DFDV

Welcome to DeFi Development Corp.'s Q1 2026 Earnings Conference Call. I'm Dan Kang, Chief Strategy Officer and Head of Investor Relations. Joining me today are Joseph Onorati, Chief Executive Officer, John Han, our Chief Financial Officer, and Parker White, our Chief Operating Officer and Chief Investment Officer. As a reminder, we will be making forward-looking statements during this call. Actual results may differ materially due to risks and uncertainties which are outlined in our filings with the SEC, including our Form 10-K. Our latest shareholder letter was published yesterday, May 13th, after market close, and is available on our website. We will begin today by answering questions submitted by retail investors, followed by questions from the sell side. Joseph, Parker, John, thank you for joining us.

Happy to be here.

Our first question is from retail. "I invested in DeFi Development Corp. because of this mission statement, quote, 'DeFi Development Corporation is a public company whose core strategy is to hold and grow a large reserve of Solana, SOL.' Can you tell me if this is still your core mission?" Joseph?

Yes. The purpose of the company is to offer investors with leveraged Solana exposure. We see some other DATs in the space trying to move away from being a DAT. That's not us. We're leaning into it. If you read our investor letter and walked away thinking that we've taken our eye off the ball, then we haven't communicated well. The reason we dove into experimentation in the letter is because we wanted shareholders to understand that everything, we do, from running validators to partnerships we make, on chain deployment of the treasury, the Treasury Accelerator program, even ApeX, is ultimately meant to amplify SOL accumulation. These aren't at odds with stacking more SOL. If anything, they provide a differentiated avenue for accumulation that no other DAT's pursuing. Our mission's still the same: grow SPS as fast as possible.

At the end of the day, SPS, or SOL per share, is still the only number we measure ourselves against. 108% trailing 12 months of growth is great, but it's just a start, and we think we have plenty of SPS growth ahead of us.

All right. Thanks, Joseph. Next question, "At current SOL levels and staking revenue, will DFDV sustain two years of runway? How concerned should we be of the OPEX and the debt service if SOL drops to, say, $60 or $40? Will the staking revenue keep the lights on to survive?" John, you wanna take this?

Yeah, sure, happy to. That's an excellent question and an important question, and it's one that's front and center for the entire DFDV team. You know, all of us have lived through multiple bear and bull cycles, especially in crypto, so we treat runway, capital allocation, and sustainability as core priorities. We are confident that we have the funds to sustain operations for well over two years at current Solana prices and with the staking revenue. We run detailed periodic runway models specifically for these various scenarios, both for our internal purposes as well as for our auditors. We are laser-focused on reducing OPEX wherever possible to drive greater Solana per share growth, so like Joseph just mentioned, our key KPI there.

As we discussed in our shareholder letter, we do make selective high-conviction bets on opportunities where we believe we can create meaningful value for our shareholders. Many of those bets obviously do incur one-time costs. You know, these are bets, but obviously they have costs. That service, on the other hand, remains very manageable, and we maintain a very comfortable runway even if Solana prices were to fall 50% from here. That said, even if that did happen, we wouldn't expect, you know, such weakness to happen to sustain very long. We remain very bullish on Solana long-term. Thank you.

Thanks, John. Next question, "DFDV succeeds if Solana succeeds. What are you doing to incubate, accelerate, and proliferate the expansion and adoption of SOL?" Parker, you wanna take that?

Sure. I think this kind of comes down to two primary areas. The first one is effectively marketing or storytelling, right? We continue to talk to investors, and they understand Bitcoin primarily because of Michael Saylor. We want to be, in our own way, the Michael Saylor for Solana, telling that story, being the evangelist. That's something that we've tried to do. We've put out a number of pieces, long-form pieces, short-form pieces, via our Twitter, our blog, some of the recordings that we host. Lots of different avenues there. We continue to do more of that going forward. The other area is through ecosystem development. We've, you know, historically done partners with all the major players across the ecosystem. We plan to continue to support that kind of initiative over time.

As new entrants come to market, we'll do additional partnerships to help bring focus and a spotlight to those projects. We may use risk-managed portions of our balance sheet to help grow liquidity on some of these platforms and ultimately create an environment that others want to participate in because, you know, a regulated public entity is involved on chain. It's ultimately the marketing and the capital deployment, and we plan to continue doing both to help support the ecosystem growth.

All right. Thanks, Parker. Next question. In addition to the recent rise of Solana's price, what other activities and/or investments have been made in the Solana ecosystem more broadly, and what positive news can you tell us about them which are actually adding value to the company? Parker, you wanna take that?

Sure. On our side, you know, we recently announced a partnership with Jupiter Lend that was a month or two ago. We are working on some additional partnerships. We announced a partnership with Allied Architects in Japan as part of our kind of Treasury Accelerator program. We continue to make progress on DFDV UK.

These are a few of the initiatives that we're working on to both directly and indirectly, you know, help grow value for the Solana ecosystem and accrue some of that value back to DFDV. Additionally, and more broadly speaking, there've been a number of positive developments on the Solana front. You saw the recent announcement about Google and the payments API there. We're continuing to see more and more activity on the Solana side, both with RWAs and tokenized assets and other large institutions getting involved in the ecosystem. I think we're gonna talk more about that in a little bit, but I think that's also germane here.

All right. Thanks, Parker. Next question. Is ApeX related to DFDV or Sol? As I understand, it's only tied to Bitcoin. Do you expect the release of the governance token to be a catalyst for both DFDV and Sol? Joseph, you wanna take this one?

Yeah, sure. We won't comment on the release of a governance token for for ApeX. As outlined in the shareholder letter, we think ApeX meaningfully improves the cost of capital for a preferred equity fundraise for DFDV.

