Ep 43 — Why it's not NAV but Native Yield with Leah and Max from Sol Strategies

Welcome to the Deco podcast where we bring you stories from founders and investors in Web3. Before we get started, this is not a financial or legal advice. It's just a conversation about things we find interesting in web3. Views expressed are our own personal opinions. Deco members or guests appearing on the show may have positions on assets they talk about. All right, welcome to another episode of the Deco podcast. Today we have with me Leah Vald, who's the CEO of Sol Strategies, and Max Kaplan, who is the CTO at Sole Strategies. Before Sol Strategies, Leah founded Valkyrie Investments and she sold that business to Coinshares and she has been an author and she's had multiple investment related positions. So, yeah, a seasoned market participant or market player to say the least. Max used to be an engineer at Kraken. He was there for about six years, if I'm not wrong. Max and post that he started his validator business and, you know, someone who's been there in the weeds and AKU really understands, you know, what it means to be a validator and runs, I think, a validator business at Assault Strategies. Welcome to the show and yeah, thanks a lot for being here.

Thanks for having me.

Thank you for having us. Okay, so before we get into what you used to do and you know, all of that, first thing that I wanted to ask is how do we reconcile these two things? Because bitcoin started as, you know, Supposhi wanted it to be peer to peer digital cash. And now we have a bunch of crypto assets which are on corporate balance sheets and it's, you know, there are various vehicles for you to trade these assets on typical stock exchanges. Now, I think it's not necessarily valid, but it's probably a little bit of a detour from what we wanted these things to be at the beginning. So, you know, just make us make sense of that.

Max, what do you think?

Yeah. So I'm a sorry, on the context of Bitcoin and Bitcoin and spacs, Correct? Yeah. Yeah. Well, listen, so here's what I would say is that, you know, like, obviously, you know, in terms of treasuries, right. MicroStrategy was really the first one that, you know, did the whole, you know, like treasury type company, you know, with Bitcoin, right. And you know, they have done a fantastic, fantastic job. Right. And you know, I think the results of the company really speak for itself. You know, for us though, we really looked at things and to be honest, it was really Leah, because, you know, Leah came on as CEO and did a lot of this before Me, right. But I'm going to hyper up right now. But you know, listen, there's like, we love bitcoin. Like I came from the bitcoin world and so did Leah, right? So like we're not talking badly about bitcoin at all. But there are like unique advantages that a Solana based company, you know, Solana treasury company, which we don't really view ourselves necessarily as a Treasury company. But you know, just, let's just talk generally about Solana treasury companies. There are unique advantages of doing it with Solana, right? And really the biggest one is that bitcoin is a fantastic, fantastic asset. But you know, you can't make native yield on it, right? And with Solana you can. And you know, that I think is really like, you know, the biggest difference is, you know, for us we're able to make native yield in you know, really two ways that are like pretty similar but you know, staking and also like our validator business, right. And from there, you know, like a Treasury company, you know, does things like issue debt to go and buy up more, you know, like in a bitcoin world, issue debt, buy up more bitcoin, right. And for us, like, and listen, like Salana treasury companies, they do that as well. But we're also able to acquire soul at a cheaper price because we're able to make native yields on both the staking side and the validator business side. Right? So like that's I think how like the companies I think differ overall. You know, obviously like I can get into the differences between Solana and bitcoin, you know, which we view Solana more as a network where we view bitcoin more as an asset, you know, and really like our view really is this, is that, you know, like we think Solana is going to see the most economic activity of all blockchains because of that. We want to be running validators because of the fact that as a, if you're running a validator, you get a portion of the transaction fees. As we see more and more things come on chain and more activity props up, that'll be more revenue we make, more soul we generate and then, you know, the cheaper we can acquire. Soul. That's what I would say. Lee, I don't know if you wanted to add anything to that.

No, I think that was absolutely perfect. I completely agree. We're now seeing obviously lots of different treasury vehicles that are coming out. As Max mentioned, we see ourselves as different. We're focused on the underlying technology. But why Solana is important, you Know, at the time, especially when we launched our strategy, There was no ETFs, there was no other public vehicles that were focused on Solana. And in the market was very interested in investing in Solana. And for all the reasons that made the ETF successful and they couldn't. There's still so many barriers to entry to invest in Spot. Now. Those are definitely decreasing, very much so across a lot of the banks in the United States and globally. And it's still a little bit of a TBD if that does become a preferred method of buying Spot. As of right now, there still are restrictions for certain registered investment advisors in the United States and other allocators to actually buy Spot. So we wanted to provide another opportunity where investors could invest in a much more holistic Solana company by us putting Solana on our balance sheet, but also being completely a Solana driven technology company. So we thought that that would be one interesting in the market, but also two, we were just really excited to do it.

