← The Wolf Of All Streets
The Wolf Of All Streets
Is Solana Becoming Wall Street’s Favorite Bet? This $1.5B Whale Thinks So! | Kyle Samani
00:45:06
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- [00:00]
A
We all know that crypto and blockchain are taking over the world. But do you believe that all markets will eventually be on chain? The question isn't actually if. It's when to unpack how this transformation is currently unfolding. I sat down with Kyle Samani, co founder and managing partner at Multicoin Capital and chairman of Forward Industries.
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B
Nasdaq came out a week ago, and they said, we're going to trade tokenized securities in Q3, 20, 26. And I was like, man, like, we need to move faster, make things happen.
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A
Kyle explains how his vision for building on chain capital markets was inspired by Project Crypto, an initiative from current SEC Chairman Paul Atkins.
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B
You know, SEC Chairman Paul Atkins gave a speech seven weeks ago or so, and he announced Project crypto to the 4,000 employees at the SEC, and he said, hey, guys, we need to move US securities markets on chain.
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A
And why Solana is uniquely positioned to power this shift.
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B
I think Solana today is in the best position to capture that opportunity for these on chain securities for a number of reasons. That includes kyc. That includes dividends. That includes stock splits and reverse stock splits. That includes the ability to revoke ownership and reissue elsewhere. There's a bunch of these things you need to have to be a functional security. All of those functions are built into Solana mainnet.
- [01:10]
A
Today we dive into Ford Industries bold plan to become one of the first fully on chain native companies. Explore how traditional finance will migrate onto blockchain rails and discuss what this means for investors, entrepreneurs, and the future of the global economy. That's dope. This episode is brought to you by Binance, the world's number one crypto exchange, trusted by over 270 million users worldwide. Start your crypto journey with binance@binance.com Binance is not available in prohibited countries, including the U.S. check its terms for more information. Www.binance.com en terms. How do we even introduce you now, Kyle?
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B
You know, I think for the purposes of this podcast, I mean, it's like. I think it's. I think it's both. Yeah, both, you know, founder and managing partner of Multiple Capital and chairman of Ford Industries.
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A
Yeah, perfect. For the purpose of this podcast, I guess we're moving on to Ford Industries. Right? And obviously the treasury narrative has gained a lot of steam. It's been a roller coaster, to say the least. But you guys have come in with an exceptional presence.
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B
Appreciate that. We're. We're pretty excited to be where we're at. And look, we just got to the starting line. A few days ago. So we've got a long journey ahead of us.
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A
Okay, so why a Solana treasury company in a world where Bitcoin treasury companies obviously became exceptionally popular, clearly on the heels of what strategy or microstrategy has pulled off over the years? Then we saw sort of a move by Tom Lee to make Ethereum treasury companies very large. Obviously you're leading the charge here on Solana Treasuries at least as the biggest. There's been some in existence for a while.
- [03:02]
B
Yeah, I mean, you know, I'd say I was a little skeptical of digital asset treasury companies a few months ago. And I've come around for a bunch of reasons, the most important of which is like, look, Bitcoin digital asset Treasuries don't do anything other than financial engineering. They just lever up and buy Bitcoin. At least so far. Maybe they'll change, but as of now, that's what they do. And with Solana, there's actually opportunity to build the future. You know, SEC Chairman Paul Atkins gave a speech a few weeks, about seven weeks ago or so, and he announced Project crypto to the 4,000 employees at the SEC. And he said, hey guys, we need to move US securities markets on chain. And I've been reflecting on, like, what is it going to take for that to happen? And like, that's not just going to happen because Jerry Atkins gave the speech and snapped his fingers. It's going to happen because people try to move over and that's going to require engagement. And further from Nasdaq and Izzy, it's going to require dtcc, it's going to require the banks. And look, none of these parties are like, incentivized to move quickly and like, make this happen. And in fact, NASDAQ came out a week ago and they said we're going to trade tokenized securities in Q3 2026. So like, you know, that probably means Q3 27 is like my assumption of what that actually means. And I was like, man, we need to move faster and make. Make things happen. As chairman of Ford Industries, I'm now in a position to effectuate change and make Project Crypto happen. We are working diligently now to be in a place to tokenize our own equity. And I think we'll be able to share more about that soon.
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A
Galaxy is one of your partners and they did that with their own equity. Right. Doesn't take a genius to figure out that that's possible with the existing partnership you have.
