Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to the day two of the Sidoti Micro-Cap Conference. My name is Aashi Shah, and I'm an Analyst here at Sidoti. With me today, I have Upexi, Inc. Joining me in welcoming Brian Rudick, Chief Strategy Officer. We have 30 minutes today, including the Q&A. I would like to request everyone in the audience to submit your questions at the Q&A section at the bottom of your screen. With that, Brian, I will let you take over.
Thank you so much. Hi, everybody, and thank you very much for your interest in Upexi. I am Brian Rudick, the Chief Strategy Officer. We are the leading Solana treasury company, so think MicroStrategy just with a different cryptocurrency. I will spend about 25 minutes talking about the company, the digital asset treasury space, and why we believe we are extremely well positioned. Then I will make sure to leave five minutes at the end so we can get into Q&A. Yes, Upexi is and was a consumer brand owner. So we own three different consumer brands where we sell direct-to-consumer or via Amazon. We put up roughly mid-teens revenues, and that business is basically break-even. It was a small company before we pivoted to become a digital asset treasury company.
And in February, we actually saw the U.S. administration was turning from a headwind to a tailwind with respect to digital assets, and we decided that it would have this positive undercurrent going forward for at least the next four years. And so we revealed that we had plans to expand into crypto. We honed that strategy in April, and we raised $100 million to invest in a Solana treasury. And this was actually the very first large-scale equity raise for an altcoin treasury, meaning to invest in anything beyond Bitcoin in the U.S. We began staking our SOL tokens almost immediately to earn a roughly 7% yield on that. So our treasury is this productive asset. In May, we did our first large purchase of locked Solana, and you can actually buy that at a really solid 15% discount.
And those are effectively built-in gains for shareholders as that discount moves to par over time. And then in July, we did a subsequent $200 million raise. Part of this was equity. Part of it was this very novel in-kind convertible raise. And it was highly accretive. So we raised at roughly 1.6 x, and it increased our SOL per share or book value per share, however you want to think about it. And so we were able to create additional value for our shareholders. In August, we crossed the 2 million SOL mark. We have roughly 2.4 million SOL right now, valued at over $300 million. So that's where we are right now. One thing that I think is a key differentiator for us, there are several that we'll get into, but one is we've led with innovation, particularly on the capital market side.
It's so important because the barriers to entry in the treasury space are not particularly high. But at the end of the day, this is a capital markets initiative. And so we have led here on a couple of different occasions. So as I mentioned, we did the first large-scale equity raise for an altcoin treasury. And then we did the first, and to my knowledge, only in-kind convertible note, which offers investors this very differentiated risk-reward. It materially reduces credit risk, and there's big benefits for both the investors and Upexi itself. And so we're going to continue to try to lead with innovation, particularly on the capital market side. We also think we have a differentiated management team. So our CEO, Allan Marshall, founded XPO Logistics. It is now a $17 billion NYSE-listed company. Our CFO, Andy, has been with Allan for most of their careers.
I spent a decade in traditional finance, mostly at different hedge funds like Citadel, Balyasny, and Millennium, and then spent five years leading the research effort for the largest digital asset market maker. So we like to think that we have deep expertise not only in crypto, but in our view, more importantly, within the capital markets and very deep connections as well. That gives us a big leg up. Here's some background on treasury companies. So it really all started with MicroStrategy in August 2020. It was tired of seeing the purchasing power of dollars on its balance sheet fall. And so it decided to buy Bitcoin. The price of Bitcoin started to move up, and then MSTR saw its stock price move up as well. And pretty soon, the market actually ascribed it a premium valuation relative to the value of its crypto.
So in other words, its market cap has fluctuated a bit, but maybe on average has been roughly two times the value of its Bitcoin that it held. And then it actually started to issue equity to buy even more Bitcoin. And when you do that, when you issue equity at a premium, it is by definition accretive to your crypto per share. And this is how MicroStrategy has been so successful. What you saw after MicroStrategy, a number of other Bitcoin treasury companies have come along. These are all pictured in the bottom left. And then after the new U.S. administration took office, you saw this expand to altcoins or anything beyond Bitcoin, including Solana. There's a number of big, big benefits to investing in a treasury company versus just owning the underlying.
