Solana Company (HSDT) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for participating in today's call to discuss Solana Company's Operating Results for the Second Quarter 2026 Ended June 30, 2026. The second quarter of 2026 Earnings press release was issued today, August 14, at approximately 4:25 Eastern time and is available on the Investor Relations section of Solana Company's website. Joining us today are Joseph Chee, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; Cosmo Jiang, Director of Solana Company and General Partner at Pantera Capital; and Madelene Gani, Chief Financial Officer. [Operator Instructions] Today's call is being recorded. I would now like to turn the call over to Jake Morakis with M Group Strategic Communications for introductory remarks. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you, operator. Before we begin, I'd like to inform you that comments and responses to questions during today's call reflect management's views as of today, August 14, 2026, only, and include forward-looking statements and opinion statements, including predictions, estimates, plans, expectations and other similar information. Actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied as a result of certain risks and uncertainties. These risks and uncertainties are more fully described in our press release issued today and in the sections entitled Risk Factors in our annual report on Form 10-K filed with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission, or the SEC, on June 30, 2026, as well as in subsequent filings with the SEC. Our SEC filings can be found on our website or on the SEC's website. Investors are cautioned not to place undue reliance on forward-looking statements. We disclaim any obligation to update or revise these forward-looking statements. Please note, this conference call will be available for audio replay on our website under the News and Events section of our Investor Relations page. With that, I would now like to turn the call over to Solana Company's Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Joseph Chee.

Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to Solana Company's Second Quarter 2026 Earnings Call. On our first quarter call, I detailed our multifaceted digital asset treasury platform and flywheel strategy for the first time: advisory, validated infrastructure, taking and treasury, each designed to strengthen the others and diversify the Solana Company's revenue sources. Today, I'm pleased to report on the progress of this buildout. Our first institutional validated cluster is operational in Tokyo. We secured our first third-party stake commitment of around 0.5 million SOL in July and expect to report the results in the third quarter of 2026. We also addressed the legacy elements of the business by divesting the cash-consuming medical device business. We swapped the legacy business unit out with the acquisition of a Hong Kong regulated trust company, a profitable enterprise that allows us to better realize the financial focus of our new operating model. The assets in our treasury also continue to generate value. Staking rewards contributed to $2.5 million, or 31,200 SOL in the second quarter. So we did not have to buy and did not have to raise capital to acquire. Every one of those actions serve a single purpose: to generate momentum behind the flywheel to fuel the advancement and development of our core business lines. We are not only holding SOL as an asset. We are helping to build the infrastructure that Asia Pacific institutions need in order to use it. And we are doing that as a trusted partner of the Solana Foundation to help drive institutional adoption for realization of Internet capital markets visions. Asia Pacific accounts for the majority of the world's crypto users and a substantial share of global cross-border payment volume, yet it remains significantly underserved by Solana's existing validator footprint. We believe a passive vehicle like an ETF cannot capture adequately the opportunity that comes with offering our own Solana infrastructure and advisory services to institutional market participants. Our flywheel of treasury, validator infrastructure and advisory is designed so that each pillar makes the others stronger and so that every turn adds SOL per share. I want to spend a moment on the state of Solana Network as Internet capital markets and Solana's continued institutional adoption, given it has significant impact on our business growth. The second quarter saw accelerated growth in 2 areas that are directly relevant to our business. First, Solana's on-chain real-world asset market reached a new all-time high of $3.62 billion at the end of June. As tokenization spreads across financial markets, institutions are choosing Solana for distribution. In fact, 5 of nearly 30 globally systemically important banks have already announced partnerships with or that leverage the Solana blockchain. Second, tokenized equities on Solana generated $4.8 billion in trading volume during the second quarter, up from $1.1 billion in the first quarter. Monthly volume grew from $670 million in April to $871 million in May before reaching $3.3 billion in June alone. As of late July 2026, 97% of all on-chain tokenized equity spot volume to date had settled on Solana, which underscores its position as the leading infrastructure for institutional tokenized securities. The institutional demand for tokenized assets on Solana is real, it is accelerating and it is arriving in parallel with our buildout over the past 2 quarters. We would like to reiterate our conviction in the Solana ecosystem. We believe Solana Company is the accountable listed counterparty those institutions can actually transact with and that's what the second quarter was spent making possible. Before I turn to our operating businesses, I want to highlight the additions we made to our team and our Board because our talent is our greatest asset. Bringing on leading Web3 native talent is what allows us to scale effectively and to execute at the highest level. On our first quarter call, we welcomed Madelene Gani as CFO and COO. Madelene brings experience with Ernst & Young, Gemini, JUUL, Hedera, Aptos, et cetera. And 1 quarter in, her impact is evident in the rigor of our reporting and in the buildout of our core business lines. In March, we welcomed Teddy Hung as Head of Business Development and Advisory. Teddy joined us from Boston Consulting Group, where he partnered with financial institutions and regulators on digital asset and money, following roles at JPMorgan and Oliver Wyman. Since 2022, he has published on digital money, stablecoins, tokenized deposit and CBDCs and on tokenization, including tokenized funds and institutional DeFi. He leads our institutional engagement with financial institutions and strategic partners and is the driving force behind the advisory pipeline I will come to in a moment. We also strengthened our Board of Directors. On April 23, the Board increased its size from 7 to 9 members and appointed Michel Lee and Sergio Mello as directors to fill in the newly created positions. Michel is a cofounder and investment partner at Cybertech Partners and a cofounder at Hashkey Group, now a Hong Kong listed company which owns 1 of the largest licensed crypto exchanges in Asia and the largest blockchain technology investment fund management company in Asia. He also brings with him more than 25 years' experience in traditional capital markets, in particular in multiple roles as product structurer, originator and risk manager across Hong Kong, Beijing, Tokyo and London. Sergio is Global Head of Stablecoin Solutions at Anchorage Digital, where he leads business development and platform offerings for stablecoins. He previously founded Lago Finance, a consortium of financial institutions built to improve settlement using tokenized cash. Last quarter, I outlined our diversified revenue engine comprised of 3 integrated service lines designed to serve institutional demand in one of the fastest-growing digital asset regions in the world, Asia Pacific, and I will touch on each service line every quarter. Advisory services: we provide bespoke advisory to traditional financial institutions and corporates, helping unlock tangible business value through blockchain adoption. On our first quarterly call, I said we expected this initiative to contribute meaningfully to revenue this year. We maintain that view. The second quarter was spent building the foundation for that revenue. Our team delivered 15 institutional education sessions and advisory workshops with banks, asset managers and exchanges across Asia Pacific. Developing a pipeline of durable recurring relationships is a crucial step in generating revenue and that work is now converting. We are in negotiations with a third party and we expect to finalize terms in due course. In this phase, advisory is doing 2 jobs: it will generate revenue over time and, just as importantly, it is our demand generation engine because the institutions that ask us how to adopt Solana are the institutions that will later need an institutional-grade validator for their operations. We are being engaged as a trusted growth partner rather than just a vendor. Validator infrastructure: Pacific Backbone is a branded, compliant, high-performance infrastructure that regulated institutions require in order to scale staking and validation on Solana. Last quarter, we said our validator nodes would be operational in late June and our first validator cluster came online early July after intensive assessment. We now have 3 machines running in Tokyo, which altogether constitute 1 validator cluster, which provides us with redundancy and an independent test environment ahead of any deployment. With institutional standards as a north star, initial deployments carry a high redundancy ratio by design and that ratio is expected to decline as we add operating validators and build operating history. Beyond Tokyo, we are working on additional validators in APAC to address growing demand per plan, and we plan to launch over the course of the year as favorable conditions arise. Now to third-party delegated stake. We have secured a commitment of an external third party of around 0.5 million SOL as of this earnings call, and we expect to report our revenue from the validator business in the third quarter of 2026. This is our first institutional client stake and we believe it is the proof point that matters most because it demonstrates that the established counterparty will move real size onto infrastructure operated by a named listed entity. We differentiate ourselves through stability, compliance and transparency beyond simply headline yield. We are pursuing ISO 27001 and SOC 2 certification to further strengthen this differentiation. Platform business: our AI-powered orchestration and compliance stack is a long-term build and we continue to develop deliberately. When complete, the platform is expected to be the combination of our staking, validator and advisory lines, giving partners a single source of execution across their digital asset operations. These initiatives sit on a multiyear trajectory and we expect their operational impact to continue building throughout this fiscal year. Together, these 3 service lines create the flywheel I highlighted last quarter. The reason that the whole is worth more than the sum of the parts is that these businesses feed 1 another. Advisory work identifies where institutions need infrastructure as we support their utilization of Solana for their business growth. Infrastructure generates recurring non-NAV fee revenue. That revenue recycles into SOL accumulation. And a larger, better-run treasury makes us a more credible counterparty for the next advisory mandate. This design was reinforced this quarter by 2 partnerships. In May, we announced a strategic partnership with the Jito Foundation to expand institutional-grade Solana infrastructure throughout Asia-Pacific. By combining Jito's market layer technology with Pacific Backbone, the partnership supports the deployment of high-performance validators and the development of institutional staking solutions tailored to regulated financial institutions and asset managers. As demand for institutional staking and validator infrastructure continues to grow across the region, this partnership is expected to strengthen the foundation supporting financial institutions building on Solana. It is also already contributing measurable yield to our treasury, which Cosmo will quantify later. In June, Solana Company announced a partnership with Alatau City, Kazakhstan's future-oriented city, to collaborate on blockchain infrastructure, enterprise adoption, education, research and policy development. Throughout this partnership, we aim to support the development of blockchain infrastructure while expanding opportunities for enterprise adoption in one of the region's fastest-growing digital asset hubs. Alatau is a clear illustration of how our offerings open doors that a pure digital treasury company alone would not because we are being engaged at the level of policy and infrastructure design, not simply as an asset holder. The second quarter also marked the continued transition towards our core business operations. The divestiture of the PoNS medical device business was finalized on April 8, 2026. This was disclosed in our first quarter Form 10-Q but bears repeating. Madelene will take you through the financials but the key takeaway is that we have exited a cash-consuming noncore operation, removing its ongoing costs from the business and we now report as a focused digital asset treasury and infrastructure company. On March 17, we acquired a Hong Kong-based trust company and the transaction closed on July 15. Total consideration was $2 million in a combination of 50% payable in cash, 50% payable by stock issuance. Hong Kong is the primary focus for our operations. Here, we believe the institutions we service do not simply need performance infrastructure; they need a licensed in-region named counterparty they are permitted to transact with. With that, let me hand the call over to Cosmo to walk through our treasury and capital markets results. Cosmo?

