hello

I’m a ratio with a mood. When belief outruns belongings, I climb; when cash outruns clout, I fall. And when dreams shake hands with reality, I’m exactly 1.

What am I? The market-to-NAV (mNAV) multiple.

Forward Industries is raising more money

Of late, the Solana world has been swept with a palpable excitement.

After languishing at the $200 dollar mark for a period, SOL has surged 30% in the last month to $235.

That momentum is largely due to Forward Industries’ $1.65 billion PIPE financing, the largest Solana treasury vehicle by far.

If it worked for BTC and ETH, then it must work for SOL too.

On Monday, Forward did exactly what it said it was going to do: The company announced its purchase of 6,822,000 SOL, establishing the largest SOL treasury position by a wide margin.

At an average purchase price of $232 per SOL, the purchase totaled a whopping $1.58 billion, consuming nearly all the proceeds from Forward Industries’ PIPE deal.

To put that purchase into perspective, the purchase is about 16.5% of what Tom Lee’s Bitmine Immersion Technologies (BMNR) has purchased in ETH.

Forward’s mNAV currently trades at an elevated 2.09, meaning its stock is trading at a 109% premium over the value of its underlying assets.

That naturally points to the next step in the DAT playbook: Forward Industries is issuing more FORD shares to raise capital.

The company announced earlier today a whopping $4 billion at-the-market equity offering program to fund its SOL strategy.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about Forward and what sets it apart from other DATs is its stated goal to become the most “natively onchain publicly traded company in the world,” Forward Industries’ Chair and Multicoin Managing Partner Kyle Samani noted on yesterday’s Empire podcast.

That means doing what Michael Saylor cannot do with BTC, or what Tom Lee isn’t doing (yet) with ETH: deploying SOL holdings into Solana DeFi.

For example, borrowing against SOL at a 5% bank rate, converting proceeds to stablecoins, deploying in DeFi at a 10% yield and earning a 5% spread profit.

This effectively produces “cash flows” for Forward Industries, which the company can then pitch to investment banks to raise new capital and repeat the strategy.

Solana has $12.5 billion in TVL today. Assuming Forward plows all its SOL into DeFi, that’s a fairly significant $1.6 billion capital infusion into the ecosystem.

What might the downstream effects be for DeFi?

For one, that may nudge crypto a step closer to the long-anticipated “alt season.”

For the average DeFi participant, there’s profit in anticipating where Forward’s liquidity will be directed and the kind of second-order market impacts it could have on Solana tokens.

One might speculate that flows will reach Multicoin portfolio companies such as Kamino and Drift. After all, Forward executed a minuscule $1 million trade via the DFlow DEX aggregator, a Multicoin portfolio company.

Yet, Samani was adamant that the capital wouldn’t flow into companies simply because Multicoin was an investor, and risk assessment would take precedence.

Capital “should flow into leading DeFi protocols onchain,” not simply because Multicoin backed them.

There’s a slight irony involved here. 

Traditional finance looks poised to use DeFi at scale, but that is really crypto natives ushering them onchain through layers of corporate financial engineering.

If that was the one good thing to come out of the digital asset treasuries meta, maybe it might have been worth it after all.

It’s the summer of DATs and Solana has arrived at the party. 

But when October rolls around, everyone will be looking to DAS: London to hear from these meta-defining voices on where things stand and where they’re headed.

Get your ticket today with promo code: LIGHT100 for £100 off

📅 October 13-15 | London

Toby launches genSOL

Toby, a Solana MEV network, just launched its genSOL liquid staking token.

genSOL stakers will accrue “Pearl” points, and large stakers with 100 SOL earn an additional layer of incentives.