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- [00:00]
A
The challenge with Bitcoin is Bitcoin doesn't do anything. It's just, it's your pet rock, you put it under your mattress, just sits there. Solana is not that. Solana has this thriving ecosystem of all these defi protocols, these depend teams. So you have all of this like cool activity happening on chain and we've realized there's an opportunity to not only tap into all of that stuff to earn incremental yields for our shareholders, but to then obviously take this idea of defi and of trading that Solana provides and embedded into all kinds of applications and services around the Internet.
- [00:36]
B
I'm now joined by co founder and managing partner of Multicoin Capital and chairman of Forward Industries, Kyle Simani. Kyle, how's it going?
- [00:43]
A
Jen, Marissa, thanks so much for having me.
- [00:45]
B
Okay, what's the most exciting thing you've done in the last two days?
- [00:49]
A
I went skydiving.
- [00:51]
B
Okay, that is very exciting.
- [00:53]
C
Was it a first time?
- [00:54]
A
Second time. I went skydiving like 14 years ago. But like the most iconic skydiving in the world is over the Palm in Dubai, so I had to do it.
- [01:03]
B
All right, and I'm going to put you on the spot. Bring that back to Breakpoint, to break point. How does skydiving, how does taking that risk and doing this beautiful thing bring us back to Breakpoint and how you're interacting in the salon?
- [01:17]
A
Have you ever traded a meme coin? It's that risk. It's that risk.
- [01:19]
C
The exhilaration.
- [01:20]
A
The exhilaration, the adrenaline. No, I think in all seriousness, thing I've been most excited about was I got some time backstage yesterday with the team from State Street. They just launched their new tokenized Treasuries products. And I think we've seen similar announcements coming from JP Morgan, from some big firms out of the uk. It just seems like all of the major fund managers and asset issuers are issuing tokenized fund products on Solana and that's just incredible to see.
- [01:47]
C
So we're talking about a sole Treasury. How does that take shape and what is the plan there?
- [01:53]
A
Yeah, so I launched Ford Industry. I led a $1.65 billion pipe into Ford Industries along with my co sponsors at Jumping Galaxy a few months ago. Today, Ford Industries is the largest Solana digital asset treasury company in the world by about a factor of 4x or so we initiate. We endeavored on this because we thought there was a really interesting opportunity not to have a vehicle that holds soul in public markets, but to have a kind of Berkshire Hathaway style publicly traded company that can use its balance sheet to make really accretive and strategic acquisitions in and around the crypto ecosystems and to apply Solana's technology in really interesting, disruptive and potential as very creative ways to shareholders.
- [02:33]
B
The next question I was going to ask you is I've seen some things circulating the Internet, people saying that you're the Michael Saylor of Solana, but it sounds like the business model is a little bit different than than Saylor's model. What do you think when you hear folks saying that and tell us a little bit more about the acquisitions and the strategy for Ford Industries as we move into 2026.
- [02:52]
A
Yeah, I'm very flattered whenever, whenever people say that. I've been hearing it now for a little while. I know Michael and we had a chance to sit down with him a number of times. He's super awesome. I love the evangelism he's done for bitcoin. The challenge with bitcoin is bitcoin doesn't do anything. It's just. It's your pet rock. You put it under your mattress, just sits there. Solana is not that Solana has this thriving ecosystem of all these defi protocols, these depend teams. I was just talking earlier today with Sorare, this soccer NFT trading card thing, they migrated to Salon a few weeks ago. So you have all of this like cool activity happening on chain and we've realized there's an opportunity to not only tap into all of that stuff to earn incremental yields for our shareholders, but to then obviously take this idea of defi and of trading that Solana provides and embed it into all kinds of applications and services around the Internet. And so those are the kinds of acquisitions we're looking to do. I can't name names of specific companies, but I can say we are now actively in discussion with looking at a bunch of deals and I'm optimistic that we'll be able to find some pretty out there ideas and apply after acquiring those companies. Put crypto in them in really cool ways.
