The Wolf Of All Streets - Is Solana Becoming Wall Street’s Favorite Bet? This $1.5B Whale Thinks So! | Kyle Samani

Episode Date: September 21, 2025

In this exclusive interview, I sit down with Kyle Samani, co-founder of Multicoin Capital and chairman of Forward Industries, to unpack the future of on-chain capital markets and why his firm just deployed $1.5 billion in cash to purchase Solana. We dive into Kyle’s bold bet on Solana, what inspired Forward Industries’ plan to become the most on-chain native publicly traded company, and how Project Crypto from SEC Chairman Paul Atkins could transform global markets. Kyle shares why Solana is uniquely positioned to handle tokenized securities, why treasury companies are evolving beyond Bitcoin, and how institutional adoption will reshape the financial system.

We all know that crypto and blockchain are taking over the world, but do you believe that all markets will eventually be on chain? The question isn't actually if, it's when. To unpack how this transformation is currently unfolding, I sat down with Kyle Samani, co-founder and managing partner at Multi-Coin Capital, and chairman of forward industries. Mazdaq came out a week ago and they said,

we're going to trade tokenized securities in Q3, 2026. And I was like, man, like we need to move faster, make things happen. Kyle explains how his vision for building on-chain capital markets was inspired by Project Crypto, an initiative from current SEC Chairman Paul Atkins. You know, SEC Chairman Paul Atkins gave a speech seven weeks ago or so, and he announced Project Crypto to the 4,000 employees at the SEC, and he said, hey guys, we need to move U.S. securities markets on chain. And why Solana is uniquely positioned to power this shift.

I think Solana today is in the best position to capture that opportunity for these on-chain securities for a number of reasons. That includes KYC, that includes dividends, that includes stock splits, and and reverse stock splits, that includes the ability to revoke ownership and reissue elsewhere. There's a bunch of these things you need to have to be a functional security. All of those functions are built into swanamo made met today. We dive into Ford Industries' bold plan to become one of the first fully on-chain native companies, explore how traditional finance will migrate onto blockchain rails,

and discuss what this means for investors, entrepreneurs, and the future of the global economy. This episode is brought to you by Binance, the world's number one crypto exchange trusted by over 270 million users worldwide. Start your crypto journey with finance at finance.com. Finance is not available in prohibited countries, including the U.S. Check its terms for more information.

www.finance.com slash E.N. slash terms. How do we even introduce you now, Kyle? I think for the purposes of this podcast, I mean, I think it's both, you know, founder and energy partner of multiple one capital and chairman of Ford Industries. Yeah, perfect. For the purpose of this podcast, I guess we're moving on to Ford Industries, right? And obviously, the Treasury narrative has gained a lot of steam. It's been a roller coaster, to say the least. But you guys have come in. with exceptional presence.

Appreciate that. We're pretty excited to be where we're at. And look, we just got to the starting line a few days ago, so we've got a long journey ahead of us. Okay, so why a Salon a Treasury company in a world where Bitcoin treasury companies obviously became exceptionally popular, clearly on the heels of what strategy

or micro strategy has pulled off over the years? Then we saw sort of a move by Tom Lee to make Ethereum treasury companies very large. Obviously, you're leading to charge. here on Salana Treasuries, at least as the biggest, there's been some existence for a while. Yeah, I mean, you know, I'd say I was a little skeptical of digital asset treasury companies a few months ago, and I've come around for a bunch of reasons. The most important of which is, like, like, Bitcoin, digitalized treasuries don't do anything other than financial engineering. They just

lever up and buy Bitcoin, at least so far. Maybe they'll change, but as of now, that's what they do. And with Solana, there's actually an opportunity to build the future. You know, SEC Chairman Paul Atkins gave a speech a few weeks, about seven weeks ago or so. And he announced Project Crypto to the 4,000 employees at the SEC. And he said, hey guys, we need to move U.S. securities markets on chain. And I've been reflecting on, like, what is it going to take for that to happen? And, like, that's not just going to happen because, because Chair Atkins gave the speech and snapped his fingers.

It's going to happen because people try to move over. And that's going to require engagement from NASDAQ and NISI, it's going to require the DTCC, it's going to require the banks. And look, none of these parties are like incentivized to move quickly and like make this happen. And in fact, NASDAQ came out a week ago and they said, we're going to trade tokenized securities in Q3, 2026. So, like, you know, that probably means Q327 is like my assumption of what that actually means. And I was like, man, like, we need to move faster and make things happen. As chairman of Ford Industries, I'm now in a position to effectuate change and make project crypto happen.