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B
Correct. But the difference between us And Galaxy is, Galaxy is just a much bigger company and they're going to be less nimble once we get our equity tokenized. Then there's, we want to do on chain fundraising, we want to be able to do dividends, shareholder governance. Someone has to be first to do all of these things. And we are in a better position to move faster and be more nimble than Galaxy, Coinbase or anyone else. So that is something we strive to do. The other side of this, of course, is just that's all capital market side of forward industries. And then the other side of this is like core business operations. The very first thing that Ford Industries did after closing on the pipe last week was buy a one million dollar market order of Solana on chain. We tweeted the transaction id. It's all out there. And I think that's important for obviously a starter for digital asset treasury company. But beyond, you know, like that we want to be able to pay vendors on chain, we want to be able to do payroll on chain, we want to be able to show that you can run a publicly traded company natively on chain. And ultimately I hope Ford Industries will be the most on chain, native company, publicly traded company in the world. I think there's value for the Sloan ecosystem in doing that and obviously accelerating the vision of Project Crypto.
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A
So interesting. I want to touch on something you said that I agree with. Is that basically Bitcoin treasury companies, to me, I just call them hedge funds. I hate the term treasury company because there's no way to beat Bitcoin using Bitcoin. Right? I was a huge skeptic of them from the very beginning. When I was pitched 25 of them my first week, my first hour, I should say, in Vegas Bitcoin conference, all of my Spidey senses started tingling. I was just very concerned about what that meant for the market and certainly what it was going to mean for shareholders of any of these companies. Then we started seeing this proliferation obviously of altcoin treasury companies. And at first I was a skeptic, but then it sort of came to me that beating Ethereum or Solana using Ethereum Solana is much easier than beating Bitcoin, right? I mean, what yield are you getting simply by staking your assets?
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B
Roughly 8%.
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A
Right? So you can beat Solana by 8% simply by having Solana using Solana. So it actually makes a lot more intellectual sense. You can have the debate all day about whether it's a superior, worthy treasury asset long term. That's up to everybody to decide. But if you have a benchmark and your goal is to beat it, that's nearly impossible. Bitcoin and much easier with Solana, right?
- [07:26]
B
Correct. But look like Solana staking ETFs are going to be here in a couple weeks. So I think about our benchmark as staking ETFs. That's the intellectually honest benchmark. And I think there's a lot we can do above and beyond staking to earn solar per share for our shareholders.
- [07:42]
A
It makes sense. So you were able to buy Solana very, very quickly. So actually I think that the market was not expecting that it was going to be all cash when you raised over $1.6 billion. I think everybody's expectation was multicoin jump and Galaxy probably own a bunch of Solana and they're going to do it in kind. You announced that it was cash and you bought 1.5-ish billion dollars worth of Solana immediately. Right. How are you able to do that when a lot of these Bitcoin, Bitcoin treasury companies clearly have not like. Right. They announced the stocks went up massively and kind of sat waiting for regulatory approval, it seems like before they could buy anything. So how are you able to actually just immediately buy Solana?
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B
I mean we did an all cash deal which did not require shareholder approval. NASDAQ has been making it difficult for pipe discussions, the one that we did, to come in with partial or fully in kind. And so we said, okay, that's fine, like we'll just come in and cash. Because we believe in what we're doing in an all cash version, which is what we did. We're not subject to Nasdaq cannot force us to a shareholder vote. I'm actually can be a little surprised on both the Pantera vehicles and the Solma vehicle announced this morning on how they're doing it. Partial in kind. It creates a lot of complexity. Most notably, if you look at the hyper liquid dat, the one that paradigm seeded, that transaction has not closed and I don't think it's going to close until maybe November. So it's just very different, very different dynamics.
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A
I didn't actually realize that the. Yeah, the differences doing in having any in kind adds a major layer of complexity.
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B
Massive layer of complexity. It was an all cash deal. We announced it on Monday, we closed it on Wednesday and we started buying on Wednesday. Our first buy was on chain. It's incredible.
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A
Okay, so now you've announced a $4 billion ATM. Correct. How does that work? We've had some. I would Say cautionary tales in situations like this, as bet, maybe even Nakamoto, where effectively you get no real price discovery because the shares haven't registered. You have low float. There's going to be massive float coming on whenever they do register, which means you don't really know what the price is going to be. In the case of Nakamoto, the price was basically where the pipe was first raced back almost to just over a dollar. Right. So how do you, I guess, utilize the ATM now before the shares register and you have, you know, 80 million float instead of a million?
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B
Yeah, I mean, look, we. I can't provide a specific commentary on what we're doing or not. Obviously. The statement went out yesterday. The board has approved the. The shelf registration. And, you know, a company has discretion on how it chooses to use that. Can't really provide more commentary, unfortunately.
