All right. GM, everyone. Parker, can we do a quick mic check? How you doing?
GM. Can you hear me?
Yep, perfect.
Perfect.
Cool. Let's go ahead and get started. Thanks, everyone, for coming in to today's Spaces. I'm Pete Humiston. I'm the CMO here at DeFi Development Corp. We thank you for joining us today. For those who probably already know, today is our monthly business recap and AMA, where we're gonna be covering all that went down last month, where we made progress. We're gonna hit on what's ahead and answer some questions we also received from investors and market participants alike. Joining me today is Parker. I'm sure everyone knows CIO and COO here at DeFi Development Corp. And going to be, just chatting with him, asking him some questions. You know, as just a quick reminder, too, if anyone in the audience has a question at any point, just feel free to send it our way.
We'll do our best to get to these, as many questions as we can. And of course, this Spaces will also be recorded for playback. So if you need to revisit it at a later date, just keep an eye out. We'll get that out, tomorrow. Before we begin, just a quick note: today's discussions may include forward-looking statements. These involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected. For a fuller discussion of these risks, please refer to our most recent SEC filings, including our Form 8-K. We don't undertake any obligations to update these forward-looking statements. Great! So before just quickly jumping into the questions here and throwing them Parker's way, I just wanted to quickly hit on some January highlights, which we also detailed in our recap blog post.
You can find that, too, as well, if you want to check that out. We finished the month with, you know, approximately 2.2 million SOL on the balance sheet and an SPS of 0.0743. DFDV SOL supply sat north of 512,000, and, DFDVX, or tokenized equity, did over $30 million in trading volume. On the partner front, the partnership front, we expanded on-chain yield and treasury infrastructure, via several new integrations, including that with HILO, Mooncake, Solstice, Yield Vault, and Jupiter Lend. We also did a pretty good full-court press on the media and content front. Parker was included in a number of different podcast appearances. DK also attended the, Needham, conference, where he did, yet another epic presentation.
And then we also published a number of different pieces for the On-Chain Advantage series that we do, as well as we launched the Just Chattin' series as well. So head on over to YouTube. You can check out all of those if you're interested. Also, we strengthened governance and global operations across a number of ways. Notably, we added Hadley Stern, who was previously the Chief Commercial Officer at Marinade Finance, to the DFDV board. We announced that there's a new revolving credit facility between us and DFDV UK. And then we also had a one-on-one Spaces with Michael Chan, the CEO of DFDV UK, to discuss the latest and greatest on that front.
And then last but not least, we also hosted our January Reddit AMA, where Parker here did a really stellar job of answering questions, all of which pertained to, you know, things from the preferred stock plans to SPS growth levers for 2026, our validator strategy, yield outlook, market structure monitoring, and a number of different things. So feel free to head on over to our subreddit. It's r/dfdvdegens, or check out the blog post for a quick recap as well, if interested. So now that I got that all out of the way, before, I guess, going into questions, Parker, what's up? What a day, what a week, what a month to be hopping on a Spaces, given market conditions. How are you? How are you holding up?
Yeah, pretty wild out there. I was looking at the daily on Bitcoin, and we're right on the edge. If we close at double digits down for the day, this will actually be the largest single-day candle for Bitcoin since the FTX blowup, and one of the few, you know, down double-digit days on Bitcoin ever in its history. So it's getting pretty wild out there. You know, it feels like we're in for a little bit of a bounce, maybe it's a dead cat bounce, but it's y eah, this is pretty nuts. So, yeah, I have nothing else to say other than that.
Yeah, no, totally. I mean, you know, you and myself, probably fair to say we're veterans of the space now. You know, been in the industry for 8, 9 years. I feel like we've both seen a lot. I'm sure folks in the audience have seen a lot, too. And, you know, I won't speak for you, but for myself at least, I feel like I'm pretty battle-hardened, and, you know, the volatility doesn't freak me out as much, you know, as it did when I was first getting involved. But, man, you know, a day like today, a week like today, I'm kind of, like, shook at the core, and I kind of always try and use it as an opportunity to just, like, gut-check myself and say, "All right, like, you know, I've been through a lot.