We are working diligently now to be in a place to tokenize our own equity. And I think we'll be able to share more about that soon. Um, once we do that, Galaxy, Galaxy is one of your partners and they did that with their own equity, right? Doesn't take a genius to figure out that that's possible, uh, with the existing partnership you have. Correct. Um, but, you know, the difference between us and Galaxy is Galaxy is just a much bigger company and they're going to be less nimble. Um, once we get our equity tokenized, then there's what we want to do on-chain fundraising. We want to be able to do dividends, uh, shareholder governance. Someone has to be first to do all of these things. Um, and we are in a better position to move faster and be more nimble.

than Galaxy, Coinbase, or anyone else. So that is something we strive to do. The other side of this, of course, is just, that's all capital market side of Forward Industries. And then the other side of this is like core business operations. The very first thing that Ford Industries did after closing on the pipe last week was buy a $1 million market order of Solana on chain.

We tweeted the transaction ID, it's all out there. And I think that's important for, obviously, a starter for digitalized a treasury company. But beyond, you know, cap like that, we want to be able to pay vendors on chain. We want to be able to do payroll on chain. We want to be able to show that you can run a publicly traded company natively on chain. And ultimately, I hope Ford Industries will be the most on-chain native company, publicly traded company in the world. And I think there's value for the salon ecosystem in doing that and obviously accelerating the vision of project crypto.

It's interesting. I want to touch on something you said. that I agree with is that basically Bitcoin treasury companies, to me I just call them hedge funds. I hate the term treasury company because there's no way to beat Bitcoin using Bitcoin, right? I was a huge skeptic of them from the very beginning when I was pitched 25 of them my first week, my first hour, I should say, in Vegas at the Bitcoin conference. All of my spidey senses started tingling. I was just very concerned about what that meant for the market and certainly what it was going to mean for shareholders

survey of these companies. Then we started seeing this proliferation, obviously, of alt-coin treasury companies. And at first I was a skeptic, but then it sort of came to me that beating Ethereum or Solana using Ethereum-Salna is much easier than beating Bitcoin. Right. I mean, what yield are you getting simply by staking your assets? Roughly 8%. Right. So you can beat Solana by 8% simply by having Solana using Solana. So it actually makes a lot more intellectual sense. You can have the debate all day about whether it's a superior or worthy treasury asset long term. That's up to everybody to decide. But if you have a benchmark and your goal is to beat it, that's nearly impossible with Bitcoin and much easier with Salana, right? Correct. But look, like

Salana staking ETFs are going to be here in a couple weeks. So I think about our benchmark as staking ETF. So that's the intellectually honest benchmark. And I mean, there's a lot we can do above and beyond staking to earn silver share for our shareholders. It makes sense. So you were able to buy Salana very, very quickly. So actually, I think that the market was not. not expecting that it was going to be all cash when you raised over $1.6 billion. I think everybody's expectation was multi-coin jump in Galaxy probably own a bunch of Solana and they're going to do it in kind. You announced that it was cash and you bought $1.5-ish billion worth of Solana immediately.

How are you able to do that when a lot of these Bitcoin Treasury companies clearly have not? Like, right, they announced the stocks went up massively and kind of sat waiting for regulatory approval, it seems like, before they could buy anything. So how are you able to actually just immediately buy Salana? I mean, we did an all-cash deal, which did not require shareholder approval. NASDAQ has been making it difficult for pipe discussions when we did to come in with partial or fully in kind. And so we said, okay, that's fine.

Like, we'll just come in in cash because we believe in what we're doing. In an all-cash version, which is what we did, we're not subject to, NASDAQ cannot force us. to a shareholder vote. I'm actually, candidly, a little surprise on both the Pantera vehicles and the new new Soulmate vehicle announced this morning on how they're doing it partial in kind. It creates a lot of complexity. Most notably, if you look at the hyperliquid dat, the one that the paradigm ceded, that transaction has not closed, and I don't think it's going to close until maybe November.

So it's just very different, very different dynamics. I didn't actually realize that the, yeah, the difference is doing, having any in-kind adds a major layer of complexity. Mass. It was an all-cash deal. We announced it on Monday. We closed it on Wednesday. And we started buying on Wednesday, our first buy was on chain. It's incredible.