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A
Okay, that's fine. So let's talk about treasury companies more broadly in the trend. They're clearly all not built the same. Do you view. Do you think that they need to be built in a certain way to be viable, or are you of the mind that treasury companies are good because it's just more adoption of crypto generally?
- [10:58]
B
I don't think more is good because it means more adoption. I think that's a pretty lazy way of thinking. I think that there are a hand. Look, all these treasury companies are, in a very literal sense, publicly traded permanent capital vehicles. Some of them are going to have different mandates. Ours is to increase solar per share. Others may have other mandates. You know, we'll see how that evolves. I think it's difficult for them to differentiate. Not impossible, but difficult. And to the extent that you have some differentiation, I think maybe only a handful are going to differentiate and justify their own independent existence in the long term. It looks like, I think there's only 20 or 25 DATs already out today, something like that. It looks like based on just the pipeline of more that are coming, that number is going to get closer to maybe 40, maybe even upwards of 50. We'll see. The market is not going to sustain 50 independent DATs two years from now. And so there's going to be a lot of consolidation, which is actually a very interesting opportunity of M and A for the largest teams who have the most pedigree and can get deals done.
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A
I asked Jack Mahlers the exact same question a couple months ago. I said, you know, aren't most of these just going to fail at some point? There'll be so much competition to raise or find new Financial engineering that people just won't be able to compete and eventually have to sell off. And he said, yeah, that's our plan. Good. The big ones will buy the small ones cheaper. Bitcoin for me.
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B
That's correct, yeah.
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A
So you think that that's the case for every bucket basically of Treasuries? Because, I mean, listen, I understand Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, Treasuries. I start to shake my head at, as you said, like hyper liquid Treasuries. I just. How far down the curve can these go?
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B
Yeah, I mean, certainly hyper liquid is an interesting spot because there's only 30% of the tokens are floating or whatever. So that's certainly a very interesting dynamic that I'm guessing most public shareholders will not understand. Public hyper liquids, what floating market cap is something like 17 billion or something like that? We'll see. I think the smaller assets are more kind of in difficult situations. I think the avalanches, the Swiss, you know, those kinds of things, they're going to be very difficult to sustain.
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A
So why are people trying those? Is it because they believe they'll be able to do it in kind, or are they not going to try them anymore now that they see that the NASDAQ is cracking down is becoming so much more difficult? Because I haven't seen any in all cash.
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B
If, you know, if you're a founder of one of these protocols, a million people are calling you right now and have been calling you for the last month or two and telling you to do one. And most of the founders don't fully appreciate the dynamics in terms of like equity, capital markets and this kind of crossover thing. I mean, this is to some extent uncharted territory. And it's obviously very easy to tell yourself, well, it seems ev. Positive to do so. You can see why, as a function of those things, why most teams are trying to do one. I think most founders dramatically underappreciate how much time and energy it takes to get off the ground. And I think they'll mostly look back in 12 months and regret those decisions.
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A
I mean, is the cynical view that it's a way to exit their positions without ever saying they have to sell and with actual liquidity when they wouldn't have otherwise had it if they were able to do in kind?
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B
Yeah, I think that's, that's. That element is at play partially. Certainly. I would tell you, not the only driving effort. I think that sentiment is more likely to be held by investors than by founders.
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A
That makes sense. So the larger trend, I mean, These are obviously happening for a reason. A lot of it I think is markets have wildly changed, the regulatory environment has changed, legislative environment has changed. We're in this Goldilocks period of the institutionalization of crypto. Right. So it's a part of a larger trend. What else is exciting you outside of the DAT space? Obviously we have a number of crypto companies going public. Right. We have legislation, stablecoins, market structure coming. I mean, what are you watching in the context of what you're building?
- [15:20]
B
Yeah, I mean the most important thing from a regulatory perspective for forward industries is project crypto because we need to bring securities markets on chain. And in our view step one is like, let's get a major US security tokenized and trading on chain. That's why we're raising our hands and doing that ourselves. I think some of the additional guidance we're looking for is going to be on, you know, going for example, to brokers sitting at the Robin Hoods of the world and telling them, hey guys, you need you. You as a legal requirement have to hook into Solana Main Net for liquidity. Obviously that's not the case today. I hope that becomes the case, you know, in the next whatever, 12, 24 months. Once our equity is tokenized, once we have a market makers and all the liquidity and all that stuff is there, then we are in a position to go lean on the sec, right, to like to do something like that. And obviously we're certainly going to try to do that once, once the time is right. So I, I think that's the very important thing for us to do, both for Ford Industries and for crypto as a whole. You know, the other obviously big thing going on right now is the genius acts. To me, the Clarity Act. I was in D.C. earlier this week meeting with members of Congress to that, to that extent and I feel pretty good about where things are. There's been some disagreement, but I think those issues are being resolved and I think we're going to get the Clarity act passed before the end of this calendar year.