Number one is you can actually basically access the cryptocurrency in the form of a familiar equity security, so you can buy it in your Schwab or E*TRADE account, but number two, we will often trade with a beta to the digital asset, so often what you'll see in up markets is multiple expansion. So not only will the value of our treasury move up, but also the multiple that the market places on that treasury will also move up. And if you have a positive medium-term view, it's very possible that our stock can outperform the actual underlying digital asset for that reason. And then lastly, we do have these additional value accrual mechanisms. The big one, as I mentioned, is the ability to issue capital in this accretive fashion. Also mentioned the ability to buy locked Solana at a discount.
And that all in should make it gives us multiple different ways to win, as you see down here in the bottom right, a rising value of the treasury, a rising multiple placed on that treasury. And then with that higher multiple, we can do more and more accretive equity issuance. This is just a slide on MicroStrategy's wild success, talking about how successful this can be. The two things I'd point to here is until recently, MicroStrategy was legit the best performing stock in the U.S. since it turned on its treasury strategy in late 2020. And then the second component, it's more than doubled the return of Bitcoin without having very much leverage at all. And this all has to do with its ability to issue equity in this accretive fashion. Here's an overview of Solana. Basically, the TLDR, we view Solana as the leading high-performance blockchain.
And so I think of Bitcoin as essentially a store of value or digital gold. When you move over to the smart contract side of the spectrum, it is essentially a new computing paradigm. So we went from mainframe computers owned by academia to computers that were owned by individuals in the form of a PC, and then later on laptops. And now these computers owned by everybody in the sky that anyone can permissionlessly upload arbitrary computation to in the form of a smart contract to create a decentralized application. And anyone can permissionlessly interact with it. There are really three big things that stood out to us about Solana. Number one, we view it as a first, second-generation smart contract blockchain, which it basically offered a step change function in performance. So it does things like process transactions in parallel, just like modern computers do.
Number two, it has this really wonderful ecosystem of users, developers, and decentralized applications. This provides for really strong network effects. Anyone wanting to interact on-chain will go to Solana because there is a plethora of applications. And anyone wanting to build applications will likely do that on Solana because they have really wonderful distribution to a bunch of users. And then lastly, you can see on the right-hand side here, Solana is actually leading in a lot of key metrics like monthly active users, decentralized exchange volumes, and decentralized application revenues, sometimes when you even combine all the other leading chains. So our thesis is really pretty simple. We provide exposure to crypto in the form of a familiar equity security. It's even more than that. We unlock value using proven capital market strategies from strategy.
It's even more than that because we have these additional improvements on MicroStrategy's playbook in our staking and in our buying discounted locked SOL. And then we can capitalize on crypto's secular expansion, and Solana is an endgame winner, and then we can also give back to Solana with improved visibility within traditional finance through events like this. For any treasury company, there's really two different components. One is you have to maximize external visibility. You want folks to know about your underlying ecosystem and all the potential big benefits that it can offer the technology realm, and then you want them to, if they're thinking about investing in the digital asset, to do it through your company. You can see here we've got pretty extensive efforts already afoot within traditional finance, such as this presentation and the meetings today, and then also within the crypto sphere.
We're continuing to push and to be as visible as possible. Here, I would note that we do have a first mover advantage, which helps quite significantly as well. Then the second component is just the intelligent capital issuance as well. Here, we did do that $200 million raise in July, which was highly accretive. We will look to do anything that is risk-prudent and accretive based on market conditions and whatever is best for shareholders at the time. I think the key thing here is we have this demonstrated ability to issue capital in this accretive fashion, which is quite unique among treasury companies. Here is our strategy. When we raised $100 million, candidly, it was eye-popping at the time. Then a lot of folks kind of came along as treasury companies became all the rage, and $100 million didn't look quite so big anymore.
We do want to go big and go fast and raise as much capital in this accretive fashion as we can. Number two, we are backed by the crypto sphere. So we had 15 or 16 of the leading digital asset VCs invest in us. And they offer a ton of support. A lot of them have reinvested. They're linking us up with their networks. They're promoting us and leveraging their visibility for the sake of ours. And a lot of them are actually running validators at low or no cost for us so we can really capture all of that 7% staking yield that they have that expertise in order to do for us. So it's a big, big benefit for us.
