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Solana store
A Solana Spaces store (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
Sol train

Companies pile into creating solana versions of Michael Saylor’s Strategy

SOL Strategies, Upexi, and DeFi Development Corp are acquiring millions of dollars of solana to stockpile.

Sage D. Young

The playbook of Michael Saylor’s bitcoin-buying firm Strategy has extended to the solana ecosystem. 

This week, three companies announced solana acquisitions. On Tuesday, publicly traded Canadian firm SOL Strategies announced the acquisition of nearly $18.3 million worth of solana at an average price of about $149 per token. 

The same day, consumer goods company Upexi said it increased its treasury of solana by $30 million, bumping its total holdings to 201,500 tokens worth about $30 million. Upexi still has upward of $60 million in cash reserves for additional near-term investment into solana, its press release reported. 

Meanwhile, DeFi Development Corp, which was known as Janover until April 22, also picked up 82,405 solana for nearly $11.2 million and said on Monday it agreed to acquire a solana validator business for $3.5 million. DeFi Development Corp holds 400,091 tokens representing roughly $59 million.

The three companies each plan on earning solana rewards through staking or by running validators (computers that help maintain and secure the solana network).

The price of solana, the sixth-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, with more than $76 billion, has increased more than 36% in the past 30 days, though today it’s largely flat, hovering around the $145 level.

“Our goal is to acquire and HODL as many SOL as possible,” Upexi CEO Allan Marshall said in the press release. “With over $60 million of cash available for near-term SOL purchases and planned future accretive raises, Upexi is well positioned to accelerate the accumulation of SOL and further its lead as the canonical Solana treasury company.”

SOL Strategies’ purchase follows the company completing an initial $20 million closing of its $500 million convertible note facility aimed at purchasing SOL tokens to be staked on the firm’s validators, according to its press release. Similarly, Upexi’s increase in its solana holdings occurred after the closing of a $100 million private offering from crypto venture capital firms like GSR. 

SOL Strategies, Upexi, and DeFi Development Corp are mirroring Michael Saylor’s Strategy, a corporate firm initially known as a business software enterprise that has shifted its attention to becoming a bitcoin powerhouse. 

Strategy started accumulating bitcoin in August 2020. Since then, it’s become the largest corporate bitcoin holder. The latest purchase was announced on Monday, when Saylor revealed that Strategy scooped up an additional 1,895 bitcoin, bringing its total to 555,450 bitcoin worth about $52.7 billion.


Sage D. Young is a crypto journalist who’s written for CoinDesk and Unchained.

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Hyperliquid reclaims all-time high

HYPE, the native token powering perpetuals exchange Hyperliquid and its underlying blockchain, rebounded to reclaim its all-time high previously set at the start of the month.

Treasury firms Hyperliquid Strategies and Hyperion DeFi have also rallied as the token increased double digits in the last 24 hours to trade as high as $76.70, rising past its record price set nearly two weeks ago, according to CoinGecko. In the interim between all-time highs, HYPE pulled back to around $53.

The token has several tailwinds, the first coming from ETF flows. Since their inception in May, HYPE ETFs have yet to record negative weekly outflows, posting a cumulative total net inflow of $171.8 million, per SoSoValue.

The second comes from Hyperliquid spending basically everything it earns in fees to buy HYPE, a mechanism embedded into the protocol’s codebase.

The venue’s buyback funding mechanism is set to add a new source of yield. Validators of the network activated “AQAv2,” which means stablecoin deployers will share about 90% of reserve yield revenue on their supply within the protocol.

Around $6.1 billion of Circle’s USDC resides in Hyperliquid, per DefiLlama. Accrual begins on August 26 and the first payment is made on October 3, the network announced in its Discord channel last week.

A substantial amount of capital is riding on different positions of HYPE. In total, a move down to under $53 would result in the liquidation nearly 1.8 million HYPE worth of leveraged long positions on the on-chain perps venue, or $131.7 million, data from CoinGlass shows. For the upside, a climb above $100 results in the liquidation of more than 3 million worth of leveraged HYPE short positions, or $221.5 million.

HYPE’s rebound to all-time high comes after Michael Selig, chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, defended his agency’s decision to approve regulated perpetuals, or futures contracts without expiration dates, CNBC reported on Monday.

Last month, the CFTC approved bitcoin perpetual futures trading in the US through regulated prediction markets firm Kalshi and an affiliate of centralized exchange Coinbase.

“Perps are highly likely to become lightly regulated and thus approved in the US,” said David Pakman, head of venture investments at CoinFund.

“We expect to see perps for many different types of assets, from commodities to equities,” Pakman told Sherwood News.

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Crypto market snaps back as sentiment lifts, with altcoins from ethereum to XRP soaring

The market capitalization of the crypto industry has jumped around $83.2 billion in the last 24 hours, with privacy-focused token Zcash and worldcoin, the native cryptocurrency of the network backed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, leading market gains, jumping over 22%.

But the last 24 hours have been good across the board:

Investors have been eager to see some positive signs around the Iranian conflict ending, coupled with hopeful outlooks around the CLARITY act, both breathing some life into assets, Kairos Research cofounder Ian Unsworth told Sherwood News.

Simon Shockey, a crypto strategist at crypto wallet infrastructure firm Privy, said the upswing stems from several things converging. He pointed to how alt markets broadly were very oversold following the bug found in Zcash that shook confidence.

Friday, Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox said Anthropic didn’t find any more serious bugs with the Zcash protocol after Shielded Labs requested the AI firm run a security audit of the network with Mythos.

Shockey added that the pool of willing sellers has dwindled. Even if structurally, AI is a much more compelling and asymmetric bet in the eyes of allocators, many of these crypto assets have simply run out of marginal sellers despite some shorter-term narrative-driven pumps. The only people left to sell at this point are the teams themselves and VCs.

Net-net: oversold conditions plus exhausted seller bases plus a macro backdrop thats stabilized equals a snapback, especially in names that have real usage or community conviction behind them,” Shockey told Sherwood.

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