So when Mike and Saylor started doing this for MicroStrategy and you know, people realized that, okay, this thing works because you get to borrow money either really cheap or at 0% interest rates and, you know, give bondholders that option to either, you know, convert it to stock or give out cash, whatever. Right. We'll get into the mechanics later. But I just want to understand the thought process behind, okay, the Bitcoin was fine. It was kind of acceptable. The market reacted fantastic to, you know, microstrategy doing this. What was it that allowed you guys to think that, okay, now since it is done for Bitcoin, we can do this for Solana? And you know, when two, three, four, five companies do it, the path kind of becomes clear as to what you need to do to issue this kind of debt and, you know, borrow and you know, buy Solana or stake it or whatever. But you guys being like, really one of the first ones to do that. I just want to understand, like what was the thought process and it's really the direction of the company, right? I mean, 95% of the revenue comes from the validator sets that you guys run. If I'm not wrong, right? It's ballpark, 95%. So, yeah, I mean, it's a pretty big decision as a company. I just want to understand how you guys, you know, arrive at that.

Yeah, I'll jump in here. And you had a lot of different parts of that question. So I'm going to try to hit them all. I think one of them was financing and then One is generally strategic direction and how all in we are and right is kind of what I'm hearing. So yeah, I mean as previously mentioned, what Happened was originally SolStrategies was a company called Cipher Punk holdings. And Cipher Punk holdings was listed on the CSE, the Canadian securities Exchange in 2018 by a whole bunch of cypherpunks. And they're amazing. So at the time they put their. They converted the balance sheet of what was a different company, it was a hostile takeover of a uranium mining company actually. So converted the balance sheet assets to Bitcoin and made bitcoin investments. And it was effectively the first public company in North America to provide that bitcoin vehicle. And that was very interesting at that time. Now fast forward we hit 2024. There's obviously Bitcoin vehicles, Bitcoin ETFs, but there was nothing for Solana. And the market was really, really interested in buying and having access to Solana. But for us still technologists, we really wanted to be part of that ecosystem and run validators and actually build a Solana tech company. So it was really twofold. So to your point, we were the first, we're the first in North America, it's my understanding, the first Solana specific public equity in the world. I would love to to know of a different one, but at least I know we're first in North America. But it was also important again that we actually started a tech company and that was under our former cio, Mo Adam, who is the founder of Bit Access, the first bitcoin ATM company. So really old school Cipher Punk. And then we got Max to come on and Max and Mo had a great relationship as well. So again for us it was a strategic advancement and development that we saw. We think that MicroStrategy is still very powerful. But the beauty of what Saylor did was Saylor, and that was 2020. I mean he had this vision and a powerful company to boot. And he had been a public company, CEO of multi billion dollar company for many, many years. And he had with his conviction threw it into Bitcoin and then educated the public on Bitcoin and kept that rallying call. So that's where I see there's an extreme difference of where we are in 2025, but also last year in 2024 is we're past needing just to rally cry the market and have just a vehicle. Instead we need companies and I think that the market understands that and they have. If you look at the different investors in our company, it's not Just a couple. It's a lot of different investors and it's across the board of retail institution, you know, allocated in ETFs as well. So the only thing I'll say on your point is definitely there's been a lot of strategy, you know, treasury vehicles that have come out. But what's interesting to us that we believe is the future development and we think that we'll see more of, and you're already seeing some transitions, is that the market is so sophisticated at this point that they are looking for companies. They do want to look at fundamental analysis, they do want to make comparative valuations with how did the mining companies do, you know, via historicity in the past. So that's the evolution that we see. MicroStrategy was brilliant again because of Saylor and he was able to structure a very interesting capital market strategy. Now for our capital market strategy to hit your second question, I think it's different because we can get that native yield on Solana, right, And you can't on Bitcoin. So because of that we can structure things very differently that we think are more attractive to investors. Obviously, us and all other of the companies that are popping up are different than MicroStrategy. We're small, you know, micro caps or small caps. We're small, small fledglings, which means the financing needs to be different. And I think that there's a ill expectation that everybody will finance similar to strategy when truthfully we're not the same company as strategy. They're running a different operating business and have been financing their capital market strategy in a very unique way again for over five years now. So what we think we're doing is smarter and more tuned to what is natural to the yield that we're generating from our validators, which is why the last financing round, a portion of the interest payments, if you will, are kicked back from our staking yield. So that, you know, I'll let you read more into it. It's all public documents. But for us, that was an interesting mechanism that hadn't been done before is to take on debt financing that again, those that interest payment is a portion of the staking yield from the soul that we bought, that we stake to our validator. And therefore again for us, it's incredible. More soul, more revenues on the staking side, on the validator business side. And we think that's the future. And I think I got the questions, but if I missed one, maybe Max could hit it.