And then lastly, the key thing that I think differentiates us is we are running the company to really maximize shareholder value, but in this really risk-prudent fashion. So what that means is we will not take on too much credit risk leverage. We want to make sure that we're well-positioned for any market environment. Number two, we're not going to do crazy on-chain degen trading. We're not like looping liquid staking deposits to try to pick up a small amount of yield. Our view is that the risk-adjusted return on that is low. And our alternative, really, candidly, is to just buy more locked, where when you put that discount into any sort of yield equivalent, we're making low- to mid-teens yields anyway. And then lastly, we are using operational and risk management best practices. And so we're really only using qualified custodians and diversifying among them.
And we think that this will not only position us for any environment, but really resonate with crypto and traditional investors alike. This is a slide that gets me so excited. So we have different ways to create value. Maybe I'll start on the left. We can buy locked SOL at a roughly 15% discount. What this means is we cannot sell that locked Solana on a centralized exchange, which we weren't planning to do anyway. And we cannot utilize it in DeFi, which we also weren't planning to do anyway. And because we have this buy-and-hold strategy, there's really no reason for us not to buy locked Solana. We've been buying it at a 15% discount in the past. Over time, that 15% discount will move to par as it unlocks. And we still get that 7% staking yield.
So if you think of that 15% discount as similar to OID on a bond, we are effectively doubling that 7% staking yield. This has come down a bit as some is unlocked, but currently, 42% of our book is in locked form. And that's essentially built-in gains for shareholders. Number two is intelligent capital issuance. We've talked a bit about this, but whenever you can issue equity above book value, it's by definition accretive. What we saw, very candidly, is the market was flooded with treasury companies after we came out, and it was quite successful. There are now about 200 digital asset treasury companies. And as a simple rule of supply and demand, it compressed multiples for everybody. We're trading slightly under one right now. But the reason why I mentioned that is we would not issue equity below one time.
And that is because it works both ways. If you issue equity above one, it's accretive. If you issue equity below one, it is dilutive. And my comment here is, number one, we're hopeful that we will enter into a more full bull market. And then you could very possibly or even likely see multiple expansion to where we could issue equity again. But even then, just as we are now slightly below one, we can issue in-kind convertible notes where that conversion price is typically slightly above the spot price or not slightly, I should say, materially above the spot price to where it effectively equates to quasi-selling equity should the notes convert at a nice premium to book to where it is definitely accretive to your crypto per share. And we actually demonstrated that. We raised $36 million in an in-kind convert two weeks ago.
So we can still be active despite the current market environment. Number three, we stake our Solana and earn a 7% yield. This has to do with the consensus mechanism of the blockchain. Almost all blockchains outside of Bitcoin are now proof of stake. And you are essentially helping to secure the network by pledging your cryptocurrency. And you get paid some combination of transaction fees and inflationary rewards that in Solana adds up to 7% that most folks think are basically risk-free. Nothing is obviously risk-free, but very risk-minimized. And then lastly, the biggest determinant of any treasury company performance will be the performance of the underlying cryptocurrency. Solana has pulled back a good amount since we had put this slide out. And what I'd say is the underlying fundamentals just continue to move up and to the right.
We're seeing more and more adoption by big tech and big finance. Over time, prices will follow fundamentals. We have this mega catalyst that I'll talk more about in the potential passage of U.S. legislation in the form of the Clarity Act. At just 4% of the market cap of Bitcoin, we really believe quite strongly that Solana's price will move up more likely than move down. This is a bit more on the capital markets flywheel. I'm a former banks analyst. I ran a long short book of bank stocks. I think of treasury companies as another balance sheet financial. If you think of them like a bank, I actually think it's a very helpful analogy. Banks make spread income.
And they basically borrow from depositors, and they lend to borrowers, and they make the spread between the yield on loans and the cost of deposits. And then the market will basically present value all that spread, add it to book value. Banks will trade above book value. And then if a bank issues equity above book, it is by definition accretive to its book value per share. We're the exact same way. Instead of borrowing from depositors, we raise funds from the capital markets. Instead of investing into loans, we actually invest into Solana. And we earn the spread between the return on SOL and our cost of capital. And when the market thinks that's positive, we will earn that not just this year, but in future years. They will present value that and add it to NAV.
And then we can, and I would argue, in a good market, when the market thinks future returns of Solana will be strong and outpace our cost of capital, we can and should trade above one times. And then we can monetize that, as I mentioned. So as an example, MicroStrategy historically averaging roughly two times on its multiple. When it sells equity at two times, it's effectively selling a dollar for two. We're buying Bitcoin half off. You might have heard of them talk about Bitcoin yield. They have literally created $26 billion worth of free Bitcoin for shareholders over the last six quarters using this strategy. We're doing that. And we're also doing it just like MicroStrategy with convertible bonds as well. And then when you do accretive issuance, it increases your crypto per SOL.