Okay. So now you've announced a $4 billion ATM, correct? How does that work? We've had some, I would say, cautionary tales in situations like this, S-Bet. maybe even Nakamoto, where effectively you get no real price discovery because the shares haven't registered. You have low float. There's going to be massive float coming on whenever they do register, which means you don't really know what the price is going to be. In the case of Nakamoto, the price was basically where the pipe was first raised back almost to just over a dollar.

So how do you, I guess, utilize the ATM now before the shares register and you have, you know, 80 million float instead of a million? Yeah, I mean, look, we, I can't provide specific comments here on what we're doing or not. Obviously, the statement went out yesterday. The board has approved the shelf registration, and, you know, a company has discretion on how it chooses to use that. Can't really provide more commentary, unfortunately. Okay, that's fine.

So let's talk about treasury companies more broadly in the trend. They're clearly all not built the same. Do you think that they need to be built in a certain way to be viable? Or are you of the mind that treasury companies are good because it's just more adoption of crypto generally? I don't think more is good because it means more adoption. I think that's a pretty lazy way of thinking. I think that there are a hand – look, all these treasury companies are in a very literal sense. publicly traded permanent cavalry vehicles.

Some of them may have different mandates. Ours is to increase sole per share. Others may have other mandates. We'll see how that evolves. I think it's difficult for them to differentiate, not impossible, but difficult. And to the extent that you have some differentiation, I think maybe only a handful are going to differentiate

and justify their own independent existence in the long term. It looks like I think there's probably 20 or 20. 25 DATs already out today, something like that. It looks like based on the pipeline of more that are coming, if that number's going to get closer to maybe 40, maybe even upwards of 50, we'll see. The market is not going to sustain 50 independent Dats two years from now. And so there's going to be a lot of consolidation,

which is actually a very interesting opportunity of M&A for the largest teams who have the most pedigree and can get deals done. I asked Jack Mahler the exact same question. couple months ago. I said, you know, aren't mostly just going to fail? Like, at some point, there'll be so much competition to raise or find new financial engineering that people just won't be able to compete and eventually have to sell off. And he said, yeah, that's our plan. Good. The big ones will buy the small ones, cheaper Bitcoin for me. That's correct, yeah. So you think that that's the case for every bucket, basically, of treasuries? Because, I mean, listen, I understand Bitcoin,

Ethereum, Solana treasuries. I start to, you know, shake my head at, as you said, like hyperliquid treasuries. I just, how far down the curve can these go? Yeah, I mean, certainly hyperliquids and interesting spot because there's only 30% of the tokens are floating or whatever. So that's certainly a very interesting dynamic that I'm guessing most public shareholders will not understand. But look, hyperliquids, what, floating market cap is something like $17 billion or something like that. We'll see, I think the smaller assets are the more kind of in difficult situations. So think the avalanches, the suez, you know, those kinds of things, they're going to be

very difficult to sustain. So why are people trying those? Is it because they believe they'll be able to do it in kind? Or are they not going to try them anymore now that they see that the NASDAQ is cracking out and this is becoming so much more difficult? Because I haven't seen any in all cash. If, you know, if you're a founder of one of these protocols, a million people are calling you right now and have been calling you for the little.

last month or two in telling you to do one. And most of the founders don't fully appreciate the dynamics in terms of like equity capital markets and this kind of crossover thing. I mean this is to some except uncharted territory. And it's obviously very easy to tell yourself, well, it seems EV positive to do. So you can see why as a function of those things, why most teams are trying to do one. I think most founders dramatically underappreciate how much time and energy it takes to get off the ground. And I think they'll mostly look back in 12 months and regret those decisions. I mean, is the cynical view that it's a way to exit their positions without ever saying

they have to sell and with actual liquidity when they wouldn't have otherwise had it if they were able to do in kind? Yeah, I think that's, that element is at play partially, certainly. It's probably not the only driving effort. I think that's, That sentiment is more likely to be held by investors than by founders. That makes sense. So the larger trend. I mean, these are obviously happening for a reason. A lot of it, I think, is markets have wildly changed.

The regulatory environment has changed. The legislative environment has changed. We're in this Goldilocks period of the institutionalization of crypto. Right. So it's a part of a larger trend. What else is exciting you outside of the DAT space? Obviously, we have a number of crypto companies going public, right? We have legislation, stable coins, market structure coming.