I think you nailed all of them.

Okay, good.

All right, so when I First started looking at these companies, I mean, the finance brain or the equity research brain, it kicked in and it was like, why is the market paying like $2 for a stock which holds crypto assets which are worth like $1, right. Where is that premium coming from? Natural, like first reaction is obviously that, well, there aren't too many vehicles that are in the market, right? That is point number one which allows, you know, everyday people or institutions that have mandatory restrictions into, you know, whether you can't invest into crypto assets through, you know, exchanges like Coinbase, whatever. You need to hold things on stock exchange and in those forms. So probably because they don't have any other way to get exposure to crypto assets, this is how they do it. And that is where that premium comes from. Secondly, I think what you mentioned, like what Saylor did was also super clever. He, I think increase the time of investors by, you know, telling the bondholders or people who trade in bonds saying, look, you are getting like whatever, 2, 3, less than 2% a year on Treasuries, I give you this massive call option. You know, it's like heads you win and tails also you win kind of a thing. So if BTC goes berserk like it always does, in pretty much like four years time, you make way more than what you would have made holding treasury assets. Right. If BTC doesn't, well, you're not losing out on much. I'm giving you back your 100% of the cash. Right? So it was not the people who told BTC who were attracted to this option. It was people who held like treasury assets who were attracted to that option. Right? So. And that market is way bigger than people realize, right? I mean, it's way bigger than people who trade crypto or whatever, Right. On the other hand, like you mentioned, the yield that you get by staking assets, right? That is how you can entice bondholders. And that is where company like loan strategy comes into the picture. BTC is still fine. It's a, I don't know, $1.52 trillion asset and the volatility is dampening, you know, year by year as more and more market participants are okay with it. But something like sol, obviously it is smaller, it is more volatile. So I want to understand how the conversations with, you know, like when you want to raise how those conversations pan out and how are you pitching? So because you're giving me a 5% yield or 10% yield through Validator, that is fine, but what's the use of it if the asset is going to tank like 50% in a year.

I'll start and then I'll kick it to Max and I actually think small. So I'll hit your first comment about premium to Nav and then the second one and I'm going to talk to the max because I think it'd be helpful for your listeners then to just understand why we think Solana is superior. Because in the end of the day it's a bet on Solana's future and for why would they pick sole strategies over other vehicles? Is a leveraged bet that we're building something great in Solana and therefore a more sophisticated bet on its future. But in its basis it's an investor feeling bullish on Solana. Right. So that's where it comes down to. And so I think it'll be helpful for Max to to talk about why we're bullish Solana. But to your first question and is the most annoying answer under the sun. But you come from capital markets. Fortunately, unfortunately it's price discovery. So as of right now, investors are willing to pay that premium. So you know, and especially for our stock, we've had a premium to nav for since our strategy launched. But that's where we then really hit the rallying call on our first earnings in January 28th. Our fiscal year is September 30th of you can't compare us just to NAV. Right. But again, prior to that people only did and there was that premium. But to your point, there was no other vehicles. And in the end of the day, wherever a market is set, a market is set. Now the question is can it maintain that premium? Right. And that's where I think that the other treasury vehicles are going to have issues in the future because as more vehicles come out and they try to compete against us. Right. As an actual company, then I think premiums compress. But in the end of the day, yes, that's always the question. Oh my gosh, that premium is overblown. But then you step back and you say oh, but they're still trading at that level and there's a lot of volume and there's a lot of participants. So to be honest, it's a tough argument for I think a lot of investors, institutional investors to make for short term Investment Horizon because there's such a healthy market for all these companies right now. But to your point, what's the long term strategy that will compress? There's no treasury vehicle that's going to be able to compete with a spot etf, a stake Spot ETF in the US A company like ours that actually has, you know, revenue. So I think that that's going to compress. So I just wanted to hit that one. Now in the end of the day, yes, as mentioned, it's a bet on Solana. You asked the question what is it like for me to pitch? It's education, right? For the most part, who you're talking to and who I've spoken to and been pitching for the past year. And to be honest, what's been interesting, it hasn't been retail. I haven't pitched retail ever. I'm on podcasts, but I'm only. I have two investor calls tomorrow. It's institutional allocators, it's the top shops, it's the family offices, it's the ETF allocators and portfolio managers. And for the most part they come from either the mining world and they're comfortable with small cap mining or, or they already have Bitcoin ETFs and allocation to Bitcoin and their question is, what should I do next? And that starts the conversation. Now what happens next for me is I need to explain why Solana, right in the end of the day, you know, they have their allocation of Bitcoin and or they want a more leveraged bet now that Bitcoin has normalized in a certain way. It was their volatile alpha and maybe it's not enough alpha for what they allocated their, let's say, 1% of the portfolio of a more risky portfolio too. So end of the day it starts with education. Then I try to explain the company. I get some glassed over, you know, eyes when I try to explain validators and the intricacies of the network. But everyone seems to understand and believe that Solana is the best bet and is moving away from Ethereum. So I'm seeing mainly investors with Bitcoin and Solana that their interest levels are and that they'll allocate to us. And that's also why we're being allocated in some of the ETF portfolios and or early Bitcoin mining investors who still hold, let's say CleanSpark Marathon. And they see us also akin to that story and they want to get in early to that and that's also an easy narrative to discuss. So that's how those conversations go. End of the day they have to be bullish Solana, otherwise they're not interested in us. And that's fantastic because that's the way that we structure the company. Max, why are we bullish Solana and not Ethereum.