All right. Thanks, Joseph. Let's turn to some sell side questions. This question is, at Needham, DK, you discussed experimentation as a core part of DFDV's playbook. How should we think about the budget for experimentation going forward? Is there a hard cap as a percent of treasury or balance sheet, or is it more opportunistic? When an experiment doesn't work, at what point do you decide to cut it versus give it more time? I'll take this, guys. It's a good question. I'll start with, I guess, the budget or call it, like, capital allocation framework. There's definitely a waterfall of priorities, and any investment we make has to clear the bar of basically the ROI on buying Sol right here, right now. Especially since we think Sol is eventually going to 10K.

It's why we've made the, what I would call, what we outlined in our letter, the asymmetric bets that we have. In each scenario, we model the upside, the downside, and in each of the scenarios that we outlined in the letter, the downside was fairly de minimis, but we believe the opportunities were magnitudes greater than the upfront cost or cash or SOL investment. ZeroStack Corp. is actually a great example. You know, had that SOL sat there on our balance sheet, we would have earned the staking rewards and, of course, generated a return equal to the SOL price action over the last, call it, like, eight months or so. Because of the way we structured this deal, we got a return well above our investment, got the staking rewards back as well.

The economic cost to DFDV was effectively zero. You know, I think there are numerous examples of this kind of playbook really paying dividends to us. ApeX is another fantastic example of us bringing a $400 million project to life in terms of TVL in just a matter of weeks, with again, a fraction of the balance sheet committed upfront. These are a few examples. Again, we're gonna try to be as transparent as possible with shareholders with respect to both our wins and our losses on experimentation. Again, all of it is geared towards driving SOL per share growth in some capacity. All right. Next question. Can you give us a sense, one year later, of Bonk's actual SOL per share contribution?

What kind of Sol per share growth would have occurred had you not announced this partnership? I'll take this once again, guys. Difficult to quantify. Shareholders can see how our equity reacted post-announcement. I really think the attention and volume that that partnership drove was most key. Got us on the radar for crypto native investors, showcased our knowledge of not just crypto, but its culture as well. It literally tripled our average daily volume in the ensuing weeks, right? It's difficult to pinpoint an exact Sol per share number, let's call it, like, pro forma for that. I think investors can do some back of the envelope math on the impact just looking at, you know, what happened to DFDV equity in the ensuing days and weeks following that announcement. All right. Next question.

The letter mentions you intend to keep experimenting and that some bets won't work. How are you thinking about the threshold for disclosure? Will we hear about every miss the size of Bonk or only the ones above a certain materiality threshold? Joseph, you wanna take that?

Yeah, sure. Yeah, I think the materiality threshold is just a legal question. We check with our lawyers if something's material. If it's material, we disclose it. If it's not and we think it's, you know, accretive to the business, then we'll disclose it. We put Bonk down as an example miss because it was very public, but it wasn't very expensive to launch the token actually. From a pure dollar cost perspective, it was just a legal cost, and then outside the dollar cost it was, you know, the team's time to, you know, get it out there. The upside potential, you know, when we modeled it, you know, was significant.

So, even if the company never intended to sell any, the potential benefit to the business was, in our view, massive in comparison to the cost, and that goes to the point on asymmetric bets that DK's mentioned a couple of times now. Also, I guess, reflecting a little more on threshold for disclosure and what counts as a, like a win or a loss, you know, on a bet and whether to disclose it or not, Maybe this answer is not very direct, but quantifying some of these misses might not be straightforward. For example, in the Bonk validator partnership, if it hadn't moved the stock price, would it have been a miss? I doubt it. I mean, setting up the validator was relatively low cost.

You know, we probably actually generated revenue on the partnership. Not much, but some. You know, even if the stock price didn't move, I don't know if that one would be a failure. Maybe over-musing there.

Cool. Thanks, Joseph.

Thank you.

Next question. Thanks for the framing around Treasury Accelerator. Can you walk through some of the key milestones you're looking for on Allied Architects and DFDV UK, and when we might see the SOL per share contribution? Is this a next six months or next three-four years kind of thing? Parker, you wanna take that?

Yeah, it's a good question. I think it's a little bit of both. On a unrealized basis, you may see an impact in the next six months, but the intention for us is not to, you know, wrap up these deals in six months, sell all the stock, get out, right? The intention is for these to be long-term partnerships and growth opportunities for us. We think that every major capital market in the world should have exposure to enhanced Solana as DFDV provides in the U.S. That also may take some slightly different flavors in each market, but ultimately, we're here for the long term with these partners. I think you may start to see some benefit in the short term, but I think it will be tough to evaluate the full success on any month-denominated basis.

It'll likely be, you know, many, many years, who knows, maybe a decade before we fully understand the totality of the impact here. We're playing for the long term.

Thanks. I'd like to add to that. The way I think about these deals, for the Treasury Accelerator is in a bear market or a flat market, you know, we're not gonna see a lot of, you know, significant SOL per share growth at the DFDV side for these relationships. In a bull market when, there's, you know, demand for SOL's ripping, because of these partnerships, we're able to offer additional leveraged exposure to Solana. To maybe tighten it up, I think these deals, have potential for outsized, upside with, you know, limited or no, downside.

Awesome. Thanks, guys.

And I think-

Sorry, Parker.

Expanding that, on that a little bit further, doing some back and forth, the way I think about all of our experimentation is accumulating call options. I think in this case we now have, you know, a call option on Solana DATs in Japan, for example, or Solana DATs in the U.K. If we can acquire these call options for fairly minimal cost, of course, call options aren't great in sideways markets, but or down markets, but in up markets, they have levered upside payoff. That's essentially how we look at the Treasury Accelerator program and also kind of most of our bets in general.

Awesome. Thanks, guys. One more on Treasury Accelerator, specifically as relates to Allied Architects. You mentioned Allied Architects has limited operating commitments. How should we think about what limited means in practice? Is there a potential asset management agreement coming, and would that change the economics of the deal materially? Parker, you wanna take that?

