is becoming meaningfully more constructive. Liquidity will return, and when it does, it will flow toward quality. We are entering what may prove to be one of the most consequential years in the history of digital assets, with the convergence of agentic AI, decentralised compute, real world asset tokenisation and institutional adoption creating conditions that favour precisely the kind of patient, infrastructure-oriented approach KR1 has taken. The networks, validators and decentralised AI and agentic compute layers being built today will form the backbone of a new financial and computational internet, and KR1 is now positioning itself as an active participant in that buildout.

We would like to thank our shareholders for their continued support and patience, and we look forward to demonstrating, through our actions and results, why KR1 is the most credible, institutional-grade digital asset vehicle on the London markets on its path to build out the premium blue chip digital asset company on the LSE, the next chapter for KR1 is just getting started.

George McDonaugh and Keld van Schreven, Managing Directors and Co-Founders, KR1 plc.

Excerpt taken from the annual report and audited financial statements of KR1 plc for the twelve months ended 31 December 2025, published on the Company’s website and available as an announcement.