Yeah. Well, also too I wanted to touch on like 1.2 in terms of premium to nav and the, you know, like to understand our business, especially like, you know, for your audience too. It's, it's like this, it's that yes, we are a Treasury company, but like you know, we have 3.6 million sold delegated to our validators, right? Which is like something like $525 million. Just to put things into perspective on the like, if you were to sum up all of our stake, we'd be like the 19th biggest operator on the entire network. Bigger than some of the biggest centralized exchanges out there. Right. And you know, it's like Leah touched on a great point which is, right, you know, like listen, like, like we are a Solana based company and our value is going to be very tied to Solana, right? But if you take a step back and you think about, okay like how does the network work and like what is going to make Solana succeed? What is going to make Solana succeed is more economic activity happening on Salana. Right. And the beneficiaries of that, like there's going to be several, don't get me wrong, but one of them certainly is going to be validators, right? Because of the very fact that the more transactions there are, the more, the higher the fees, things like that, the more revenue the company is going to generate. Right? So like, you know, you asked a great question, like what's the difference between holding Soul, you know, and staking it versus like you know, holding a company holding a stock like Soul Strategies. Right. I'll just say like to not, you know, to not pitch people that, you know, like I'm not pitching anyone to old social strategies, but like a generic, hypothetical, generic company like ours, you know, we are and they kind of touched on it. You know, it's like it's a leverage play. You know, it's the fact that with Solana, the more Solana succeeds, the more revenue we are going to generate. Right. And to talk about like Solana and why we are bullish on Solana, I mean listen, like if you look at like any major metric, whether it's Dex volumes, whether it's rev on chain, whether it's active addresses, transactions, right? It's like night and day. Solana is way better. Right? And then you look at too like some of the cool things that is coming on Solana and you know like our view really is like, okay, cool, the tech is there. Like we've proven out just to put things into perspective too. Like, you know, so I worked at a centralized exchange, Kraken. Right. For six years. I was one of the first engineers there. The day the Trump Coin launched, Solana Dexes did double the volume of both Kraken and Coinbase combined. Okay. At that point, that proves that, like, tech works. Right. And, you know, but, like, listen, like, you know, like, meme Coins can be, like, extractive. And, you know, I don't want to get into meme Coins, but, like, think about when, like, bigger assets get on chain, you know, equities. We launched, we announced our intent to be the first company to list their stocks on chain. Right. You know, and, you know, there's a lot of other companies trying to do this as well, you know, and, like, they're really picking Solana. Like, even Kraken, for example, they have their own layer two. They announced they're going to Salon. Right. So, you know, like, we really see that. Like, okay, cool. You know, like, if you look at, like, any data, like, try and find a data point, like the only two data points out there that Ethereum is beating Solana on. Sorry, I know I'm rambling. Is like TVL and stablecoin Supply, and both of those really have, like, a first mover effect because Ethereum has just been around for so much longer. If you look at, like, anything that doesn't really, like, factor in the length of time as a variable, Solana is really, really crushing it. So that's really why we're all in on Solana. In terms of tvl, I think it's not a metric that matters a lot