Sure. Today there's no operating agreement in place. We don't have, you know, operating commitments that would create ongoing costs. I can't discuss any future asset management agreements that may be implemented. However, of course, if we were to sign on for additional costs, that would come with commensurate additional, you know, revenue and upside there. I'll leave it at that.

Thanks, Parker. All right, next question. Would you consider running your ATM or selling SOL to repurchase any convertible debt? Is this philosophy around convertible debt repurchase similar to the MSTR playbook, or are there different ways you're thinking about convert retirement? Are converts completely off the table as a future funding source? Parker?

Sure. Ultimately, we want to maintain our flexibility. This is a very dynamic space. MicroStrategy has not been around for that long, and they've changed the playbook several times already. You know, just recently Saylor starting to discuss potentially selling some Bitcoin. I don't wanna paint ourselves into a corner by saying we will never do something or we will always do something. You know, we evaluate these opportunities as they come along and look at the economics. You know, maybe an example. If the convert was trading at $0.05, this is you know, hyperbole.

If the convert was trading at $0.05 and we could retire all of our debt for $6 million, yeah, maybe we'd sell a little bit of SOL, if it was, you know, trading at $100 a coin to retire all of our debt. Again, hyperbole, but, you know, we kind of look at all the opportunities as they present themselves and as the market creates opportunities. If we feel that something is, you know, mispriced, we may, you know, take advantage of that. We do really prefer not to sell SOL to buy back debt. You know, there may be some situations where it makes sense on a SOL per share growth perspective, 'cause these are convertible notes, so when there's a buyback, it also does retire that future conversion.

You know, this is not the base case. This is more of an exception. I'll kind of close out with that and just, you know, really highlight that optionality that we wanna maintain because, you know, this is such a changing environment and, all of these things, our common stock, SOL, convertible debt, everything else has a market price, and those are always in flux. Saying we will or won't do something today, is, you know, tough to predict for the future.

Awesome. Thanks, Parker. Next question. Your leverage ratios are high given the pullback in SOL price. As you simplify the capital stack and lean into different issuances like preferred equity, what's the target leverage profile we should model, and how does that change in a downside SOL scenario? Parker, you wanna take that?

Sure. Our long-term leverage target, we do want to target somewhere around 30%. Now, of course, that's going to move around quite a bit as the price of SOL moves, and we really don't want to effectively be forced rebalancers to that 30% target, because that would require us to lever up in bull markets and de-lever in bear markets, which is the exact opposite of, you know, what you want to do for long-term SPS growth. Again, we kind of have this long-term target, and this should, you know, roughly be maintained in, I would call it, the midpoint, if you will, of market environments. In the overly bullish environments, you would expect our leverage ratio to decline, and in the overly bearish markets, you would expect our leverage ratio to increase.

That may be slightly due to, you know, our own actions, but largely it's gonna be due to the market. If, you know, the value of the balance sheet gets cut in half because SOL has a 50% pullback, well, the leverage ratio doubles without us doing anything directly there to contribute to that. We do want to, you know, target a prudent level of leverage, maintain some cash reserves to cover coupon payments or, you know, dividend payments on preferreds, that kind of thing. There may be opportunities to slightly add some leverage in a bear market and slightly de-lever in a bull market. Generally speaking, we want to, you know, maintain that rough 30% target and allow the market to kind of change our leverage ratio for us.

Awesome. All right. Next question comes from George over at Craig-Hallum. Could you give us your updated thoughts on the key use cases for SOL, particularly any recent wins that embolden your conviction in the asset? Parker, you wanna take this?

Sure. There's a lot of things here. You know, interestingly enough, with the team launching a project on Ethereum, it's actually crystallized our bullishness on Solana from both a technology perspective and candidly, a liquidity perspective. If you look across the Ethereum ecosystem outside of Ethereum, Layer one or the base layer, SOL is a clear second place on liquidity. None of the L2s on the Ethereum side really come close. There's some activity on, say, Hyperliquid, but Solana has a dominant number two position on the liquidity front, and on a technology front, Solana is a very clear win-winner. It's much easier to launch projects, to manage projects. It's just a better UX on Solana all around. A few key themes that we're watching on the Solana front that are really exciting. First one is stablecoin growth.

We're seeing pretty meaningful growth on that front. Not just in TVL numbers and transaction volume numbers, which on the transaction volume side outpace all other chains. The types of entities getting involved are pretty spectacular. We saw quite a while back, Western Union, but there's a number of other large entities that are issuing stablecoins, sometimes first and foremost and even only on Solana. I think you're gonna see that continue to happen. You know, people in DeFi like to look at the total stables, TVL of, you know, $300 billion and say, "Wow, that's so big." In the grand scheme of, you know, global credit markets or global money markets, it's tiny.

I think, as, you know, global stables TVL grows to, let's call it $3 trillion, $5 trillion, $10 trillion, the $300 billion that we're at today is a drop in the bucket, and I think Solana is best positioned to capture the lion's share of that big, let's say $10 trillion TAM for money on-chain. A key reason for that is agentic AI and the X402 standard. What we're seeing is the number of machine-generated payments and payments using X402 on Solana outpacing all other chains. That's just because it's just easier to send money on Solana. It's cheaper to send money on Solana. Machines can pay, I like to say token for tokens on the agentic AI side.

You know, agents can pay for LLM tokens with, you know, crypto tokens, with stablecoins. It still makes economic sense to send those small amounts. They settle instantly. You know, there's no permission required for an AI to have a wallet to, you know, send assets around. Another really big unlock that we're excited about is the Alpenglow upgrade. The key change here is gonna be finality times, bringing finality down to about 100 ms to 150 ms. Just last week, I believe it was, there were some tests that show that it's actually working. Gearing up for the mainnet release, hopefully here in Q3.