If I'm starting to freak out, like, maybe this is, you know, signs that we're close to a bottom," or, you know, "This truly is, you know, a one-of-a-kind situation." And I think you did a great job of kind of alluding to that, talking about Bitcoin price action and, you know, where we stand on the technical level. But I, you know, I guess-
Yeah, I don't-
Yeah, go ahead.
I was gonna say, I don't wanna, you know, like, speculate too much, and our CFO reminded me of a great quote the other day, and he said, "Only monkeys pick bottoms." So, you know, it's certainly tough to pick a bottom, but yeah, the level of, like, abject panic, and consequently seeing a couple people, you know, prominent figures in the space either quit and leave the space or say the entire roadmap for the last three years was the or five years, was garbage, you know, I'm talking about Vitalik on that, is. I don't know. It seems like we're having all the signs of a bear market, and this has certainly been the one of the fastest, it seems like the fastest bear market on record.
So, hopefully that means the rebound doesn't take as long. But, you know, I have to think after a move like this, confidence is certainly shaken, and this is not gonna be a, you know, a rebound straight to $90,000 or $100,000 in a couple weeks. It takes a while for people to, you know, confidence to build and come back in. But, you know, I'm really heartened by the fact that we do have the ETFs. We've got a Bitcoin ETF. We've got Solana ETFs. And anybody that wants to, you know, go picking, go bottom picking, can certainly do so. And there's TradFi folks across the board that have allocations to crypto or have talked about making allocations to crypto.
So, you know, I don't wanna say this is the last bear market ever or, like, bear market of this size, but there's gonna be a lot of coins getting scooped up by TradFi investors here. And they don't trade with leverage. It just, it's part of a portfolio allocation. And so, you know, for all the OGs that are selling here, you might not get your coins back. So I, you know, I feel for those folks, but, you know, it's up to them what they wanna do.
Yeah, totally. And I just the last point on this, I mean, I think you made a great observation, too. You're seeing, like, a lot of prominent figures leave the space, or at least step away in some sort of capacity. I think that freaks a lot of people out. And I guess I would say, as someone who's been in the space for a while and have kind of felt this firsthand, like, it can, I totally get it. Like, it can be exhausting going through the ups and downs. And, you know, people, you know, in their own right and way, I'm sure, hit that exhaustion level and just say, like, "Hey, I just can't, I don't wanna do this anymore.
I can't keep doing this." But, you know, while I get that, I wanna use this as an opportunity to also say, you know, the conversations internally amongst the DFDV team is, like, everyone's just like: "Oh, yeah, you know, like, this is kind of expected. You know, bear market's coming, or it may be here, whatever." But, you know, it's very much still business as usual. There's not an ounce of, I think, anyone on the team even, like, considering throwing in the towel. And which is what I'm super excited about, as we kind of push through what could be, you know, quiet times or a little tumultuous times.
Yeah. Yeah, my favorite part of generally the full cycle is the kind of the trough of disillusionment, if you will, where you know the scammers kind of step away, the fast money kind of steps away, the price stops moving so much, which is nice. And we can really get back to first principles, get back to building, get back to why we're here in crypto, what the user pain points that we need to solve are. And you know, again, that's my favorite time. Of course, the crazy bull markets are great, but it's a little nuts, and people start to forget why you know, why we got into the space and why we're here.
And so, you know, I'm excited for the bottom to get in, whenever that is, and for us to level off and be able to get back to building, and kind of getting back to first principles. So, yeah, very excited for that. Hopefully, it doesn't take too much longer to get there. But I think, you know, the next wave of y ou look at all the big companies and projects in every cycle, and they almost always started in the bear market or maybe at the tail end of the last bull market. Whether that's, you know, MicroStrategy or projects on the DeFi side. I mean, look, Solana got started in the 2018 or so bear market.