I mean, what are you watching in the context of what you're building? Yeah, I mean, the most important thing from a regular perspective for forward industries is project crypto. Because we need to bring securities markets on chain. In our view, step one is like, let's get a major U.S. security tokenized and trading on chain. that's where we're raising our hands and doing that ourselves. I think some of the additional guidance we're looking for is going to be on, you know, going, for example, to brokers sitting at the Robin Hood to the world

and selling them, hey, guys, you need, you as a legal requirement have to hook into Salon of Mainnet for liquidity. Obviously, that's not the case today. I hope that becomes the case, you know, in the next, whatever, 12, 24 months. Once our equity is tokenized, once we have a market makers and all the liquidity and all that stuff is there, then we are in a position to go lean on the SEC, right, to like, to do something like that. And obviously, we're certainly going to try to do that once the time is right. So I think that's the very important thing for us to do, both for forward industries and for crypto as a whole.

You know, the other obviously big thing going on right now is the Genies Act, excuse me, the Clarity Act. I was in D.C. earlier this week, meeting with members of Congress to that extent, and I feel pretty good about where things are. There's been some disagreement, but I think those issues are being resolved, and I think we're going to get the Clarity Act passed before the end of this calendar year. Let's talk about tokenized stocks, right? Because we've had them in their early iterations already. I think most of them are wrapped, obviously,

and there's some sort of engineering that's required to be able to trade those on-chain. you're talking about bringing it wholly on chain. I assume you would still be tradable, you know, on your Schwabs and your e-trades and everywhere else. How does that actually work? What are the mechanics of having basically this bifurcated market that doesn't exist for most publicly traded equities because it's obviously you're not just breaking new ground by tokenizing it.

You need to have markets that are consistent across every market where it's sold, right? Yeah. So dual listings are not a new cost. There are quite a few equities in the world that are dual listed, for example, across NISI and London Stock Exchange or the SGX, which is Singapore, a number of other places. So this is a thing. I don't fully appreciate the legal machinations of how that works across the various jurisdictional securities exchanges. I can say in the context of, you know, having something trade on NASDAQ and on Solana Mainnet, A, Galaxy has already done it, and then B, I expect that

The service provider that we're working with will allow a direct one-to-one transfer to move back and forth between basically the DTCC and slot of main debt. There will be no taxable event, you know, if and when you choose to do that. And it'll be close to instant, I believe, which means market makers should be able to keep prices in line across both sides. That's interesting because it was so heavily celebrated when the DTCC went from like T-plus 2 to T-1, right? Now we're talking about T plus 10 seconds. Effectively, yes. I don't hold me to that, but I believe that's what it's going to look like when it works. I mean, it would have to, right?

Because you would have to have those shares tradable between on-chain markets and off-chain markets in real-time with the same exact price. And to your point, the market makers would have to be able to manage that. Correct. That would be incredible if that really happens in 12, day, two months, whatever time you said. I mean, look, the tokenizing part will be sooner than that. The big question is going to be, when does the SEC expand its definition of NBBO, which is national best bid an offer from the brokers to include on-chain liquidity? And I don't fully appreciate the dynamics of how Reg NMS and NBBO work.

But as that gets updated, you know, that's really going to unlock. I think a lot more securities coming on chain. How in touch with regulators have you been on-thead? things like this, right? How do you handicap that this administration or this SEC knowing who Atkins is and who purses and how they approach this? How do you know that they're willing to go that far, right? Do you actively engage with the regulator and discuss with them the idea of tokenizing markets? Are they receptive to that? Because we know they wouldn't have been a year ago. I mean, well, look, Chair Atkins gave the speech for Project Crypto seven

weeks ago. The full text of that speech is available online. I encourage you. It's a quick, it's a quick Reid. Just Google Atkins, Project Crypto. So he is unambiguous in his views here. So it's going to happen. Look, the SEC is a big place. There's a lot of inertia. There's a lot of competing priorities of things going on. Custody rules, tax issues, staking ETF, the generic listing standards. I got to prove last night. So I can't fully speak to like, you know, how quickly things will move as it pertains to project crypto other than i'm pretty optimistic it's going to move i have had a chance to speak with chair atkins about this in the somewhat recent past so he's aware of what we're doing and uh i generally think uh is obviously supportive

given this is directly aligned with project crypto and you mentioned this slimlined approval process for ets obviously we saw that just announced this week that basically if you've had six months of futures on Coinbase, let's dumb it down, right? Then you can apply and be approved for an ETF in a much shorter timeline. Salon ETFs have already had the can kick down the road, right? So you've got to imagine that since they qualify by the new standards and are already being scrutinized, that they've got to be next up or very soon on the docket. How do you think that that affects the Salana Treasury company space and, you know, how long do you think it's going to be before we start to see? You hinted at it earlier that very soon you think we'll see staking salon

ETFs, not just slant ATFs. I think we're going to have salon ETFs, sorry, Solana staking ETFs around October 1st. Oh, that's incredible. It's very soon. I'm very, very excited. So does that help you?

