The Wolf Of All Streets - $1.7B Crypto Longs Gone in MINUTES! What’s Next? #CryptoTownHall

Episode Date: September 22, 2025

This Crypto Town Hall livestream tackled the aftermath of a massive $1.7 billion liquidation event in the crypto markets, focusing on both immediate price action and the broader implications for crypto treasury companies. The discussion dove deep into recent mergers and acquisitions, particularly the STRIVE/Semler Scientific deal, and what it signals for the evolving digital asset treasury sector. Panelists explored liquidity, market structure, investor impacts, company overhead, and strategies to protect and inform retail investors amid volatility and rapid innovation.

Everybody happy Monday. Welcome to Crypto Town Hall every day here on X at 10.15 a.m. Eastern Standard time. This is a bit of a bloody Monday after a massive liquidation flush last night, middle of the night, as is tradition, on a Sunday going into Monday. We saw a major move across the board in crypto. As I said, about $1.7 billion in Long's liquidated. This was the largest liquidation event. of the year. Frankly, pretty impressive that Price is sitting where it is. Dave, are you a speaker or listener? I'm showing you as listener, but welcome to the glitch. Good morning. You can hear me, I assume. Of course, I can hear you, but I can't see you. Alex, are you a listener or a speaker? I am a speaker. I am here with you in these scary and trying times, Scott. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This platform is such steaming hot trash. It just never works.

Hamateo, Matt, and Adam are also speakers to me. Yeah, I also. to Gorov, Maricio, Matt, Brian, Alan. Yeah, okay, great. Those guys are listeners to me. Can I start? I'm going to actually have to leave somewhat early today. I have some things to do for my wife. But look, this was a classic liquidation flush in one sense,

and it was totally different than what we've seen in another sense. Classic in the sense of very quick, very abrupt, spot-led derivatives moving almost exactly in tandem with spot. There are two differences between this and past liquidation events. One, lead not, lead, I don't know. In terms of what got flush, Bitcoin was a rather small percentage of the overall flush, less than 30%, actually less than 25% of the overall flush of what got liquidated was Bitcoin. So that's very different than in the past. We've seen other Ethereum-leds ones, this was very broad-based across Alts. And the second is it almost immediately did a 50% retracement of the upside

and then sat in a 50% rain, within spitting distance of that since then. And that's, it's just very, very different. Whenever we've seen this sort of pattern before, it indicates a one-off event, boom, and now we move on to the next thing. But it is definitely different insofar that we've. was more alts impacted than Bitcoin and not just in percentage terms, but also in amount liquidated terms. Didn't you say this morning on Macro Monday that the bulk of it was on a single exchange?

Did we lose, Dave? Can you guys hear me? Yeah, it was. Sorry, more than half was on by bit, according to Coinglass. So what does that tell you? It tells me that there was a. serious build-up in spot versus a broad swath of perpetuals on the buy-bit exchange. When the spot got dumped at a very liquid time, it brought everything down.

And, you know, they closed their position, you know, by buying back the derivatives at a lower price than the spot in all likelihood and made money. That's what it looks like, unless they got super greedy, in which case, then they got their basics are ripped off. By super greedy, I mean left the the short position running while the market, you know, rallied back 50%. Now, that seems highly unlikely that they would have done that, but so be it. The market always rallies back 50% on one of these flushes and very quickly. Well, sometimes. This chart pattern is very bullish. More often than not, it rallies somewhat back and then kind of rolls over a little bit and might test the bottom.

This one, I mean, for it to do that, it could still, but it hasn't. And that's been, you know, and it's been hours of a very tight range. It's also interesting. I haven't had a chance to dig in. I'm curious if anybody else has. Anybody on this panel looked at implied volatility going out a month on Bitcoin and crypto options on Deribit or other platforms and how much did it move based off of this? And from what I can see, it doesn't look like a lot, which is also very interesting.

I'm curious. If anybody has that, that would be good to know. Yeah, to the guests, we can't always see you, but you can raise your hand using the little hard icon down here with the, you know, if there's all icons you can use to raise your hand, and you can also just jump in because it's almost impossible to moderate when we can't even see who's on stage. Does anybody have that data or taking a look at that? Dave, you're probably the guy who would have taken a look at that, to be quite honest.

yeah unfortunately i'm just uh in the process yeah i i haven't had a chance and i'd have to dig in uh you know the when you look at at the things i look at they're generally backwards looking like bit bow and others and you know he doesn't show any tick up in their volatility predictions you know probably tomorrow you'll see a little bit of a tick up but you know we i'm curious how much yeah so okay to go to the to go to the panel and open this conversation while we're on this topic. Does anybody think that this is more than a $1.7 billion flush of liquidations, which we see all the time when there's either too much euphoria or just an opportunity? Does anybody think that this is a deeper signal of something else? Maricio, go ahead. Thanks, guys. I am just looking

across through the assets I track here, and it's a bloodbath, basically, all across, you know, crypto assets. What I do see that sanding out as an outlier, to me is that the Bitcoin miner index, Wagmi, is green for the day. And it's actually at all-time high. Obviously, I ran inside for today. I mean, they're absolutely flying. Yeah, I haven't seen the individual stocks. I follow this more as a proxy. And to me, this is actually probably the strongest signal that other things I'm tracking that this is a buying opportunity potentially and just a, you know, a market hiccup because the people holding and buying the miners don't seem to be batting an eye at this. I did find the interesting, the news

about Strife, Asset Management, purchasing similar scientific, to be quite interesting. And I had thought that that might be some of the reasoning behind the sort of redness for the day in this idea that, you know, you saw Nakamoto get a piece of meta planet. Now you're seeing Strife purchasing similar. And I think people might be looking around and saying, I thought the whole point was to buy Bitcoin, not to buy each other. But I'm curious to see what other people think. Well, Strive also bought 5,800 Bitcoin in the same announcement.

