All right. GM, everyone. Welcome to today's Spaces. I'm Pete Humiston, I'm the CMO here at DeFi Development Corp. Thanks for joining us today. Today's discussion is going to be our March business recap. We're also going to be diving into our latest shareholder letter that we put out last month. A whole bunch of good stuff in there. We're going to dig in deeper into how we're thinking about the business, the market, and where we're headed from here. Joining me today is none other than Parker White, CIO and COO. We've got Joseph Onorati, CEO, and DK, CSO at DeFi Development Corp. As always, for those of you in the audience, if you do have questions, feel free to drop them under the pinned tweet on our profile and we'll go through and try and answer as many questions as possible towards the end of this Spaces.
Also, just a quick reminder here, today's discussions may include forward-looking statements. These involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. Please refer to our SEC filings for more details. We undertake no obligation to update these statements except as required by law. With that said, we can get right into it. Guys, GM, how's it going?
Going great.
Fantastic.
GM.
GM.
Cool.
Although-
You guys-
I'm more of a Ford guy myself.
Say that again.
I said, although I'm a bit more of a Ford guy myself.
Yeah. No, I get it. No comment. Before going into some of these questions, guys, just I guess maybe it'd be helpful to give a quick overview of what went down last month. Certainly a slower month across crypto. We continue to push forward as we have. We ended the month with 2.2 million SOL, a little bit higher than the prior month, representing $185 million in notional value. SPS actually grew from 0.0743 to 0.0754. dfdv SOL supply grew 30%, which came off the back of Jupiter Lend increasing the cap on the dfdv SOL and SOL loop $30 million.
We published what I think is an awesome piece, one of many, and more to come, research piece entitled "Every Agent Needs a SOL: Sizing the Opportunity for Agentic Finance on Solana." We'll get into that, of course, in the Spaces. We also just continue to push forward on various different integrations and partnerships. I think we published some pretty good original content as well, everything relating to navigating Solflare wallet, to talking a little bit more about our most recent investment into ApeX. With that said, for those of you who want to learn more after this Spaces too, because we'll be digging into some of the topics here, feel free to head on over to our blog. We just published our March 2026 recap this morning as well.
It covers a number of things in detail, including all relevant links if you want to dig into some of the content that we put out there. Guys, let's just shift right into it. March 2026, like I mentioned a second ago, SPS expanded. What were the drivers behind that?
It's a good question. A couple things, pretty simple. We've got staking and our general organic yield. That is going to just grow our SOL per share every day, every month, every quarter, kind of passively. Then on top of that, we did do some buybacks, and we bought back at a discount to NAV, so that also grew SPS. We did have to sell some of our SOL yield for OpEx and to fund the buyback, so that's why if you calculate it doesn't exactly track out. All in all, decent little growth for SPS.
Awesome. Speaking of some notable growth, I think month-over-month, also mentioned dfdvSOL grew 28%. Anything to note on that front and just anything in general?
Joseph, you want to take that one?
Sorry, I didn't actually hear what Pete said.
dfdvSOL, everyone's favorite LST, surged 28% month-over-month of supply. I know I mentioned the Jupiter Lend increased-
Yeah
Our cap, but.
Jupiter Lend thing.
Anything else?
Yeah.
How are we thinking about dfdv SOL too?
Yeah, I guess I can take this one. Yeah, we mentioned this on the earnings call, but essentially at this point, dfdvSOL is integrated across effectively all of Solana DeFi. There's no major project that I'm aware of that doesn't support dfdvSOL. We will continue to get dfdvSOL integrated on new projects as they launch. At this point, we've reached full saturation, if you will, on the platforms. Now the goal is just around, you know, growing its usage. Candidly, we've not put a lot of effort into that. We mostly use it ourselves. Certainly, a few other people use it, but it's not been like a huge marketing push for us. That's candidly because it's not really a profit center directly, because some of the biggest LSTs don't charge any fees.
This might change in the future, and we could start making a more competitive push, but it would require us to effectively start paying back the block rewards that we generate. It's not been a huge, I'd say, focus of ours beyond the integration throughout the ecosystem.
Yeah. The dfdv SOL world domination has kind of been completed in some ways, but we'll never pass up the opportunity to expand elsewhere, wherever it might be possible in the future.