The lending platforms, Kamino and Jupiter, got started in the, you know, 2020 kind of timeframe, or maybe a little later, in Kamino's case, I think 2022. So, you know, there's lots of building that's going on right now, and I'm super excited to see what that leads to in the next bull market.
Yeah, excellent point. Oh, God, I would try and dig for it. I probably won't be able to find it, but I, I think Kobe did, like, a really good piece, like, a couple of years back, talking about how advantageous it is to build and launch in the bear market. You know, it's, it's not, it's not as fun, right? Because it's like you gotta kind of tread water for a little bit, and you don't really know when things are gonna be coming on the up and up. But you have so many. You know, the bars are slow. You have a lot of tailwinds, you know, amongst other things. But, I'm sure I, I won't say anymore, but I'm sure we're gonna be talking about that, that advantage, if you will, a little, a little bit later down the line here.
Anyways, not, you know, nudge, nudge, wink, wink. Anyways, January, it was a little bit of a quieter month for a number of reasons. But, you know, certainly, that's not to say there wasn't anything done. How would you summarize or what stood out to you in January? How should market participants, investors, you know, think about what we were doing last month?
Yeah, so I put out a tweet, and it was pinned for a while. I can't remember if it's still pinned. But that, you know, 2026 will be the year that we go from, you know, being a DAT to being an actual DeFi Development Corporation. And so, you know, you saw kind of the very, very first phase of that, with us launching the meme coin. You know, obviously, we've talked about it as an experiment, as a bit of a test. It's certainly not something that we're abandoning, but, you know, it's just a small example of what we plan to do there on the DeFi development side. So there's a bunch of other things that we can do.
Don't have anything to share immediately, but, we ultimately don't. Long term, our vision for the company is not about just a passive ride the wave, or even a, like, a pseudo-passive ride the wave with leverage, like a MicroStrategy does. We actually wanna help create the wave. And so there's a lot of things that we can do on that front, not just by deploying some capital, doing some TVL deals into some early projects, you know, maybe sponsoring some hacker houses, and hackathons, and that kind of thing. But we can actually do some development, some building ourselves directly, whether that's people on the team, with, say, engineering and product experience, whether that's, you know, launching new projects and hiring dev teams from, other places in our background, whether that's Kraken or other teams that we, have, you know, built relationships with.
So you'll kinda start to see this take shape over the coming months, and we'll be, you know, forthcoming about these developments as they come out, and as we launch them. But it's something I'm really excited about, and, you know, I think it'll be one of the first times that a well, certainly the first time that a treasury company has kind of, like, gone into the development side. But it's, you know, one of the few public companies that's, like, very actively building in DeFi. You know, there are a few out there, but not too many, so we're excited to kinda be embarking on this journey.
Yeah, it's a great point. You know, like, we talk about this a lot internally. I think views have kinda changed over time, but I think we've mostly settled on this idea, and I think the market, too, that it's like, you know, DATs will try and do what they can from a capital market standpoint to increase their respective crypto asset exposure, but they're gonna ultimately need to do something. I think a lot of people have, like, said, they'll have to pick up an operating business, or they'll have to do something like that. That's a realization we came to kind of earlier than the market and the rest of folks, and, you know, hence why we've started to do some of the things that we've done and will do.
I think it's, like, important that we just reiterate that to the general market, that, you know, while, of course, we wanna continue to accumulate more SOL, we're gonna also experiment and do things. And I really don't think that there are that many DATs, let alone SOL DATs, that are of kind of the similar mindset. And, you know, it's, I don't know. It's just, it's really interesting. I'm super interested, of course, because we work in the vertical, but to just see how the DAT vertical itself evolve through this, you know, 2026, and whatever comes of it. So-
Yeah, for sure.
Wanna give our shareholders a pat on the back in a way.