And they're buying, from what I read, similar at a pretty high premium, like 210% or something to the underlying value, which seems a bit surprising. I think anyone who listens to this show knows that we've been anticipating a lot of mergers or acquisitions in the treasury space that a few will succeed. And the rest will probably get consumed. We are seeing the first iterations of that. I actually have two of my friends here, Brian and Alan from Upexy, who were effectively the first major Salana treasury company. Maybe you guys have some asset on sort of the what this means or the treasury trend. I know you're not a Bitcoin treasury company exactly, but obviously you're very on top of everything that's happening in that space. Hey, thanks so much for having us.

This is Brian Riddick. I can share some views. So please. I candidly thought that M&A was quite unlikely in the DAT space. You know, if you're a seller and you're trading below one times, why would you ever sell, you know, for something below NAV? And then if you're a quire and you can just buy the assets at one time out in the marketplace, why would you ever pay something greater than one time? And then there are all these additional other items that I thought could have made it unlikely.

So, you know, there's significant fees for lawyers and bankers. There's like management and cultural considerations. and it takes time to consummate these deals. All that said, I'm now starting to think that maybe it would be more prevalent. So if a company with a higher MNAV actually acquires a company with a lower MNAB, it is by definition accretive to your Bitcoin per share, Salana per share. And then it comes with other potential benefits too, because half of this is this visibility game.

Maybe if you are now this larger combined institution, you can attract more eyeballs, you can attract more trading volatility. volumes, which enables you to actually drip more equity out there via an equity line or an ATM. So this deal, at least according to Bitcoin treasuries.net, I have strive at four times. And so even if Semler is trading at below Nav and they bought it at this 210% premium, it still is nicely accretive to BTC per share for asset or strive. And then it just depends on what happens with the multiple. So if a company is trading at this higher premium to book or higher premium to NAV and you acquire

one at a lower premium to NAV by definition, you're going to increase BTC per share. If your multiple holds, then your stock should move up commensurate with that increase in BTC per share. If that multiple does not hold, then obviously anything can happen with the stock. And this was actually famously used by M&T Bank. It had this premium multiple. It traded at two times book. And throughout all the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s, it used this to engage in this bank roll-up strategy.

And as long as that premium multiple held, it was able to do this and really compound nav or compound book value for shareholders over a period of time. Then in the mid-2000s, its multiple came down, and it had to move away from this strategy. So it's a long explanation, but I actually think, like, yes, it's possible. And we could see more of this going forward. Matt, you had your hand up? Yeah, I think this is really the story of the day driving the narrative right here. Scott, some really great comments already.

But as I've been looking into it, for me, my main question really is, if you're a strive shareholder, are you going to accept the full dilution? And does the premium hold in the merged equities valuation or the merge entities valuation? So that's really kind of what I'm waiting to see. Yeah, I think that's what everybody, as I said, from what I'm reading, it's about 210% premium to the last close. for some are just seems really, really high. I mean, Brian, you said you weren't expecting these.

Why do you think they would pay such a premium in an all-stock deal? So let me, let me do it. I don't think it's actually, I don't think it's really a premium. I think this is probably a weird artifact because they also just raised money and something going there. Because like, for instance, if you just pull the similar stock today, it, it spiked like up 15, 20%, it's now down to only up 10%. So like there's clearly something about the structure, the deal and the pricing.

that means it's not actually a really a premium on the similar stock or the similar stock would be spiking to meet the premium. I think it also has to do with your ability to raise capital. So even if you have okayish trading volumes and you can issue equity at a premium through the ATM, you're going to be limited by how much you're actually trading each day. And I think that was probably the case with ASST. And here, if you find another company that is willing to accept your stock as consideration,

you know, you can actually go quite big and you can do it in something that might not be as accretive as if you're out there raising equity via the ATM at four times and then buying Bitcoin at one times. Maybe you're paying above Bit one times, but it's still accretive to Bitcoin per share. And this enables you to actually get the funding to do it in a big way and quite quickly. Go ahead, Lou. Yeah, I mean, I think that the fact that you've got similar, you know, while similar is up 8%, it's off of a much smaller base. So net net, this has been value destructive for, you know, the two combined companies.