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A
Let's talk about tokenized stocks, right? Because we've had them in their early iterations already. I think most of them are wrapped obviously and there's some sort of engineering that's required to be able to trade those on chain. You're talking about bringing it wholly on chain. I assume you would still be tradable, you know, under Schwabs and your E trades and everywhere else. How does that actually work? What are the mechanics of having basically this bifurcated market that doesn't exist for most publicly traded equities because it's obviously you're not just breaking new ground by tokenizing it. You need to have markets that are consistent across every market where it's sold. Right?
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B
Yeah. So dual listings are not a new concept. There are quite a few equities in the world that are dual listed, for example across the NYSE and London Stock Exchange or the sgx, which is Singapore, a number of other places. So this is, this is a thing. I don't fully appreciate the legal machinations of how that works across the various jurisdictional securities exchanges. I can say in the context of, you know, having something trade on NASDAQ and on Solana Main Net, A, Galaxy has already done it. And then B, I expect that.
- [18:01]
A
The.
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B
Service provider that we're working with will allow a direct one to one transfer to move back and forth between basically the DTCC and Solana mainnet. There will be no taxable event if and when you choose to do that. And it'll be close to instant, I believe, which means market makers should be able to keep prices in line across both sides.
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A
That's interesting because it was so heavily celebrated when the DTCC went from like t plus two to t plus one. Right now we're talking about t plus 10 seconds, effectively.
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B
Yes. I don't hold me to that, but I believe that's what it's going to look like when it works.
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A
I mean it would have to. Right, because you would have to have those shares tradable between on chain markets and off chain markets in real time with the same exact price. And to your point, the market makers would have to be able to manage that.
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B
Correct?
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A
That would be incredible if that really happens in 12 to 18 months or whatever timeline you said.
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B
I mean look the, I mean look, the tokenizing part will be sooner than that. The big question is going to be when does the SEC expand its definition of nvbo, which is national best bid and offer from, from the brokers, to include on chain liquidity. And I don't fully appreciate the dynamics of how Reg, NMS and NVBO work, but as that gets updated, you know, that's really going to unlock, I think, a lot more securities coming on chain.
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A
How in touch with regulators have you been on things like this? Right. How do you handicap that? This administration or this sec, knowing who Atkins is and who Purse is and how they approach this, how do you know that they're willing to go that far? Right. Or do you actively engage with the regulator and discuss with them, the idea of tokenizing markets, are they receptive to that? Because we know they wouldn't have been a year ago.
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B
I mean, well, Cher Atkins gave the speech for Project Crypto seven weeks ago. The full text of that speech is available online. I encourage you. It's a quick read. Yeah, just Google Atkins Project Crypto. So he's. He is unambiguous in his views here. So it's going to happen. Look, the SEC is a big place. There's a lot of inertia, there's a lot of competing priorities of things going on. Custody rules, tax issues, staking ETFs, the generic listing standards I got approved last night. So I can't fully speak to, like, you know, how quickly things will move as it pertains to Project Crypto, other than I'm pretty optimistic it's going to move. I have had a chance to speak with Chair Atkins about this in the somewhat recent past. So he's aware of what we're doing and I generally think is obviously supportive, given this is directly aligned with Project Crypto.
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A
And you mentioned this slimline approval process for ETFs, obviously we saw that just announced this week that basically, if you've had six months of futures on Coinbase, let's dumb it down, right, Then you can apply and be approved for an ETF in a much shorter timeline slot. ETFs have already had the can kicked down the road. Right. So you've got to imagine that since they qualify by the new standards and are already being scrutinized, that they've got to be next up or very soon on the docket. How do you think that that affects the Solana treasury company space and, you know, how long do you think it's going to be before we start to see. You hinted at it earlier that very soon you think we'll see staking salon ETFs. Not just on ETFs.
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B
I think we're going to have salon ETFs. Sorry, Solana staking ETFs around October 1st.
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A
Oh, that's incredible.
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B
It's very soon. I'm very, very excited.
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A
So does that help you? Does that hurt you? Is it a competitor? Is it a. You know, is it basically symbiotic? How does that look?