Yeah, look, we know how to launch tokens on Ethereum now. Maybe if the Ethereum maxis want to start buying SOL, we should make dfdvSOL available on Ethereum. I don't know.
Yeah, you got a point. Not everything can take place on Ethereum in the same way it can on Solana, which brings me to actually my next point, and this is for DK, the Chief Strategy Officer here at DeFi Development Corp. DK, you put out this awesome piece, "Every Agent Needs a SOL." You want to quickly just give us a quick rundown of what that piece was all about, what this means for Solana. Is it true Solana is going to dominate agentic AI on-chain?
I feel like I need to give a one-liner here like Joseph did on our earnings call, which is, it is true. Next question. No, I'll dive a little bit into it. It's actually worth talking about, before we go into agentic AI, the DFDV model that we came up with for valuing SOL. Parker may have touched upon this in a prior Spaces, but it's important enough that I'll call it out again. We, as a company, have obviously spent a lot of time chatting with a number of institutional investors on Solana over the last year, how it works, why it's well-positioned, the technology, a lot of educational effort on that front. One of the big hang-ups is actually figuring out how to value SOL itself.
That sounds trivial, but it's a really complicated issue, frankly, because most of the folks who are assessing, say, the value of DFDV common equity, obviously need to get behind SOL as an asset worth owning. Many of the traditional valuation methodologies that exist don't really apply well to Solana. For example, there are, I'm going to say, DCF analogous models out there that are used to try to value SOL similar to how you would value a public equity. Logically, there are a few flaws with that. For starters, token holders' number one don't have contractual claims on the cash flows of the network. I say cash flows in quotation marks, right? There are other debatable elements related to things like weighted average cost of capital and terminal value, which are key elements to a DCF.
Of course, SOL is a commodity, not a security, right? You're trying to apply a framework that's built for companies with management teams that allocate capital. You're trying to apply that framework to an open protocol where no singular team controls the revenue, no singular team sets margins, no singular team decides how value effectively gets distributed. We wanted to come up with a new methodology for this. The idea is that SOL, the token, should be priced like land in a growing city. If you were to draw an analogy to real estate, for example, what you earn from, let's say, a particular property, let's call it the rental yield, is one input to real estate valuation, but it is not the only one, right? Really the key determining factor of real estate value is built around scarcity.
How many people want or need to own a piece of land, and how little of it is actually up for grabs? Simplistically, what this does is it boils valuing SOL down to two elements. What's your supply and what's your demand? That brings us to the agentic AI piece, because one of the key elements of demand in our model, the DFDV model, is going to be agentic AI. Two arguments you really need to make here to think that agentic AI is going to be a meaningful value driver for SOL. Number one, why would agents transact on-chain? Then number two, why would they choose Solana? As far as the first question is concerned, there are a few reasons, but really the first one is that traditional rails, payment rails as they exist, were really made for humans, right?
They require accounts, identity verification, authorization flows. There are a bunch of settlement delays, right? An AI agent has no identity document, no bank account, no credit card unless you've sort of let it out on the loose with one. Yes, agents can use, let's say like more traditional rails like Stripe, right? You can have an agent provision with API keys and things like that. Every one of those additional steps that you introduce basically creates friction, it creates latency, and it creates some element of human dependency. It's not a problem for a single agent, but imagine 10 million agents trying to do this at mass scale or trying to operate in some autonomous way. Doing it through manual, I'm going to say traditional financial rails, can be a really big bottleneck, right?
No, the advantage is not absolute in that traditional rails can work for, let's say, a handful of agents. As agents scale over time, our view is that you really need these agents transacting on-chain. Otherwise, you're just going to be inherently capped by those various friction points. As far as why Solana, look, all the things we've spoken about over the last year, and sort of pitching Solana to investors, Solana's speed, Solana's low-cost profile, all those things obviously matter for agentic finance. I believe we had a section in our deep dive where we actually said finality itself is the product, right? Imagine you have an agent that is operating in some loop, and every single transaction confirmation along the way becomes a blocking step. In Solana, the agent waits less than a second.
If you are on, I don't know, Ethereum L1 takes what? Approximately 15 minutes for true finality. If you're an agent that is trying to manage a bunch of DeFi positions or executing some arbitrage, all of that creates just way too many, I'm going to say, friction points along the way. For that reason, I would say Solana is at a considerable advantage. The stat we highlighted on our earnings interview was something that Vibhu had highlighted at DAS, which is, I think year-to-date, Solana's certainly north of 50% of x402 volume share. I think it was somewhere around 65%. That share often swaps or trades places with Base. The early signs at least that we're watching are very positive for the Solana network.