As long as that multiple holds, then your stock price will move up, and it feeds into this virtuous cycle that is so powerful and has created so much value in the past. This is a slide on valuation. As I mentioned earlier, we've seen 200 companies come in and do this. I think we need to work through some of this oversupply, but I actually do think that there's a lot of underlying fundamental reasons why a treasury company should trade above one times. For instance, the ability to issue equity in this accretive fashion or the ability to buy locked Solana at a discount. You don't get that if you invest in the tokens natively or you buy an alternative instrument like an ETF.
The other thing that I would point out is just from a fundamental conceptual basis, a smaller company that's underpinned by a smaller token, in my view, should trade at a higher multiple. So one reason for that is if a smaller company does a similarly sized, similarly priced raise, it'll be more accretive than a larger company. If we issued $100 million at 1.5x, it would be very nicely accretive. If MicroStrategy issues $100 million at any multiple, it's not going to move the needle because they're so big. So there should be this embedded growth premium. Similarly, because we are underpinned by a much smaller cryptocurrency, all else equal, I would argue that Solana at 4% the market cap of Bitcoin is more likely to 4x than something like Bitcoin, which is already the fifth largest asset in the world, to 4x.
So another embedded growth premium for being underpinned by a smaller cryptocurrency. And then lastly, as I mentioned, we have more embedded growth or embedded value accrual mechanisms or ways to create value than a Bitcoin treasury company does by staking to earn that 7% yield and buying a locked Solana to basically double that at a discount to double that yield. Here's a snapshot on our Solana treasury. The market has changed a bit. Now we have 2.4 million SOL valued at over $300 million. 42% is locked. We diversify across top qualified custodians and top validators. And we don't stake it ourselves. It's not our expertise. And there's actually no reason for us to delegate to validators because most of them will pass back full economics. They just want as much stake as possible.
But you can see here, here's a, in the bottom right is our purchase history. And SOL has come down here since. But we've done a pretty good job of buying on the lows and have a better average purchase price than the vast majority of our peers. Here are some key metrics. The two that I will point to, one is this adjusted SOL per share. So what you can see between April and September, we increased our SOL per share by 54%. This is the key metric and the key reason why you would invest in a treasury company. If you bought Solana on April 24th and you staked it yourself, on September 4th, you'd have 3% more Solana.
But because we have these additional ways to create value for shareholders in accretive issuance, in staking, and in buying that discounted locked SOL, we were actually able to increase the number of SOL that each shareholder has by 54%. And so this is the key unlock that a treasury company brings. The last thing that I would point to on this slide is that bottom right here, volumes have come down for everybody. But what I'd say is we're still putting up double-digit millions of volumes on average. And over the last six months of last year, we had the leading volume of any Solana treasury company. And so volumes are super important both for the model because typically when you issue equity, you drip it out into the market via an ATM or an equity line.
And that, by definition, is a function of your volumes if you don't want to hit your own stock price. And then number two, you need solid volumes to attract larger investors and investors of all kinds. And we nicely have that, whereas many of our peers are not quite there. This is a slide on why crypto. So I was in traditional finance for a decade, and I moved into crypto because I believe very deeply that it offers these really wonderful use cases and benefits that you don't get with traditional technology. So number one, you can remove intermediaries because blockchains create trust between unknown parties. And so, as you know, finance is rife with intermediaries. And that's why so much of the use case right now for digital assets is decentralized finance.
Just as one quick example, you can trade on a centralized exchange, and they might charge you 150 basis points as a transaction fee, or you could trade on a decentralized exchange, and because it is just code and there is no intermediary that is trying to maximize profits and extract as much rent as possible, they will charge you four basis points to make that transaction, so this is one of the big key benefits. Another one is the democratization of value exchange, so traditional finance is built on these antiquated rails. If you send money to somebody in another country, it can take up to five days, cost up to 5%. And that's because we have this system of correspondent banks in different jurisdictions with different rules. And they're all taking a cut and all have different operating hours.