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B
Yeah, I think it's definitely net positive for Solana and that. Positive for Forward Industries for sure. Are there some people who will go by the Staking etf? Yeah, probably. That's fine. That's good for Solana and that also means that it's just more awareness of Solana. It's going to cause some people to go learn about Solana. Some of those people will learn about Forward, and some people will prefer the corporate wrapper and the interesting things we're doing. And some people won't, and that's fine. But increasing increased legitimacy of Solana is good for Ford Industries. Unequivocally.
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A
How hard do you think it is for people to understand what you're doing?
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B
I don't think it's that hard. And look, I think also right now we haven't done a lot yet to earn to prove to the world that we can outperform a stake etf.
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A
I.
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B
We understand that that is our job to do so. And you should expect that we're going to have stuff to talk about, right, to that effect. So once that stuff becomes public information, then I think, you know, very reasonable investors will be able to look at that and say, oh yeah, this makes sense. And I can see why I might want to own this instead of the ETF.
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A
Is the expectation that the Solana staking ETF will be Solana plus 8%. I mean, that's going to be the benchmark you're going to have to beat. Or do you think that the staking ETFs will actually have a lower yield?
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B
Unclear. I don't have a super strong view there, but we'll have the answer to that question in about two weeks.
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A
So do you think that you said that you were skeptical initially of debt? So what sort of was the big aha moment that changed your mind?
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B
Project Crypto from Chair Atkins, which was on July 31st. That was, that was my like, okay, I gotta do something. And then I think separately from that, once I realized the opportunity for M A as well, that was also. I mean the first one is more of like a missionary ethos thing. And then realizing the opportunity for M and A. That was my oh, wow. Like this can be wildly accretive if executed correctly in sold per share terms.
- [23:59]
A
M and A of specifically DAX that fail because you anticipate that happening. Or also M and A of platforms or companies within the Solana ecosystem that allow you to increase Solana per share.
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B
I mean both, but more starting with the former. I think it's premature at this stage for any DAT to be shelling out a bunch of its, its core asset for some illiquid speculative acquisition that may or may not outperform in token, token denominator terms as the market matures. That I think will become the expectation. But that's not where the market is today.
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A
How large do you think that a premium to NAV can be justified or supported by the market? I mean, I guess we can talk about it now. The future is very difficult because obviously we've seen this massive compression over and over and over, over again. Right. You, for better or for worse, the stock is announced, they usually, they don't even own the underlying asset yet. As we discussed before, you see this major pump, it comes all the way down, then the pipe registers and back to where the pipe was sold. Right. So you're obviously trying to avoid a situation where your stock comes all the way back down to where it was before the announcement. Right?
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B
Yeah. I mean, that's obviously the ideal outcome. Yeah. What's the question?
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A
I guess the question is how then do you just like, what is a justifiable premium to NAV right now for digital asset treasury companies? You know, like, is there any, ever a case where they should be trading at 7, 8, 20, 25x to the net asset value?
- [25:40]
B
Yeah, that seems pretty hard to justify. But you know, how do I, I don't have a super strong view between, you know, 121518.
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A
I don't know, but that's the ballpark. It's not four and five. It's, you know.
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B
No, it's not.
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A
Okay.
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B
Yeah, I don't know how you could justify 5x that, that seems not possible.
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A
Yeah, I, I, it's so like classic crypto to me that the, that so many of them have, you know, blown out beyond that before anything happens and then naturally they have to come all the way back down. It's crazy. I mean, would you have ever can imagined a year ago? Right. I mean, if there wasn't a Trump presidency, could you ever imagine this being the conversations that we're having here in September of 2025? I mean, we were in this contentious environment where you couldn't try anything. You'd basically be sued by the SEC for it. This is 180 degrees and better, it seems.
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B
Yeah, I mean this is as good of a climate as we could have gotten. You know, it's, it's always darkest before, before dawn. Right. And it was obviously very dark under the Gensler administration and they were very hostile towards us and like they overplayed their hand. They made an egregious political miscalculation and industry banded together and a lot of people gave a lot of money and worked really hard. And look, we got a little lucky. No one ever knows what's going to be the outcome in an election and we all took one massive swing and that swing worked. So we're incredibly lucky to be where we are and we obviously try to capitalize on the moment now that we have it.
- [27:23]
A
So if you're first to live out this on chain dream that you've kind of described, do you think that that is a future that most companies will look to? Do you think that we see everything on chain? Do you think that it's a parallel market? Like what's your long term view on the best case scenario?
- [27:46]
B
I mean, as a financial matter, I see a path to making Forward Industries a $50 billion plus publicly traded permanent capital vehicle. That's going to be a long journey, I think five years plus. But I can see a path to that happening. And as chairman like that, that is my objective for our shareholders, is to get us there.