That's a little bit of a long rant of an overview, but I did want to set that context and let people know this is why we're doing this research because I think this is going to be a key input for folks and at least initial reception to both the DFDV model as well as the agentic AI seem to be pretty positive. We don't pretend to have all the answers, right? I think a lot of this is meant to get folks just thinking about it and getting folks to figure out what kind of research or metrics to track over time.
Man, to think you almost just left stuff with just a one-liner.
It would've saved us a lot of time, right?
Yeah, but you wouldn't have dropped all the alpha you dropped. No, again, it's a really good piece and of course, we also published the month prior, "SOL in the Digital City: A New Way to Value L1 Tokens," which, as DK said, this agentic piece is an input to it. I would highly recommend both folks who are bullish, perma-bullish on Solana like yourselves to check them out. They're on our blog. Yeah, it is insane. There is still, despite the price action and general market sentiment, there are still lots of positive developments in the Solana ecosystem. Market hasn't been trending well, and I think everyone feels that and everyone sees that, and there's a number of different pockets of the market where that's evident, but one of them also is NAV compression, and this isn't just unique to Solana.
This is across all of the DAT Space. I think Strategy might be a little bit of the anomaly on that front. Guys, just kind of curious, given the NAV compression and Solana activity, how do we think this environment reshapes the competitive landscape as a whole?
I can jump in on that one. Real quick on DK's, the agentic AI piece. I think the best way to see for yourself, and this is just my personal experience playing with my own OpenClaw, is just telling it, "Hey, create a Solflare wallet," and it just goes and does it, and then I can just send it some coins, and then it can do all these things on-chain for me. Just directly trying it out, I was like, "Ooh, this was a lot nicer than trying to go." I personally don't have a Stripe account, so I got to go create a Stripe account, set that up, and then try to provision an API key or give it access, and then it has full credit card access.
It's a lot more friction even setting up a Stripe account, and so I think, just firsthand experience there, it's just a lot easier to have the AI, my OpenClaw just pay with stables on Solana than it is trying to figure out some secure way of giving it a credit card. Yeah, I could just give it my credit card. I guess that would work, but then it's like giving your two-year-old your credit card. You just don't know what it's going to do, right? Well, I don't know, maybe not two-year-old, but seven-year-old. That's that. On how the space is going to reshape, and would, of course, love to hear Joseph and DK's thoughts as well. I think you're going to see a bit of a separation.
I think too many DATs were launched this past summer, and too many DATs on all the assets, but then also lots of DATs were launched on assets that probably shouldn't have a DAT. I think what you're going to see is some of these pivot away, maybe bifurcate, or change their narrative, whatever. I think ultimately what you're going to see is. Let's call it two major DATs emerge, at least in the U.S., on the top three assets. Bitcoin, ETH, and SOL. Maybe one on a couple other assets, tough to say, but I think you're going to see some.
You may not see acquisitions and actual consolidation, but I think there's going to be a narrative during the market that, "Hey, DFDV is the top or one of the top two Sol DATs." People stopped talking about, "Oh, well, there's seven Sol DATs, how do you differentiate?" I think that those types of questions are going to subside, and it's more going to be how do you continue to grow your Sol stack, and how do you continue to be the best possible Sol DAT you can be? Because there's only one or two real viable ones effectively. That's how I think the competitive landscape is going to shape out. What are the defining factors? I do think the space championing, if you will, the marketing, but the support of the ecosystem is really important. What a DAT does to champion the ecosystem?
Say, Saylor is an excellent evangelist for Bitcoin, and so I think that's why MicroStrategy is such a solid Bitcoin DAT because they've been such a great champion for so long. I think DATs that do that for their respective asset will emerge as a winner. I think leverage is a really important component. Not just how much leverage, but the type of leverage and the cost of said leverage. I do think organic yield is also an important piece as well, and how integrated you are into the ecosystem. I do think it's a bit of a secondary point, but I think if you can generate a couple of hundred extra basis points of gross yield, I think people like it. Those are my thoughts. Would love to hear from Joseph and DK.
