Q3’26 Update: What We Kept, What We Cut, What Comes Next

• What Is Growing
• What Is Still Costing Us
• What We Cut—and What the Experiments Taught Us
• What Comes Next for Bitcoin Finance
• Where We Are Heading

~$7,600/month in services revenue across four operating partners

Dear Friends and Investors,

In Q2, we reorganized around a simple idea: AI services would generate cashflow and relationships, and those relationships would create opportunities to finance productive businesses with Bitcoin. This quarter helped us separate what is paying from what is interesting—and what is still costing us.

The services business is working. Losses on the legacy lease book have grown. We have cut some side projects, kept the useful technology, and narrowed the next financing experiment from a real-estate fund to a small inventory trade.

§What Is Growing

Our paid work now covers mortgage-document processing, customer-record synchronization, procurement approvals, financial reporting and healthcare data workflows. Across finance, healthcare and community organizations, the problems are surprisingly similar: information arrives in the wrong place, systems disagree, and somebody spends hours chasing what should already be connected.

Customers are paying us to fix those processes and keep them working. That is where our experience running financial operations has become valuable beyond vehicle finance. The next step is to reuse more of what we build across customers, so growing revenue does not require the same increase in our hours.

This is the part of the Q2 strategy we are keeping: earn our way into understanding a business before proposing how to finance it.

§What Is Still Costing Us

We have stopped new vehicle originations, but losses on the existing lease book continue to grow. Payments still come in, while missed payments, repossessions and recovery costs keep reducing what we ultimately collect. We continue servicing the book and working through its obligations.

Credit pressure is showing up elsewhere too. Ford Credit’s U.S. retail net charge-offs reached US$98 million in Q3 2026, up from US$95 million a year earlier. In private credit, Ares Capital recorded US$527 million in net unrealized investment losses in the first half, while Blue Owl valued US$133 million of Loparex second-lien loans at just five cents on the dollar at June 30. (SEC)

Our own lesson has been expensive: signing the deal is the beginning of the work. Collections, servicing and recovery determine the actual return. We want future financing experiments to be smaller, shorter and easier to follow from purchase through repayment.

§What We Cut—and What the Experiments Taught Us

We stepped back from XSTR / XtoNostr, our social-publishing venture, and from Frontier Crown as a standalone business. Frontier Crown was a game we built to explore trade, cooperation and sovereignty. It attracted interest in the model, but we would rather collaborate around research such as Max Bittker’s RuneBench, which uses RuneScape to study AI agents, than build every game and simulation ourselves. (Max Bittker)

Building the game also made us ask what decentralized storage, networking and AI actually look like in practice. Our commercial test for storage became blunt: can it be 4× cheaper, or offer something useful enough that someone would pay 10× more? Spare disk space alone does not pay for keeping files available, replacing failed providers and supporting users. Across our exploration of Nostr-based hosting, decentralized VPNs and inference, patchy availability kept bringing us back to the same conclusion: useful fallbacks alongside established infrastructure, rather than a reason to leave Cloudflare.

Some experiments produced tools worth keeping. In October, we published Grynvault Rebalance, built on Alby Hub, to move Bitcoin between the specific Lightning channels where we need it. We also submitted the underlying rebalancing improvements to Alby’s LDK-node project. That contribution is open for review. This is the approach we prefer: encounter a real problem, fix it, and share the work.

§What Comes Next for Bitcoin Finance

The $1M real-estate bridge fund did not close on our original timetable. We are taking the useful idea—finance productive activity and recycle the capital—and testing it over a shorter cycle. Buy inventory, sell it, settle the transaction, and measure the result in both dollars and Bitcoin.

The proposed structure shares gains and losses between the operator and capital provider. When Bitcoin falls, the same dollar sales buy back more BTC; when it rises, they buy back less. Restoring the BTC capital becomes cheaper in fiat when Bitcoin is down and pricier when it is up. We want that outcome shared through the agreement, alongside the trading result.

Barqly remains part of the core technology work. Its developing shared-wallet and agent-spending tools fit what inventory financing needs: agreed approvals, limited spending authority and people retaining control of the funds while software handles authorized tasks.

§Where We Are Heading

Our bet is that businesses will keep paying for reliable operations even as AI becomes cheaper. Doing that work gets us close to the purchases, sales and cashflow problems that financing should serve. The company we want to build helps businesses operate better, then brings capital to transactions we understand.

The next quarter is about growing the paid operating base, making delivery more repeatable, continuing recoveries on the lease book, and completing one small BTC-denominated inventory transaction. We want a completed cycle we can learn from before raising a larger pool around it.

Introductions to businesses that regularly buy inventory or fund shipments would be especially useful, alongside capital partners interested in a small risk-sharing pilot and organizations with finance processes worth automating.

We are still working toward the same mission: accelerating the world’s transition to sound money through productive businesses and real commerce. We are getting more disciplined about which parts we need to build ourselves.

Thank you for continuing to support us as we work through the old business and build the next one.

Warm regards,

Hudhaifah Zahid
Director @ Econommi • Grynvault