Sol Strategies Inc. (STKE) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Well, welcome to today's fireside chat with SOL Strategies. I'm John Roy. I cover Technology here at Water Tower Research, and I want to welcome everyone. So today, I'm joined by Michael Hubbard. He's the CEO of SOL Strategies. I should mention that the company's safe harbor statements can be found on their website. Also that this fireside chat may not be reproduced or written transcript distributed without the expressed written consent of Water Tower Research. Michael, welcome. How are you doing?

Thanks, John, for having me on. Doing well. How are you?

Doing good, doing good. So let's just start it off. For those who don't know SOL Strategies, maybe give us just a quick overview of the company.

Absolutely. So SOL Strategies is a Solana-focused infrastructure company and digital asset treasury. So we've been focused on Solana since September last year. We were the first public company that had this dedicated Solana focus and treasury strategy. We have a background going back to 2018 as a public company as Cypherpunk Holdings. So we've always been a crypto company. And last year, we decided Solana is where it's at. That's where we believe the future of blockchain technology is going. So we've been focused on Solana ever since. We currently have a dual strategy. We have a Solana treasury, and we have a validator business, which is an infrastructure business on Solana, generating revenue. And we're really focused on pushing Solana forward and bridging the gap between Wall Street and the blockchain world.

Great. Thanks for that overview. So let's talk about leadership continuity. Obviously, you've just stepped into the interim role at a pretty pivotal time for SOL strategies. Can you address how the leadership transition is being managed? And can you talk about the day-to-day Digital Asset Treasury plus plus strategy, how that's going to work and how you're really going to make this transition go smooth?

Absolutely. So we've known for a few months that the transition was upcoming. Leah, who was our previous CEO, she joined the company. She's been a director for many years. She became CEO last year in July with the express mandate of implementing the Solana-focused vision and the NASDAQ uplisting, which we completed in September. She built a really strong team, bringing on our CTO, Max, myself, our Chief of Operations. And really, that mandate was fulfilled with the NASDAQ uplisting, and she had expressed a desire to transition. So we've known that this was an upcoming transition for us, and we've started an external CEO search that's been underway for some time now. At the moment, I sit in as Interim CEO. I've got a background running technology company back in South Africa, where I built one of the largest independent validators on Solana, which was later acquired by SOL Strategies. And I'm really focused on how do we expand on our infrastructure business and continue our DAT++ vision, which you referred to.

Great. Excellent. So let's talk a little bit about capital deployment and maybe near-term catalysts. So you did a CAD 30 million LIFE raise, I believe.

Yes.

And that's really looking at SOL acquisitions. Can you walk us through how that's working and your approach to treasury accumulation?

Totally. So really, what we're focused on is this dual strategy. We have the treasury, which consists of Solana, and we have the validator business. On the treasury side, after the LIFE Offering and those funds have just been deployed, so we have about 520,000 in that ballpark SOL in our treasury. All of that gets stake to our own validators. So there's no inefficiency or fee drag on that because it's all putting -- being put to productive use on our own infrastructure. So we're earning a staking yield in the region of 7% on that at all times. So that's really great. But at the same time, we're looking at how do we diversify out of just being a pure treasury play and really contribute to, a, powering the network, the infrastructure that we believe in as well as offering a service to third parties. So our validator business, we've got 2.7 million SOL delegated to our validators right now. That's over $500 million. And through that, we're providing the staking service to third parties that is bringing in additional revenue to our business. And as part of our kind of ongoing strategy to diversify out of just a pure treasury play and really be in the bones and in the meat for the network and bring in value that way as well.

Excellent. So let's talk near-term execution priorities. So over the next 6, maybe 12 months, what are your top 3 operational priorities?

The focus is really on how do we improve the ability for Wall Street and what that means is institutions and funds and big institutional investors, how do we improve their ability to gain access to and exposure to the Solana blockchain? And how do we convey the message and the story of why we believe Solana is the best blockchain for the future of finance. How do we convey that story to those people and provide the infrastructure for them to access those yields that staking on Solana offers. 7% yield is really great. So you can not just hold an asset like if you hold Bitcoin, you can't stake it, you don't earn any yield on that. On Ethereum, your yield is much lower. So that 7% yield on Solana is very attractive, and we think that's going to be something that institutions are continuously looking to gain exposure to.

So if they gain exposure, let's take a step back maybe and look at maybe the medium term, next, say, 12 to 24 months. What kind of milestones are you expecting to see happen with the DAT++ framework?

I think it's really going to boil down to how the infrastructure side of it plays out. We've seen a massive growth of [ debt codes ] in the last 6 to 8 months, I would say, massive, right? So we were the first and there was no other Solana focused that for 8 months. And now there have been over a dozen new ones that have launched. So really, when you have so many different companies that are proxies to an underlying asset, what is the differentiating factor and value there. And that's where we believe we have a really strong operating team on the validator front. And we're looking at how do we expand on that side. So beyond just staking, what additional value and services could we offer to enhance the growth of that revenue stream.

