Good day, and welcome to the Q2 Update Conference Call. Today's conference is being recorded. And at this time, I’d like to turn the conference over to Corrado De Gasperis.

Thank you, Casey, and good morning, everyone. This is Corrado, CEO of Comstock Mining, on the line with Zach Spencer, our Director of External Relations and Treasurer and we welcome you to Comstock Mining second quarter 2020 conference call. I will provide a brief summary of the information that’s included from our press release from this morning, including our progress on our strategic initiatives especially with the mercury remediation business. If you don’t have a copy of today’s release, you will find a copy on our new website at www.comstockmining.com, and please just click on the Press Releases tab in the main menu bar. We will file our quarterly report on Form 10-Q next month on time, most likely on or before August 14th as we finalize our full Q2 financial statements. Please also let me remind you that, we will make forward-looking statements on this call, including an update on our 2020 outlook. But any statements relating to matters that are not historical facts may also constitute forward-looking statements. These statements are based on current expectations and are subject to the same risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. These risks and uncertainties are detailed in previous reports filed by the company with the SEC and in this morning’s press release, and all forward-looking statements made during this call are subject to those same and other risks that we can't necessarily identify. Okay, let’s jump in. Our realignment which we've been really working hard at over the last year is complete. And really now all of our daily activities are designed to simplify focus and accelerate our business activities. So, we're starting to see already in the last few communications movements, and we are driven identifying develop-only economically feasible gold and silver in the ground,…

Thank you, sir. [Operator Instructions]. Okay. We will take our first question from call Carl Frankston, a Private Investor.

Hi, Carl.

Corrado, how are you doing? Good. Good. Good.

Doing good.

Yeah. I would like to ask a question. Several weeks ago, there were a SEC EDGAR filing, with Leviston Resources and Triton Funds.

Yes, sir.

Could you please elaborate on that? And, it appears that it's your option to sell them stock. Could you comment in terms of future dilution? You're talking about getting rid of the debt. Is it going to be necessary for to draw down on these funds and dilutive?

Yes. Thank you Carl for the question. So, there were two filings. The first one was, well, the first one I'll mention was Leviston Resources. This is an equity facility that we've had variations of it in place. Over the last few years, we've hardly used the facility during 2020, which is very good, a very welcome change. But it's important for us to have the facility in place. That was $2.5 million and it would only be our intention to use that facility as it was absolutely needed. And it wasn't put in place for the purpose of drawing down to pay down debt. Certainly, it would be available for that if that was required, but we don't see that, that would be required. So that's number one. So that's really that's in place, that we've always had in place, but I guess we will always we'll have in place and hopefully the trend will continue that our reliance will go from being heavy on those facilities in '18 and '19 to being very, very light in '20 to hopefully ultimately not being required at all. So the trend is our friend, I guess, but there always be that facility in place. In terms of the other filing that was a direct placement, that's not a facility. That was a direct placement of $1.25 million with a fund, that we use substantially all of those proceeds for funding the mercury business. Ultimately, we had hoped to have some of our assets sales done a little bit sooner. COVID kind of delayed that on us unfortunately. We're still driving very, very hard on that. The Philippine opportunity, frankly, it's a double edged sword, the government has been really driving us hard to get over there. We could not feel more support, more alignment, more motivation with us to get those systems up there. I think the Philippines will ultimately be recognized as a leader in sort of embracing the Minamata convention and really working hard to stop artisanal and small scale mining use of mercury. This is the UN's biggest push. We didn't initially expect to be deploying, our first project outside of the Comstock until at least a year after we were operating the first system on the Comstock. So it was somewhat unplanned if you want to say it that way. It's a good problem. But that money from that fund was a direct placement. And that money is already going towards the Philippine unit that was already built, some of that building was done in advance of the funding, which we were grateful for, because it allowed us to stay on track, and the rest of it will go there as well. So, does that answer the question, Carl?

Yes. So Triton is already done, that's past tense.

