$IREN : we need to talk. This concern comes from a whale who has held $IREN since $7. Worth taking seriously. The issue - Mike Alfred sits on both the Audit Committee and the Compensation Committee at IREN. Audit Committee - appointed October 2021. Compensation Committee - appointed November 2025. His background - founder of Alpine Fox LP, co-founder of BrightScope and Digital Assets Data. He has an activist investing background, previously challenging management at Barnes & Noble Education to demand tighter corporate governance and secure board seats. The observation - an investor with an activist background who has publicly championed performance accountability approved a compensation structure that moves away from performance hurdles for IREN’s Co-CEOs toward pure time based vesting. Whether that’s a contradiction or a pragmatic decision during a complex business pivot is open to debate. Let’s look at what has happened during his tenure on each committee. Audit Committee - since October 2021: IREN heavily promoted a public market narrative that its Childress Texas facility was being aggressively prepared for High Performance Computing and AI data centres. In July 2024 an activist report by Culper Research alleged that IREN’s facilities were built strictly for Bitcoin mining and were entirely ill-equipped for HPC without billions in unexpected capital costs. Multiple securities fraud class action lawsuits filed by Pomerantz, The Gross Law Firm and Levi & Korsinsky regarding IREN’s HPC and data centre disclosures are currently ongoing and moving through the court system. No settlement or dismissal has been reached on these specific claims. The Audit Committee’s role is to ensure public disclosures match financial realities and that risks are properly vetted and transparently accounted for. During the same period IREN has executed significant capital raises including a $2.6B convertible bond offering and extensive ATM share issuance. Share count has nearly tripled from roughly 100 million to over 357 million. Compensation Committee - since November 2025: The most recent decision - June 30 2026. The board and Compensation Committee approved 9,099,328 RSUs each for Co-CEOs William and Daniel Roberts. Pure time based vesting through 2033. No ARR targets. No operational milestones. No stock price hurdles. This follows a pattern. In May 2025 the board modified existing performance RSUs, which had failed to hit their milestones, into time based awards. The second time the compensation goalposts have shifted in management’s favour. The Compensation Committee’s role is to protect shareholders from executive overreach and design rigorous hurdles that force management to perform before they get paid. A separate observation - Alfred is notably active on X for a sitting public company board member. His commentary across crypto markets, short sellers and market dynamics is more publicly visible and opinionated than most directors would typically maintain. The structural concern governance experts raise - Audit and Compensation Committee members are designed to be the objective check on management. Their role requires impartiality behind closed doors. When a director maintains a high profile public presence visibly aligned with the company’s stock narrative, some investors question whether that impartiality is preserved. Did he personally benefit from the RSU decision? Not directly - he received 6,657 ordinary shares as standard director compensation. He holds roughly 878,000 shares between his personal stake and Alpine Fox LP. His interests are tied to long term stock performance either way. The questions worth asking as a shareholder: Does his public conduct sit comfortably alongside his fiduciary duties on the Audit and Compensation Committees? Does approving time based vesting align with the activist governance principles he built his reputation on? … TBC