As Solana attempts to reclaim the $220 level as support, an Australian-based firm has joined the trend of Digital Asset Treasury (DAT) companies with a $100 million financing facility for the launch of a new SOL treasury strategy. Related Reading: Analyst Says Ethereum Bounce Is Imminent As BitMine Continues To Accumulate First Australia-Based Solana Treasury On Tuesday, Nasdaq-listed Fitell Corporation, a global provider of fitness equipment and health solutions, unveiled the launch of the first Solana-based digital asset treasury in Australia. According to the announcement, the company has secured a $100 million convertible note facility with a US-based institutional investor to support the launch of its SOL treasury strategy. Notably, $10 million from the initial closing will be immediately deployed to purchase the altcoin. Following the launch of the Treasury, Fitell plans to rebrand to “Solana Australia Corporation.” Additionally, it has initiated steps for a dual listing on the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX). The DAT is expected to generate yields by deploying SOL assets across a “diversified suite of on-chain DeFi and derivatives strategies,” including structured products such as options, snowballs, on-chain liquidity provisioning, and other highly liquid strategies with managed downside risk. Meanwhile, returns generated will be reinvested into the treasury reserve, the company explained. Cailen Sullivan, one of Fitell’s advisors, affirmed that their strategy “focuses not only on Solana itself, but the broader ecosystem of applications being built on top.” “By deploying more assets on-chain, we aim to generate outsized returns, setting a new benchmark for performance in digital asset management while supporting the growth of DeFi applications on Solana,” Sullivan added. SOL Corporate Adoption Continues Fitell Corporation’s CEO, Sam Lu, expressed the company’s ambition to become the largest publicly listed SOL holder in Australia and the Asia Pacific regions: The launch of our Solana digital asset treasury positions Fitell at the forefront of Solana adoption in the regions of Australia and Asia Pacific. (…) With the expertise of David Swaney and Cailen Sullivan, we are excited to execute on a roadmap that combines innovation, yield generation, and disciplined risk management. This initiative follows the recent push for Solana-focused DATs, which have seen hundreds of millions of dollars invested in the strategies this month. Last week, neurotech company Helius Medical Technology revealed the launch of a $500 million SOL treasury strategy backed by Pantera Capital and Summer Capital. The Pennsylvania-based company announced the first purchase for its DAT strategy on Monday, adding 760,190 SOL, worth approximately $168 million, at an average purchase price of $231. Similarly, Nasdaq-listed Forward Industries Inc. has unveiled its plan to bring its equity to the blockchain. According to the announcement, the company has partnered with financial technology firm Superstate to allow stockholders to tokenize and hold FORD shares on the Solana blockchain. Related Reading: CEO Dismisses September Crash, Reveals Why The Bitcoin Price Is Headed For $150,000 Forward Industries Inc. is currently the largest corporate SOL Treasury, successfully closing a $1.65 billion private investment in public equity (PIPE) earlier this month to purchase the cryptocurrency, stake it, and generate excess returns. Bitwise’s CIO Matt Hougan suggested that strong corporate treasury purchases and the highly anticipated approval of spot SOL exchange-traded funds (ETFs) could start a “Solana Season” in the coming months. As of this writing, SOL is trading at $220, a 6.7% decline in the weekly timeframe. Featured Image from Unsplash.com, Chart from TradingView.com
Multicoin Capital co-founder Kyle Samani believes Solana-native Digital Asset Treasuries (DATs) have a structural advantage over Bitcoin-focused vehicles—and that the mechanics underpinning those DATs could become a durable, price-positive flywheel for SOL. Speaking on Blockworks’ Empire podcast days after Forward Industries closed a $1.65 billion PIPE led by Galaxy, Jump, and Multicoin, Samani argued that Solana’s yield, composable DeFi, and on-chain corporate operations create cash flows and optionality that Bitcoin simply can’t match. Why Solana DATs Beat Bitcoin “We’re building a new financial system from the ground up,” Samani said, framing Forward as both a proof-of-concept for “internet capital markets” and a scaled balance sheet that can systematically convert Solana’s technical and financial primitives into shareholder value. The immediate differentiator in his view: yield. “Saylor is paying roughly 9% [on MicroStrategy’s perpetual preferreds], but his core business produces effectively no cash flow… our vehicle will produce cash flow via two mechanisms at a bare minimum. The first… is the native SOL staking yield… roughly 8%. And the second is by doing this credit spread arbitrage,” he said. Related Reading: Helius Joins Solana Treasury Trend With $500 Million Funding For New DAT Strategy By borrowing dollars from traditional lenders at single-digit rates and deploying into on-chain venues yielding “12–20% depending on what you’re doing,” Forward intends