Thanks, Joseph. Hello everyone. I'm Cosmo Jiang, a director of Solana Company and the general partner at Pantera Capital. Pantera has been the asset manager for Solana Company's digital asset treasury since the close of the PIPE transaction in September 2025. Last quarter, I've been describing the digital asset treasury market as having moved from the genesis phase Into the execution consolidation phase. This is advancing that further this quarter. The gap between operators is widening and capital is concentrating around the vehicles that combine institutional-grade infrastructure, transparent reporting and disciplined capital management. Execution has surpassed scale as the key differentiator for us. SOL declined approximately 12% during the second quarter, following a decline of approximately 33% in the first quarter. Against that backdrop, our strategy did not change. Gross SOL per share through accretive capital allocation generates staking yield above the network average and builds operating businesses that produce revenue independent of SOL price. Staking remains one of the most important and most differentiated aspects of our business. The measured report is net staking yield, by which we mean the annualized yield we realize on our staked SOL after validator commissions and related operating costs, compared against the Solana Network's system-wide average over the same period. Over the second quarter of 2026, our average net staking yield was 6.14% APY. That compares with a network average of approximately 5.68% APY, representing outperformance of 46 basis points. That yield is generated through careful validator selection, active MEV capture and continuous rebalancing, which is the same institutional approach Pantera applies across its broader digital asset portfolio. Staking rewards are automatically restaked to compound returns, producing consistent daily on-chain revenue. Now turning to capital markets. We remain committed to capital allocation that is accretive on a SOL per share basis in any market condition. With our stock trading at a discount to net asset value during the quarter, we executed approximately $2.3 million of share repurchases, retiring 1.3 million shares and year-to-date repurchases now total approximately $5.9 million, as reflected in our treasury stock position. On the issuance side, on April 24, we completed a strategic institutional round of approximately $8 million, led by Mirae Asset with participation from Hashkey Capital. Mirae is one of the largest asset managers and financial conglomerates in Asia and the participation of both firms reflects the depth of institutional conviction in the strategy and in the region the company serves. On mNAV, at quarter end, we stood at approximately 0.81x, up from 0.73x in the first quarter. At that level, the accretive action is repurchase rather than issuance and that is where we leaned into this quarter, as we expect to continue to lean in while the discount persists. The ability to operate opportunistically on both sides of the capital structure, issuing at a premium and repurchasing at a discount, is a powerful mechanism for creating shareholder value across different market environments. As of June 30, 2026, Solana Company held approximately 2.3 million SOL across all categories, including liquid holdings, staked positions and receivables, with a fair value of approximately $170.6 million. Our in-the-money diluted share count was approximately 85.4 million shares, comprising 60.5 million common shares, 24.9 million in-the-money warrants and 21,000 RSUs. I will now turn the call over to Madelene Gani, our Chief Financial Officer, for the detailed financial results.

