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Happy Friday, Lightspeed readers!

Today we’ve got a podcast roundup featuring Jack’s latest Lightspeed episode with Galaxy’s head of DeFi, Michael Marcantonio. 

We’ll also unpack MetaDAO’s ongoing and controversial governance proposal to do an OTC sale of $6 million worth of META tokens to Variant and DBA fund.

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The ultimate Solana thesis 

Jack Kubinec: Why is Solana the most likely blockchain to be the clear leader in global tokenized securities trading?

Michael Marcantonio: The bet that Galaxy is making is that Anza, Firedancer and the entire ecosystem on Solana can move faster at hitting a point of velocity sufficient to absorb the $500 trillion of global securities that are traded every year. Solana can do it today, right? If you add up the number of transactions that Solana can execute per second, it could actually warehouse the total number of executed transactions.

Of course, Nasdaq doesn't just absorb executed transactions. It also executes, absorbs packets for cancels and everything else. But when you look at Nasdaq vs. Solana, you can't just look at tick to trade. You also must look at the T+1 settlement. And when you factor in T+1 settlement, no centralized system today can compete with any decentralized network. Blockchains give you near-instant settlement; Alpenglow will deliver settlement between 100-150 milliseconds.

Jack Kubinec: What does integrating Forward Industries’ DAT into DeFi look like?

Michael Marcantonio: Forward has roughly $1.65 billion SOL. When it stakes that amount as a validator, it now has $1.65 billion of stake weight, which gets you state/price updates faster because you are in the first level of the turbine tree. Second, you have stake-weighted Quality of Service (QoS), which gives you this giant tunnel to push your transactions through with higher priority. So you get faster prices and better execution.

What can a DAT do with that? The FORD DAT is going to be building a fully vertically integrated DeFi trading and execution stack. From validator [and] RPCs to trading and execution, to aggregating orderflow, every step in the supply chain, the DAT is going to excel at.

And so what sort of activities are you gonna see with that sort of execution stack? You're gonna see the Forward Industries’ DAT have arguably the best access to market-making onchain and liquidity provisioning onchain. This tighten spreads onchain, provides better rates onchain and will accrue to the benefit of the token. 

Full episode on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts and X.

There has been a Cambrian explosion of Digital Asset Treasury companies. 

Don’t miss the chance to hear Lightspeed legend @smyyguy make sense of DAT data live at DAS London.

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

📅October 13-15 | London

MetaDAO governance proposal:

An ongoing MetaDAO governance proposal lays out an OTC sale of 1,470,768 unlocked META tokens to DBA and Variant to fund MetaDAO’s operations. 

If passed, the sale will take place at a price of $4.0795 per token ($85 million market cap), or a total of $6 million. That’s a ~31% discount to META’s current market cap of $124 million, which has shot up since the proposal started trading.

When asked about the fund’s value add to MetaDAO, DBA co-founder Jon Charbonneau said in the MetaDAO Telegram that advantages include a portfolio and pipeline with “a number of perfect potential MetaDAO customers,” noting that DBA’s multiple recent investments are early-stage Solana teams. He also highlighted Variant’s complementary strengths on the legal side.

As per MetaDAO’s futarchy rules, the proposal passes only if “Approved” trades ~1.5% above "Rejected.” 

“Rejected” ($6.096) is currently trading above “Approved” ($5.911), implying that markets believe META would trade about 3.03% lower if the proposal passes. That signals a bearish read on the OTC deal — markets are viewing it as value-negative right now.