Yeah. I'm curious what DK has to say, but yeah, I agreed with pretty much everything you said. Earlier on in your discussion there, you'd said that, or I think you said one of the things to believe is there's like 200 DATs now. A bunch of the DATs that had become DATs in the last year are trying to distance themselves. I think a bunch of them are just going to move out of the space, right? Move to, say, RWA tokenization or maybe even pivot back to what the legacy business was if they came into existence via change of control. A bunch of these companies are looking for different operating businesses, and I think this is good for us because thins out the competition. I think a bunch of these businesses become irrelevant, I guess, but not necessarily irrelevant in a negative way.
It's just they're not DATs anymore, so they're not part of the discussion. M&A is just a lot harder, I think, than many investors thought earlier on. We got that feedback a bunch of times. We haven't seen much of it in the space so far. I think there will be more, but there's not going to be 30 or 40 mergers or something here. Curious what DK's thinking?
I don't have much to add beyond, I'm going to make a claim here, which is that the more mental gymnastics you have to do to justify your existence, the worse the value proposition is for shareholders. One of the beauties of our story is I actually think we've been very consistent from day one of this being a story of Sol on steroids. We're the first Sol DAT in the U.S., the best performing Sol DAT from an equity performance perspective since launching our treasury strategy. Pretty persistent on our North Star. I see we have a question on this later on, Pete, that I'm happy to dive into because I've got lots of thoughts on it. Yeah, not a surprise to me that we've seen a lot of folks get shaken out in recent months, and I don't know.
This whole team has been through too many crypto winters to change course or get shaken out. I'm pretty proud. We're just heads down continuing to do what we can to acquire as much SOL as possible.
Well said all around. Yeah, I think our view internally too is we've got to just keep doing stuff and innovating and finding ways to differentiate, and the market will price us accordingly. I think it's fair to say, a lot of competitors I don't think have adopted that kind of mindset. I really think the epitome of that too has been on the ApeX front, which does bring me to one of the questions I had for you guys was, we spent part of March just educating folks about ApeX and why you invested into it. Maybe it'd be good to just again go over that. Where does ApeX stand relative to DFDV, and why is this something that ultimately shareholders should be aware of?
DK, are you interested in kicking that one off?
Yeah, I'm happy to chat a little bit on it. Look, one of the key ways that I think we have separated ourselves from what I call a simple copy-paste of the MSTR model, is our commitment to trying to figure out other ways to generate SOL growth and SOL per share growth over time. Right? You've seen this with us announcing our Treasury Accelerator. You've seen this with what I call our willingness to take asymmetric bets on a number of crypto and/or DeFi-related projects. ApeX for me falls squarely into that bucket. We've called this in the shareholder letter, a natural extension of our role is the bridge between TradFi and DeFi. It's literally the DFDV logo. Just as we bring institutional capital on chain, the idea with ApeX is that ApeX translates DAT-preferred equity and yield into a yield-bearing stablecoin.
Why it matters? I think. To be blunt, to be bullish on ApeX is to be bullish on stablecoin market growing over time. I think given a lot of the Market-to-NAV dynamics that we have alluded to thus far on this call, it's to be bullish on the thesis that DATs are going to need to take on leverage to grow more of the underlying, over time, more crypto per share over time. Saylor has kind of laid out a very nice playbook for preferred equity being a very elegant form of leverage for DATs to keep accumulating more of the underlying. Now, to be clear, we don't control ApeX's decisions. ApeX is an independent protocol. The project has been pretty explicit that it intends to include DAT-preferred equity in the collateral list.
Today, that's STRC, by far, and then a little bit of Strive SATA as well. I think given that direction, it's not inconceivable to imagine that any future preferred equity offering that we pursue as a company at DFDV could be a candidate for inclusion in said collateral basket for ApeX. That dynamic, should it come to fruition, would be, or I should say could be pretty beneficial to us as a company. It could be beneficial to our cost of capital, and then of course by extension, beneficial to our North Star SOL per share growth. That's a little bit of a summary. Parker, Joseph, you have anything else to add, please feel free.
Yeah, thanks. Maybe just a little more broadly across the DAT Space. You mentioned STRC and SATA, however you say it. I think there's going to be a large number of DATs that issue variable rate perpetual preferred. I think from the DAT's perspective, it's an excellent instrument for growing crypto asset per share. Whether it's Solana with DFDV or otherwise. ApeX's strategic positioning made a lot of sense from our perspective from, I guess, given our DAT status already, our perspective or our vantage point where we think this instrument type is very powerful for DATs. While only two have issued them so far, we think there's more coming.