So, you know, my guess would be that most other people who are thinking about acquisitions are going to look at that and pause. Brian, what do you think of that? Brian, you're our new resident bank analysts. I've had it. This is a little bit outside my expertise. Typically what you would have seen when one bank acquires another is they would hold pre-market a conference call and they would put out a new presentation and they would demonstrate

to the market the increase in book value per share. And so, I was a little surprised that we didn't see strive do that and just show, you know, on a pro forma basis, the increase in Bitcoin per share. I think the market would have received this much better if they had something more to go off of. I think this is all new for a lot of folks. You have a lot of crypto investors investing in these vehicles and are, you know, even I'm not too sure how to think about all of these components. So yeah, I think like that's one thing in the future when this does occur, if this does occur again, that it could really help investors and could lead to better stock price performance.

Yeah, a lot of it's way over my head. It, and does not a clear. criticism. I'm sure they know what they're doing, but it feels like you would just take the money and buy Bitcoin and not pay a premium for a company that's buying Bitcoin. What am I missing? I think so, but you have to be able to raise the funds. Right, of course. Yeah, I think that that is the one reason why you might do this. It's got the most important part here is this bargain out talking about, which is whether they're paying a premium because they're getting to block purchase, there might be some other

things to it. And as was noted, it's not obvious what the premium is. What this is telling you is something very important, which is all the people who believe that these things are at large will go to a discount are missing the fact that to the extent that companies with absolutely nothing in a business model beyond owning Bitcoin will never really go to a discount in any significant sense because the others who do have business models will buy them, even if it's just to buy the Bitcoin. So the idea that somehow the Bitcoin Treasury company trend will somehow blow up and take the price of Bitcoin down with it, to me, is DOA at this point. It's pretty clear. I mean, it was always a kind of a silly thing. I mean, it could be that the price of Bitcoin

going down will take down the company. That is absolutely possible. But the opposite, you know, not possible. I mean, as a Bitcoin takes down the companies, there could be a situation where then they're forced to puke their Bitcoin and at least send Bitcoin lower than it would have gone. But no, what will happen is is stronger, by weaker, even if it's stock, even if it's all stocked. Makes sense. Adam. I was just going to say, Dave, I mean, do you think this is just more of an

awareness-building event for them, rather than just going and buying Bitcoin then? I mean, is this just like, to put it on our radar? Like, I didn't even know Vivek had this company, right? Is that, is that, like, the way you look at it? I never want to speculate about what other people's motives are, particularly people as smart as we're talking about now. Maybe Vecca's

a smart guy. His board of directors are smart people, at least one of them is a friend. I am not going to speculate. I refuse. I tried to put him on the spot this morning. Yeah, that wasn't. Well, he was right to, you know, yeah, anyone who's ever been in, you know, under security laws knows how ridiculous that is. Yeah. I try to ask James Lavish about the news. I did see Gore. Go ahead, Gorev. Yeah, I couldn't see his hand up. So thanks. Go ahead, Gorff. We are in the middle of a very good conversation. I'll just go a few steps back with our friend.

I forgot his name, probably Matt, among so many speakers. First, I'm glad that you found reasons for debts to buy each other, not just stocks, but sooner than later, merger acquisitions. If you have any further doubts on the cost of lawyers and everything else, just think about it from one perspective. Right now, a little price movement of the stock versus NAV has triggered to buy stocks. Just add one more layer of spices, which is the asset and the foundation of all these companies is based on already a super volatile asset or maybe sometimes like many assets, let's say, Solana and whatnot.

So there will be like mega crashes that would probably be much bigger than any cost and a big premium. And then comes the point where like where exactly can treasury companies decide to dilute or where exactly like Scott said, where exactly do they decide to puke. And that would also be a decision. So altogether what we are looking at is the institutionalization of digital assets through the treasuries. where all these super smart people that have already done and practiced assets and asset building, basically books now call treasuries, for many, many years, right? So all these permutations combinations will only lead to better stabilization of digital assets.

What do I mean by that? Last, and I know I've been blamed of, you know, usually hosting monologues, so I'll quickly shut down. Whenever I look at Scott, I'm just like So quickly wrapping this without a monologue, extended monologue. We will end up having these treasuries acquired by others, no matter what the cost is, of course, TBD. But the best part of all of that is that, you know, all these digital assets most likely will be held under treasuries, which the way I speak about it in the crypto term, it is the burn address, but this time the burn happens. for a cost. You know, tokens don't come back from the burn address, and burning usually in the token world is super positive. Any token that goes inside a crypto treasury is a fantastic burn

that has created value. So as long as we keep practicing what we have practiced in financial world, I think we're doing just about fine in crypto. That also, by the way, covers the last topic, which was largely about, you know, what happens when Bitcoin treasuries go down. Exactly the same thing that you started your discussion with, which is other companies buying them, maybe at a much deeper discount, which is great. I mean, Bitcoin still stores value eventually. Boo. I already talked.

Your hand was up, so welcome to the glitch. Okay, so all of that, it's been, all that we just discussed on these, we're now obviously seeing some crazy treasury. company structures happening. I saw one announced yesterday for a token that doesn't exist yet that also had Solana on the balance sheet. Not sure how that gets past the NASDAQ, but I think it's very clear that there is a bit of mania in this space and that the conclusion will be interesting to watch. Yeah. Haven't you heard story protocol, Scott? Story protocol was the first one and then there are zero G and whatnot, like tons of, tons of treasuries.