Does that hurt you? Is it a competitor? Is it a, you know, is it basically symbiotic? How does that look? Yeah, I think it's definitely net positive for Solana and net positive for forward industries for sure. Are there some people who will go by the stake in ETF? Yeah, probably.

That's fine. That's good for Solana, and that also means that it's just more awareness of Solana. It's going to cost some people to go learn about Solana. Some of those people will learn about Forward. And some people will prefer the corporate wrapper and the interesting things we're doing. And some people won't, and that's fine. But increasing legitimacy of Solana is good for forward industries unequivocally. How hard do you think it is for people to understand what you're doing?

I don't think it's that hard. And look, I think, well, right now, we haven't done a lot yet to prove to the world that we can outperform as a slant-staking ETF. We understand that that is our job to do so. And you should expect that we're going to have stuff to talk about right to that effect. So once that stuff becomes public information, then I think, you know, very reasonable investors will be able to look at that and say, oh, yeah, this makes sense. And I can see why I might want to own this instead of the ETF. Is the expectation that the Solana staking ETF will be Salana plus 8%.

I mean, that's going to be the benchmark. You're going to have to beat. Or do you think that the staking ETF will actually have a lower yield? Unclear. I don't have a super strong view there. But we'll have the answer to that question in about two weeks. So do you think that you said that you were skeptical initially of Dats? So what sort of was the big aha moment that changed your mind?

Project Crypto from Chair Atkins, which was on July 31st. That was my like, okay, I got to do something. And then I think separately from that, once I realized the opportunity for M&A as well, that that was also, I mean, the first one is more of like a missionary. ethos thing, and then realizing the opportunity for M&A, that was my, oh, wow, like, this can be wildly accretive, if executed correctly in sole per share terms. M&A of specifically Dats that fail because you anticipate that happening, or also M&A of platforms or companies within the Salada ecosystem that allow you to increase Solana per share? I mean both, but more starting with the former.

I think it's premature at this stage for any dat to be shelling out a bunch of its core asset for something illiquid, speculative acquisition that may or may not outperform in token denominated terms. As the market matures, that I think will become the expectation. But that's not where the market is today. How large do you think that a premium token? to NAV can be justified or supported by the market. I mean, I guess we can talk about it now. The future is very difficult because obviously we've seen this massive compression

over and over and over again, right? For better or for worse, the stock is announced. Usually they don't even own the underlying asset yet, as we discussed before, you see this major pump. It comes all the way down and the pipe registers and back to where the pipe was sold, right? So you're obviously trying to avoid a situation where your stock comes all the way back down to where it was before the announcement, right? Yeah, I mean, that's obviously the ideal outcome.

Yeah, what's the question? I guess the question is how then do you just, like, what is a justifiable premium to nav right now for digital asset treasury companies? You know, like, is there ever a case where they should be trading at 7, 8, 20, 25 X to the debt asset value? Yeah, that seems pretty hard to justify. but, you know, how do I, I don't have a super strong view between, you know, 1-2, 1-5, 1-8, I don't know. But that's the ballpark.

It's not 4-5. It's, you know, 1-2. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's not going to be, I don't know how you could justify 5x that that seems not possible. Yeah. It's so, like, classic crypto to me that the, that so many of them have, you know, blown out beyond that before

anything happens and then naturally they have to come all the way back down it's crazy i mean would you have ever can imagine a year ago right i mean if there wasn't a trump presidency could you ever imagine this being the conversations that we're having here in september of 2025 i mean we were in this contentious environment where you couldn't try anything you'd basically be sued by the cc for it this is 180 degrees and better it seems yeah i mean this is as good of a climate as we could have gotten. You know, it's always darkest before dawn, right? And

it was obviously very dark under the Gensler administration. And they were very hostile towards us, and look, they overplayed their hand. They made an egregious political miscalculation. And industry banded together. And a lot of people gave a lot of money

and worked really hard. And look, we got a little lucky. No one ever knows what's going to be the outcome in an election. And And we all took one massive swing, and that swing worked. So, yeah, we're incredibly lucky to be where we are. And we obviously try to capitalize on the moment now that we have it. So if you're first to live out this on-chain dream that you've kind of described, do you think that that is a future that most companies will look to?

