Inside the Company Copying Strategy’s Bitcoin Playbook — With Solana

When Michael Saylor famously transformed MicroStrategy into a leveraged bet on Bitcoin, few could have predicted just how successful the experiment would become. Now, a new firm is aiming to do something similar —with Solana.

Meet DeFi Dev Corp, or DFDV, a publicly traded company that has seen shares surge more than 3,000% since launching an attempt to run back Saylor's playbook on Solana. As DeFi Dev Corp's COO Parker White explains to Coinage, that playbook isn't exactly a mystery.

“We want to bring TradFi capital into DeFi and DeFi returns into Tradfi,” White said.

The experiment started just a few months ago. In 83 days, White and his team transformed a publicly traded company into what is effectively a Solana holding vehicle — mirroring Saylor’s MicroStrategy, but in a faster, more volatile market. And they’ve managed to do it with institutional backing from Pantera Capital, one of the most respected names in the crypto investing game. As of the end of May, DFDV now holds more than 609,000 SOL (more than $103 million.)

“I come from traditional equities. I'm a fundamental value investor,” said Pantera Managing Partner Cosmo Jiang. “As investors, it's so important that you constantly reexamine your assumptions, especially in light of contrary data.” For Jiang, that meant moving beyond skepticism of MicroStrategy’s ability to consistently trade above its NAV valuation and instead embracing what made it work: irrational markets, volatility, and a management team that knows how to play the game.

“You have to believe that markets are irrational sometimes,” Jiang said. “You have to believe that there's always going to be volatility in the market. And then, three, you have to believe that there is a management team that knows how to take advantage of those circumstances.”

And just as Strategy tethered its boat to Bitcoin's price moves, DFDV shares now swing with wherever Solana price heads next. But as White explains, there are differences to the execution strategy since Solana offers different ways to monetize than Bitcoin. The hope is to use Solana's tech stack to generate yield, optimize holdings, and expand its treasury far more dynamically than anything Bitcoin could offer.

“We took [MicroStrategy’s] playbook and then we added a giant — I’d call it like a two-thirds additional stack,” White said. "On the Solana side, it's a very productive asset, it's the economic security for the internet capital markets." From staking and yield generation to serving as a bridge between TradFi and DeFi, DFDV wants to be more than just a publicly traded SOL proxy.

“You can just buy the stock in your prime brokerage account and get a little position … but then once you have some skin in the game … you start to go down the rabbit hole,” White said, hinting that exposure to crypto via equities may be the new entry point for newbies that Bitcoin itself used to serve.

For Pantera, which rose to fame after an incredible 1,000x return on its Bitcoin bet years ago, Solana has quietly become its next largest investment in the fund. And now with DeFi Dev Corp emulating buys that have an outsized impact given Solana's relatively smaller market cap at $90 billion to Bitcoin's $2 trillion, things could rapidly accelerate in a lead up to an eventual Solana ETF approval.

“You look at MicroStrategy's $100 billion market cap — call it 5% of Bitcoin. If you translate that over to Solana … that's $5 billion," Jiang said, justifying Pantera's initial $50 million bet to get DFDV cranking with its Solana buys. "It sounds like a pretty big [total addressable market] to me.”

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