Well, I think there can be this tendency, you know, and I've heard people talk about this, and you've seen some of the maybe early signs of it. But there can be a tendency for some of these DAT operators to kinda sit back and be like: "All right. Well, we've got a bear market, can't raise capital, so we're just gonna hang out, go on vacation, and we'll get back engaged when the market turns around, and we'll, you know, flip the ATM on again, and we'll start raising capital again to buy SOL, or ETH, or Bitcoin, or whatever." But I-
Do you wanna quickly hit on how those like, the incentives that do exist for a dynamic like that to work? 'Cause maybe the audience doesn't totally understand, you know, how it is some of these operators could just sit back and kick their feet up, right? I mean, they've got shareholders.
Yeah, they've got shareholders, but these businesses are very takeover-resistant. You've seen a recent kind of takeover attempt with Empiri Digital, but generally speaking, these businesses are very takeover-resistant. And that's because if they're trading at a discount to NAV, and you have some activist investor, and they step in, and they're like, you know, "Hey, you gotta return capital to shareholders," or whatever, the management team, in addition to all the traditional, you know, poison pill-type mechanisms to or shareholder or management protection provisions to kind of ward off hostile takeovers, management can always kind of deploy the nuclear option, which is to start selling assets to buy back shares and bid the shares back towards one.
At which point, there can never be a takeover offer for cash greater than one, because it makes zero sense for someone to offer, you know, $100 million for $90 million of assets. Like, that's just y ou know, that's silly when it's just cash on cash, right? You could see, like, maybe a share-for-share swap done at a premium, and this is, for example, how ASST was able to acquire Semler. You know, ASST used shares that were trading at a significant premium to NAV, but they acquired Semler's BTC, paying a premium to NAV. So Semler was able to sell their Bitcoin for greater than one, they just happened to sell it in shares. So that was kinda the only way that deal got done.
So I'm going off on a bit of a tangent here, but the point is, it's very difficult for DATs to have a hostile takeover attempt go successfully. And, you know, a lot of these management teams get paid pretty nice compensation packages. You look at their salaries, their bonuses, and so there's a kind of a temptation to just sit back and say, "Well, you know, I'm here to run the ATM. I'm here to raise debt capital and preferreds, and that's not possible right now, so I'm just gonna sit back, stake my assets, and wait for the market to improve." So that can be certainly an approach that some take, but obviously, we don't think that's the right approach from a, you know, a morals perspective, but also from a long-term upside perspective.
We wanna build as many rocket boosters as we can to attach to the rocket when it's time for launch. We don't wanna just sit back on the, you know, one or two boosters that we have.
The rocket boosters, I love that. Need more rocket boosters.
That's right. Stacking rocket boosters.
Awesome. Well, you know, it's. I'll throw this question your way. I mean, I feel like we always talk about it every month, but it's something I think people always just want to hear or see if there's any update. So, you know, is there anything we wanna hit on, you know, in light of last month and even, you know, kind of the past week or whatever, as it relates to, buybacks, preferred issuance, ATM, SOL purchases, like all that, all that good stuff? How do we kinda think about the capital allocation framework right now?
Yeah, so, I'll kinda hit on those in loose reverse order. In terms of accumulating SOL, you know, for better or worse, the time that we can accumulate SOL is when we have spare capital to deploy. And, you know, the problem here is that typically we're not given capital to deploy, unless the price is going up. And so unless we were given capital to deploy and then just sat on it a nd we do sit on some capital for OpEx and, you know, maintain a little bit of cash buffer. But, generally speaking, when we raise capital, we try to deploy it fairly quickly. And that's just, you know, what investors are looking for. So in this environment, buying more SOL, is a little difficult, unfortunately.
You know, you look at the price, and you're like, "Geez, this is a great price." But, you know, we really don't wanna take on margin debt, because if things keep dipping, you know, we don't wanna be in a margin call situation. About the preferred, you know, we are hard at work, trying to figure out how to get it done. Unfortunately, even just the last couple of days, you've seen the, prefs trade-off. So STRC is, you know, down now 5% off the peg. SATA, the, ASST one, is down 15% off the peg. So for better or worse, investors look at that and say, "Well, those guys have giant balance sheets, and they're trading where they are." So that means it's gonna be more difficult for us to do a preferred with a smaller balance sheet.