I think that'll be a real stepwise improvement because what that does is it moves Solana out of the realm of competing with other Web3 platforms and saying, "Well, Solana's the best, you know, blockchain." It's like, "Yeah, but blockchains are all kinda slow." Actually, what it does is it brings Solana on par with Web2 platforms. Now you might say, "Well, I could run my application using, say, an RDS instance on AWS, or I could run my application using the Solana blockchain," and they actually have about the same speed. In fact, the Solana blockchain in some cases may be faster. All of the Web2 applications that we're used to, snappy apps, immediate, you know, page transitions and button clicks just working, that all is coming to Solana.

It's already great, but there's that kinda last little improvement that I think surprisingly actually is a stepwise function. This also opens up a whole host of additional applications on-chain. The one that everyone likes to talk about is, of course, on-chain perpetual swaps, something like a Hyperliquid, but on Solana. Because now it becomes, you know, Solana will start to compete with the centralized exchanges in terms of speed for a central limit order book. There's a whole host of these new applications that are unlocked with Alpenglow, and I think, you know, Alpenglow happens, say, in Q3. You'll start to see some of these applications be developed or migrated or upgraded, say, in Q4 and then into 2027. I think 2027 is gonna be a real catalyst time for Solana from a technology perspective.

Price may or may not kind of front run that, but, you know, on the technology side, we're very, very excited for the next, let's call it two years. The last thing I'd say that's very exciting is the RWA growth. We're seeing xStocks and some of the other equity issuance platforms really start to have legs. You're seeing people trading metals on-chain. You're seeing people trade commodities on chain. There's just a bunch of exciting things that are happening there that I think we're just in the very, very early innings, and I think, you know, and people like Larry Fink at BlackRock say this, that ultimately all assets are going to be tokenized.

When we're sitting here saying, "Well, you know, there's $200 billion of tokenized RWAs if you include stablecoins. You know, there's maybe, like, less than $1 billion of non-stablecoin RWAs out there, like true RWAs, you know, like tokenized stocks. This is just a tiny, tiny rounding error to zero relative to global assets. I think you're gonna see massive growth in assets being issued on chain, and Solana is candidly the best place for it, and is already winning that race. I think you're gonna kind of continue to see that happen.

Yeah, I'll add, as we highlighted in the letter, 94% of all tokenized equity spot volume has settled on Solana, which is a pretty staggering figure. Parker, I'll note you missed a good chance to say if stable coins are the ChatGPT of crypto, then Solana is Nvidia. I saw a funny article the other day, and it actually showed Claude had a price target for Solana of $350 by the end of this year. I don't know if that's too bearish, won't comment any further than that.

Is this the secret Mythos model giving us some price targets early?

All right, guys, we are at our last question. This one is for Joseph. Could you please address the increased focus on privacy networks like Canton and Zcash? How do you feel Solana loses any mandates given its transparency?

Yeah, thanks. I'm pretty bullish on privacy personally. Yes, I think non-privacy focused blockchains are disadvantaged. I think that's probably in the extreme long term. On a long enough timeframe or even a maybe a medium timeframe for Solana, I expect there to be privacy layers or tools built on top of the chain. Solana's got a great community of developers, problem solvers, and if the market demands privacy on Solana, then Solana's gonna find a way to deliver it at scale. While I'm bullish on privacy, I'm not worried about this, you know, for or from Solana's perspective in the short term, certainly.

All right. That brings us to the end of our Q&A. Thank you, Joseph, John, and Parker for your thoughtful responses as always. We thank all the listeners for tuning in to our earnings call. Please do not hesitate to reach out to us if you have any additional questions. With that, in service of SOL per share growth, we will see you all next quarter.

See y'all.

Thank you.

Good morning. Welcome to DeFi Development Corp's third quarter 2025 Business Update Call. I'm Dan Kang, Chief Strategy Officer and Head of Investor Relations. Joining me today are John Hahn, our CFO, and Parker White, our COO and CIO. Unfortunately, Joseph could not make it today as he is stuck in transit coming back from the Cantor Crypto and AI Conference. As a reminder, we will be making forward-looking statements during this call. Actual results may differ materially due to risks and uncertainties, which are outlined in our filings with the SEC. Our latest shareholder letter was published yesterday, November 12th, after market close, and is available on our website. We'll begin today by answering questions submitted by retail investors, followed by questions from the sell side. John, Parker, thanks for joining us.

First question: How are you planning to generate revenue out of SOL tokens held by DFDV? Staking is okay, but what are the use cases to generate additional revenue? Are you going to partner with stablecoin issuers or financial institutions to lend your SOL, for example? Parker?

Ultimately, everything is on the table for us. Now, of course, we take risk into account, right. We are not just going to lend all our SOL out to my brother to open a ski shop, even if he is offering 20% yield. We do put everything on the table. Of course, we have got staking, we have got running our own validators and getting third-party delegation, we have got our DeFi positions, but there are other areas that we can expand into to grow revenue. For example, our Treasury Accelerator program, where we have got likely asset management fees included there, where we can collect additional revenue from our expertise.

Additionally, there are partnerships that we can do with some of the DeFi native platforms where we're providing liquidity, where they may give us additional yield over and above the stated rate due to our size and commitment to maintain said size for a period of time. Those are just a few examples. There are others that we aren't quite ready to talk about now, but we're always looking for ways to expand our revenue and our yield generation, whether that's using our assets directly or, in some cases, just using our own expertise and selling a service-type business or providing a service-type business. That ultimately all flows back into additional accumulation of SOL. Again, we have to do so in a risk-measured, eyes-wide-open-to-the-risk approach to make sure that we don't have adverse effects, especially in a bear market.

Thanks, Parker. Next question: Can you give some color on the 11.4% average organic yield that you generated in Q3? What was the rough breakdown of this yield, and what are your strategies going forward for generating average organic yield?