because what matters more is the velocity of assets and which chain can support that velocity. Right. Yeah. And, you know, you touched upon Meme Coins, so I just want to add a little bit there where there is this narrative on Twitter which said that Solana has, like, over reliance on Meme Coins and whatever. But I can. It's a little backwards because I. I think Meme Coins happened on Solana because it could take on all of that volume. Yeah. They would have happened elsewhere had that chain been, you know, been capable of tackling all that volume at a cost that Solana does. So I don't know what you guys think about it when someone says that, that it's a risk for Solana, that, you know, it relies a lot on meme Coins for generating revenue for validators. Yeah. Well, so listen, here's what I'd say about this is like, you know, I come from a data background. You know, we were talking about this before the call. And you know, I like to use the terms signal and noise, right? And I think Meme coins are noise, okay? Because yes, they generated like a ton of revenue. And like, you know, like that is what really got. Like that is really what solana was in 2024. Okay? But like you got to step back and look at like why that happened and also how successful it was, right? And, and that's where I think the real signal is. So to get to go like, like step into that, you know, like for example, like there was many other chains these meme coins could have launched on. Why did they choose Solana? It's really two things. It's number one, as you touched on, correctly touched on, it's really the only chain that could support real volume. Number two, it's that it's like the best UX out there, right? You know, it's that like the users are there, okay? Like users are there. Users want to use Solana because it's so much easier with Ethereum, for example, people in your audience probably try to use a layer too. And you might have a token on base that you want to use, but you don't have any Ethan base, but you have it on Arbitrum and you got to bridge back from arbitrum to the eth L1 then back to the base L1. It's a really crappy UX. And even me sometimes like I have issues like understanding like, you know, like I'll be like, why isn't this transaction going through? And I'm like, oh damn, I didn't even realize I don't have Ethan like you know, base, you know, and Solana is just like easier to use, right? So like that is the real signal. And then also too the other real signal is this. And like I kind of touched on that. But I really want to harp on this point is that like Solana has done, like I said, like that data point I talked about where the day Solana Dexs did double the volume of both crackers, Kraken and Coinbase combined, right? Like no matter what asset it is, like volume is volume, right? And like success is success. Like the fact that Solana was able to do that is like a huge signal, right? And that is why I think that so many of these like tokenized equities projects are picking Solana because like if you look at like Dex volumes across all chains like ever in the history of time and history of blockchain and like that Solana absolutely blew the all time high out of the water that day, like, that was unchartered territory. And I think that day proved that like Solana can actually handle real volumes. So, like, to tie this back into meme coins, it's that you could almost look at meme coins as like a stress test and like, as like proving that Solana can actually handle this. I personally would like to see a world where there are better assets being traded on chain, and I think that will happen. I think if you just look at like what's going around, like, it's pretty clear real world assets are going to come on chain, right? You know, between equities, real estate, so many things, and I think we've proven out the tech and I think it's going to happen. So that's what I would say.