It was done. It was closed. It was funded. Substantially all the money goes to the Philippines the unit first, if you will, which is completed. So that one's the one that kind of was advanced funded and then we put the money in. And then for the working capital to ship the unit, established the camp over there, get some other local equipment organized around it and get up and running. And I think that unit is going to be cash positive within a couple of months of it being set up and run. The only thing about that is we need our team to get over there. We ship it, let's say we ship it next week, or the week after, within the next two weeks. It's going to take three or four weeks to get over there landed, released through customs. At that point, we need to be on the ground there, setting up and training and operating and Philippines, like Nevada still has two week quarantine, when you fly into Manila. We can't go over there and get stuck in Manila for two weeks. We have to actually get to Devou and get the team. Now we have local partners there that are doing a lot of the supporting work with the JV, but ultimately Paul Clifft has to be there himself to set up the equipment train, the team and get it up and running fully. So, no. I'm sounding kind of monotone, but it's one of the most exciting things I've been involved in a long, long time. And, it seems routine now, like every other night I have 7:00 to 8:00 PM calls with the Philippines and it's the next day, not just me, the whole MCU team, both our attorneys, our partners, everyone over there. It's just working together and everyone feels behind schedule because of the Government's real motivation to make this happen. So, it's very, very good positive.

No, no, that sounds fine. I'm just concerned about the, when they get stocked, are they getting 144 stock or they're getting free market stock?

So...

After these two announcements, the stock price hammered pretty good from like $1.05 down to about $0.60 cents and it kind of coincided with these two announcements and they all get, they kind of listed as discount to a weighted-average stuff. And, I'm certainly not casting aspersions. I don't know either group.

No, no, no. So, let's just comment. Yeah. Let's just comment. I mean..

If they benefit from a lower stock price that would get more shares and...

Yeah. No. So, in both cases, we direct the pricing. In other words, we do not, we won't do a deal if we don't know what the price is. We won't subject ourselves to that, and we didn't in both those cases, number one. Number two, it seems like any time, we file a pro-sup and I understand this. There's a negative reaction. But I feel like both counterparties are people that we've vetted and that we certainly in Leviston’s case we know very, very well. And in Triton’s case, they're scheduling to come out and bring some their investors to tour the site, et cetera. So, our feeling always is that we want to build a stronger base of capital that stays here. But, when we file a pro-sup it's registered stock, Carl. It's not restricted stock. I hope that answer that question.

Thanks.

So, you don't know for sure, but we do our best to be positive. It was...

Again, I'm not casting aspersions, but Wall Street is not benevolent. So, if you can make a book.

Yeah. You’re preaching to the choir on that one. I'm with you a hundred percent. So we're just trying to be as careful as diligent possible. Our goal not through registration statements or stock sales, but our goal through our investor initiatives are that, when we look at our top 20 shareholders, we like what we see. But they're necessary, they're committed with us, but they're not sufficient. So, what we would like to see four months from now, six months from now is additions to that Top 20 by people really believing in the 120 that were intermediately driving to, and then the bigger number that we will continue to pursue after that, and that we just slowly but surely hopefully faster, add more and more shareholders to the base, right? And hopefully those shareholders, who have their arms wrapped around $22 million of value will have their arms wrapped around 120 million, 220 million, 320 million will just keep growing from there, but we need a stronger base. So, there's a lot of short money that somehow, migrates around certain industries and we're doing everything in our power to avoid it.

Thank you. We will take our next question from investor Harvey [indiscernible].

Have you copyrighted the term environmental minor?

I love that term. I'm writing it down. That's a great term.

That may be a good place for us to be using considering what we're doing now?

Yes, I am. It's funny, like, I've never heard the term before, but I feel that who we are not because of MCU, by the way, right, we've gotten three of the top, state of Nevada, county and federal government awards for environmental excellence, I mean, top of the food chain. I believe that those activities not only attracted the MCU team to us, but also the Nevada Department of EPA, who we worked very closely with on the Carson river Mercury is super fun, directing people to us, almost like a like a partner feeder because we are environmental minded.

So is it copyright, or I would certainly jump on it right away?

