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Solana treasuries gain momentum as big names enter the field

Sharps Technology announced a $400 million fundraise to kickstart its solana treasury as three crypto firms aim to raise $1 billion to enter the race.

Yaël Bizouati-Kennedy

The solana corporate treasury space is getting more popular, as Bloomberg reports that Galaxy Digital, Multicoin Capital, and Jump Crypto are entering the race. The firms are reportedly seeking to raise $1 billion to create a solana treasury by “taking over an unidentified publicly traded entity.” Cantor Fitzgerald is set to be the lead banker for the transaction and the Solana Foundation has endorsed the deal, which is expected to close in September.  

Also today, Sharps Technology, a medical device and pharmaceutical packaging company, entered the solana treasury fray, sending shares soaring over 70%. Sharps Technology announced it will establish “the largest Solana Digital Asset Treasury Strategy to date,” funded by a $400 million PIPE deal with the backing of Monarq Asset Management, ParaFi, and Pantera. The deal is expected to close August 28 and Cantor Fitzgerald will also play a role, being the lead placement agent.

Sharps Technology noted it has signed a nonbinding letter of intent with the Solana Foundation, which commits to “selling $50 million of SOL at a 15% discount to a 30-day time-weighted average price, subject to certain conditions being met.”

Finally, DeFi Development Corp. announced today that it has entered into definitive agreements for a $125 million equity offering priced at $12.50 per share to “acquire as much SOL as possible, as quickly as possible, and do it in a way that compounds value per share for our investors,” Joseph Onorati, DeFi Dev. CEO, said in the release. Cantor Fitzgerald is also in play here, serving as exclusive financial adviser and sole placement agent to the company. The company, which holds over 1.42 million solana, saw its shares sink on market open.

Onorati told Sherwood News that the company is encouraged to see other players recognizing what it saw early: that solana is one of the most compelling treasury assets in crypto.

“DFDV was the first US-listed company to establish a solana treasury strategy, and we’re pleased to continue to be one of the few crypto-native operators executing a crypto treasury playbook. Our focus has always been on putting capital to work in a way that compounds solana per share for our investors while directly supporting the solana ecosystem through our validator infrastructure and DeFi integrations,” Onorati said.

Dan Kang, head of investor relations, told Sherwood that additional entrants only validate the strength of the thesis. 

“The more capital that comes into solana, the stronger the network becomes — and the better positioned DFDV is to keep scaling as the benchmark solana treasury vehicle in public markets,” Kang said. 

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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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