I'll just say that I got Bullish Solana from Pump Fund. So obviously I think it's great. I really did. It was so interesting. But to see such a robust marketplace and even though it's kind of a crazy thing to see, it is very much a healthy market. And it reminded me of bitcoin exchanges in the early days. And so it made me feel as if this ecosystem, which already had developed so much and was already very developed, still was in its nascent stages and just had so much participation and interest. So I agree with everything Max was saying and I think that it's fascinating and shows participation.

I think the only ecosystem that comes close right now or, you know, gives me Solana vibes is Hyker Liquid. I don't know if you guys have been paying attention, but yeah, no incentives, no nothing. And the volume just keeps going up and up. And people who are like serious traders do vouch for the product itself. And I really like how they are tying their liquidity with the normal chain that they are building, right? I mean, with builder codes and with really sharing that liquidity with every other application that gets built on the Hyper EVM and how they are sharing these, et cetera, with the developers so that they don't need to bother about bootstrap and liquidity. I think their approach is pretty cool. So the question to you guys is like, are you guys paying attention to other markets and what could take some of the share away from Solana? And you know, how does that, how does all of that work? Like, are you open to looking at other assets? Let's say Hyper Liquid does exceptionally well in the next year or two, or is it like only Solana? How does that go? Yeah, listen, well, I'll say this, that Hyperliquid has been doing a great job. Like, they deserve a ton of credit, right? But our view really is this, is that we still think Solana is going to win and we think Hyper Liquid still has like, listen, it has strong momentum and I don't want to take away any credit that they are due because they have done a fantastic job. But Solana has like a bunch of strategic advantages, right? And you know, listen, like, I think one of the coolest things that Hyper Liquid does, like in my personal opinion is like, you know, placing cancels, putting them in the top of the block and building like a very good trading experience, right? And they also just like purpose built a product. Like, I don't even know if I call it like an L1. Like it is an L1, but it's like almost like it's like not an L1, it's like not an app. It's like somewhere in the middle, right? And you know, there's a lot of work being done on Solana to get to a point where we're going to be able to do similar things. And I am very bullish that that's going to happen very soon, you know, and it might not be like the most perfect ways, you know, like, listen, there are teams that are working on this and you know, I don't want to share like anything that, you know, teams are working on, but, you know, until they announce it. But, you know, I really think that we're going to be able, you know, get to a point where we're able to do a lot of the things that, you know, Hyper Liquid, you know, really optimize for and at the same time still reap a lot of the benefits that Solana has. And like the biggest benefit, the biggest factor that Salon has really is users, okay, Is that like there are users that are like, are hardcore there. And like, you know, listen, like, I think that tech is important but like, tech is really a means of acquiring users, okay? And like that's the real value is how many users. Like your business has. Application has, layer one has whatever, right? Solana has a ton of users and there are people that are going to want to continue to use Solana. And listen, like, I think that the competition between Hyper Liquid and Solana is good and it's going to make both better. Our bet though is on Solana and we're focused on Solana. You know, we went through the material name change in September to call it Sole Strategies. We're not going anywhere and we are very bullish on Solana Yeah. You want to add to that?

No, he nailed it. You're not going anywhere. But to Mas's point, you know, we're not deaf to other exciting opportunities, I should say. We're not pivoting, we're not changing our focus from Solana, but definitely always trying to learn about what's going on in the ecosystem.