If we do a preferred, the yield that we're paying, the interest rate that we're paying, is gonna be, you know, a lot higher than those guys. So it starts to get to a situation where the question is asked: Should we raise the preferred if we're paying, let's say, 25% or 30% interest? Like, does that make sense? Yeah, maybe SOL can double from here very quickly, and then you could argue it makes sense. But, you know, that's kinda the equation that we have to wrestle with on the preferred front. We've got a few tricks up our sleeve, though, and we're certainly working to get it done, but the market's pretty soft right now for that. The last one that you brought up, obviously, the ATM, you know, we can't really run that.
Doesn't make sense to run that when we're trading at a discount to NAV on most metrics. We do have some institutional investors that think we should be running it, because we're trading at a pretty significant premium to NAV, when you look at the EV to NAV metric or the debt-to-NAV metrics. So if we use MicroStrategy's kind of preferred measure, we're actually trading at a 42% premium to NAV. But, you know, we really like to look at either just the straight equity to SOL, or even the kind of fully converted, fully diluted NAV, and those are at discounts. So that does bring us to share buybacks, and, you know, we've been pretty public about the fact that we're not gonna widely announce share buybacks, 'cause this is actually a pretty sustainable source of SPS growth.
So if we can buy back shares when the stock's trading at a discount to the assets, we're growing SOL per share for everyone that didn't sell their shares, for all the long-term holders. And so, you know, if you go look in the filings, we have done some buybacks. You can go take a look, and, I won't say when we're gonna do more, but I'll just leave it at, you know, we are all compensated and fully aligned on SOL per share growth. That's how, not only we get our bonuses, but more importantly, that's how we grow the value of our own shares. You know, we've got quite a few shares, and, many of us have bought shares, after the initial acquisition.
You know, in terms of buybacks, we think this is a great way to grow SOL per share in a down market, and we will have utilized it in the past, and we'll likely continue to utilize it in the future.
Awesome. Great recap. Yeah, being the short of it, January, you know, some buyback activity, still jamming on the preferred issuance. That t hose were kinda like the two focuses of January, at least from the capital allocation side of things. But, you know, there were a few other things, too, that took place, that I thought were notable. We actually added Hadley Stern, who was previously the chief commercial officer over at Marinade, to the board of directors, and then there was a couple of things, like, on the DFDV UK front. So, wanna use this, like, as an opportunity, maybe if you wanna shill Hadley, we're super excited to have brought him onto the board. I think we've got, like, a pretty, pretty stacked lineup on the DFDV board.
Then, of course, you know, there was some good progress on the DFDV UK front, so would love to hear any kinda general thoughts.
Yeah, so they're actually kinda related, 'cause, I'm sure many folks saw that Hadley also joined the board of DFDV UK. And some folks may not know this, but he's, I think he's actually got, like, three passports, Canadian, British, and American. And so, you know, Hadley's been in the space for quite a while, and, you know, he was at Fidelity for a long time, so really brings a wealth of experience, connections, and just kinda perspective, especially on the kinda institutional adoption front. You know, anybody following Marinade knows that they kinda went from, an LST, kinda, you know, crypto-native LST to. And they're in the process of, you know, trying to onboard more institutions, ETF providers, and so on, that use their, you know, kind of their KYC staking, service. So Hadley was a great addition to the board.
You know, added some gray hairs and some experience, a lot of connections, and we're really excited to have him. On the U.K. front, he did also join the board there, but generally, on the U.K. front, you know, we're kinda working through the regulatory hoops. It's much, much less, I'd say, permissible than the U.S. The U.S. and the U.K. have kind of somewhat different philosophies on the regulatory front, particularly when it comes to the SEC and the FCA, you know, securities regulators. On the U.S. side, it's very much about, like, hey, you can basically do whatever you want, as long as you disclose it. Like, as long as investors are aware of whatever you're doing, you can kinda just do it. You know, there are some guardrails, but they're very wide.