Don't forget the narrative. The narrative is, I'm not surprised you have a datco. I'm surprised you don't. Yeah, well, okay, I'm not surprised that people are trying it. I'm going to go back to Alan and Brian on this because you guys did this extremely early. Like I said, effectively the first Solana treasury company. There's been rumors, I'll say, but very wide reports that this isn't as easy as it was, right? I mean, the NASDAQ obviously is making this much more difficult. The SEC

has a spotlight on it. So are these things even going to list? I mean, one of the biggest problems that we've seen in the treasury space is actually that you had huge announcements, massive stock pumps, and then companies unable to actually purchase assets for months and then shares registering from the pipe late in a dump. That's what happened to, certainly with with Nakamoto, Esbet. We've seen, Alan, I know you and I kind of talked about this privately after I interviewed Kyle Samanee yesterday. They raised a $4 billion ATM. Their shares have not registered. What happens if they start using that before there's price discovery? There's a lot of still

major pitfalls here the way that these things are structured. Yeah, thanks, Scott. I agree. You know, Brian and I looked at these and the way they're a structure. We never had an ATM set up. So, you know, we kind of went about it the old way. We raised the capital. We registered the shares. And even at that time, you know, we still had a big down draft. And that's pretty normal. We are, you know, kind of interesting to see how, like you said, ESBET, like it was, you know, they announced these deals. They got a small, really small float of a million shares. The stock went to, I don't know, 80, and they're raising money off the ATM. And it seems like a lot of, you know, my concern and our concern around it is these

individual investors, you know, getting hurt that just the retail guys don't understand. It's in the past, you know, when there was a change of control or something like that, the the SEC always made you file a new S3, but this new, there's a new thing where they become wixie, which means they can automatically register the shares if the stock, even though it's not registered and the company trades, you know, above $750 million market cap. So there's this little it's not little this major thing that's causing

a lot of companies to be able to register shares whenever they want but they're holding those back and hitting these ATMs we don't we we're not in that position we don't do that

we raise capital we file registration we tried to go with transparency but I just hope it doesn't ruin the reputation of some of the Dats

but that's what we're seeing in this in this field right now right but you Brian's got another Hey Ellen Ellen How do you talk about your investor base? Who is buying these treasuries?

I think there's a lot of retail. There's a lot of institutional people, you know, outside of crypto that are interested in them. As we're, you know, I think Brian and are scheduled to do like 20 conferences. We've done like five. We're really finding that the smaller institutions, a smaller family offices, have a real interest because they do. Like a lot of us on this call, understand how value can be built and that there are going to be a lot of, you know, opportunities for, for consolidation and, and it's not all just about like get in at one

times now, trade it, you know, hopefully sell it two times nav. So I think there's a lot more of mainstream, smaller institutions that don't get to see these deals through the banks because everything's going to the same 20, 30, 40, 50 investors really want to be part of it. They're just trying to understand it. Thanks. Mattio. Yeah, this is very insightful, and this is not my area of expertise, but I was actually just sort of curious for all these treasury companies that are popping up,

does anyone have any insight as to what kind of burn and overhead these treasury companies are operating with? Obviously, with all the financial engineering going on, with all the legal hurdles, I imagine that these teams are lean, but the actual overhead may not be insignificant with everything that's required. So I'm just sort of curious, like, what's this runway versus the actual balance sheet and war chest that they're building? And what is the margin, right? And like, what's required for them? Because, like, at some point, at some point, right, we're going to reach a place. where all of these companies are forced to post their earnings.

And that's going to be very dependent on the performance of the market. So I was just curious if anyone has any insight there, because it's a big looming question in my mind, as I'm not exactly sure how to gain exposure to these things and where to place it, treating them as an investment of an investment. Yeah, I mean, you're talking just being a public, company is several million dollars a year on the low end. You've got, let's do more time like a billion dollars you have, you're looking right

there, even if you get a good deal, you're looking at a million to two just on your custody fees a year for hosting this, assuming you're using a third-party custodian, which I have to imagine all of these guys are because you don't want the liability of doing self-custody yourself as a public company shareholder. So I'd say you're looking at, you know, and then the really big question is basically, you know, you've got a five to ten person team figure it. So depending on sort of how extractive you're being and how much you're looking to make for yourself, I'd say there's no way you're doing this for less than seven million a year

in overhead. And I think most of these are probably looking more at like 10 to 15, even with a relatively lean team. Alan and Brian, I know you know this, so go ahead. Yeah, my view is a lot of this depends on the operating company that you're connected to. And so like UPEXE first and foremost is a consumer brands business, we run roughly break-even. And so that can cover, you know, all the costs to operate that business and then some of the public company costs as well. We can actually utilize our size to push down prices.

so we use three different qualified custodians, and the majority and the main ones that we use are charging a single-digit basis points for custodying our assets. We're also using probably seven or eight different validators that we delegate our soul to. The reason that we don't run our own validators is because the vast majority of them are passing back full economics, so they're literally keeping no money at all, and they just basically want as much stake as possible. So I'd actually contend that like the costs of doing this are quite low. There obviously is management compensation, but that is absolutely aligned with shareholder value creation. And so and then my point is just looking at these costs vis-a-vis like all the value

that we can create. We really have three different value accrual mechanisms. The big one is our ability to do intelligent capital issuance. This is issuing. equity above book, which is by definition of creative. So if you think about MSCR's history of issuing equity at roughly two times, they're literally selling a dollar for two or buying Bitcoin half off. This is how MSCR has more than tripled the return of Bitcoin since it turned on as Bitcoin Treasury strategy in August 2020 without having very much leverage. The second thing is we're staking our treasury to turn it into a productive asset.