I can take this one a little bit, and Parker, if you want to chime in, please do. We are really happy with the 11.4% average organic yield we generated in Q3. As a reminder, we have guided to approximately 10% average organic yield for our full year, and obviously came in 140 basis points above that. We do not want to give away the entire playbook for how we generate this, right, for competitive purposes, but we did provide one example in the shareholder letter for a strategy that worked particularly well for us over the last few months. You can imagine it is a combination of things.

There are yield opportunities for holding stables. There are yield opportunities both off and on-chain. We sort of view the, I'm going to say, the hurdle rate, if you will, for value-add for a DAT as the rate that you might get from, say, one of the SOL staking ETFs. In our view, given a DAT's purpose for a faster rate of accumulation of the underlying, and in our case, growing SOL per share is our North Star, quite simply, if you're not generating at least what the SOL staking ETFs are offering, you're not really, on an organic basis, delivering that much value-add. We sort of view that, if you will, as the risk-free rate that you have to beat. We were pretty pleased to be a few hundred basis points above there.

Now, I will say we maintained our guidance for 10% average organic yield going forward. This number can fluctuate, be plus or minus, give or take at any given moment in time. We feel pretty good on a go-forward basis that we can be roughly around that level. We do not want to deliver any promises that we are going to be in that 11%-12% range in perpetuity going forward. 10% is a level that we feel fairly comfortable with. Parker, anything you would add?

I think that covers it pretty well. I guess the last point to make would be, over time, we are continuing to increase our allocation to the on-chain opportunities. We mentioned here that we are now north of 15%, whereas prior we have talked about being under 10%. As we continue to move along, as we continue to get more comfortable on the finance side with accounting for everything, as we continue to add more platforms to our kind of risk-evaluated bucket, if you will, we do a deep dive on the smart contract risks involved with each platform. As we really continue to expand things out, we are going to continue to increase our exposure into the on-chain world, and that is where a lot of the additional yield comes from. That does fluctuate.

Sometimes it goes down, and it's not going to be as high as it always has been. Again, reiterating what DK said, we can't promise 11%, 12%, but we do still feel comfortable guiding towards that 10% number, especially as we do continue to move more on-chain.

Next question: 143% of DFDV's public float is currently shorted. This is more than peak GameStop before their short squeeze. Can the team discuss the possibility and math of a short squeeze? My math says the $100 million available and the buyback could easily cause a massive squeeze. John, you want to take that?

Yeah, sure. Happy to. Yeah, very interesting question. We definitely appreciate the question, but as a matter of policy, we actually do not comment on trading dynamics, short interest, or potential market activity in our stock. Our focus remains on executing on our strategy and building long-term shareholder value via Solana per share acquisition. Thank you.

Thanks, John. Next question: Could you provide guidance on your capital raising and token acquisition roadmap for the rest of Q4 and early 2026? Also, in your view, what is riskier: borrowing to acquire Solana and creating a liquidation point that could be hunted, or diluting control and profits via equity?

I can take that one. I think it's an interesting question. I'll actually take this one in reverse order over here because we often get asked the question about what's the right leverage level for this type of business, both in the short term and the long term. What I tell people is to focus less on the absolute levels of leverage at any given point in time, though we have indicated that we want to be roughly around the 30% level over the long term. What really matters is the structure of that debt, right.

If you look at our capital structure, for example, the convertible notes that we have in our cap stack are five-year duration unsecured notes, right. In theory, you should structure any debt that you're going to take on to be able to survive a prolonged bear market. Crypto has historically operated in four-year cycles, so we feel much more comfortable with, say, a larger amount of debt with a five-year duration than, say, even a smaller amount of debt with a much shorter duration. Again, this is all very specific. We do, of course, have some SOL-denominated loans that we've taken out as well, but because it's collateralized by SOL, you take on no pricing risk. There have been some really unique, I'm going to say, arbitrage, NIM arbitrage strategies that we've taken advantage of using those short-term SOL-denominated loans.

Again, those structures do not have the risk where if you get a massive liquidation event or SOL is suddenly down 70%-75%, where our treasury is getting drawn down. There is no risk of being subject to the price action there. As far as token acquisition roadmap for the rest of Q4, early 2026, we do not comment on the specific cadences of buys or what it is that we have outlined on a quarterly basis. We did maintain our guidance for 0.165 SOL per share by June of next year. That does more or less assume the same cadence on average of monthly capital raises. It does not assume any benefit from Treasury Accelerator. That is probably all we can comment on a forward-looking basis. Again, just because we do not want to get into the, I am going to say, minutiae and detail of disclosing on a quarterly basis exactly how much we intend to buy.

All right, next question: Are you planning a buyback as your stock price has gone down significantly? Parker, you want to comment on our share repurchase program here?

We do have a $100 million program in place that we can utilize. Our North Star metric, of course, is SOL per share growth. If the stock is trading in discounts to our net asset value, then it's actually the easiest way to grow SOL per share. We simply sell some SOL and buy back the stock. We could sell, for example, revenue SOL coming in. As we're always organically growing the balance sheet, we could sell off some of that to buy shares back. We could, in theory, sell principal SOL if the discount got steep enough, although that's kind of a last resort. We've talked about the preferred equity raise, so we'll have a bunch of cash, assuming that closes, coming in that we can use for a variety of purposes, potentially including buybacks.

However, we want to maximize the value from any buybacks that we implement. We will not broadcast to the market, "All right, guys, we're doing a buyback over the next three days. Please go buy shares in front of us." We want to maximize the value for our own shareholders. We have a policy not to announce that we have done buybacks until after the fact, potentially as late as the following quarter, which is the requirement to do so, just because we want to basically utilize any discounts that the market is giving us to grow SOL per share for our long-term shareholders. Ultimately, we ourselves are pretty substantial shareholders. Collectively, the management team owns 20%-25% of the stock. We are here for the long term.