Awesome. Thanks, guys. Yeah, I'm super excited about what's coming forward with ApeX and how it'll ultimately feed back into DFDV. I think it's one of these parts that is not really well understood and not quite yet appreciated, which is fine. I think with time that'll really change. Yeah, I'll just shut up there. The best is yet to come on that front. Guys, just to round out March, looking to April and beyond, are there any focuses that we have internally or maybe there's something too on the Treasury Accelerator front that we want to highlight, perhaps?
Sure. I can jump in on that one. We've been making some good progress on Treasury Accelerator. We've got DFDV U.K., ticker symbol there is DFDV, making progress. The FCA, the regulators are pretty slow-moving. I guess the Brits aren't necessarily known for their speed, at least these days. That's something we're just working our way through. They're very diligent and crossing all the T's, dotting all the I's. We're making good progress there, but hopefully soon. We may have another announcement here pretty soon. I'm excited about another country. I won't spill the tea too much, although, you guys know which ones we've been focused on. It's been a long journey getting one of these companies across the line. Yeah, we're continuing to.
We said we're going to do it, and so we're continuing to make progress on doing what we said we're going to do. We'll keep you guys updated, but definitely stay tuned.
TLDR notifications on for DeFi Development Corp's Twitter.
That's right.
We'll leave it at that. Guys, shifting focus, shareholder letter related. There was a lot in this really good piece. It's kind of crazy too. We're coming up on a year for DeFi Development Corp. Between, I think, the shareholder letter and we're about to take a one-year victory lap, maybe it'd be good to just take a giant step back and reevaluate things and throw out the question of why does SPS matter? This is a metric that we came up with. Obviously, it's inspired by Strategy. It'd be good to maybe quickly hit on what's the closest analog to TradFi and, just to remind folks, why is this our North Star here?
Yeah, I'll jump in on this one, Pete. SPS growth doesn't just matter. In some ways, it might be the only thing that matters. Let's talk about why. A DAT's value add is inherently tied to its ability to generate an ROI above and beyond the underlying asset that it holds. There are several ways that we can do this, but simplistically, the best way is to accumulate more of the asset itself. For shareholders who actually capture the upside associated with this, I'll call it outsized rate of accumulation, the rate of asset accumulation needs to exceed the rate of common share dilution. This is what Strategy calls BTC yield. We call this SOL per share growth. You can call it total SOL yield, organic and inorganic, whatever.
The growth matters because, and I'm going to state this very, very loudly, the growth rate is what influences the premium to net asset value, and the premium to net asset value obviously translates or leads to equity outperformance in a bull market. We see examples of this in TradFi all the time. One that I was looking at very recently, so I'll give the concrete example here. Reddit trades somewhere around 18 times 2026 consensus EBITDA. Their stock is up 40% the last year. Contrast that with Meta, which currently trades at a low teens EBITDA, and their stock is only up, last I checked, 10%, 11% over the last year. Why the delta on the multiples on the equity performance? Well, because Reddit is growing 70% year-over-year and has doubled its ad revenue market share.
It doesn't really matter that Reddit's ad revenues are a fraction of Meta's. The rate of growth is what matters. Similarly, I think the rate of growth on a crypto per share basis is ultimately what's going to matter for a DAT. If I think SOL is going to 10K, which we do here at DFDV, I, as a shareholder, want as much of that as possible on a per share basis. Again, I'll emphasize the rate of growth of the crypto asset on a per share basis is what drives the value for a DAT. I know there's probably a little bit of a prevailing, what do they call it, view or a consensus view that, I don't know, DATs are basically just access vehicles now. There's greater regulatory clarity, so there's ETFs out there.
There's the ability to buy spot, like the NAV premiums won't come back. If that were the case, Strategy's Market-to-NAV would not have expanded after the Bitcoin ETFs came to market. If you actually look at the figures, Strategy's Market-to-NAV was under 2x on January 10th, 2024. Spot Bitcoin ETFs start trading a day later, and Strategy's Market-to-NAV actually expands and goes all the way up to 3x or 4x over the span of that year, right? There's clearly something else going on there that isn't just, I'm going to say, access to the underlying that matters for NAV premium and for DAT outperformance. We continue to believe that it's inherently tied to the rate of growth. That's my summary on why SOL per share growth matters and why that'll continue to be our North Star.