You can get that, obviously, with owning Seoul natively. or probably forthcoming in an ETF, but like I said, we can do this for very low economics. And then the last thing is our ability to buy Loxol at this roughly 15% discount. And over time, that discount will move to par. If you put that discount in any sort of yield equivalent, we're roughly doubling that 8% staking yield because we still get that 8%. And it's only a 1.3 year weighted duration. So all that's to say is we can create a lot of value for shareholders vis-a-vis. You know, there's some costs embedded there, but, you know, we do think that it's worth it,

and that's been reflected in the stock price. And you were jumping in there as well. Yeah, sorry, sorry. Yeah, I think just to click on what Brian said, like, it is really important that you look at what the underlying business was before. We decided to do this and we're the same, you know, we had our business and we issued this, you know, announcement and then we built the treasury. A lot of these are just takeovers by crypto, you know, crypto holders or other companies that kind of seems like a little bit of a cash grab. But so our economics, you know, most of our economics go to our investors. We don't have like these high sponsor warrants on these new deals.

Like you've seen these deals come out, like the last couple of deals on Solana have been really laden with high, high warrant. penny warrants. So we're not we're not exactly sure, you know, on what level we looked at the Ford deal, like possibly $150 million of fees to the sponsors. I'm not sure how that's warranted, but, you know, it is important to summarize that we, you know, we can only control what we control. Like we have, you know, a low fixed cost and we're working really hard to pass all the economics on. So I think not all debts are created equal and we're hoping that that, that, you know, certainly shows over time. Maricio?

Yes, guys. I just wanted to make a point that I don't think we've touched on. And I'm curious if anyone here has better or more insights on this than me. But I remember last week, we were chatting here in the spaces, and we were watching around, you know, Nakamoto stock getting crushed by the market is down 50%. I think it was exactly a week ago. And largely due to the fact that there were some massive pipe unlocks that came in or that basically became available to be sold.

And I think people took a chance to do so. Yeah, there's 200 million. It was 200 million at once. And now I saw reports last week that Strife passed some massive unlocks coming in in the first or second week of October. So I thought to myself, could it be that they're taking a page of the NACA experience and trying to create some more buzz and awareness before this unlock happened so that there's more of a bit under it? But curious if anyone has any different insights, because I did remember seeing yesterday that there were some big. unlocks for that for strife coming in in the first or second week of october very very sizable so i'm curious if anyone has any any details on that anyone i don't have specific details on strive unlocks i

can only say that the pipe structure that's being used is problematic in the past for s bet obviously naka and others and that we've seen that very transparently because i mean in the case of David Bailey, he went on that tweet thread, Mauricio, when we were talking about this last week, where he basically said, it's the investors who are shorting. Yeah, like, we're rotating, like, I think it was like bad investors for long-term investors or something along those lines, like, we're just basically switching over our investor base. And I wonder if that's, if other people that use a similar structure looked at last week's event, they thought to themselves, well, we probably need to act fast.

Yeah, well, Marisa, that's what I was saying with the, Ford deal in my conversation with Kyle Simani yesterday because they did, to their credit, they raised $1.65-ish billion cash. They bought $1.5 billion worth of Solana effectively immediately, but then they had the $4 billion ATM. And I asked him, and he was, I don't know, either not willing or unable to comment. I can't really speak to their position there. And I said, well, you know, are you going to use this ATM before the shares register and your pipe investors effectively exit, as we've seen over and over again, before there's price discovery on the stock, because that's why these things have the Mount Everest pattern on the chart, right?

Totally. And I think that maybe he's trying, because I believe Semler, having been around for longer, might be perceived to have a more engaged investor base. And maybe he's trying to get some of that, maybe this move is intended in some ways to get some of that bid and some of that, you know, I guess I'm not, I don't want to call it fanatism, but that allegiance to the stock. that seems to be go beyond uh in some cases beyond logic it's more like for the cause so i'm curious i'm curious if anyone has a similar thought or has considered that Alan yeah yeah i want to

yeah just on these so on on the very first registration on all these deals because the flow is so small there's just no way to prepare the markets for the downtraft right like when you you know in our even in our case we only had a million 1.4 million shares in the flow we had 40 million shares coming. Now, we didn't sell anything on the ATM or any of those things. So, you know, investors just have to understand. Like, and in general, when you raise capital as a public company, it almost always trades back down to where you raise the capital.