Do you think that we see everything on chain? Do you think that it's a parallel market? it, like, what's your long-term view on the best-case scenario? I mean, as a financial matter, I see a path to making forward industries a $50 billion-plus publicly traded permanent capital vehicle. That's going to be a long journey, I think, five years plus. But I can see a path to that happening. And as chairman, like, that is my objective for our shareholders is to get us there.

I'm talking about generally capital markets coming on chain, right? If you lead, if you show the example, this can be done. You force the Robin Hoods of the world to basically connect to Solana to do this. Do we start seeing every stock effectively being forced to come on chain? Yes, absolutely. I mean, look, Robin Hood has been very clear they wanted to tokenize more things. Larry Fink obviously said this for Black Rock. Brian Armstrong has been talking about this.

Arjun from Cracken has been talking about this. So we know all of these people want to do this, and I think they're going to, and I think our existence just makes it a little easier and a little faster for them to do what they otherwise we're going to try and do. So why Solana in your mind? Obviously, for people don't know, multi-coin, I mean, you've been the original Saladables, right? I mean, you were the first raises. You were there from the very beginning.

You rode the entire roller coaster all the way here back to. to the top. Why Solana? Do you think it will all be on Solana? Do you think that Ethereum will capture some of it or any of these others? Or do you think that Solana can do it all? Why Solana? Yeah. I mean, look, Solana's vision is the power internet capital markets, which I think is even a super set of Chair Atkins' vision for Project Crypto. I think Solana today is in the best positioned to capture that, the opportunity for these on-chain securities for a number of reasons. First and most importantly is there's a defined token standard to handle regulated issued securities Solana rolled out this idea called token extensions maybe 18 months ago or something and adoption has been a little slower than we would have liked, but it's there and it's built into the L1 and there is a mechanism to have to deal with all the realities of having a regulated security on chain

that includes KIC that includes dividends that includes stock splits and reverse reverse stock splits that includes the ability to revoke ownership and reissue elsewhere. There's a bunch of these things you need to have to be a functional security. And all of those functions are built into swanamo main net today. I have been for some time. The big challenge with the EVM is, first, the EVM does not codify that standard at all. Are there people who are trying to build those same functions on top of the EVM? Yes.

The problem, though, is that, you know, one of the big, these seats for the EVM is, well, there's many EVMs, and they all proliferate in all these different places. And not all of the EVMs are functional equivalent. And so dealing with the inherent heterogeneity of the many EVM environments makes it much harder for the tokenized security vision to exist in practice across the many EVM chains. Yeah, you could talk about Ethereum L1 is kind of like the canonical EVM, but Ethereum L1 does not support the transaction throughput to get to the future. EthereumL1 supports on the order of 20 transactions per second plus or minus.

And like obviously that's not going to cut it. Today Solana main net can process roughly on the order of 10 billion transactions in a day, something like that. And that is enough to settle all global security transactions around the world, meaning nising, NASDAQ, London, SJX, etc. Now that's not enough yet to deal with all the limits and cancels that the market makers place, But it is enough to deal with all of the settled trades. There's a long way to go for Solana.

Job is by no means done. But we've at least proven that even by 2025, we have a system that can optimistically support global securities markets. And I think that combined with the fact that you have this guaranteed global KYC layer, excuse me, securities layer, I think is a huge deal. And moreover, you know, Robin Hood's doing their own flavor of tokenized securities on Robin Hood Chain.

Coinbase is doing their own flavor. We don't even know what they're doing yet. But obviously, they've said they're going to do something. BlackRock is doing their own thing. With Securitize, maybe they'll work with other vendors. Who knows? All of those are heterogeneous standards. Yeah, they're accomplishing the same functional objective.

But, like, as a matter of software, they're different standards. Yeah. And the beauty of Solana choosing to inform. or stat in the L1, is that anyone who wants to issue is guaranteed to use the same standard. And so much in the same way, the Ethereum has already had this fragmentation problem across all of the L2s. You're going to see the same kind of problem play out again

on Ethereum, because you're going to have all these tokenization standards, and they're not going to all work together. And it's going to be a hodgepaws mess. And there's also very little even motivation for them to be interoperable because they would be such small. They're all competitors. I mean, going from one small, small, to another small fund is not worth building a bridge, right?