Anybody that's along for the ride with us, we want to support, and we want to grow SOL per share over multiple crypto cycles, multiple decades. We are going to support those shareholders and be very tactful and discreet when we do buybacks to maximize the value for those long-term shareholders.

Thanks, Parker. Next question: 143% of DFDV's public float is currently shorted. Can we get a statement from the team that collectively controls about 25% of all public shares that none of those shares are being lent out and potentially contributing to the massive short positions? John, you want to take that one again?

Yeah, so I do want to clarify. Management and insiders do not, and in fact, cannot lend out our shares. Shares that are held by company officers, directors, and other insiders are subject to brokerage restrictions and insider compliance controls. These things prohibit participation in security lending programs, i.e., shorting. Therefore, no management or insider shares are being lent out or contributing to any short positions.

Thanks, John. Next question: I've heard the team say that they are here for the long haul, not just a couple of years. Given that longer time frame, is it reasonable for investors to assume that DFDV is aiming to grow their SOL per share past one well into the 2030s? Do you foresee two or three SOL per share being on the longer-term roadmap?

I'll take that one. This is obviously referencing our longer-term SOL per share target of 1.0 SOL per share by December 2028. We have not guided past December 2028 and given a longer-term guidance beyond that. Needless to say, I think given the ambitions of the team, it's reasonable to assume that we want SOL per share every year to grow, right. Every year that we operate, that metric should be going up.

The intent is not to stop it once we hit some longer-term or medium-term target. We do not have specifics to comment on, but you can imagine in that scenario, our absolute SOL balance, if we hit that one SOL per share target, would be substantially higher. Again, depending on your, I'm going to say, share dilution assumptions there, but either way, it should be substantially higher. That gives us a lot of unique things that we can do to keep driving the organic flywheel. We really become a key player in the ecosystem at that magnitude, a substantial liquidity provider, a key player in the network. That is probably as much as we can comment as far as our longer-term ambitions once we hit that one SOL per share target. Yeah, we will not comment on when we intend to hit two or three or ten SOL per share. I do love the numbers and the spirit of the question.

A couple more retail questions here, then we will pivot to the sell side. How often do opportunities come up to purchase locked SOL? Why do you not wait for most of your purchases of SOL to be centered around purchasing locked SOL? Is there a reason why not to only purchase locked SOL at a discount? Does locked SOL have the same utility as unlocked SOL? Parker, you want to comment on that?

The opportunities to purchase locked SOL, candidly, they typically occur when the market is going up. You have some of these funds that bought from the FTX estate back in the depths of the last bear market, and they seem to want to exit at prices that are, let's call it, above $200. However, you can always buy locked SOL at a price, right. If you offer a low enough discount, then people will come out of the woodwork to sell it to you. That is a little bit about the opportunities. Why not wait? We can always swap locked SOL for liquid SOL.

Sometimes when you see us announce purchases where the price is well below the average market price over that period, our purchase price, that is, that's typically because we are swapping some of our liquid SOL for locked SOL at a discount. We can simply buy liquid SOL immediately. It's always on sale. It's always out there. When a good price comes along to buy locked SOL, we can kind of flip into that locked SOL and realize that spread there. Next question: The reason to not only purchase locked SOL is there's a couple of reasons. One is the utility, the ability to use that locked SOL, or rather the ability to use unlocked SOL in DeFi to accomplish kind of our on-chain goals and purposes. The other one is simply diversification.

We don't think there's really much risk with the locked SOL, but it is all stuck with a single custodian with Bitgo. There is some custodial risk, and we do want to spread around the balance sheet in case, God forbid, something were to happen to Bitgo. There is a little bit of a risk management angle there. The last one simply is we want flexibility. If for some reason we do ever need to sell SOL or we want to sell some of the yield that we're generating to do things like buy back the stock, we want to have some of that liquid SOL available to utilize however we see fit. That answers that question. The last question here about locked SOL having the same utility, I kind of already answered that. The answer is no.

It does not have the same utility. It kind of just sits there. It's staked to a variety of validators that are contractually bound to that block of locked SOL. We do have much less flexibility with the locked SOL.

Thanks, Parker. Next question: Why a warrant dividend instead of a cash dividend? What is the intended use of proceeds if warrants are fully exercised? Parker, you want to maybe provide a little context on what we did recently with the warrant dividend and why we chose that versus cash?

For anyone that does not know, we issued a warrant dividend. To all shareholders on the record date, and I forget the exact date back in October, but to all shareholders, we gave warrants. It was a one to ten. If you had 10 shares, you got one warrant. This gave shareholders the right to buy shares of DFDV at $22.50 between now and January 2028. It has a pretty big time horizon there. A lot of shareholders have asked us about dividends and wanting to see some value in addition to just the price movement on the stock and the SOL per share growth and the underlying kind of factors.

We wanted to pay out this dividend, but if we were to pay out a cash dividend, we would simply be taking Solana from our balance sheet, selling it, and giving it out to investors, which would lower our SOL per share growth. It would also generate an immediate tax. A lot of investors actually do not like holding dividend stocks because they immediately have to pay individual income taxes and then turn around if they want and reinvest. They actually, at that point, have less of a claim to Solana, if you will, or a pseudo-claim to Solana than if you had just been holding the stock. With the warrant dividend, there are actually no taxes due upfront. If you simply hold the warrant and they end up expiring worthless, then no extra taxes. Nothing happened. You just had this opportunity.

However, if you decide to sell the warrant or exercise the warrant, then that value is realized and there'll be a tax piece on that. Ultimately, what we were doing is rather than giving our investors cash, we were giving our investors volatility. What a warrant, essentially we gave away a call option, allows investors to do is participate in the upside with us. If the stock goes up significantly, the value of the warrant will go up. At some point, when the warrant is in the money, if it becomes in the money, then the warrant has real economic value and can be exercised for, let's say, the stock's at $25, the warrant's at $22.50, you could exercise and you've got stock at a $2.50 discount.