It doesn't matter which company you are, unless you're Microsoft or, you know, a multi-billion dollar one, and they don't usually raise capital. So, like, investors just have to look at Nav what the value is and know where to invest. These retail deals into these restrictions. floats are very, you know, they're always going to be this, these giant ups and downs, which I think one, you know, and not to talk about us, but like each time we do these deals and all that, like the first round, the second round, the third round, it should come more and more in line and be a little more steady as you build out that retail base.

So I think that's just something that, you know, the companies and even all of these chat rooms, and this room can really kind of help just let people expect what's going to happen, you know. So I think. Alan, I was just going to ask if Alan, if you can talk about Wall Street coverage of the debt sector and, you know, how you think that is. Is anybody that you think is particularly good that those who would want to read that research should agree? I think I think there's been, there hasn't, well, there's been more of the companies coming on putting out research. Most of it, even though they say it's independent, it's really not. It seems like they're working with those clients.

But the only value from these smaller research firms right now is just to understand, you know, Nav and how to calculate it. So you can put your money to work and really, you know, intelligent, you know, at an intelligent, you know, point, right? At the right premium that you think, whatever the individual investor thinks is the right premium on these things, right? So we personally think, you know, Brian and our team, we think micro strategies at 1.7 should be the, you know, around the floor for like a salonic company because the staking revenue is more significant. And the other side is on smaller companies, maybe they deserve a larger premium. But to summarize, I think the research out right now is not, I mean, I think the research out right now should be used should be used for like a guideline. on how to calculate NAV and where you think you should invest rather than, hey, I should invest in this

because I see research. And I get what you're saying about the higher Salana staking, but there's also much higher Salana issuance of tokens. So I would assume that has the opposite effect. Yeah, I'm just talking on the premium that you're willing to pay based on NAV. No, there's no doubt that Bitcoin as the financial holding has, you know, much more predictable

or what we consider predictable, you know, upside, depending on where you're looking at it. But I think it's just really, the only reason I was using that is on, because we talked earlier about calculating revenue and how that could offset, you know, the cost of public companies. Yeah, Alan, I mean, to your point,

I've been saying this kind of since the beginning and this addresses, I think, Lou, what you're saying. A Bitcoin Treasury company, if you're, regardless of what you view, as a worthy treasury asset because obviously a lot of people think bitcoin is and others are not if the goal of the company is to benchmark to some underlying asset and beat that asset that's effectively impossible with bitcoin without taking on leverage or financial engineering and it's actually quite easy with salana i mean alan is that a i mean that to what you and brian

described that's what seems like to be the case you can use salana to make more money to make for Solana. Correct. If you, especially if you're, so if you're, if you're a Bitcoin treasury, like Nakamoto or whatever, they have no income coming in monthly. So whatever the monthly expenses are, do they have to sell Bitcoin to do that, right? Do they have to, where are they going to get that income from? So for us, we know, you know, on our 500 million treasury, we've publicly said, we have 150, 105,000 to $110,000 a day of revenue. You know, you can call it whatever you want to call it, that more than offsets all of our expenses and we're able to reinvest that capital. That's all I'm saying is that's why we think, you know,

certain dat should trade at either a slightly higher or a slightly lower premium. Yeah, I'd jump in with that is a really great explanation. I think there's a couple other things too, and Alan hinted at it too. So one is there should be a built-in growth premium for a smaller dat, all else equal, because of similarly size, similarly price raise will be much more accretive. So for an example, if we issue $100 million in equity at 1.5 times, it's going to be materially accretive for our sole per share versus if micro strategy issues $100 million at any multiple, it's not going to move the needle because they're so big. So there should be some embedded growth premium for us. Number two, all else equal, Bitcoin, and we do believe that it is the best

monetary asset in the world, but it is also a $2.5 trillion asset. It's probably not going to 5x any time over the next year. So whereas something like Seoul is literally 5% the market cap of Bitcoin, and it could. It is within the realm of possibility. So all else equal, one could argue that there is more potential upside. So there should be this embedded growth premium for a digital asset treasury company underpinned by a smaller token provided that you can have confidence that it will perform well over the medium term. And then lastly, there are these additional value accrual mechanisms like staking and like buying discounted locked tokens that investors also should be willing to pay up for. I think it's very entertaining when I get into

these debates on X and we've had them on this show, but where, you know, we mention all of these things about these stocks pumping massively before there even is assets on the on the balance sheet before these shares register, and the answer is always, well, you know, retail should do their own research. They should check SEC filings as if anybody on the planet has ever done that, right? I mean, in the Robin Hood generation, people buy stock 30 seconds after they hear about it for the first time. So the notion that people are going to go deeply do their research and figure out the differentiation between 10 Bitcoin Treasury companies as nonsense. So to me, that means it leaves it on the onus of the company, to be responsible and not put investors in a position where they can buy a stock at $26.