I mean, black ones. It's not worth it. And look, there are certain things you need to standardize and centralize as a standard for the system to work. You know, the best, you can argue the single most centralized thing in the entirety of Ethereum is the ERC20 standard, which was codified by the Ethereum Foundation in 2015. It was one of the very first things they did.

Certainly at the time, they didn't appreciate the importance of that decision. I don't think anybody did. But the fact that everything speaks to the RC20 is like the most important element of the entirety of the EVM itself. Solana took that several steps further with its instantiation of SPL as its native token standard. And it's taking that even further with token extensions and the ability to handle regulated securities. So clearly from your perspective and it's funny, I asked down it's totally the same question. and we kind of came to the one chain to rule them all. He said, yes, we can do everything.

Like, without even hesitation, I said, you know, could you do all this? Yeah, and this was a while ago. Why do you think that Ethereum still has the bulk of the institutional narrative right now? Because as much as we talk about the tech of Solana being superior for these purposes, you do still have Larry Fink talking about tokenizing everything on Ethereum. That is not true. Larry Fink does not talk about Ethereum. We talk about tokenization.

He doesn't talk about platforms. The fact that people think that Ethereum is the institutional chain is because shillers, bag holders on Twitter, shill that narrative because it's the only bullshit that they can come up with. As a technical matter, Ethereum's lead on institute, the only thing in which Ethereum has the lead on is like a checkbox from the regulators with regards to Solana is ETF. Salana is going to solve that problem the next two weeks, so they'll be on the same playing field as a legal manner. Then it's just going to be a question of adoption. There are more regulated RWAs today on Ethereum.

However, the data, you need to parse the data a little bit to make sense of it. The bulk of it is securitized as Biddle Fund. I think something like 70 to 80 percent is that. Black Rock. But then if you look at the distribution of the Securitized Biddle Fund, the top 10 holders are over 85% of that. And it's like, it's known who they are. It's, it's an MKR is a huge holder. Athena is a huge holder.

A handful of the market makers are very big holders. I think a couple of the exchanges are large holders. So my point is, is that like this notion that retail investors are holding Biddle in size, Like, lots of them, it's just not true. That's not true. And so, the lead is, I think, is very fragile. Moreover, when I look at, like, now actual bottoms-up retail adoption, if you look at Solana's X-stocks,

I think there's roughly 500 million of X-stocks issued as of today, and I believe it's, like, across tens of thousands of addresses. They may have clips 100,000 addresses. We know those are individual retail holders. We are working to tokenize our own equity, and I'm optimistic that you're going to see hundreds of millions of dollars of Ford shares tokenized in the fairly near future.

So, you know, we have these other things driving forward on this front. But the last thing I'll say on this institutionalization narrative is one side of it is like Wall Street and the asset managers, But the other side of it is the payments companies. And Ethereum is completely absent in this conversation because no payments company looks at Ethereum and takes it seriously. Because any system that's 10 years old and runs at 20 transactions per seconds for a payments company is obviously laughable.

And so when you look at World Pay, they've announced a big deal with Sala. When you look at Pfizer, when you look at Visa and all of the other work these guys are doing, all of its coalescing around Solana, even Stripe in their, yeah, they announced Stripe Chain recently, but like if you look at their keynote they gave last year, the demo they gave of doing a payment was on Phantom using Solana. And they literally went out of their way to refer to old crypto. They didn't call out Ethereum by name, and then they referred to new crypto. And new crypto was explicitly called out of Solana. So, yeah, I think the payment side is underappreciated, but in fact will end up involving way more users and way more velocity of capital.

Feels like on the payment side, the narrative won't really be Solana versus Ethereum. It feels like it's going to be private or native chains like Circle announcing their own chain versus a public chain. I don't know if circles will be private or public or how that will be structured, but it is interesting when you see the stripes and the circles and others choosing to build their own chains when something like Solana exists. Yeah, look, if you're an ambitious founder, the vision of like displacing Visa and like owning the rails is a sexy, compelling thing to believe. And so I understand why people swing for it.

I wouldn't lump Circles Ark and Strives Tempo into the same bucket. I think about those very differently. I think about Circles Ark more as basically like a private ACH or like a private Twiff network between banks and other regulated FIs. I don't think they're making a serious play of consumers, to my knowledge. Yeah, I mean, that's been my point on those is like Peggy from customer service at some company who has been told that she needs to settle accounts on stable coins and sends it to the wrong address, needs somebody to call. And you can't call the Ethereum Foundation to fix your transaction, right?