Jeez, clip that. That was great.
Yeah, who wants to follow that?
I think we're at time. Got to go, boys.
Yeah, that was great. Great overview. A lot was covered in the shareholder letter, like I've said a million times. Between that and now, we are a year in, how do we want investors to evaluate the performance of DATs going forward? I don't know, DK, if this is a good follow-up, but what is our view?
Well, I want to interject something, and you reminded me. I should have had a calendar or something for this. Today is one day after. Our birthday was yesterday for DFDV. If you looked at it as a day of the week, the Monday at this exact time a year ago was when we first announced and when the first non-Bitcoin treasury vehicle was launched, and I think the third treasury vehicle anywhere was MicroStrategy, Semler, and then us. Pretty cool seeing the progress that we've made in 366 days, I guess. In terms of evaluating going forward, I do think ultimately everything flows into SPS. I'm going to just say a lot of the same things that DK's already said. That should be just like with another company, it all flows back to, say, earnings growth or earnings.
I think it ultimately all flows back to SPS growth. You can look at things like size, you could look at things like leverage, you could look at all these other metrics, and those are all basically indicators of potential future SPS growth. Ultimately, SPS growth is what matters. I think these other indicators can be important as predictors of future SPS growth. Just like on, say, the hyperscaler AI build-out stuff, people are looking at CapEx as a key metric. That's not because CapEx is the important metric, it's because that's eventually going to flow through to earnings growth, is the hope. There may be some metrics that people focus more on in different environments. Maybe it's leverage, maybe it's SOL balance, maybe it's your cost structure. Maybe in a bear market, they focus on that.
Ultimately, that all still goes back to SPS growth. SPS growth is this great all-weather metric that you can look at bull markets, bear markets, sideways markets, and you can also compare cross-asset. You can look at SPS growth, ether per share growth, which I guess is EPS growth, funny enough, Bitcoin per share growth. You can compare us to MicroStrategy with that if you want. It's a great single condensed metric that I think people should look at. There's some other secondary metrics that you could look at in different environments that could be predictors of future SPS growth as well.
Yeah, I'll hit on some of the, call it secondary metrics. Look, Parker's right, that SOL per share growth is what matters. We have a relentless obsession with SOL per share growth. But I think one of the secondary things to look at is what I would call the oscillation of leverage throughout the market cycle. Because, of course, leverage and intelligent leverage is a very key tool in a bear market, and we want to maintain it. I call this the coiling of the spring, if you will, so that when the bull market returns, you're flying at the fastest rate possible. In the bull, we expect to equitize some of this coiled spring while we're on that trajectory and as Market-to-NAV premiums return.
The promise of SOL on steroids is to make sure we don't de-lever in the bear, and then, of course, drive as much attention and volume and equity value in the bull as SOL starts ripping. Hopefully that gives investors a little bit of a taste of the philosophy we have, if you will, on making sure that SPS growth is going to be above, I'm going to say, market rates going into the next bull.
Yeah, I like that coiled spring analogy, and that's exactly what we want to create operationally. It's not just having a healthy amount of leverage and not de-levering at the bottom, so to speak. It's also building out the, I would say, the marketing and awareness leverage. I think Saylor did an excellent job of this in the last bear market, where he was on every single podcast, he was writing all these pieces, he was building his Twitter following. He was doing all these things so that everyone had heard the story. They heard of Michael Saylor through the last bear market. Then when things started moving, everyone was immediately able to hop on the train because they already knew the story. They already knew who he was. He'd already built that trust. People were effectively just waiting for price to confirm everything else.
For most investors, price is what confirms everything, and that's why most investors like to buy things that are going up. In the same vein, if we can continue to do marketing in as high quality as possible manner, such that we can build the understanding of what our business is about, why SPS growth is important, why intelligent leverage makes sense, why Solana is we believe the leading candidate for crypto asset growth, all these things. When markets do start to turn, it's like you've already set all the gas cans around the fire and unscrewed the caps, and you're ready to go.