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A
I'm talking about generally capital markets coming on chain. Right. If you lead, if you show the example, this can be done. You force the Robin Hoods of the world to basically connect to Solana to do this. Do we start seeing every stock effectively being forced to come on chain?
- [28:26]
B
Yes, absolutely. I mean, look, Robinhood has been very clear. They wanted to tokenize more things. Larry Fink obviously said this for BlackRock. Brian Armstrong has been talking about this. Arjun from Kraken has been talking about this. So we know all these people want to do this and I think they're going to. And I think our existence just makes it a little easier and a little faster for them to do what they otherwise we're going to try and do.
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A
So why Solana in your mind, Obviously, for people who don't know multicoin, I mean, you've been the original Solana bulls, right? I mean, you were the first raises. You were there from the very beginning. You rode the entire roller coaster all the way here back to the top. Why Solana? Do you think it will all be on Solana? Do you think that Ethereum will capture some of it or any of these others? Or do you think that Solana can do it all? Why Solana?
- [29:17]
B
Yeah, I mean, look, Solana's vision is to power Internet capital markets, which I think is even a superset of Chair Atkins vision for project crypto. I think Solana today is in the best position to capture that. The opportunity for these on chain securities for a number of reasons. First and most importantly is there's a defined token standard to handle regulated issued securities. Solana rolled out this idea called token extensions maybe 18 months ago or something. And adoption's been a little slower than we would have liked, but it's there and it's built into the L1. And there is a mechanism to have to deal with all of the realities of having a regulated security on chain. That includes kyc, that includes dividends, that includes stock splits and reverse reverse stock splits. That includes the ability to revoke ownership and reissue elsewhere. There's a bunch of these things you need to have to be a functional security. And all of those functions are built into Solana Mainnet today, have been for some time. The big challenge with the EVM is first, the EVM does not codify that standard at all. Are there people who are trying to build those same functions on top of the evm? Yes. The problem though is that, you know, one of the big theses with EVM is Well, there's many EVMs and they all proliferate and they're all these different places and not all of the EVMs are functionally equivalent. And so dealing with the inherent heterogeneity of the many EVM environments makes it much harder for the tokenized security vision to exist in practice across the many EVM chains. Yeah, you could Talk about Ethereum L1 is kind of like the canonical EVM, but Ethereum L1 does not support the transaction throughput to get us to get to the future. Ethereum L1 supports on the order of 20 transactions per second, plus or minus. And like obviously that's not going to cut it today Solana mainnet can process roughly on the order of 10 billion transactions in a day, something like that. And that is enough to settle all global securities transactions around the world, meaning nicely NASDAQ, London, SGX, etc. Now that's not enough yet to deal with all the limits and cancels that the market makers place, but it is enough to deal with all of the settled traits. There's a long way to go for Solana. Job is by no means done. But we've at least proven that even by, you know, 2025 we have a system that can optimistically support global securities markets. And I think that, you know, combined with the fact that you have this guaranteed global KYC layer, excuse me, securities layer I think is a huge deal. And moreover, you know, Robinhood's doing their own flavor of tokenized securities. On Robinhood chain Coinbase is doing their own flavor. We don't even know what they're doing yet but like obviously they've said they're going to do something. BlackRock is doing their own thing with securitized maybe they'll work with other vendors, who knows? All of those are heterogeneous standards. Yeah, they have this.
- [32:23]
A
They.
- [32:23]
B
They're accomplishing the same functional objective. But like, as a matter of software, there are different standards.
- [32:28]
A
Yeah. And.
- [32:29]
B
And the beauty of Solana choosing to enforce that in the L1 is that anyone who wants to issue is guaranteed to use the same standard and so much in the same way. The Ethereum has already had this, this fragmentation problem across all of the L2s. You're going to see the same kind of problem play out again on Ethereum because you're going to have all these tokenization standards and they're not going to all work together, and it's going to be a hodgepodge mess.
- [32:55]
A
And there's also very little even motivation for them to be interoperable because they would be such.
- [33:00]
B
They're all competitors.
- [33:01]
A
I mean, going from one small fund to another small fund is not worth building a bridge. Right. I mean.
- [33:07]
B
Correct. It's not worth it. And look, there are certain things you need to standardize and centralize as a standard for the system to work. You know, the best you could argue, the single most centralized thing in the entirety of ethereum is the ERC20 standard, which was codified by the Ethereum foundation in 2015. It was one of the very first things they did. Certainly at the time, they didn't appreciate the importance of that decision. I don't think anybody did. But the fact that everything speaks ERC20 is like the most important element of the entirety of the EVM itself. Solana took that several steps further with its instantiation of SPL as its native token standard and is taking that even further with token extensions and the ability to handle regulated securities.