to use that spread, plus staking rewards, to service perpetual coupons—something a Bitcoin treasury cannot replicate because BTC is non-yielding. “You can actually objectively show where the profits are coming from to pay the coupons,” he added, suggesting Solana DATs could even secure better terms than Bitcoin vehicles over time. Samani cast the $1.65 billion raise as a starting gun for a broader re-architecture of corporate finance on Solana. Forward plans to “be the guinea pig” that runs core operations on-chain—“payroll, paying vendors… equity issuance, raising money, dividends, stock splits… shareholder votes”—with the first milestone being tokenizing a portion of the company’s equity. Notably, he expects a “pretty good chunk” of PIPE participants to “take delivery on-chain,” and said Forward will ultimately lean into real-time transparency: “I am optimistic we will at some point publish all the company’s addresses… so dashboards [can] update in real time.” Much of the thesis rests on scale and the ability to convert that scale into accretive economics—both within Solana’s DeFi and across the emerging DAT landscape. Galaxy Asset Management will operate staking and DeFi deployments; Jump contributes infrastructure and performance—“all of the nodes that we’re running are running Firedancer”—and proprietary transaction-ordering technology. Samani was explicit that Forward will not buy locked or liquid SOL from Multicoin, Jump, or Galaxy balance sheets, and that sponsor economics are split one-third each among the three firms, with Multicoin’s share accruing to its hedge fund LPs, not to him personally. On the DAT market itself, Samani expects consolidation and cross-chain roll-ups, with Solana primed to dominate: “The market’s not going to sustain 20 Solana DATs… I can see a world in which it sustains like three or four.” He called mNAV arbitrage “a very big opportunity,” arguing that vehicles trading at premiums can accretively acquire those at discounts, while Solana’s liquidity, service-provider depth, and credit acceptance put it ahead of smaller ecosystems. “I’m very skeptical that [sub-scale] mNAVs will sustain at all,” he said, singling out non-SOL, non-ETH DATs as most vulnerable. Solana DATs Vs. ETFs Samani also contends that pending US spot ETFs for SOL—especially with staking enabled—would amplify the Solana DAT advantage rather than dilute it. “I am very optimistic” staking appears in SOL ETFs “soon… sometime by the end of the year,” he said. In his telling, interchangeable wrappers—spot on exchanges, ETFs for brokerage rails, and corporate-wrapper DATs—expand the investor base while leaving Solana’s intrinsic yield engine intact. Forward, for its part, “expects the [vehicle] will be staking the substantial majority” of its SOL. Related Reading: Solana Faces Bold $460 Target As Galaxy Digital Drives Heavy Buying Underpinning the price angle is Samani’s view that Solana DATs manufacture persistent demand for SOL while routing cash flows back to equity holders. Locked-token acquisitions at discounts, systematic staking, bank-line funded DeFi strategies, and bespoke liquidity deals with leading protocols together create what he describes as structural accretion. The contrast with Bitcoin is stark in his framework. Without native cash flows, BTC-based treasuries rely on external financing and price appreciation; Solana DATs, he argued, can fund themselves. “Bitcoin can’t compete” in this dimension because it lacks staking yield and composable on-chain markets to arbitrage credit at institutional scale. That gap broadens, he maintained, if banks increasingly accept staked SOL as collateral and if ETF structures normalize staking. Forward is already “talking with a bunch of counterparties” about routing through banks with access to the Fed window to secure the cheapest possible dollar financing against SOL collateral, though he cautioned that none of this is guaranteed. For now, the scoreboard is concrete. The raise closed “in about two weeks,” with Samani estimating a roughly 40/60 crypto-native to TradFi split among participants. He personally invested $25 million; Multicoin contributed “$114–115 million.” Galaxy’s distribution pulled in “a lot” of PIPE orders; Jump’s technical edge targets incremental yield. Forward plans to be an active consolidator of DATs “both SOL and non-SOL,” while building out a dedicated executive team to run the Solana treasury line alongside the company’s legacy business. The implication for price, Samani insisted, is straightforward: Solana’s yield engine plus institutional credit and ETF rails create sustained, programmatic demand for SOL. “In retrospect it was inevitable,” he said of the consortium behind Forward. Whether that inevitability translates into Samani’s headline claim—Solana DATs “beating” Bitcoin vehicles and setting SOL up to surge—will depend on execution, market liquidity, and the pace at which banks, ETF issuers, and regulators bless staking-based structures. Notably, Forward Industries completed the massive purchase of 6,822,000 SOL tokens worth $1.58 billion at $232 average yesterday. The company has only $67 million left to purchase additional SOL. At press time, SOL traded at $235. Featured image created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.om