Yes, it's a great idea. Let me also say to you, that we've been reached out to, when I say we, I want to say MCU. We've been reached out to by the United States Environmental Protection Agency policy group in Washington. We've been had full conversations with the State Department and then about what we're doing in mercury remediation. And the conversations could not be more positive. The UN adopted the Minamata convention in 20, late 2017, with an objective of removing mercury from and this is an important term that we'll hear more and more artisanal, and small scale mining. The acronym is either ASM or ASCM, depending on who you talk to. And the world, through the UN has rallied around eliminating mercury, certainly overall but in particular from artisanal and small scale mining. Our system is not only fully designed to do that it's not only Paul Clift and Oro industries core competency building these smaller scale mining systems and they're not small, they're not toys, but there's not a lot of people, we don't know of anybody that could both clean up the environment with our systems, like we're doing on the Comstack like we're going to do in the Nibak river, but actually then the systems can on a go forward basis, mine chemical free, without the use of mercury and so this is what raise the eyebrows of not the regulators. We work very well with the US EPA district nine district eight, you and the Nevada EPA regulators. They're good people, we were partners, but the policymakers saying that, the goal is to implement Minamata. And, we're -- we believe we're, well, we believe we're the best solution for sure. But we're not even sure we see anybody else doing it. So, this is going to get very exciting. We hired an archaeologist who worked who worked for many, many years with abandoned mines in Nevada, the federal government, BLM abandoned mines group. There are literally thousands of abandoned mines in Nevada, of which a very large percentage of them have mercury contamination. So, the mark I can't even get my head around the size of the market, it's just global. So, we're very excited about what's happening. We're working our asses off I shouldn't swear we were working our butts off because we're having a hard time keeping up with it all, and that's why we're not adding cost actually to our system. We're redeploying some of the costs. We're reallocating, so we we've hired to do environmental manager. Who's run mine sites, we've hired the archeologist, who's looking at the markets for mercury. And of course the MCU team is working 24x7 to get these systems built and deployed.

Okay. Is Mark Reichman from Noble Capital on this call? Do you know?

I think Zach would know. I don't, I would suspect, the answer is yes. But assume he is and say what you're going to say, and then I'll convey the message if he wasn't.

I've been reading over the research report that, that Noble put out and they've got a target price of $4.50.

Yeah.

Is that to be understood to be within a year?

I don't have the report in front of me. Typically there's 12 month targets, but I don't know if that's what Mark I got to be honest. I have to double check that and get back because...

What is your target?

My feeling is we're going after the $120 million that we've delineated as fast as possible, and it's not going to be linear, right? I think what's going to happen is, when we pay-off our debt, you're going to see a step up. When we, the first unit is operating and people can see videos of it operating, you're going to see a step up. When the first unit generates cash, people are going to start to project holy shit, like what if we have 20 of these units deployed? So, I would say within a year, yep.

Okay. What is your role with the opportunity fund, Silver Springs Opportunity Fund?

I have a huge role, right? So when a year and a half ago, the Board of Comstock approved me to coordinate the facilitation of setting up the fund, the facilitation of building a governance team around it and then management team. And, I was working very, very hard to do that and one of the things that became evident is that, and that was driven almost singularly by Comstock wanting to monetize its Silver Springs assets at the highest possible value. So that was why I was commissioned to do that. What became obvious I knew, but it became much more obvious was that, there wasn't a lot of interest in the investors in just buying one piece of property frankly, or even buying two pieces of property. You had some real estate developers that showed some interest. But, the project is on a much bigger scale and there's positives and negatives to that. The positive is, there's so much flowing into Northern Nevada it's hard to exaggerate. The negative is Silver Springs requires some infrastructure, and if you were going to do one project, you might not be inclined to build roads and build sewer systems. You couldn't, it'd be hard to justify it with just one project. And so, as we were forming the fund and bringing in some really good people, I mean, the people that invested in the fund are world-class as far as I'm concerned. And so, the thesis expanded to let's not just acquire a couple of really good real estate development projects, let's consolidate the district. And in a way we're carrying a page out of what we did here at the Comstock consolidate the whole district, instead of consolidating around one of the most historic silver discoveries on the planet. We're…

Probably on the mercury cleanup where you said you paid about 1.7 million in cash and stock. So, 1.25 was it with cash, what was the value of the stock is put in?