- [33:57]
A
So clearly from your perspective, and it's funny, I asked Anatoli the same question, and we kind of came to the one chain to rule them all. He said, yes, we can do everything. Like, without even hesitation, I said, could you do all this? Yeah. And this was a while ago. Why do you think that Ethereum still has the bulk of the institutional narrative right now? Because as. As much as we talk about the tech of Solana being superior for these purposes, you do still have Larry Fink talking about tokenizing everything on Ethereum.
- [34:26]
B
That is not true. Larry Fink does not talk about Ethereum. He talked about tokenization. He doesn't talk about platforms. The fact that people think that Ethereum is the institutional chain is because Shiller's back holders on Twitter shill that narrative because it's the only bullshit that they can come up with as a technical matter. Ethereum's lead on Institute, the only, the only thing that Ethereum has the lead on is like a checkbox from the regulators with regards to Solana is etf. Solana is going to solve that problem the next two weeks. So they'll be on the same playing field as a legal matter then it's just going to be a question of adoption. There are more regulated RWAs today issued on Ethereum. However, the data, you need to parse the data a little bit to make sense of it. The bulk of it is securitized as Biddle Fund, right? Like I think something like 70 to 80%.
- [35:28]
A
Is that right for people?
- [35:29]
B
BlackRock but, but then, but then if you look at the distribution of the securitized Biddle fund, the top 10 holders are over 85% of that. And that's like it's known who they are. It's, it's MKR is a huge holder. Athena is a huge holder. A handful of the market makers are very big holders. I think a couple of the exchanges are large holders. So my point is, is that like this, this notion that retail investors are holding Biddle in size, like lots of them, it's just not true. That's not true, is not true. And so the lead is I think is very fragile. Moreover, when I look at like now actual bottoms up retail adoption, if you look at Solana's X stocks, I think there's roughly 500 million of X stocks issued as of today. And I believe it's like across tens of thousands of addresses, they may have clips, 100,000 addresses. We know those are individual retail holders. We are working to tokenize our own equity. And I'm optimistic that you're going to see hundreds of millions of dollars of Ford shares tokenized in the fairly near future. So you know, we have these other things driving forward on this front. But the last thing I'll say on this institutionalization narrative is one side of it is like Wall street and the asset managers, but the other side of it is the payments companies. And Ethereum is completely absent in this conversation because no payments company looks at Ethereum and takes it seriously because any system that's 10 years old and runs at 20 transactions per second for a payments company is obviously laughable. And so when you look at worldpay, they've announced a big deal with Solana. When you look at Pfizer, when you look at Visa and all of the other work, these, all of these guys are doing all of it's coalescing around Solana, even Stripe in there. Yeah, they announced Stripe Chain recently, but like if you look at their keynote they gave last year, the demo they gave of doing a payment was on Phantom using Solana. And they literally went out of their way to refer to old crypto. They didn't call out Ethereum by name, but then they refer to new crypto and new crypto was explicitly called out of Solana. So yeah, I think the payment side is underappreciated, but in fact will end up being involving way more users and way more velocity of capital.
- [37:59]
A
Feels like on the payment side the narrative won't really be Solana versus Ethereum. It feels like it's going to be private or native chains like Circle announcing their own chain versus a public chain. I don't know if Circles will be private or public or how that will be structured, but it is interesting when you see the stripes and the circles and others choosing to build their own chains when something like Solana exists.
- [38:25]
B
Yeah, look, if you're an ambitious founder, the vision of like displacing Visa and like owning the Rails is a sexy compelling thing to believe. And so I understand why people swing for it. I wouldn't lump Circles, Ark and Stripe's Tempo into the same bucket. I think about those very differently. I think about Circles Arc more as basically like a private ach or like a private swift network between banks and other regulated FIs. I don't think they're making a serious play of consumers, to my knowledge.
- [38:55]
A
Yeah, I mean that's been my point on those is like Peggy from customer service at some company who has been told that she needs to settle accounts on stablecoins and sends it to the wrong address, needs somebody to call. And you can't call the Ethereum foundation to fix your transaction, right?
- [39:08]
B
Correct. So there's that side. I actually think again, the what? Look, we'll see what they do with Tempo. But you know, right now, if you are Adyen, if you are Square, if you are worldpay, if you are fiserv, if you're any of the other thousands of merchant aggregators that exist around the world, the last place you're going to go to build on Chain is Tempo. And you know, some of them may choose to try and go in house, but I'm going to actually guess the bulk of them are going to say, you know what, Stripe took that strategy. It actually makes sense for me to do the opposite strategy, which is to go to the open, permissionless system And I think that that pendulum effect will be substantially larger than, than most people foresee.