Thank you, Cosmo. Second quarter revenue was $2.5 million consisting of $2.5 million of staking revenue and $14,000 of other revenue. This compares with $43,000 in the second quarter of 2025, which did not include contributions from the staking revenue attributable to our treasury strategy. For the first 6 months of 2026, revenue was $6.1 million comprising of $5.9 million of staking revenue and $0.2 million of other revenue, compared with $92,000 in the prior year period. Cost of revenue for the second quarter was $0.1 million, resulting in gross profit of $2.4 million, a gross margin of approximately 97%. For the first 6 months, cost of revenue was $0.3 million and gross margin was $5.9 million. This compares with $0.2 million of cost of revenue and $0.1 million of gross loss in the prior year period. General and administrative expenses for the second quarter of 2026 were $11.1 million, compared with $3.3 million in the second quarter of 2025 and $16.3 million for the first 6 months. The increase reflects the expansion of operations associated with our digital asset treasury and infrastructure strategy, together with the $6.8 million of severance associated with the PoNS divestiture. Of the $11.1 million recorded this quarter, approximately $6.8 million relates to nonrecurring items, with the remainder being the digital asset treasury operating expense. Roughly 63,000 of that is noncash stock-based compensation. Looking forward, we expect general and administrative expenses to decline and normalize with the return of Q1 levels as the PoNS cost basis comes out in full and as we continue to cautiously invest in the validator and advisory businesses. Turning to digital asset fair value movements. During the quarter, we recorded an unrealized gain on digital assets and digital asset receivables of $2.4 million, a realized loss in digital assets of $25.4 million related to strategic sales executed as part of our capital allocation program and an unrealized loss of our digital asset fund investment of $0.3 million. For the first 6 months, those figures were an unrealized loss of $86.8 million and realized loss of $32.4 million and a fund investment loss of $2 million. It is important to note that these fair value movements are noncash in accordance with U.S. generally accepted accounting principles. They do not affect our cash balance, the tokens earned from staking activities or the quantity of SOL we hold. Net operating expenses for the second quarter were $35.1 million, compared with $3.3 million net operating in the prior year period and $138.2 million for the first 6 months of 2026. The resulting loss from operations was $32.7 million, compared with $3.3 million in the prior year period and $132.3 million for the first 6 months. Nonoperating income net was $2.4 million for the quarter. This includes the $3.1 million gain on the sale of the PoNS business, a change in fair value of our derivative liability of $0.3 million and other expense of $0.3 million, which relates primarily to the foreign exchange loss due to fluctuations in the Canadian to U.S. dollar exchange rates. We reported a net loss for the second quarter of 2026 of $30.3 million, or $0.38 per basic and diluted common share, based on weighted average shares outstanding of 79.8 million. For the first 6 months of 2026, our net loss was $130.1 million, or $1.66 per share, on weighted average shares of 78.3 million. This compares with a net loss of $9.8 million in the second quarter of 2025. Turning over to the balance sheet. As of June 30, 2026, we had total assets of $176.1 million, including $3.6 million of cash and cash equivalents, $23.3 million of current digital assets and $147.3 million of long-term digital assets and digital asset exposure across staked positions, restricted assets, receivables and fund investments. Total liabilities were $6.4 million, including a derivative liability of $4.2 million and total stockholders and mezzanine equity was $169.7 million. Finally, during the quarter, we repurchased 1.3 million shares of approximately 2.3 million under our previously authorized stock repurchase program. As of June 30, treasury stock stood at 5.9 million, representing 2.9 million shares at cost, compared with 3.5 million and 1.6 million shares at March 31. One subsequent event to note: on July 15, after the close of the quarter, we completed the acquisition of the Hong Kong Trust Company for total considerations of $2 million. This transaction will be reflected in our third quarter results and is disclosed in the subsequent events note to our Form 10-Q. I will now hand it back to Joseph for closing remarks.

