Multicoin Co-founder: Why is SOL the best asset for DAT?

Original Title: Creating The World's Leading Solana Treasury Company
Original Author: Kyle Samani, Managing Partner at Multicoin Capital
Original Compilation: AIMan, Jinse Finance
On September 11, 2025, I am pleased to announce that Multicoin Capital, Jump Crypto (the largest cryptocurrency trading company), and Galaxy (the largest financial group in the cryptocurrency space) have successfully led a $1.65 billion PIPE financing for Forward Industries (NASDAQ: FORD), which will use the net proceeds to launch a Solana treasury company. Each sponsor has committed to invest over $100 million. I personally have also invested an additional $25 million on top of Multicoin's commitment, as I believe the company has long-term growth potential.

In addition to a few sponsors, the PIPE has also received support and participation from several global investment firms and leaders in the digital asset ecosystem, including:

• Companies/Corporations: Big Brain Holdings, Bitwise Asset Management, Borderless Capital, Coinlist Alpha, Cyber Fund, C/M Capital Partners, LP, FalconX, Graticule Asset Management Asia, Jupiter, L1 Digital, ParaFi, Ribbit Capital, RockawayX, and SkyBridge Capital.
• Angel Investors: Cindy Leow (Drift), Guy Young (Ethena), Howard Lindzon (Stockwits), Lucas Bruder (Jito), Lucas Netz (Pudgy Penguins), Robert Leshner (Superstate), Tarun Chitra (Gauntlet), and Tory Green (io.net).

The PIPE financing concluded today, and I have been appointed as the chairman of the company's board. As one of the earliest and most active supporters of Solana since leading the seed round in early 2018, I gladly accepted the opportunity to take on this role. As for my position at Multicoin, there are no changes; I will continue to serve as a managing partner.

As part of the financing conclusion, Jump Crypto's Chief Investment Officer Saurabh Sharma and Galaxy's President and Chief Investment Officer Chris Ferraro have been granted board observer rights. I am very excited to work with them.

SOL DAT

Solana has a vibrant, heterogeneous, competitive, and thriving DeFi ecosystem composed of dozens of mature teams. Therefore, Forward Industries has the opportunity to deploy its SOL funds into the DeFi space, creating differentiated sources of returns for shareholders, thereby further accelerating SOL purchases.

While we expect the SOL treasury to participate in staking and DeFi, we have also identified other strategies that Multicoin believes the company is capable of exploring:

1. First, Multicoin believes that by leveraging the deep networks of the sponsors within the Solana ecosystem (tracing back to the seed round financing in 2018), the company will be uniquely positioned to acquire discounted and locked SOL.

2. Second, in addition to obvious on-chain activities such as staking and participating in DeFi, the company sees a potentially huge and profitable design space, which is to arbitrage the capital cost differential between services provided by banks to public companies and those offered by DeFi. We believe this arbitrage strategy can manifest in various ways across numerous counterparties.

3. Third, given the sponsors' qualifications, the scale of the company's capital, and the sponsors' deep understanding and relationships within the Solana ecosystem, the company believes it can leverage these relationships to strike deals with major Solana protocols and applications to help enhance liquidity while also aiming to increase shareholder returns.

Michael Saylor pioneered the Digital Asset Treasury (DAT) corporate strategy, using Bitcoin (BTC) as the corporate reserve asset for Strategy. He defined the company's "North Star" as "the increase in BTC per share." Forward Industries is currently seeking to further develop on the model pioneered by Saylor, using SOL as its reserve asset for the digital asset treasury strategy. Similarly, Multicoin invests in the company, expecting the company's "North Star" to be the increase in SOL per share, aiming to enhance shareholder value through tailored strategies and active management of the company's treasury.

We believe SOL is the best asset to support DAT; it possesses several unique attributes that BTC and ETH lack.

SOL can generate actual returns through staking. The "yield" of SOL comes from organic economic activity and MEV. Over the past few years, Multicoin has written and introduced MEV multiple times. For Solana, as of September 2025, SOL stakers have an average yield of 8.05%, which includes approximately 6.19% inflation and about 1.86% actual yield from organic economic activity and MEV. This yield is paid to SOL stakers approximately every 2.5 days. While the nominal yield for ETH staking has been about 3.21% so far in 2025, with 2.81% being inflation, the actual yield is only around 0.41%. As a foundation for permanent capital tools, we believe this makes SOL an extremely attractive asset for DAT.

We believe that, given SOL's inherent properties, the convertible and perpetual preferred structure promoted by Strategy will have a far superior effect on SOL DAT compared to BTC DAT. The company can utilize these sources of yield to repay debt in ways that BTC DAT cannot achieve. The actual yield of Bitcoin is zero.
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