That way, we're not scrambling like we were in the last bull market to tell the story, tell the narrative while the rocket ship was taking off and we were trying to dump gas into it as quickly as we could get it. We've already got all the gas lined up. I think almost as important as the financial leverage is the operational and marketing leverage effectively. I think we've been making a lot of headway there. We're going to continue to pound the table to build that out, and I think it'll be an important part of our story going forward.
Man, I'm totally bummed that we missed the one-year birthday, but we'll have to get something out. We've got to find a way to celebrate. It's never too late to celebrate.
Yeah, we'll wait till we're a teenager before we do something really big and blow it out. Maybe we can give DFDV its own car or something.
Yeah, good idea.
Speaking of rather DFDV being a year old, we did a lot on the capital markets front. The letter did a pretty good job of highlighting that between the converts, the PIPEs we did, our ELOC. I guess just broadly speaking, guys, how should the investors be thinking about these tools relative to SPS growth? Maybe is there anything that we've learned? I know we have, but curious to hear what you guys think that stands out in terms of learning lessons with some of these sources of capital.
Joseph, what you got?
Oh, geez. I was like, yeah, we learned a lot of stuff. I'm not sure if I want to share that stuff. Yeah, I'll try it. I guess, how do I put this? I think that we've done a lot of things right. We moved very fast and I think the right path is SPS focus, high leverage, don't de-lever in the bear. I think this creates a leveraged SOL exposure that can't get shaken out and is a proper value proposition for a public company for Solana investors. It brings something that is unique in the market. It's better than an ETF for upside exposure to SOL. It's better than a leveraged ETF. It's better than the other DATs that don't have leverage or that have different types of leverage. I'm really happy with those outcomes.
I think that if we were doing it again, I would've paid more attention to the preferred market earlier on. I think when STRC launched in July, they were really onto something and we probably could've moved faster. I don't think that we would've gotten an idea for a Variable Rate Perpetual Preferred earlier than that, but I think that that would've been great. Then we might have gotten the leverage that we've got from different sources with a potentially lower cost and even longer duration. I guess I think we would've been on the same path, but we might have been further down the path. Yeah. I'm happy and proud of where we got in a year, for sure.
All right. Thanks for taking a stab at that. Guys, we just have a few more. I know we've got under 10 minutes to get through some of these last ones. Yeah, just real quick. One of the other things in the shareholder letter that we reiterated was a long-term vision of One SOL per Share by 2028. Any kind of thoughts on what needs to go right for us to hit that?
I'll take a first stab at that one. In the letter, we made this pretty explicit that you obviously need an improving crypto environment heading into next year and the year after, right? Obviously if we were in some unprecedented, prolonged bear market over the next two years where SOL is kind of range bound, it's low vol, it's not breaking out, that wouldn't be a fantastic setup for the DAT flywheel really returning. Obviously, we don't view that to be the case. It's certainly not even our, what would I call it, base bear case, if you will. That hasn't happened historically and we're obviously SOL bulls. But I would certainly say that's probably the most important element for hitting our SOL per share target, ironically.
Because there's almost a part of me that says, "Yeah, I would love for SOL prices to stay depressed so that we can acquire as much here as possible." That's certainly true as well. I'd rather have SOL, call it 40%-50% higher with all the optionality available to us on the capital raising front to obviously hit that one SOL per share by December 2028. I think the other element too is a little bit of this. I'm not going to call it consolidation because I don't think it's just consolidation, but like a shaking out of the broader DAT market for all the reasons that we've mentioned before, whether it's teams either pivoting because they get impatient or they lose conviction in the underlying.
Having hundreds of DATs all competing for the same pool of capital even in the next bull would put some kind of, I'm going to say ceiling on the NAV premiums overall. I also don't expect it to be the case that there are going to be hundreds. We've already started to see a bit of a shaking out and some folks just throwing in the towel on the treasury strategy. While consolidation in this space won't be as straightforward as the market expects, as we said on our earnings call, I do expect we'll see some of it, and that would obviously, I think create a very different environment a year from now, two years from now for folks to go out and creatively fundraise. That's a little bit of my view on the, call it parameters for the long-term guidance.
Just broadly speaking to the DAT vertical, how do we see things evolving over the next three to five years? We hit on this in some ways during today's spaces, but we'd love to hear everyone's thoughts on that front.