It's obviously going back to one or two, which is what happened for better or worse. I don't know that it was intended, obviously, with Nakaboto. But there was May to August of the stock trading publicly before those shares registered or they even bought any Bitcoin. That should not be the structure moving forward. am i missing something from from from a company point there's it's impossible to stop and to almost stop that right like we announced the deal at $2.28 we announced a deal at $2.28 we didn't sell off the ATM we were we didn't you know and the stock went to 20 like we never had and well we were one of

the first right so we did we had no idea like literally our phone was blowing up why is your stock at 16 17 20 i'm like we have no idea like we we filed the registration statement for 43 million in shares, right? So it is hard for, you know, you can't really put out of press police saying, hey, don't buy the stock. It's not, it's not retellies. But I think, I think, you know, the messaging has to be clear that each time a registration is filed, the more mature the company, the less painful it gets. That's the good part about where Dats are coming or the companies, you know, that are going to do this multiple times. It should start to, should start to, you know, calm those peaks and valleys.

away here for an audience of 5,000 likely, you know, retail buyers of these things is don't buy one at a 20x premium that just launched, maybe. It's probably coming back out to what the investors paid, as you said there before. Lou, you were about to jump in. Oh, I just, like, isn't buying lack tokens an oxymoron? Awesome. Well, we could buy them OTCs. So, they're actually quite liquid if we ever did need to sell them we could sell them for probably what we got into them at but because we had this buy and hold strategy and don't ever intend to sell our salana there's actually no reason for us not to buy lock sole and take advantage of that discount yeah i get right you said roughly 15 percent yes and those typically unlock monthly uh through january 2028

Lou? Oh, no, it makes sense. I'm a tell you, and your hand up. Yeah, I just had a question again as I try to understand this better and learn with all the listeners here, which is with these treasury companies going live, these investor unlocks coming so early.

Like, what's the deal with that? I mean, even in crypto, we've had these like very long lockups and investing periods become standard for anyone who's getting in early to these things, creating the opportunity for market participation and sort of things starting to level out. To see these things go live and then opportunists taking profits and just dumping on everybody so early on, I was just kind of trying to get some more information on that. Like what's going on there? But they don't have their shares, though. Like, to be clear, I'm going to tell you, in these cases where we've been talking about these, it's like Nakamoto, I think the share is registered when the stock was back down to $3. So the idea at least floated by Bailey was that they were being shorted aggressively, but it was not the initial investors selling their stock down from the 20-something price. It was actually that caused the move from, you know, $350 down to $120 overnight last week.

I got it. That's helpful. I was misunderstanding. No, I think everybody does, right? But that registration of the shares was the very tail end of that crash. Brian, you jump in. Yeah, here's an example of what happened with us. So we had 1.3 million shares in the float.

Half of those were closely held. So, you know, it was 700,000 shares outstanding. Then we issued 45 million common equity shares or pre-funded warrants, which are essentially share equivalents in exchange for that $100 million in that initial private placement. We then filed our registration statement with the SEC. They take a look at it. There's some back and forth there where they have to deem it effective for all those investors that came into that $100 million pipe to sell.

And then when they do deem it effective, which is typically post-closed, so aftermarket, then it becomes this game theoretic selling because in crypto terms, it really is this low float high FDV construct where if you think other investors who hadn't been able to sell might sell a little bit. And by the way, if you're sitting there on a five bagger, you know, it's probably prudent to at least sell a little bit. I spoke to all of our investors. I actually don't think that they were selling, but I think that there were fears of potential selling that started to bring down the stock and the aftermarket. And this happens very commonly. And there's just not that much liquidity to support it. And then you start to see these things trade down 70

percent. There are also commission-only brokers that will literally look down the S-1. They will call each of these funds, and they will actually enable them to sell the stock as soon as that registration statement goes effective on this deemed-to-own basis. So they will actually incite this rush to the exit. And so even though I think, like a lot of these are flush with long-term holders in the form of cryptoVCs, I actually do think that it becomes a scheme theoretic, like a game, essentially, where you see a lot of folks just pounding this in the low liquidity aftermarket that you see these things drop 70% when the registration statement goes effective. Matt.

It's interesting here talking about the dots, and I just got a question for you guys when it comes to Solana. I mean, obviously, we know Bitcoin has, like, the deepest liquidity in the market. But if you're a treasury company and you need to sell Seoul fast and prices move, not in your favor, aren't you having? to rely on big centralized exchanges like Binance or Coinbase and Treasury is inherent all the risk of something like an FDX style collapse, don't you? I don't know. I'm just kicking it around in my head, but I'd love to know your thoughts. Yeah, we'd consider sold to be very, very liquid. The 24-hour

volume on it is 10 billion, I believe. But we also don't ever really intend to sell our Solana. So if you look at our credit risk leverage, we only have a $40 million line outstanding, and that's relative to almost $500 million in sold. So you'd actually need Seoul to move down quite considerably and for quite a long period for us to be for sellers. Yeah, Matt, I think your question speaks to the very wide breadth of structures for these treasury companies and why people need to do their research if they know how to and pick the right ones. Because your question is, probably very valid for a, I don't know, I'm not even going to throw it out, for coin number 79 on coin market caps treasury company, right?