By giving out this warrant, we allowed our shareholders to all participate in our upside in a greater fashion than just holding the stock. The other beauty of the warrant is it actually, if it were to be exercised, would bring cash into the business, whereas a traditional dividend would mean cash going out. If and when the warrants are exercised, that cash comes into the business, we've got more cash. In most scenarios, we'd be buying more SOL. Maybe we could use it to buy back stock as well. Lots of other things we could do with it. Again, the primary use case would be acquiring more Solana, but it does ultimately just mean more cash coming into the business. A bunch of reasons to do this, a bunch of reasons we thought this made sense. Who knows? Maybe we'll do it again in the future.

All right, last question from retail, then we'll pivot over to the sell side. Has management considered perpetual preferred stock like STRK or Strife as a less dilutive alternative to the equity line and convertible notes for funding SOL acquisitions, potentially reducing short seller exploitation of share count increases?

I'm happy to take this one. We actually did recently not just file for a preferred equity offering, but announce that we're intending to raise approximately $65 million worth of Series C perpetual preferred. The structure will more or less resemble or be akin or comparable to MSTR's STRK. I do want to take a step back and comment on why I think preferred equity in general makes sense for DFDV's business. There's obviously been, I'm going to say, a lot of interest and hype around preferred equity given what Michael Saylor has done year to date.

For all of the innovation behind those structures, MSTR's business is more or less hampered by the fact that they can only meet the dividend or interest payments via ATM issuance or external capital issuance, right. Our business is not subject to that same constraint. By virtue of being able to optimize Solana's native yield and generating a 10% average organic yield, we actually have a differentiated avenue to meet our dividend and interest payments on a preferred equity structure. The way I've been describing this to investors is you can almost think of DFDV as a SOL refinery, right. To use a similar metaphor that Michael Saylor has used before, which is to say you take this digital commodity SOL and you harness it into different flavors of SOL volatility across the capital structure.

If you wanted, I'm going to say, max leverage or amplified volatility and price profile on SOL, you might trade the DFDV Common or the DFDV Options. If you wanted something that was substantially lower volatility relative to SOL itself but had some downside protection and maybe a predictable coupon, our convertible structures sort of fit that bill. Somewhere in the middle would be a preferred equity offering where the principal never comes due. You get a higher coupon relative to the senior debt in our capital structure. Given the convertibility feature, still some upside as it relates to upward price movement in SOL and upward price movement in our Common equity as well. That's roughly how we think about the, I'm going to say, different flavors of volatility that we're able to offer on SOL.

We think our business is really uniquely positioned given our not just 10% average organic yield, but really industry-leading yield among all DATs to pursue a preferred equity offering. It feels very compelling. Pivoting to the sell side.

First question is from George Sutton over at Craig-Hallum. This one will be for you, Parker. In the context of DFDV's Treasury Accelerator, can you talk about what advantages you see for foreign DATs as it relates to either different regulations, the different investor base overseas, potentially less competition, and just overall market demand, and why foreign DATs are appealing?

Greg kind of or George kind of touched on all the major reasons why we might want to do a foreign DAT. On the regulatory side, foreign investors, so you can imagine, say, an investor in Japan investing in U.S. companies have a different tax regime than investing in local companies. This applies to almost every foreign investor investing in U.S. companies. Taxes right there, one particular advantage. The second one, and this is unique especially to Japan, is a difference in regulation between crypto and stocks. In Japan today, crypto is taxed at, I believe it's somewhere around 50% versus capital gains versus equities taxed at a much lower rate. This has been a key driver behind Metaplanet's success is that there's this tax arbitrage.

You can buy a stock that holds Bitcoin, or you can just buy Bitcoin, and the tax difference is massive. There is potential regulatory kind of arbitrage type opportunities in certain countries as well. Additionally, George talked about the investor base here. Yes, every country has their own investor base. Sure, they can invest in the U.S. entity, but we think a local team speaking the local language, doing local marketing, all of those things would be more appealing to those investors than investing internationally. Lastly, and maybe most importantly, is in all of these geographies, when we launch, we plan to be the very first Solana treasury vehicle in the entire country.

By being the first into these markets, we can kind of recreate, or we believe we can recreate that kind of initial magic that we had with DFDV and hopefully develop such a lead in some of these markets that competitors do not attempt to join as well. The goal is to be the leading and hopefully the only Solana vehicle in each of these countries. By having the same brand, the DFDV brand, it will reinforce every new launch because there is this kind of tried and true approach, tried and true framework, brand, everything around the table. Investors know from day one exactly what they are getting versus a new vehicle. There is kind of this period of figuring things out for investors. That is kind of the idea behind Treasury Accelerator and why we are very excited about it.

Thanks, Parker. Still another TA question. I can take this one. What structure of investments are most appealing to you guys? Will you look for more opportunities similar to Zero Stack where you can directly deploy Solana and get both equity and debt, or are you more focused on pure equity stakes?

My commentary here is that it's really dependent on the team, the structure, the token, the region, right. No two deals are going to look exactly the same. As far as the services that we offer, that can really vary as well, right. We have often talked about this, and Joseph has talked about this program in some ways almost like an à la carte program, right.

Depending on our level of involvement and, of course, the risk profile of the underlying token, if it is not SOL, we may structure for a lot of equity and a lot of, call it like AUM percentage or substantially all the delegation to our validators and things like that, or maybe a bit less so, right. It is, again, just very, very dependent. I will say that probably the single biggest factor in determining how we are going to structure this is going to be the team that we are backing, right. We would much rather have a, let's say, very killer team in a difficult market than a subpar team in an excellent market, right. Because the execution on this matters a lot.

