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On the latest Lightspeed podcast, Jack Kubinec sat down with Pantera's Capital Cosmo Jiang to talk about the fund’s latest Solana treasury company, Helius. Helius has raised $500 million and holds $1.25 billion in exercisable warrants. Let’s dig in. 

The Solana bull thesis and Pantera's DAT strategy

What is Pantera’s motivation for launching Helius?

Cosmos Jiang: Jeff Bezos used to say that there’s the holy trinity of consumer wants: faster, cheaper and accessibility. That mirrors exactly what Solana provides. It's faster, it's cheaper, it's more accessible than traditional financial rails and that's why it's gonna win. The simplicity and clarity of vision is what really resonates. 

If you’re a growth investor, you want the guy that's growing the fastest and kicking ass and taking market share. The data very clearly favors Solana. Solana generates $3 billion of annualized free cash flow for a $120 billion dollar asset. That's pretty incredible. It's only 40x the run rate for something that is growing extremely fast, and doubling, tripling year over year. That is a compelling story that hasn't been told in a big way, and we're pretty excited to do that.

What is Pantera’s plan to increase SOL per share?

Cosmos Jiang: A lot of people still don’t understand why DATs should trade at a premium. Banks in the real world trade above their book value if they can generate a return above their cost of capital, and they trade below book value if they can’t. That’s why JPMorgan trades at 2x book, but regional banks trade below 1x book. That is how the real world works, and how I would expect that to work for DATs as well.

The question becomes: How sustainably can you generate yield and what multiple can you put on that yield? Clearly the strongest tool has been financial engineering — the ability to issue stock at a premium. Monetizing excitement in your stock and then your ability to issue and sell convertible debt, which is effectively selling call options or selling volatility in your stock. My view is that as long as you do a great job of telling the Solana story and advocating for its strong growth path, both of those avenues are gonna be persistently open to you forever.

The third thing that makes a Salona DAT different than a Bitcoin DAT is your ability to generate productive yield through staking or through DeFi. We’re going to be very active about trying to use our assets in a productive way, while staying tax-efficient.

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

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Katana was built by answering a core question: What if a chain contributed revenue back into the ecosystem to drive growth and yield?

We direct revenue back to DeFi participants for consistently higher yields.

Katana is pioneering concepts like Productive TVL (the portion of assets are actually doing work), Chain Owned Liquidity (permanent liquidity owned by Katana to maintain stability), and VaultBridge (putting bridged assets to work generating extra yield for active participants).

JUP buybacks:

Since February, Jupiter’s buyback program has acquired 3.4% of JUP’s total token supply, or about 106 million JUP tokens ($50.1 million).

Solmate raises $300 million:

Brera Holdings (BREA) has closed an oversubscribed ~$300 million PIPE led by UAE-based Pulsar Group, with commitments from RockawayX and ARK Invest. 

The company will eventually be rebranded to Solmate and change its ticker.

Brera is among the few DATs that plans to generate yield off its treasury holdings, highlighting plans to create “new revenue streams from advanced Solana staking infrastructure,” per its press release.

Crypto is changing TradFi derivatives and rate markets as we know them.

DAS: London will feature all the builders driving this change. 

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

📅 October 13-15 | London