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SOL Strategies raising $1 billion for solana opportunities

“We’re building with conviction and readiness,” the firm’s CEO told Sherwood News.

While everyone is mimicking Michael Saylor’s bitcoin corporate treasury mission (not always successfully), some companies are deciding to focus on altcoins like solana.

SOL Strategies, a Canadian publicly listed company, filed an initial prospectus “allowing for up to $1B USD in potential financings,” a press release announced.

Leah Wald, SOL Strategies CEO, told Sherwood News that as institutional interest in solana continues to grow, the preliminary base-shelf prospectus provides the flexibility to raise capital efficiently as opportunities arise. 

“This structure positions us to strategically support long-term innovation and growth across the solana ecosystem. We’re building with conviction and readiness as solana becomes a foundational layer in the future of blockchain-enabled finance,” she said. 

In parallel, the company also said it had acquired 26,478.37 solana on May 26 and sold its remaining 3.21 bitcoin.

“These transactions align with the Company’s focused strategy of concentrating its digital asset holdings in SOL to support its validator operations and long-term investment approach in the Solana ecosystem,” according to a separate press release.

Solana is the sixth-largest crypto, with an $89 billion market cap. Other companies have also focused on the asset for their corporate treasury.

On May 15, DeFi Development Corp. marked its 11th solana purchase since it started its solana treasury strategy in April.  The company now holds 609,190 solana, “the largest SOL position of any publicly traded company,” a press release asserted.

Ryan Gorman, chief strategy officer at Uranium Digital, an institutional spot market for trading uranium that’s built on solana, told Sherwood that solana has always had a robust ecosystem, despite the depths of the crypto winter, and builders never abandoned it. 

“If everyone is on the MSTR bitcoin trade, it becomes crowded,” he said. “Companies are wise to look further afield when considering growth and multiple potential.”

Gorman added that looking at other protocols, solana remains the most compelling from a speed, cost, and reliability perspective.

“It is wise to bet on solana’s future, and it makes sense for SOL Strategies to go all in right now,” he said. 

Standard Chartered initiated coverage of solana earlier this week, saying it was “a fast, cheap alternative to Ethereum: as a result, it has dominated memecoin trading,” though it did warn that the crypto may be a “one-trick pony.”

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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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