Correct. So there's that side. I actually think, again, look, we'll see what they do with Tempo. But, you know, right now if you are adding, if you are square, if you are WorldPay, if you are FISA, if you're any of the other thousands of merchant aggregators that exist around the world, the last place you're going to go to build on chain is tempo. And, you know, some of them may choose to try and go in-house, but I'm going to actually guess the bulk of them are going to say, you know, what, Stripe took

that strategy. It actually makes sense for me to do the opposite strategy, which is, is to go to the open permissionless system. And I think that that pendulum effect will be substantially larger than most people foresee. I assume your opinion is that Salonah is going much, much, much higher considering you guys quickly deployed $1.5 billion at, what is it, $230, something like that, 232?

That is a pretty reasonable assumption. Yeah. So how much high? do you think it's going and I would love to just talk you know briefly about your view on markets versus previous cycles you know do you think that we're still in the four-year cycle and we get you know 85% drawdown bear markets and these huge pumps and huge jumps do you think that you know maybe we get since we're institutionalized and obviously have a much more driving narrative kind of just continue to climb um I'm not a market cycles guy

I think they're, the biggest argument in favor of the four-year cycle thing is just that all of the crypto natives. Believe it. All just, just believe it. And it's like a self-affiliate prophecy, which is very real. Yeah. The flip side is, well, we just passed genius. I think we're going to pass clarity here pretty shortly. We have project crypto.

And I think you're going to see company after company. I mean, we again, we haven't even really seen the announcement start yet. But like every major bank is going to be. be involved in crypto in the next 24 months in some capacity. You're going to see big moves out of all of the payments companies. You're going to see big moves out of all of the asset managers on Wall Street and all the banks on Wall Street. So as that, look, I think most of those announcements hit in 26. Every one of those teams is all, they all have major internal initiatives. And all of these initiatives are now up to the C-suite. They're not in some like innovation

department over on the side. The C-suite is aware and is green lighting. you know what's happening um so as all that kind of makes its way into mainstream discourse over the course of 26 um there's a real chance that you know we just keep grinding um i heart don't really have probability views on on other side but you know the case to be made that we overcome the reflexivity the self-fulfilling prophecy yeah of the crypto natives would be that I would say maybe some assets overcome it and the rest of them get their bare market. What's the narrative for, you know, alt-coin 197 on coin market cap from 2017 right now? I agree with that statement.

Yeah, it could be absolutely brutal. Listen, we got a couple minutes left. Is there anything else that we missed? Anything super exciting that we didn't touch on that you would love to mention before we go? No, look, I think the opportunity at Ford Industries, I'm super set about what we're doing. It's new. It's weird. We are looking to hire.

If you can be a talented member of the team, reach out. We don't have job descriptions kind of intentionally. It's more of a, hey, if you really want this and you think you're value of creative, then convince me that you're value of creative. And we'd love to have you on the team. So that's comment one. Comment two is I think there's an opportunity here to be a new kind of leader of a publicly traded company. the tools to engage retail investors around the world have improved meaningfully.

Robin Hood acquired a company called Safe Technologies recently, to that effect. And there's a bunch of other similar type tools. So we're very much looking forward to engaging with shareholders directly via these different channels. We're very much going to go to people where they live, meaning Reddit, coin echo, you know, stock twits, etc. You're on thread guy, you know, you guys are, you guys are getting all the corners, obviously. Yeah, and so we understand it's our job to communicate with shareholders where they are. So we're very much looking to do that. And of course, if you have any ideas of interesting things, you think we should do, I'm all ears.

You can tag me on Twitter or you can just send me a DM, whatever you want. Yeah, right before we're done. So how does this look for you with multi-coin? Is multi-coin now all in Solana as you guys have gone so heavily into Forward? Or do you continue to invest in the rest of the crypto ecosystem? Well, look, Forward Industries is a meaningful position in our hedge fund, but it's not even, like, a dominant position. You can check our form ADVs that we file quarterly with the SEC, but our AUM is well north of $3 billion, maybe even north of the four today. So I can't say that like forward is a massive ticket for us.

We obviously have a large, a lot of position, but we invest across all kinds of ecosystems. and we'll continue to do so. We are obviously biased. I'm going to have made some big bets, but look, we feel really good about those bets, and let's see what the future holds. Awesome, man. It was a real pleasure of catching up after all this time.

Good luck at your wedding. Thanks, Scott. Appreciate it. We'll speak soon. Thank you, man.