Right. So how does this relate to your North Star strategy, something I've heard about a little bit.

I think in order to -- to kind of go to our North Star strategy, what it really means is we believe that the global financial system, it's a matter of time until it massively adopts blockchain technology. It is already happening. We are seeing real-world assets, tokenized stocks, mobile networks through something like Helium, Hivemapper, all these really great use cases that are coming out there and where they say, look, blockchain technology is really unlocking a lot of value here. So over the next few years, we're going to see a big transition in the global financial system. And when we look at where that transition is going to take place, it is without a doubt, Solana that is offering the best value proposition for those use cases. So how do we position ourselves to be a substantial infrastructure provider on Solana. And what that means is we are powering the network, we are executing the transactions on the network, and we're offering staking services and other infrastructure access and services to institutional partners. How do we position ourselves to capture that value and be the partner to Wall Street when they want to interact with Solana, which without a doubt, they will want to at some point in the near future.

Yes, absolutely. No, when I talk to people, it's pretty obvious at this point that reducing friction in the system is what blockchain is going to do. Any time you reduce friction, that's a winner.

Absolutely.

That's end of story. So let's talk a little bit about the NASDAQ cross-listing and the uplifting there. I mean, obviously, that gives you more access to U.S. institutional investors. What is it really changing for you near term and then maybe medium term as well?

In the near term, the big change truly is the liquidity on the stock. By being able to trade on the NASDAQ and not just the NASDAQ, but on the Global Select market, we're able to have much deeper liquidity on the stock. We've got options now being traded as well, which just helps in our goals to grow our treasury strategy, being able to fund raise. And we're really looking at fundraising as a way of growing the treasury in an accretive way. So we're not going out and we haven't done any of these really convoluted equity structures. We're really focused on clean balance sheet, raising funds when it makes sense to our shareholders, where we can add Solana to the balance sheet and grow the treasury. And the NASDAQ really unlocks that as well as just broader institutional access. And as we tell the story of the DAT++ model, we think that we're going to see very clearly that our company is going to be the most sought after, most valuable to investors who want exposure to the Solana ecosystem and not just the Solana token, but the whole ecosystem and its growth.

All right. So a lot of people are relatively new to crypto DAT the whole bit. What are the kind of steps you're taking from a risk mitigation standpoint for your infrastructure? It certainly needs to be institution grade if you're going to work with these guys. What kind of steps are you taking to assure them that, "Hey, we are definitely no institutional-grade infrastructure."

Well, that's an area that I think we're actually very strong in and something I'm very proud of. We've got an excellent CTO in Max Kaplan, who's running all of our infrastructure and together with an engineering team, which is based around the world, which gives us really good 24/7 coverage. Now the key piece there is that we collectively have years and years of experience in running validators. And the way we run our entire setup is, first of all, we're ISO 27001, SOC 1 Type 1, SOC 2 Type 1 certified, SOC 2 Type 2 audit in progress. So what that means is that we have very specific policies in place on how we manage our technology and our infrastructure. But then all of our validators are running on active passive systems. So we have dedicated backup nodes for everything. We run across multiple different data centers. So between all of these -- and we've built some open source software that we've been pushing out for the community as well to manage some of these active passive setups to really automate and improve all of this. So through all of this, what it means is that we're able to provide a really high fidelity and reliable service to our staking customers. One of our validators has had, I think, 19 months now of continuous uptime, not a single minute of downtime for 19 months. And across the board, we've had 100% uptime in recent months across our validators. As far as the treasury goes, that's on the validated and the staking side. As far as the treasury goes, we use qualified custodians. So we have obviously strict access control. We're a public company. We're PCAOB audited. So we use qualified custodians, and we use multiple custodians to reduce that counterparty risk as well. So we ensure that our treasury is always in safe hands and properly managed.

Great. Well, Michael, unfortunately, we're going to have to leave it there. I really appreciate you spending time with me today and explaining this in terms of where SOL Strategies is headed.

Thank you, John. That has been great.

Sure. To learn more about SOL Strategies, please visit their website or come to our website at www.watertowerresearch.com. I want to thank everyone for joining us. The views expressed in this fireside chat may not necessarily reflect the views of Water Tower LLC and are provided for informational purposes only. This fireside chat may not be distributed or reproduced without the written consent of Water Tower Research and should not be considered research nor recommendation. WTR is an investor engagement firm, not a licensed broker, broker-dealer, market maker, investment banker, underwriter or investment adviser. Additional disclaimers can be found at watertowerresearch.com.