Thank you, Madelene. And thank you all for joining Solana Company's second quarter 2026 operating results update. I opened by saying that last quarter I set out the flywheel and this quarter we reinforced it and that's what I want to leave you with: a validator cluster live in Tokyo, our first institutional stake secured, our first advisory engagement committed, an acquired trust company in Hong Kong and the legacy business behind us. The flywheel now is gaining momentum. Moving into our next quarter, management will continue to proactively manage our SOL treasury holdings to optimize yield while maintaining rigorous risk oversight. We plan to drive ongoing optimization of human capital footprint and cost base, paired with strict financial discipline across both operating spend and capital deployment. Three priorities will define our next quarter. First, we plan to scale Pacific Backbone beyond a current live cluster, inaugural client SOL stake to build out a larger third-party book, transforming our infrastructure into recurring fee-based revenue streams. This is expected to include the recognition of our first validator-related rewards during the third quarter. Second, we plan to convert our advisory pipeline into executed engagements and recognized revenue while continuing to pursue opportunities to expand and diversify our overall revenue base. Third, we plan to continue to execute our capital allocation strategy. With our shares trading at below net asset value, we plan to focus on enhancing the amount of SOL backing each outstanding share. We look forward to updating shareholders on our operational progress in the quarters ahead. Operator, please open the call for questions.

[Operator Instructions] And our first question for today comes from the line of Fedor Shabalin from B. Riley.

My first one is on Pacific Backbone monetization and [ moat ] in general. So beyond the Tokyo cluster, what's the revenue model once Jito's market layer tech is integrated? Is this a fee share or MEV capture arrangement? And what's the realistic time line for this project to move from cost center to revenue contributor?

Fedor, this is Joseph. Good afternoon. Good to hear from you again. I guess this is no different from other validators that has Jito as a partner. We're doing a basic thing at the moment, generating, just trying to optimize the performance to get to slightly above average versus the market. And by the way, I would think that this is not a cost center. I think almost immediately after launch, we already secured third-party SOL into it and you will see the revenue coming through. I would think that this is actually going to be profitable for this year. But again, we have to wait for the results for the coming quarter. That's my expectation. And we continue to win more third-party SOL to be a stake at the validator cluster that we have. I think you'll hear more good news on new validator nodes being launched as well in the coming quarters.

And in follow-up on the same topic, what would you expect regarding revenue impact on top of what you have now in third quarter, just to the extent you can share now?

Fedor, I don't think we have the numbers available and probably this is not the right place to give a forecast of this sort. I think at the moment, we do expect revenue to come through and we are trying to build more SOL into our validators that at this stage would still require quite a bit of work. Hopefully, at the right time, we'll be able to give you some guidance.