Max, you mentioned that, you know, Solana is going to bring those capabilities or whether that is high through code or whatever. But I want to understand, like, what is happening currently, what is happening with Franken Dancer, Fire Dancer, you know, and how is that going to improve Solana ux, which is already probably the best out there, but how is that going to improve? Yeah, well, there's two main things I really want to talk about and, you know, you know, there's a few. Right. But in the interest of time, I'll talk about two and I'll do it in the context of the question you asked. Right. One of the most exciting ones is application specific sequencing. And what that really means is like, again, like, one of, I think the coolest things that Hyperliquid has done has been, you know, placing cancels at the top of the block and, you know, things like that and specific ordering to, you know, ensure the best possible trading experience that there is. Because, you know, if market makers can't place cancels and they can't get some guarantee around that, it's a really crappy experience. There are a number of teams working on that, and I think that that's going to happen relatively soon. You know, it might not be the prettiest way, but we will be able to get that, I'm pretty confident, relatively soon. You know, the next one, which was announced at a conference called Solana Accelerate, is Solana's new consensus algorithm called alpenglow. And what Alpenglow really is, is, you know, like, really right now. Like, I think, like, you know, in order for any product out there in the world to really succeed, it's got to be like a 10x improvement over something. Okay. And, you know, like, if you think about, like, you know, if you're in the audience, like how many times you switch banks in your life, you know, maybe a couple, whatever. Right. But, you know, like, if you got like a 10x better interest rate, you might, you know, and Solana was really like a 10x improvement over Ethereum. Like when you're talking about 12 second block times versus 400 milliseconds, you know, with Alpenglow, you know, like, listen, like, it's a little complicated here and there. And like, you know, it's not fully tested and you know, these, these results are in a lab. We can get down to 25 milliseconds. Okay. And to put that into perspective, that is faster than some centralized exchanges. Okay. You know, and even once you get around, like in my experience working at centralized exchanges, once you get around like, you know, like the single digit milliseconds, like, and equities is different. Okay. But you know, like with centralized cryptocurrency exchanges which trade over the Internet, a lot of them, you know, like fancier ones, they're co loaded depends upon the exchange, right? But if you're trading over the Internet, you know, once you get to the several like the single digit milliseconds, what actually is more important is jitter over latency. Right? You know, having a constant amount of jitter so that like, you know, if you're expecting your order to take 5 milliseconds, that it actually takes 5 milliseconds, not 10. Because that's the difference between you making money versus losing money. Right? If we get down to that, you know, like 25 milliseconds, we're actually like very competitive with centralized exchanges. And I think that is really like what we should be going after versus like Solana versus Hyper Liquid Solana versus Ethereum. Like, yes, like that competition is healthy, but I think all of us in crypto really want to see volume move on chain because I think that's for the best. And I really think that like, we can get there. So those two things I'm really excited about Fire Dancer also as well. But like, again, talking about competition, like, I gotta give a huge amount of credit to the Anza team. The Agave client has gotten so much better to the point where, you know, like, it's maybe might be like minimally different, you know, and like, I'm not trying to take away any credit from the jump team who built Fire Dancer because, you know, it is. That code base is incredible. I have like four really small PRs in there and like some of them were like three lines and it took like, man, like three hours to do. Mad props to them. Kudos to them. But you know, competition has been healthy and you know, there's a lot that's coming on. I think Solana's biggest strategic advantage is it moves quickly. And you know, I think we're going to continue to do that and I think we're going to just continue, you know, like Alpine Glow, like, you know, they're trying to shoot for the end of this year, which is a major change to the consensus that brings a ton of advantages. So we'll see. But that's really what I'm most excited for, those multiple things. Awesome. So now that, you know, Solana is on corporate balance sheet, when does the reverse happen? Like, when are stocks coming on chain? I know that you guys have been working on it, and I want to understand what the process is, like, what are the hurdles, how long, really? Because we've been seeing this, Right. Since Ethereum started. Right. And right. Since Ethereum went online. We were, you know, saying that, you know, everything will come on chain and everything will be tokenized and. But yeah, I just want to understand the process and why it takes as long as it's taking. Yeah, great question. You know, and there's different companies trying to go about it differently. I'll talk about ours, but I'll also talk about the others. But so we partnered with a fantastic company called Superstate. And what we are trying to do is like, this would be like an actual real stock, not a wrapper or a derivative, like real stock with real voting rights, things like that. Okay. Like, there's like, no difference, you know, register with transfer agents, like SEC register, transfer agents, things like that. With that, what I really think is going, like, you know, like, I think that's going to happen, like, pretty soon, like within the next, you know, like couple months. Right. Like, I think it should. I think we will see stocks on chain by the end of 2025. The thing that I'm most interested in is, like, obviously with, you know, the sec, it's to be determined how much those stocks are going to be able to be used in defi. We've seen Hester Pierce make some comments that, you know, she might seek relief, you know, like some like, like exploratory period for like a year, a year and a half. Right. But there's nothing really stopping, like, a tokenized stock being held on chain, as far as I understand it right now, sitting in a wallet. Okay. But like, the defi aspect of, like, being able to go and trade that on Jupiter, things like that, that is very much in the air now. Other companies and you know, like partnerships, whatever, are kind of going down this, like, wrapper route, which I think has some advantages as well, but also like, disadvantages. You know, just like anything, it's pros and cons. I think those, like, you know, like, I think that there are some on Ethereum and I can't speak so much to the differences, the timeline on those. But for the ones we're working on, which is the real tokenized equity that just go a little bit deeper is actually a real stock that's kyc, whitelisted, registered with the sec. We think that we are close to getting there. But the biggest thing is just how much the token will actually be able to use in defi. Able to be using defi, but I think it'll be a thing by the end of 2025. You disagree? Lier, you're good.

I agree. I'm really excited. And you see the top players talking to the SEC about it, pushing for it. Those are powerful folks with DC interests. So I'm really bullish too.