So, yes, so let me answer that question very, very carefully and clearly. So, the first agreement, which was done in June of 2019 committed $2 million. Okay, and that $2 million, Harvey gets us 15% of the mother company MCU. Right and the right to 50% of the first US joint venture, which most likely would be formed with the equipment that's landing here this week. Okay, so now of that $2 million commitment we put in so far, has been monetized, $1.7 million of cash has gone into MCU the holding the parent company, and they're holding 625,000 shares of LODE that were that are restricted. Okay? That restriction will list in November and their goal will be to monetize an additional $250,000 from that 625 obviously, given today's share price that 625 will well exceed the 250,000, sort of remaining requirement, if you will. And that money either would come back to us or we would put it towards the commitment that we've made to the Philippines. Okay. So that's number one. Number two, we've second secondarily committed up to $3 million in MCU, and MCU, Philippines that will, that will give us an additional 10% interest in the parent company. So, we will end up with 25% interest in MCU and 50% interest directly in the joint venture in the Philippines. So, the way this was structured was that we would have, we would end up with 25% of MCU, which is the parent and then it's our choice, but then ultimately the right to invest in directly into 50% of any project. So, that's, where I come up with this 62.5% of the economics is if it plays out the way we intended to we’ll have 50% of the project as a joint venture, and…

So we have the right to pick up 50% of every one of the projects?

Correct. That's right. We have the right of first refusal on each project. We have the right of first refusal on any capital that comes into the entity, and I got to tell you, the people that we are working with Paul Cliff, the owner of Oro; Tom Manzt, Brad Huburger I mean they're world class people in my opinion in terms of their competency. Paul might be one of the last breeds of truly expert a alluvial/surface mining people. But, the fact that he builds all of his equipment himself, and I was joking with him the other day, you don't build Chevy's, you build Cadillacs, and I offended him. He's like, dude, we build Maseratis, and we see the first system. You'll know what he means. It's so precise and so specific and let me just say, besides the engineering and the equipment. It's customer intimate. Like Paul's whole life has been to know who his customer is and build exactly what they need. Then go camp out with them until it works the way it's supposed to. And so, I just think we're, and we all like each other, which is kind of unusual in business. So, I'm having a lot of fun with it, but that's how it's structured Harvey and I'm telling you, it'll be as big as we let it is my opinion. I was talking to Arnold the other day and he was like, how big can it get? And I couldn't answer the question, because there's just everywhere we turn there's mercury contamination.

Okay. I'm going to go to the end of the queue and get let other people ask. If there's more time, I'll get back on.

Thanks Harvey.

Thank you, Corrado.

Thank you, sir. We will take our next question from Jeremy Aiden, Private Investor.

Hello, Jeremy.

I'm not sure if this question was addressed, but I just wanted to know for the real estate sales, the current potential buyers seem like they've been on the table for a long time. You can feel that they're able to step to the plate, or if it's something that should be considered as another potential buyer.

Yeah. So, no. So, it's the fund, that's buying the assets. The fund raised over $11 million last year, owns 150,000 square foot manufacturing facility, owns and operates the silver Springs airport, has no debt. And has a lot of investment interest in this thesis of consolidating this Northern Nevada enterprise zone, if you want to call it that. So I truly believe that, the COVID thing sort of paralyze the markets. There's a positive, a negative there. The big, big drop in March, which was a big sell off paralyzed everybody. But, it also triggered a lot of capital gains. Then the market rebounded which was kind of shocking. But so, there's a lot of people now that are feeling more stable in terms of their portfolios. But they've got capital gains that they need to deal with, and they also are concerned about the go forward. So, the conversations are very positive. The fund is qualified as an opportunity zone. Meaning, if you have a U.S.-sourced capital gain and you put it big money in the fund, it's automatically deferred for up to 5 years. And then if you keep your money in there for the full duration, which is 10 years, then any new appreciation is tax free. So, there's a tremendous amount of interest in investing in this kind of thesis now the negative is typically that they're in pretty tough areas, right? Like by definition, the zones where poor census tracks needing economic development. So Silver Springs hundred percent qualifies as that, except with all the new highways that have been built and expanded around it is has become literally Grand Central Station of Northern Nevada's economic activity. That's a little bit of an exaggeration. Reno really is the Grand Central Station and the tracks Tahoe Reno industrial center is really the Grand Central Station. But we're the very first stop, off of that, and so, no, I don't, there's no question in my mind, they're going to raise, 10s and 10s of millions of dollars. And but it's important to know also, that the fund has massive access to economic development dollars, private activity bonds, USDA loans, new market credits, and so far the fund is, is debt free, and it's only raised equity so it has operating assets, it's debt free, very strong financial position and looking to bring in one more round of equity before it starts accessing those very inexpensive economic dollars if you will.