The U.K. takes a much more, kind of, check with us and get approval approach, and so there's all these rules about what a public company can do, what they can't do, what they have to get approval on. It's, yeah, it's just a lot more approval-oriented. So obviously, it takes time, and no regulator on planet Earth is in a hurry. And then, of course, you know, DATS are down, and crypto's down, and so kinda going through all those hurdles, you know, we're faced with lots of skepticism and kinda have to spend some time educating and going through that. So we're hopeful that we can get over the line soon. Nothing's guaranteed, but the intention is to, you know, get that vehicle out there and also get it primed and ready for whenever the market turns around.
Because, you know, the U.K. is a market where access to crypto is more difficult than in the U.S. There's certainly fewer DATS and fewer ETFs, but the exchange offerings aren't as great, and the especially pension and retirement offerings aren't great. And so we think this will make a, you know, excellent access point for British, and also, you know, people all over Europe and all over the world that may trust a London Stock Exchange-listed vehicle, run by, you know, a British team, than, say, a U.S. team. So, we're pretty excited about getting that one off the ground, and we'll keep you guys updated.
Yeah, pretty, pretty wild timing. Like, as you mentioned, it's, it's been a little bit more of a long and, and winding journey on the DFDV UK front. But, you know, it looks like the things are starting to shape up and look, you know, increasingly more promising, heading into, what could, undoubtedly be a really good opportune time to be deploying capital. So, yeah, excited to see what the DFDV UK DAT does, later this year, or throughout this year, rather. You know, I guess with that said, another kinda question. I think we've kinda talked about this a little bit in one way or another, but would love to, to hear from you. You know, how do you think DATS are gonna perform, assuming we are in a bear market?
I think we're really starting to see, like, a ton of FUD come out. Saw one tweet, someone saying there's, like, you know, some 200 DAPS. This is all these are, like, heavily levered. Like, this is a ticking time bomb. It's all gonna blow up. We kinda talked about how there are clearly a number of DATS that are just kinda kicking their feet up and just not looking to do anything innovative. And then there's a select few, I think ourselves included, that is more than prepared to push through what comes our way. But, but yeah, would just love to get your general thoughts on how do we expect DATS to largely perform, and any kinda like FUD that, you know, we should probably brace ourselves for?
Yeah, I mean, most DATS aren't levered. You know, we have leverage, and MicroStrategy certainly has leverage, Strive, but most DATS don't really have much leverage. So this idea that they are ticking time bombs is silly, and in fact, they help, in many ways, dampen the downside, or should, because in theory, these coins are on these balance sheets. And many folks are not interested in doing buybacks, or maybe they do buybacks at a significant discount and a trickle of buybacks. But what that means is that the stock, yo u know, the stocks of these DATS take the beating, and the coins are actually kind of held out of the supply. So the coins aren't really dumped onto the market. Again, for the non-levered DATS, there's, like, zero chance that they are forced to liquidate.
For levered DATS, you know, basically all the leverage is unsecured debt. So what that means is, there's no margin call. There's not a price that the asset can drop to, that forces an entity to sell. That's not how that works. And that's, candidly, the beauty of DATS, where, you know, you can take on leverage, you can borrow money. So our, you know, big block of leverage was the convertible bond we did back in July. We raised $123 million, roughly, and, you know, we paid a 5.5% interest rate on that, which is a pretty good rate. And not only that, it's a five-year maturity instrument. So as long as we can pay our 5.5% a year on the $122 million, we can't get margin called, right?
SOL could go to $1, and if we'd set aside the cash to pay the interest payments, then, you know, the stock, the stock's gonna be way down, but there's no margin call, and we technically don't have to sell any SOL. And so that's the beauty of the leverage here. There's no real situation where there could be a blow-up, where a DAT is, you know, say, us or a MicroStrategy or somebody is forced to, like, dump the balance sheet. And that's kinda the beauty of the preferreds, where, you know, whereas, say, the convert, yeah, you know, in four and a half years, it's gonna mature, and if SOL is still way down in four and a half years and we can't refinance, then, you know, we might have a problem. But with the preferreds, there's no maturity on those.