And are you guys thinking about revenue diversification at all? Beyond validators, what is it that you can do with Solana? Not just the asset, but the network itself so that there could be more streams of revenue? I don't know. You guys are already tapping into MV is what I assume because I see G tips on the doom dashboard. So. Yeah, yeah, you know, well listen, so you know like on the MV thing, like I think like and you know I actually said this on our earnings call someone asked me about like how we're extracting mev and I'm going to get into your question, but I just want to say this that like our view though is that like we don't like extractive, like overly extractive mev. And also to be clear, like we do like run the JITO client, right? So like we are doing mev, but we're not doing like sandwiching or anything like that. And the reason for that is because like in order for Solana to succeed, which like we are like very much vested in the interest of that considering our treasury, right. We need, we want more assets to be traded on chain. We want users to be trading on chain. And the only way users are going to trade on chain is if they get good price prices. Okay. And with overly extracted, I mean if you're doing front running, you know, like things like that, like it's just going to scare users away. Like why would an institution want to go and trade on Shane if they're just getting an absolutely just crap price. Okay. So I want to say that now on your revenue point. Absolutely. You know, like really what we are shooting for and you know, like I joined in January, we've been building tech for about six months here. Okay. And you know, we built like a. What? I think I'm obviously biased, but I think we've built A pretty good staking business. You know, we're growing. You can see that on dude, you know, and we're going to continue to grow that out, but we want to be good stewards to the Solana network. Like, we want to help that grow that out. And, you know, we're going to do that in multiple ways. Like, one of them which, you know, we really just talked about is we announced our intent to be the first company to list, like, our stock on chain. You know, another thing is we were, you know, like, we launched a mobile app, you know, it's called Orange Fin. It's in the App Store, Google Play Store, and Solana Mobile. You know, we have some cool plans with that, you know, and also, you know, we want to be an infrastructure company, right? So, you know, really, you know, you might see us get into, like, other businesses within, you know, like supporting developers, things like that. Like, everything that we do, we want it to be around helping Solana succeed. Right? And if there's a way to make revenue on that, like, as well, so be it. We want to go after those problems also, too. Like, another area we're looking at is really like, some of these, like, uglier problems, like taxes, reporting, things like that, you know, like, that's an area we'll, you know, we might explore as well. Is there anything to add, Leah? If not, I can.

No, I totally agree. I would just say that one additional fun one, even though it's squarely within validators, is the white label validator that we run for Pudgy Penguins. And I would consider that differentiated because there's other economics that you can cut through white label validator services. So even though it still is squarely validators, you know, I think that new business line is important to know.

So is it like you run validators for them? How does that work? Yeah, it's this. It's that, like, you know, Solana is an awesome network because it's like, it scales so much, but it's like tough to run a validator, right? Like, not anyone could just go and do it. Like, there's a lot of complexity on the back end. There are a lot of companies that want to run validators, you know, and basically, you know, like Pudgy Penguin's fantastic partner, you know, that came to us saying, we want to run a validator, we don't want to run it. You know, we have a lot of experience doing that. We have blog posts basically about how we've automated the whole process. So we run a validator for Them. That's another distinct business line that I completely forgot to mention. Thank you, Leah, for mentioning it. And yep. You know, like, there's a company out there and you're listening and you want to run a validator, hit us up. Awesome. So more of a general question, like, you've been deep in Solana Network for a long time. Are there like one or two things which you think that, okay, this is where it really needs to improve? Yeah, there's a bunch. Right. Like, and you like. One of the things I like about Solana is that, like, everyone is so honest about how, like, bad the problems are. Okay. I think the jitter on Solana has been getting rough, you know, and that's going to be really important. And what I mean by jitter for like, the less technical people is like the difference in, like, if you submit a transaction and let's just say, you know, it takes like hypothetically one millisecond to submit, and then the next time it takes two. You know, like, for the average retail user who might be listening to this, like, you might not care, but for a trader, that's a huge thing. I think that needs to improve. And there's a lot of work being done there. I think that the developer experience on Solana, while there's a lot of work being done on it, there still needs to be some work there. And it's kind of like Solana's greatest strength and greatest weakness as well, in that it is a complicated system to learn because, you know, like, other chains out there, hyper liquid, you know, what with an EVM model, like a modified EVM type thing, Solana, completely different, you know, svm and they're just like, really, like, really, like. No, there's not like, not that much in common between the SVM and the evm. And you know, in order to like, it takes a while to understand the svm, there's a lot of like, weird things you got to get through to deploy a program on chain, you know, and there's like all these different frameworks. You know, you got anchor, you got other things out there, like Pinocchio. Like there's one that. Or. Well, I forget. I don't know why I'm blanking on the name. I didn't get a lot of sleep. But you know, like, so there, you know, like, that I think can be improved. Yeah, like, you know, I think, you know, then like, I can get like really technical, like stakeweight quality of service. It's caused some issues here and there. Right. But you know, like overall, like Solana's like, main like motto is ibro, increase bandwidth, reduce latency. Right. And we can continue to do that. You know, there's a lot of things in the pipeline. I touched on a lot of them. I'm not going to harp on them again. But, you know, I think the jitter is definitely like been getting a little rough and yeah, developer experience. Awesome. Thanks a lot for spending time. I really enjoyed it. And I can't wait to see like, Sol Strategies trading on chain and then a bunch of stocks, you know, just as you guys had in Solana and then other people started doing it. I hope the same thing repeats and we bring real world things on chain and not the other way around. Yeah, absolutely.

Same, same. Thank you so much for having us, by the way.

Thank you. Yeah.