But likely not for Solana if you're well structured and don't have a lot of leverage. Alan, I saw you were trying to jump in there. I think Brian hit, you know, kind of hit it there for us, you know, with the amount of liquidity in Salana now. And the more liquidity come into these markets, right? So like if we get more mainstream adoption of, you know, regulatory, roadblocks that have been there, I think more and more liquidity is going to come. But just on the final side, like when Brian went over the way we had 1.4 million share,

like so each time, you know, as investors want to take some risk out of it, like now we have 43 million shares of standing. And then you'll have 80 million shares standing. It becomes much more difficult to manipulate, you know, and I will say that these things, like on our unlock, I think our stock was $15 when the announcement came out. And on 740,000 shares of volume, it was down at four. So I don't know exactly how that happens. I'm not a market.

You know, it doesn't make any sense to us. But, you know, I think as these floats become bigger and bigger, you'll have more, you know, like I said, less peaks in valleys and hopefully we'll get to here, you know, the companies will get to here over the next couple quarters. Yeah, Alan, since we've only got a couple minutes left, I would ask you and Brian, since we have a big audience and they still don't really know how to look at these and value them. I mean, how do you differentiate yourself, make sure that it's a safer investment than some of the more speculative ones, you know, from your perspective to answer the question like Matt's, how do we clarify that and, you know, why should people purchase certain treasuries and not others? How do we even really do our research?

The one thing we try to do, and Brian can do it too, is we try to be clear on where we are on the fully diluted MNAV. So on our website, it will show you even on shares that have not been, you know, registered yet or have not been issued on our debt so that you can make a really informed decision. It's really hard. Like I invested in an S-Bed. I even put some money in BMNR, like, but I can't, I can't figure out where they are on real-time, you know, actual MNAV because they don't tell you how many shares they sold yesterday on the, you know, on the ATM and stuff. So what we try to do is just really be as clear as possible. So if you're making an investment based on like the actual premium to NAV and you built out of a thesis on where it can go, we just want to give you all the info to make the clear decision.

Whether there's a registration that hits for 24, 48 or 72 hours, we don't think that's that relevant for us. We would like our investors to know, you know, and we clearly put out the S-1s and we know what it is. It's just clarity. Like we wish everybody and we hope everybody can just put that data out there. so investors can make clear, you know, decisions and also have a time frame that's more than three days in their mind. Yeah, I agree. I think that a lot of this is like an investor education component to it. And like here's where we've put out what we call a fully diluted MNAV.

There are all these sorts of things that could really impacts like a basic MNAV. And, you know, if you looked at our basic MNAV, you'd think we were trading at a pretty material discount. to book value and that we don't believe to be true. We think that there are all these different things that make it appear so, but should actually be adjusted for it to get at the true underlying valuation that the market's describing to our stock. And similarly, we've done that with an adjusted sole per share metric and all these things are so gamable. So if I go out and I raise $100 million and one month, I just buy one million worth of soul, and then the next month, I buy $99 million worth of soul. I could go out there and tell the market that I increased

sole per share from last month by $99. Next. And then I can go out and I can borrow $100 million and the very next month buy $100 million worth of soul. And I can tell the market I just doubled soul per share again. And by our adjusted sole per share metric, we would show no increase in soul per share because it was all timing related and leverage related. And so I do think that there's just a big market education component to this as well. It would be nice if we could create a consensus metric for defining MNAV. Yeah, we've been working with all the dashboard providers. It's just, it's not a very simple exercise.

It takes a good amount of expertise. And so I haven't seen one that I think like completely nails it yet, but hopefully we'll get there. I mean, last week when Nakamoto price dropped, I believe the Treasury Dashboard, had them at 0.75, 0.7, 0.8, somewhere in that range as a discount in Nav and was very quickly clarified that they were still trading at a slight premium, right, by David Bailey. So I don't even think people are looking at accurate information when trying to make these decisions. Pretty, I mean, I guess that's the hallmark of a new trend and new space.

Yeah, we see treasury trackers where someone announces a billion dollar shelf for a billion dollar equity line or ATM and like these treasury trackers like give the company the full credit for you know as if they had that money in the door when you know the company might trade a million dollars per day and you're going to be limited by like your ADTV in terms of how much equity you could drip out there so yes I agree fully it's going to take a little bit of time but we're doing our best to help inform people as best we can Perfect. Any final thoughts, Alan Bryan, are right here against the time. So I'm going to go ahead and wrap. But I want to make sure I gave you full time to answer that question. No, I think we've done the best we can do and we continue to even. We just created a new metric. So we're trying to do our part. We're really trying to build a long-term business here with long-term shareholders. So hopefully, like Brian said, hopefully these other systems can figure it out and maybe keep up and give investors clarity. It makes it really interesting to see how these things can build value if you know where you're at.

But appreciate the invite today. Yeah, yeah, it's great. You guys are obviously welcome anytime. It's nice to have people who are actually, I guess, as we say in crypto, in the trenches of this to answer the questions because often we get a lot of speculation and don't have anybody who can clearly define how this actually works. So I appreciate you guys. Hope you can come back more often. Matt, Mauricio, Lou, thank you, everybody else who is here. Guys, we'll see you tomorrow, 10.15 a.m. Eastern Standard Time for the next.

Cryptotown Hall. Have a good one.