And yes, the dividends are a lot higher. You know, MicroStrategy's converts, cheapest ones were issued at 0% interest, and their preferreds are issued at, you know, 10%-11% interest. But the dividends on the preferreds are just that. They're dividends. And so in an absolute worst-case scenario, you know, MicroStrategy could decide, "Hey, we're gonna pause the dividends until the market improves," and not have to sell any Bitcoin to meet those dividends. So this would, I think, be a nuclear option for them and, like, an absolute last resort. But there's basically no scenario where MicroStrategy is forced to sell a bunch of Bitcoin into the market. So I think all this FUD around, "Oh, DATS are just, y ou know, they're gonna blow up. They're ticking time bombs," it's kinda just that.
It's either people grasping at straws to explain, you know, what's going on in the market, or maybe more nefariously, they have a big short position on, and they're trying to stoke the fears to get things to really run to, print on their short. So that's, some of my thoughts on leverage and DATS. You know, I think ultimately, DATS that are, levered are the best ones. There's no reason to have an unlevered DAT, really. You should just buy an ETF. It sucks to the downside. Of course, on big days like today, levered DATS, get absolutely hammered, but, you know, it kinda goes the other way, too. And, I'm reminded of when we first took over Janover back in April of last year.
It was actually, I think it was April 5th, so we're talking 10 months ago. SOL was at $100, right around there, and in 7 weeks, the stock was up 9,700%. You know, 97x. So I'm not saying that that'll happen again if SOL, you know, goes up, but a lot of that's due to leverage, and obviously, the business that we've built and the team and all of that contributed, but I think leverage is a piece of that. And so I think that's, you know, should have leverage to explain their existence, and the unique leverage, the non-margin leverage, the unsecured leverage, is kinda the stuff that you wanna see.
Yeah, all great points. Man, you know, it never ceases to amaze me the—you know, I guess I gotta be fair, too, like, just how some t here's always, like, a cohort of people who are the loudest but also seemingly know the least, and, you know, the FUD surrounding DATS recently is just like, it totally epitomizes it. It's just so funny, and DK does, like, a really great job of kind of combating some of this, and of course, you yourself on socials and, you know, when anytime we're speaking or anytime we're on chats like this, just kinda combating the FUD and the misnomers relating to DATS and leverage and how they operate and how they function.
But, yeah, I totally expect more and more people to try and engagement farm, if you will, or look, you know, try and look like a market wizard by just pointing to the DATS and saying, like: "This is how we blow up." But, you know, funny enough, it seems like there is already a blow-up of sorts that's taking place. Maybe this time around, we just don't know or won't know who it is anytime soon, but it's most certainly not on the DAP front, and I think you already alluded to it. It's probably the biggest risk or one of the biggest risks is just potential takeovers and then forced liquidation, but that's not gonna be a walk in the park by any means.
Yeah, I don't think. I really don't think you're gonna see a single successful takeover attempt. You may see, you know, somebody sell a little bit to kind of bring the, the assets o r, sorry, the collapse in NAV premium and bring it back to 1x. But, yeah, you know, maybe a couple on the Bitcoin side, where some of these companies that have no business running a DAT, they don't know the first thing about Bitcoin, maybe some of the smaller ones. But, like, I mean, candidly, you look at the, you look at the Solana DATs, you look at the ETH DATs, you look at most of the Bitcoin DATs, and, like, these guys, yeah, and some of them are competitors, but, like, they have been in the ecosystem.
They, you know, they, they know that it's pronounced Solana, not Solana, right? So, like, I think it's gonna be tough for anybody to come in and force these guys to, like, completely liquidate.
Yeah. Yeah, no, I totally hear you on that front and won't belabor the point anymore. But yeah, totally, totally just mentally bracing myself for DAT FUD, among other kind of FUD. You know, it's gonna be emotional times, probably, for a little bit, and, you know, people are gonna act accordingly.
Sure.
