Zack Guzman
5 min read
In This Article:
Does Solana Need Its Own Michael Saylor and Strategy? originally appeared on TheStreet.
For the last five years, Michael Saylor has been synonymous with one of the boldest Bitcoin bets in financial history — transforming MicroStrategy into a proxy Bitcoin ETF before one even existed. Now, a new playbook is being written and this time, it’s not Bitcoin that’s the focus — it’s Solana.
“There are so many institutional investors who prefer equities,” said Matt Sigel, Head of Digital Asset Research at VanEck. “A big part of it is the governance and disclosure is standardized… those securities can fit right alongside a typical equity portfolio.”
VanEck has been leading the charge on the institutional front, filing for the first Solana ETF in June last year and continuing to await updates as the U.S. gears up for what could be a post-Gensler regulatory reset. But before that milestone, there’s a race underway in the public markets — one that mirrors the early days of Bitcoin’s treasury strategy boom. At the center of it is DeFi Dev Corp, a company modeled loosely after MicroStrategy, but with its own twist.
“We kind of think of it as the MicroStrategy 2.0,” said Parker White, COO of DeFi Dev Corp. “Because Solana is a native yield asset and it's this kind of fuel inside of this whole DeFi ecosystem, there's a bunch of things that you can do with Solana… to generate extra yield as opposed to Bitcoin, which… kind of sits in a vault.”
White says the goal is simple: “We believe we can stack SOL faster than any other entity on the planet.”
But expectations are high. According to Sigel, “MicroStrategy famously trades at about 100% premium to the value of its Bitcoin. There’s three Solana treasury companies more or less. They’re trading at 4- to 6-times the value of their Solana.” That has since come down a bit as Solana's price has retreated the past few weeks.
But nonetheless, that kind of market premium reflects a growing appetite for exposure — not just to Solana as a token, but to the broader thesis that it might become the winning Layer-1 blockchain in a crowded field.
“We think the most likely scenario is that most of the economic activity on open source blockchains will consolidate into one or a small handful of Layer-1s,” Sigel said. “We think [Solana] has the best shot of becoming that leading blockchain.”
Part of that optimism comes from real technical performance. But another part is just plain memetics. Sigel predicted late last year that Solana could surpass $500 per coin in 2025.
“How strong is the culture [and] meme-ability?” Sigel asked rhetorically. “It's really validating to the thesis to have now three public companies that have committed to that treasury strategy.”
