Canada’s SOL Strategies, a treasury and investment firm focusing on the Solana ecosystem – a high performance blockchain with its namesake cryptocurrency – has just become the first Solana Treasury firm to list on Nasdaq. Trading under the stock ticker STKE, the firm is among the top corporate holders of Solana (SOL), holding some 370,420 coins worth over US$82 million. The six largest corporate holders of Solana now hold a combined amount of nearly $1 billion. However, this amount is set to over double with the imminent entry of Forward Industries, a US-based medical company that has just raised $1.6 billion to buy and hold Solana as part of a corporate treasury strategy.
Corporations stockpiling Solana come as the first Solana ETF is expected to debut in November, pending final approval from the US Securities and Exchange Commission. This would follow ETFs for Bitcoin and Ethereum approved last year. A Solana ETF would provide regulated access to Solana through brokerage platforms without the complexities of crypto wallets or crypto exchanges and will pave the way for broader institutional adoption of the asset.
But to be clear, corporations such as SOL Strategies are not just front-running institutional adoption for a speculative price bet; they see the blockchain as being part of new financial infrastructure that is transforming the traditional finance space. The blockchain hosts real world assets such as US equities and tokenized real estate, while cross border payments are moving rapidly onchain slashing the inefficiencies of the banking system and the Jurrasic SWIFT system. Solana, in particular, is known for its transaction speed and cost. The network can process up to 65,000 transactions per second, while keeping the average cost below one cent. Compare that to SWIFT! Moreover Solana’s total value locked (TVL) in Decentralized platforms is over $12 billion. The coin itself has a marketcap of over $120 billion – well over the marketcap of most banks (about the size of UBS and Toronto Dominion Bank). Staking Solana generates annual yield of between 5 – 9%, which is also more than the dividend yield of most banking stocks. Yet this is pale in comparison to yield opportunities on Solana DeFi platforms, where liquidity providers can earn annualized yield multiple times this amount.
Among Solana Treasury firms, SOL Strategies stands out as rather than just holding Solana, it is an active participant in the ecosystem by operating its own validator node (generating passive income through staking) and making strategic investments into SOL ecosystem projects and infrastructure. It is not front-running institutional investment, it is helping to shape it.