You know, I know we're kinda coming up on time, but just to quickly. We kinda hit on it at the start, but one of the other things that went down in January was, you know, we experimented with DisclaimerCoin Don'ts. I think that there were some people, you know, I saw just asking what were, like, the plans around it, you know, our general thoughts around it. Do you want to kinda quickly summarize, like, our view on that, and what was the impetus behind, you know, the experiment?
Yeah, so this kinda goes back to the, you know, developing and DeFi, point that I made earlier. But effectively, although we do have our stock tokenized on chain, there are a whole host of rules around things that we can and cannot do when it comes to a stock. So, for example, we cannot pay somebody to market make our stock. Strictly prohibited. But token projects, that's, like, the thing that you do. You launch a token, you get a market maker. Furthermore, we cannot pay out rewards to our token holders—sorry, our stockholders in more stock. We can't go on chain and be like: "Okay, let's set up this vault, and we will air drop or pay incentives in DFDVX tokens, to people doing ABC or XYZ activity," right?
That's another very common thing that projects can do, you know, crypto projects. So for us, you know, meme coins have kinda been carved out on the regulatory front as a pretty clear, like, you know, safe harbor or, you know, opportunity to do, you know, do a lot of things that the company or an issuer wants to do, to, you know, for lack of a better way to put it. So getting the coin out there, certainly it tests our ability to launch assets. There's a lot of plumbing involved, less so with the meme coin than, say, other assets, but, you know, there's still certainly plumbing involved. But it also gives us a tool, you know, long-term to use for all sorts of things.
So you could think about, you know, incentives for activities on-chain. You could think about, potential airdrops and giveaways, you know, campaigns. You could think about some type of real-world crossover. I know this was big in the NFT days, where you'd have events, you know, IRL events, where admission was granted to NFT holders. So we could certainly do something like that with, you know, with DONTS. Or we could, you know, even create an NFT and airdrop it to DONTS holders. There are all sorts of interesting experimentation things we could do. Governance is another interesting one. You know, maybe set up a DAO and have the token holders vote on certain things.
You know, this is experimentation that we wanna roll up our sleeves and get directly involved with, but we kind of can't and are left out by just having, you know, the X stop on-chain. So the meme coin is a way for us to kind of get active and really be involved on-chain, just like any other on-chain project might be that does have their own native token, that they do have freedom to do a lot more things. So that's kinda like some of the high-level thinking there. Certainly we're, you know, holding a whole bunch on our balance sheet, and if the value goes up significantly, that will strengthen the balance sheet.
And, you know, tradfi investors look at assets as assets, and they just see the assets and say, "Oh, this, this must be worth something." Or look at the market price and be like, "Well, you have this many coins, and here's the price, and that's worth X amount." And, you know, they value that when they think about leverage ratios, balance sheet health, and all that. So yeah, that's kind of some of the thinking on that.
Yeah. Well said and summarized. It is, of course, gonna be a work in progress and something we'll play around with, and there's a number of different directions we can go with it. But you know, we're obviously, you know, for that reason and kind of given where we are, we're not making any promises as to, like, what to expect and how it'll be used and, you know, that hence the branding behind it. So, yeah, thanks for covering that. I think that was kind of, like, the last remaining question that we had here. So, yeah, with that said, I know we covered a lot. Is there anything else you wanna hit on, Parker, or you wanna say closing out here?
I think since we started talking, Bitcoin's retraced $2,000, so maybe we gotta get it off and stop the bleeding.
Yeah, you know, I guess the last thing I'd say is, you know, I know a lot of folks here on the call are shareholders, and I know it's been super painful, even today, you know, pretty big drop. But certainly we appreciate the support and, you know, we're not going anywhere. We're here for the long term. And so, yeah, just wanna say thanks for everyone who has been riding with us and will continue to ride with us, and we will try to keep building and build something great.
Yeah, definitely. I think, I think folks are gonna be excited to hop on next month's monthly recap, I'm sure. But, we'll, we'll leave it at that. Thanks, everyone, for joining us today and sending in your thoughtful questions. As always, questions, comments, or concerns, please feel free to send them our way.