- [40:04]
A
I assume your opinion is that Solana is going much, much, much higher considering you guys quickly deployed $1.5 billion, you know, at was it $2 and 30, $230, something like that, to 32.
- [40:17]
B
That is a pretty reasonable assumption.
- [40:19]
A
Yeah. So how much higher do you think it's going? And I would love to just talk, you know, briefly about your view on markets versus previous cycles. You know, do you think that we're still in the four year cycle and we get, you know, 85% drawdown bear markets and these huge pumps and huge jumps? Do you think that, you know, maybe we get, since we're institutionalized and obviously have a much more driving narrative, kind of just continue to climb.
- [40:49]
B
I'm not a market cycles guy. I think they're the biggest argument in favor of the four year cycle thing is just that all of the crypto natives believe it all. Just, just, just believe it. And it's like a self fulfilling prophecy of course, which is very real.
- [41:05]
A
Yeah.
- [41:06]
B
The flip side is, well, we just passed genius. I think we're going to pass clarity here. Pretty shortly we have Project Crypto and I think you're going to see company after company. I mean we again, we haven't even really seen the announcement start yet. But like every major bank is going to be involved in crypto in the next 24 months in some capacity. You're going to see big moves out of all of the payments companies. You're going to see big moves out of all of the asset managers on Wall street and all the banks on Wall Street. So as that look, I think most of those announcements hit in 26. Every one of those teams is all, they all have major internal initiatives and all of these initiatives are now up to the C suite. They're not in some like innovation department over on the side. The C suite is aware and is green lighting, you know what's happening. So as all that kind of makes its way into mainstream discourse over the course of 26, there's a real chance that, you know, we just keep grinding hard, don't really have probability views on, on either side. But you know, the case to be made that we overcome the reflexivity, the self fulfilling prophecy of the crypto native would be that I would say maybe.
- [42:21]
A
Some assets overcome it and the rest of them get their bear market. What's the narrative for, you know, Altcoin197 on CoinMarketCap from 2017 right now, I.
- [42:33]
B
Agree with that statement.
- [42:34]
A
Yeah, it could be absolutely brutal. Listen, we got a couple of minutes left. Is there anything else that we missed? Anything super exciting that we didn't touch on that you would love to mention before we go?
- [42:44]
B
No, look, I think the opportunity at Ford Industries, I'm super excited about what we're doing. It's new, it's weird. We are looking to hire. If you think you can be a talented member of the team, reach out. We don't have job descriptions kind of intentionally. It's more of a, hey, if you really want this and you think you're value accretive, then convince me that you're value accretive and we'd love to have you on the team. So that's comment one. Comment two is, I think there's an opportunity here to be a new kind of leader of a publicly traded company. The tools to engage retail investors around the world have improved meaningfully. Robinhood acquired a company called Safe Technologies recently to that effect. And there's a bunch of other similar type tools. So we're very much looking forward to engaging with shareholders directly via these different channels. We're very much going to go to people where they live, meaning Reddit, Coingecko, you know, stocktwits, etc.
- [43:41]
A
You're on thread guy. You know, you guys are, you guys are getting all the corners, obviously.
- [43:45]
B
Yeah. And so we understand it's our job to communicate with shareholders where they are, so we're very much looking to do that. And of course, if you have any ideas of interesting things you think we should do, I'm all ears. You can tag me on Twitter or you can just send me a dm, whatever you want.
- [44:01]
A
Yeah, right before we're done. So how does this look for you with Multicoin? Is Multi Coin now all in Solana as you guys have gone so heavily into Forward? Or do you continue to invest in the rest of the crypto ecosystem?
- [44:14]
B
Well, it's Forward Industries is a meaningful position in our hedge fund, but it's not even like a dominant position. Yeah, you can check our Form 80s that we file quarterly with the SEC, but our AUM is well north of 3 billion, maybe even north of 4 today. So I can't say that, like Forward is a massive ticket for us. We obviously hold a large Solana position, but we invest across all kinds of ecosystems and we'll continue to do so. We are obviously biased and have made some big bets, but look, we feel really good about those bets and let's see what the future holds.
- [44:52]
A
Awesome. Man. It was a real pleasure catching up after all this time. Good luck at your wedding.
- [44:57]
B
Thanks, Scott. Appreciate it.
- [44:58]
A
And we'll speak soon. Thank you, man.