Yeah. I think maybe expanding on what I said earlier. I talked about the maybe shorter-term competitive environment, but I think the role that DATs are going to play in the major ecosystems that they occupy, I think, is going to change. It's a natural evolution. You're seeing it already. That role is going to be of not only a key marketing champion for the asset outside of the ecosystem, right? Saylor telling all the hedge funds, DFDV telling all the hedge funds and the institutional investors about why Bitcoin or Solana is important, but also as a key ecosystem participant or driver. I'm not fully explaining myself well, but effectively as a key voice in the developmental direction of the ecosystem. Right? I'll comment on the Bitcoin side because that's a very heated topic on the Quantum stuff.
MicroStrategy has a very large voice, and you're probably not going to see, for example, BlackRock step in to have an opinion on the Quantum BIPs and the migrations there, and whether Satoshi's coin should be burned or some of these other topics, maybe until the very end when it's about to materially impact things. I think generally, say a BlackRock's going to take a step back. The exchanges may get involved in these conversations, but they support a whole bunch of different assets, and so they also tend to take a bit more of a wait and see approach. I know Coinbase got involved in the block wars with Bitcoin Cash way back in the day. From an institutional championing perspective, I think MicroStrategy has one of the strongest voices as such a large holder.
Now, pivoting the conversation to the Solana side, yes, there's a Solana Foundation. They've got a pretty outsized, strong voice. Their stated goal has been to fade over time. There needs to be others that pick up the standard. I think naturally it would make sense for DFDV to be one of the top two or three holders of Solana on the planet. If that's the case, then we should have a pretty active role in driving the ecosystem forward. That's on a technical front, but that's also on some of these more, I don't know, philosophical debates, if you will. There can be pure technical like, "Hey, we should implement this upgrade that reduces latency or it increases bandwidth." Right? There's other changes that are maybe a little more philosophical.
Changes around maybe how difficult it is to run a validator or the cost to run a validator or what monetary policy should look like, so on. We should be a voice in those conversations, and I think in general, DATs should be a voice in those conversations for their respective ecosystems. I think you're going to see more of that over time, and I think it's a good, healthy thing for the ecosystem. Yeah, I don't know. Maybe it's a hot take, but that's a prognostication that I have.
Great. Good deal, guys. Last question here. I know we're coming up on time. The letter acknowledged a tougher environment. How do you guys feel about just general state of crypto and are there any massive risks that you see to the model right now? I guess it doesn't have to be massive either, but obviously there's a lot going on in the world. Sentiment's pretty in the gutters. Just general risks or anything that's top of mind.
Yeah, I could take that one as well. Yeah, DK touched on it. A longer-term bear market that goes beyond the standard cycle, I think would be a risk. SOL going to, I don't know, $1 or $0.50 would be a risk. I think it'd be a risk for the ecosystem. Yeah. Maybe a bit of a risk more to Solana than to say our business would be some giant issue with the Solana network. Let's call it a week-long outage or some massive bug is discovered. I'm just rattling off random risks at this point. Look, we're in crypto, so certainly things are not without risks. We've planned for a bear market, we planned for a bear market from the beginning.
A pullback into the 60s range, 50s range, 40 range is certainly not out of the question and something that we plan for and prepare for. Yeah, the risks are always there, of course. I think we've done a good job to so far mitigate them, and we'll continue to be diligent about all areas of risk. Certainly, we are taking a look at the way we hold coins on-chain post-Drift, and taking another look at how we evaluate platforms that we hold assets on. You could say that's a risk, and we take that very seriously. Yeah, nothing I see as existential that's highly likely, if that's a question.
Yeah, no, appreciate it. It's always good to just hit on the risks and, I think more importantly too, remind market participants and investors that we're fully aware of the risks and constantly thinking about potential downside scenarios and how we navigate that, so we can just ensure that the team can continue to persist through the bear and into the bull. I think we're all totally okay with things going south if they do. Also we remain long-term super optimistic, and I don't think that there's anything that could break our spirits, knock on wood. I don't think there's anything that's going to break our spirits in that regard. Cool, guys. Well, I think we're over time here. Thanks Parker, Joseph, DK, for coming in. Thanks everyone in the audience for sending in your questions. As always, comments, questions, concerns, be sure to reach out to us.
We appreciate any and all feedback, and we'll catch you all on the next one. In service to SOL per share growth, this is Pete and team signing out. Take care, everyone.
See you all.
Thank you.