We need to make sure that the teams are very disciplined, not just in, call it shilling the token on a day-to-day basis and being on socials, but actually in the execution of operations. We need to make sure they are very locally connected and locally aware of the market that they are operating in, et cetera. I think that probably gives you a little bit of color on some of the things that we consider when we are structuring the, I am going to say, exact equity stakes and whether we are going to do a SOL denominated convert versus a pure cash injection. Parker, anything you would add?

I think it's great.

Cool. All right, last one on TA. Can you talk a little bit more about the services agreements and how the economics actually help you grow SOL per share, Parker?

Yeah. Plain and simple, these services agreements amount to cash coming in the door every month, every quarter, every year depending on the payment schedule. We can take that cash and turn around and buy more SOL. It does not cost us anything. It costs us our time and our efforts. As long as we are making more than the operational overhead to execute on the services agreement, then it is simply revenue coming into the business just like any other source of revenue, and we can use it to accumulate more Solana.

All right, this next question comes from Brett and Gareth over at Cantor. We were excited to see your proposed Series C cumulative perpetual preferred. Can you talk about how this structure compares to other methods of fundraising that you have done?

I touched on this one a little bit earlier, but I do want to emphasize one big key difference on this, which is when you consider the concept of intelligent leverage, as it is so called in the DAT space, the beauty of doing this preferred equity issuance is that the principal never comes due. Again, in our case, we have a 10% average organic yield that helps us meet our obligations. When you think about our North Star SOL per share and the ability to deploy any proceeds from a perpetual preferred fundraise into Solana itself, it is purely SOL per share accretive, right.

That is a pretty powerful, I'm going to say, structure for us to lean into. Of course, our hope is that this one is well received. We obviously have to get it across the finish line. If it is, you can imagine that we are going to potentially consider more preferred structures in the future.

Next one also from Cantor. This one will be for you, Parker. Your dfdvSOL liquid staking token provides a unique opportunity to amplify DeFi yield on Solana holdings. Can you explain how you're driving additional adoption of dfdvSOL and how an increase in its usage could benefit your validator revenue?

For those who maybe are less familiar, the dfdvSOL liquid staking token essentially creates a liquid version of stake pointed at our validators. It allows us to take what is normally locked up, which is stake, and go use it across DeFi. We, of course, on our validators charge fees, pretty low fees, but there are fees nonetheless. We, of course, are charging ourselves those fees, so it all flows back to the same place. Others can also use the dfdvSOL token LST. If you go look at it on any of the ranking websites, go check it out on Sanctum, it is one of the highest yielding LSTs out there. We do have, if you look at it, there are, I believe I checked yesterday on Sanctum, 155 unique holders of our LST. is not massive, but it is certainly not just us using it. We do have people reaching out from time to time wanting to use it more. In many ways, our LST does outperform pretty much all other multi-validator LSTs because multi-validator LSTs like Jito or Marinade have switching costs underneath or rebalancing costs, another way to put it. The best way to, or the way to maximize yield on an LST is to stake to a single validator LST because you do not have that rebalance piece. The problem with that is you are fully trusting that LST or, sorry, that validator operator. If they go down, then your opportunity cost is the entire staking yield.

We believe for us, we have a compelling kind of trust rationale there where people can trust that our validators stay online, are highly performant, are not going to have problems given our public company status and our visibility. We do have third parties that are staking to us because we are, again, higher performing than any of the multi-validator LSTs out there like Jito or Marinade. The way to increase usage is simply marketing that. We have done some level of marketing. There is certainly more that we can do.

As we continue to get dfdvSOL added to more platforms as a collateral asset, as a trading pair, as we continue to expand the use cases for dfdvSOL, we will lean more heavily into marketing, trying to drive additional third-party stake, which, as we said over and over again, does ultimately result in more revenue for us, which is more SOL and more SOL per share growth. This is another opportunity that we have to grow SOL per share organically.

Last question again from Craig-Hallum this time. How quickly do you expect consolidation amongst the DATs? Do you expect to be a consolidator?

I'll take this one. This is my view, which is that there will be fewer SOL DATs in a few years, particularly in the U.S. versus the number that you see today. We really can't comment on anything as it relates to M&A, but I'd keep in mind that a lot of teams do have fairly complicated cap structures, warrant overhangs, asset management agreements, things like that. I mention this just because I don't think it's as simple as a drag-right model where you mesh two teams together and you have the right MNAVs and boom, all of a sudden, the entity just forms. You really do need the right, what would I call it, MNAV spreads accordingly.

You would need the right exchange ratios, right, for a deal to make sense for both parties. The dynamics between the teams obviously matter a lot. I would also say this is not a, the topic of consolidation is not exclusive to SOL DATs, right. Like we would expect to see consolidation probably on a wider level. You could expect to see some of the BTC DATs likely get consolidated. We've already started to see some of that, right. It would not surprise me to start to see some cross-pollination among DATs in the space more generally. Beyond that, not much more I'm going to say. We do have an investing/life-related question from George Sutton at Craig-Hallum, which is, can Solana Jesus save me from my investing sins? I really wish Joseph were on the call right now because.

Yeah, I guess we have to ask Joseph.

Yeah, I'll just say Joseph makes fun of me all the time for whenever I have paper hands, he's like the first one to taunt me for it and tell me I'm going to be poor for forever. So yeah, not sure if he'll be able to help you, George. All right, in closing, thank you for joining us on our 3Q earnings interview. Since we won't be doing one of these before the end of the year, we wish you all a fantastic close to 2025. We hope to see some or all of you guys at breakpoint in a few weeks here in December. As always, please don't hesitate to reach out. Our management team is always willing to chat with shareholders. And with that, in service of SOL per share growth, we'll see you guys next quarter. Take care.