There's no reason why we can't use internet and blockchain-based rails to send money instantly and for free. You really do get these wonderful use cases and benefits of utilizing blockchain infrastructure. Here you can see in the middle that crypto really is in secular expansion. I'm of the very strong view that there are no real underlying fundamentals that you can throw in a model, a valuation model like discounted cash flows. Prices will rely more on sentiment or the multiple than it is basically on future earnings because it's such a nascent technology. If you look at the underlying long-term fundamentals like number of crypto users, number of daily transactions, active experience developers, these are all up and to the right. Over time, prices follow fundamentals.
So especially now where we've seen a bit of a pullback in crypto prices vis-à-vis continuing improved fundamentals, I really like the future outlook. And then lastly, what I'd note is we have what I think is potentially the biggest catalyst in the history of crypto. The U.S. regulates crypto using really the 1940 Act and the 1930 Act and the 1933 Act. And those were created even before computers were around. And what we really need to see corporations come in in a big way is for clear rules of the road. They need to be confident that those rules won't change when we get a new administration. The House has passed the Clarity Act with widespread bipartisan support. It is a big, big priority for the current administration. It is now in the Senate.
Candidly, it got delayed a little bit as some of the banks pushed back against stablecoin yield. Polymarket is giving it a roughly 50% chance of passing. But I think we could be on the precipice of the biggest crypto bull market of all time if this passes. Oh, I'm sorry. Yeah. And so if you think about it, it's firms like Google and Amazon that have billions of customers, built-in trust, abundant capital, and top developers. And I really think if Clarity passes, we could have a crypto wallet on our iPhones. Google Chrome could have a built-in crypto wallet. Amazon could start accepting stablecoins. And I think that that will happen because they don't want to pay 2%-3% to use credit cards. And it'll be abstracted away so individuals won't even know they're using stablecoin and blockchain-based rails. This is a quick TLDR on why Solana.
I know we've got about three minutes left, but essentially, Solana is hyper-focused on what it calls internet capital markets. Its end goal is to have all the world's assets trading on one single liquidity venue accessible 24/7, 365 to anyone with just an internet connection. It's essentially trying to upgrade our antiquated financial infrastructure. If you think about it, things like ACH, credit card issuer networks, they were created 50 + years ago, and they're slow and they're costly. And even FinTech is a front-end wrapper on those antiquated rails. If I sent someone $10 on Venmo, it makes it easy for me to do it, but then it uses ACH in the background.
What you're seeing is a lot of folks really try to utilize blockchain-based rails to where they can have vast improvements in speed and cost, access to capital, transparency when you need it, composability, all these wonderful benefits. You're seeing that happen in a big way on Solana. Solana has over a billion of tokenized equities already. And what you've seen is funds like BlackRock, Apollo, VanEck tokenize different funds on Solana. You're seeing a lot of folks build stablecoins. This is like PayPal, SocGen , Western Union, a bunch more. You're seeing Visa start to use Solana to settle international payments. And I think that if Clarity passes, especially, I think it's almost going to be game over for big tech and big finance really adopting the use of public blockchains like Solana. And I think Solana is really well positioned and Upexi is too.
The last slide I will leave you with, and then maybe we'll have time for a question, maybe not, is just why Upexi. I think there's really four reasons and four things that differentiate us. So number one, we've led with innovation, and we will continue to do that. Like I mentioned, we did the first large-scale equity PIPE for an altcoin treasury. We did the first, and I believe only, in-kind convertible issuance. We're going to continue to lead with innovation. Number two, we think we have a differentiated management team with a very deep understanding of the capital markets and deep ties to folks in both traditional finance and crypto. Number three, we have a differentiated strategy where we want to maximize value for shareholders, but in this risk-prudent manner. We think this positions us for any market and will appeal to investors of all kinds.
And then lastly, we actually have a very strong track record of creating value for shareholders with that large increase in Solana per share that very candidly, most treasury companies have not been able to do. And so if you look at that as a potential indicator of our ability to increase our SOL per share in the future, I think it bodes really well. So I think we're in this really great spot and really looking forward to 2026. Yeah, if there's any questions or it might have been at time, but I'll turn it back over at this time.
Thank you so much for the presentation, Brian. Unfortunately, we're at time, so there will not be a lot of time for questions. I request everybody in the audience, if you have any questions, you can send it over to us at conference@sidoti.com, and then we can send it to Brian. But thank you so much for spending time with us today. Everybody in the audience, thank you for joining us today at the Sidoti Micro-Cap Conference. Thank you so much.
Thank you.