And just had one more question there actually, the actual buyer have any, like, do they have any skin in the game? You're just holding a non refundable deposit and any kind of like?

Yes. So, non-refundable deposit is correct. But all of the all of the board and the management of the fund are direct investors. So, not only are we holding non-refundable deposits, but all of the money has come from, the people that are either represented in management or by the board.

Thank you. We will take our next question from Jeremy Harrison an Investor.

I think we just talked to Jeremy.

I'll keep it short because I know it's running pretty long. As far as the fund, can you clarify the last week notice is when a million was raised initially. You can see the other there the 18 million filing. Then think about a couple months ago. It came out where any other money been raised and secured, or is it still waiting on commitments -- so 50?

So, we've only gotten, so in terms of like hard numbers, it's only a few hundred thousand but we're literally talking to three reed industries right now. Who combined to make up, more than the 18 million. So that's sort of a hybrid answer, which is, hard commitments. No, not really, but like, hard, serious interest. And so I think it's going to happen is there were about 20 investors in the first raise of 11 million. We like that very well. Right, like it was a very strong group of people who, I can't think of any one of them that doesn't want to be there the whole time. So, that was a great start. In this case, I think we're talking about it could be 20, it could be 5, right like that. And then, and then the base will be so strong. We believe that we will accelerate the listing, and the registration. And then the third raise will probably be a public offering, which we would go out to the broad masses of people. So, it's coming together very nicely in that context. It's frustrating but the last three or four months, just it was just very, very hard to get traction. We, anyone we reached out to was interested. But we got deferred, no one's saying no. But we just, just couldn't get the meetings at the attention because there's so many other things that they were having to deal with. Now that but now we're now we're getting the meetings like now we get like, I want to be clear, we got meetings this week. We have meetings. I mean, so people are doing the work. So it's, it feels like we're, again, we're back in the saddle.

Okay. As far as the 4.1 million in debt. That's, I think everybody's main concern. Is there a backup plan for that? If this does, stretch out if it did stretch out? Is there a back, can that be delayed. I know it's doing by January?

Yes. We've had great conversations. We have that would say at least three backup plans and I prefer not to talk about them right now. But I think you'll hear very soon. You'll hear very soon. There's no scenario where the debt gets us in trouble.

Got you. Will do.

Okay.

And then, as far as with the Philippines the first unit is going in that's the sand and gravel unit, correct?

Yes.

Okay.

So, just to, just to elaborate on that a little bit, right? We add plans, each unit is different and is typically designed purely for mercury remediation. But, there is a 27 kilometer river of which most of the mercury contamination sits at the top part of the river. It's up river in elevation up to the side of the mountain. But, the government was pushing us very hard to deploy a unit at the bottom of the river, and we were like, that doesn't really make a lot of sense. We want to clean it from the top down because otherwise, how do you sustain the clean activity? And they were like, well, what about, sand and gravel?

Right.

And, it took us a little while to get our head around what they were saying. But we finally got it, like that there was a huge demand for sand and gravel. There's probably less mercury contamination. While certainly to the extent that we've sampled, it seems like there's less mercury contamination down the lower parts of the river. We don't know of that for certain. We know there's mercury contamination pretty much everywhere, but more at the top, less at the bottom. But when you factor in that you could actually have a saleable product with sand and gravel, the amount of mercury and by default, the amount of gold in the mercury becomes less important because you have a base load. So, what we did was we took a pretty sophisticated and pretty high quality as all Paul's equipment is sand and gravel unit and we retrofitted it with the mercury centrifuges and controls. And so, it's actually not something we originally thinking we would be doing. But we're very excited to do it. So that one's going first. It's actually a simpler system overall, right? It's something that, if you didn't have any mercury, it would kick butt in terms of sand and gravel processing. And so, in a way it's both a very conventional business that will generate a base load of profit and revenue for us to get set up and running. But it'll also, if there's mercury in there, it'll get it, and then it'll be even more exciting. So, yep. That's how we're doing it.