- [03:59]
B
Do you think all the digital asset treasury companies we've seen come to fruition over the past year are still going to be around in a few years from now?
- [04:05]
A
Very unlikely.
- [04:06]
B
Okay, what does that consolidation look like? Like who's going to, who's going to be able to weather the storm?
- [04:11]
A
You know, we had multicoin our, we just celebrated our 8th birthday. The folks at Jump have been doing trading crypto for about 10 years. Folks at Galaxy about 8 or 8 years or so. All of us have been through multiple market cycles and we've all survived and ultimately thrived by making big decisions and big trades in bear markets. We have the balance sheet, we have the team, we have the talent to survive. And so we feel like that washout is going to be a really great opportunity for us. The big challenge that this DAPP market faces to consolidate is that a lot of these DAT companies have a lot of structure on them. I won't name names here, but if you go read the filings of a lot of these DAT companies, what you'll see is that a lot of the insiders effectively can block a transaction or have almost blocking rights on a transaction. You'll see things that, you know, the M Nav on the public dashboard says 0.7 or 0.8, but they have leverage on their balance sheet and so their M Nav net of debt is 1.5. And so like you can't acquire that asset. There's that I've seen for other assets that 95% of the tokens that the dad holds are locked. And so, you know, like these, these, these companies could easily trade down to 0.1 or 0.2 mnav. And I do think you're going to see a lot of these drift down into, into that range.
- [05:26]
B
Is that going to be bad for the industry? Like, just talk to me a little bit about sentiment if that happens because there are a lot of people who are very excited about right now. Do you think that's going to be a hurdle that the industry has to overcome?
- [05:38]
A
I mean, I don't think there's a reason to be excited about that because like all they do is like, at least in their current incarnation is like they talk on TV and then maybe buy some stuff that's like not exciting. And that's not why we launch Forward Industries. I'm very excited for things to drift down the point one or point to M NAV because that creates opportunity for us and of our shareholders.
- [05:57]
C
So we've highlighted some of the shortcomings of this current generation of dax. So what does that next version of it look like? What are some of the opportunities that we sort of identified that can carry the next generation of them into the longer term?
- [06:11]
A
Yeah, look at forward. We are already doing a lot of those things. So we started running our own validator probably a week or two after the pipe closed. We announced at our earnings call a couple of weeks ago that we are launching a Prop amm, which is basically an on chain market maker on the slaughter blockchain that's in testing now. It's going to go live, I think in the next few weeks here, maybe sooner. What's amazing about that is that if we look at some of our competitors, they are also announcing similar things, but they are announcing massive dilution to their shareholders to launch these equivalent initiatives. For Forward to launch a validator, for Forward to launch an lst, Forward to launch an on chain market making business. We've encouraged zero incremental dilution to offer those services. I consider all that stuff table stakes, that stuff's not fancy. We got to do it and we're going to do it. We're going to earn more yield for our shareholders. The real opportunity at hand is to go identify interesting assets in the world and apply crypto in compelling ways. And given our backgrounds at Multicoin, Jump and Galaxy, given our relationships in the ecosystem, the trust we've engendered with all of these different parties, we think we are in the prime position to negotiate incredible deals for our shareholders.
- [07:18]
B
Just before we let you go, I want to draw on what's going on at Multicoin as we head into 2026. What's your investment thesis? What are you really excited about?
- [07:27]
A
I mean, our investment. These things haven't really changed. We believe that crypto is going to power global finance. Solana is going to be the home of Internet capital markets. And we invest at all layers of the stack, from core infrastructure and cryptographic primitives all the way up through applications. This year we've been spending a lot of energy on prediction markets. We invested in Kalashi, we've invested in a few other prediction market teams and we expect there's going to be a lot more really cool consumer applications in the years to come that embed crypto in a really fundamental way.
- [07:56]
B
Kyle, thanks so much for joining us at the desk. It was a pleasure.
- [07:58]
A
Jan, Marissa, thank you all.