Okay. And does it recover the amount of gold as the other units are or no?

It should.

Okay.

It's got the same type of centrifuges. Every situation is different, right? So, we'll have to see the efficacy of it, but we're pretty confident it'll get it clean enough with the controls that are in place that it needs to be. So, we'll see how much, we'll see how it does. But in all cases, these things will perform at very high levels.

Got you. And the Comstock unit, that was at still 25 tons per hour, right?

Yeah. Which is important to highlight that, the Comstock unit was designed more than anything to I want to say perfect the process, right? Like we know that there's, we've gotten high levels of cleanup, high level of efficacy, coming from units that had one centrifuge, this unit and coming to Comstock is like, it is the Maserati, because it's got three centrifuges. It has a full mercury reactor in addition to the centrifuges. This is something that we are in the process of patenting. And then it also has the spiral separators de-watering filtration units, et cetera, et cetera. So, this is where we sort of perfect the ultimate process to get the highest remediation, to get the cleanest material out, and then scale that up subsequently. The Philippine sort of leapfrogged us a little bit, to be honest, right?

Right.

We were planning to do the Comstock thing first. But, they'll both work.

Okay. I think that's it. That answers my questions. I really appreciate it.

Alright, sir.

Oh, one last question. Are you still planning on doing a blog on just the funds coming up?

Yeah. Yes. There's a lot of that activity going on. And so, I was just trying to help get some more things done before. But we'll give more transparency and more updates on that as we go forward.

And also a documentary in the Philippines. That would be great while you're while you're doing that, if you guys...

Yes. Now we've already been approached by a couple of folks, like the Discovery Channel, type folks about that. So, yes, we'll see how that plays out. There'll be something I imagine for sure.

Thank you, sir. We'll take our last question from Charlie Patent an investor.

Yes. My question is just regarding and it was mentioned on previous calls, but not so much waste. I think there was a PA that was meant to get completed in the third quarter. I think this one, yes. Any more information on that?

Yes. So, sort of two points on that. So, on the Dayton resource, our intention is to publish an updated resource estimate. I mentioned earlier, we're going to go under SK 1300 guidelines for that. And although it won't, it won't get to the level of a preliminary economic assessment. There will be economic dialogue, in that report, around the resource estimate, so it'll be more than resource estimate but less than a PA. The intention is then that we would have one more or an intermediate drill program. The biggest debate we've had is do we drill before or after we published a report. I think the way we're going, we're probably going to be before the report will lay out all of the new geological interpretation it’ll layout the intentions for the drill program, and then, subsequent to that next round of drilling and updated engineering, then we could be very close, if not on a preliminary economic assessment for the Dayton. And so that's answer number one. Number two, which may have been what you were referring to, Tono team has done a tremendous amount of work on updating the resources, submit, for Lucerne, and I know that they've done similar to what I just mentioned, some amount of preliminary assessment on the economics for sure. It's almost required, to do that now with the new Canadian and US standards, frankly, I don't know, for certain, if when they publish that resource estimate, if it'll reach the level of PA or it'll be close, but there will also be economics there too. So, I don't want to speak for them. But I know that's the intention, right? updated resource estimate, either in conjunction with or followed by preliminary economic assessment. So, either way, we're getting a lot…

And so, you still expect to release some numbers regarding the resource estimates this quarter, or do you think it might be next quarter?

No, I think it will be this year. It will be this year.

Okay.

I think we're not far off, right? But I think with the S-K 1300 rules being new, we're already started dialogue with Behre Dolbear on exactly how they're going to do it, right? They haven't done it yet, right? So, I think that will have an impact a little bit on our timing. But, we'll be out, hopefully sooner rather than later. But, certainly before the end of this year.

Okay. Thank you very much.

Alright, thank you. Casey. I think that's it. Great call. Great facilitation. I guess we could wrap it up.

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's presentation. You may now disconnect.