The $1.6B Solana Treasury Bet, with Kyle Samani, Co-Founder of Multicoin Capital

That's probably the biggest misconception I see is that people somehow think, like, Ethereum has some special magic touch that Solana somehow lacks, and that's just not true. They're both very mature, robust systems.

Solana has way more usage than Ethereum on a daily basis. And look, it's gonna be-- it, it should be a fair fight.

Welcome to another episode of 51 Insights, today with Kyle Samani, co-founder of Multicoin Capital, one of the most successful crypto funds in the space. Kyle, welcome to the show. Marc, a pleasure to be here.

Thanks for having me on. Yeah, thanks for coming. Kyle, I wanna jump right in.

Uh, you just became chairman of Forward Industries, for which you raised one point six five billion in a private placement, which is the largest sold treasury company now.

You did this together with Galaxy Digital, Jump Crypto, and also Multicoin. How does that feel? Oh, man, Marc, thanks so much for asking. It's been awesome.

Uh, the last few weeks has been just, like, some of the most fun I've ever had. It's been crazy. It's been hectic. I've never done something like this before, but it's been a, a lot of the most fun I've had.

And look, the-- we are now in a position. We are the largest Solana dapp treasury company in the world, uh, and I can tell you, our aspirations are a lot greater than that.

So we just got to the starting line, and, uh, we're sprinting. Why did you launch Forward? Yeah.

You know, I got together with the Galaxy guys and the Jump guys a coup- few months ago, and we all started kinda talking about what this could be.

And y-y-you know, it wasn't enough to just be like, "Well, we can buy Solana and a pub- publicly traded company." We wanted to-- Uh, that was not en- high enough of a, of a b- uh, bar to, to clear.

But we started talking about what we could do with this thing, and we realized that this entity represents a few very interesting opportunities.

First, and probably most importantly, I think Forward Industries is paramount for the long-term mission and success of Solana. You know, a, a few weeks ago, SEC Chair Paul Atkins gave a speech called Project Crypto.

In that speech, he said, "We need to move US securities markets on-chain."

And I've been thinking a lot about that, and it occurred to me that, like, this is gonna be a really hard process and that, quite frankly, Nasdaq and NYSE, uh, and CME are not gonna be the people who are gonna get us there.

We need very motivated, talented people who are gonna bust ass and try and make that happen.

And, you know, now that I'm, I'm chairman of a publicly traded company, we are in a position for Forward Industries to really kind of be the first person to, to start fulfilling that vision.

We expect that we are going to move, uh, all of our capital markets operations on-chain, so meaning fundraising on-chain, dividends on-chain, shareholder governance on-chain, all of those kinds of things that pertain to the stock.

And then, uh, we're also gonna try and move as many of the core operating parts of the business on-chain as well, so obviously payroll, paying vendors, those kinds of things.

And, and in doing this, we, we need to prove to the world that you can have a publicly traded company do all of these things on-chain.

Um, obviously, most of the folks are gonna be reticent to do these things, and so we need to prove to the world that all of these things are doable, and we are in the prime position to do so.

So I think that's probably the most important thing, um, for us as we think about, like, why are we doing this? Someone has to be first. Um, second probably big thing we realized is,

as an actively managed, publicly traded company, we can actually do things that, like, an ETF cannot. The most important of which is, uh, we can use the yield that we generate from, from Sol and from DeFi,

uh, and staking and stuff, and then we can also tap into Solana's native DeFi markets.

And what I mean by that is, you know, we're right now trying to secure loans, uh, from lenders, hopefully banks, um, at, you know, call it four to five percent-ish range.

Maybe it's a little higher than that, but that's our hope. And we can then deploy that dollar-denominated into Solana DeFi, where we-- I think we can earn, call it, twelve to fifteen percent and earn that spread.

This is a kind of story shareholders love to hear. It's obviously very profitable, and so that's a very great thing we can do.

But then once I realized we could do that, then I started to think further, and I said, "Well, you know what?

MicroStrategy, um-- or s-s-excuse me, Strategy, has started to issue these perpetual preferreds where they have a nine percent coupon they have to, to pay." Well, Strategy has no cash flow.

Like, the Bitcoin they hold doesn't do anything. But we're producing cash flow from two sources, both Sol-denominated cash flow as well as dollar-denominated cash flow, and we can use those proceeds to pay those coupons.

And I think that's incredibly exciting is that we can look at this instrument that the Strategy guys pioneered, but actually Solana as a platform is actually a better vehicle, or I should say, a better platform on top of which we can employ the strategy that Saylor and his team came up with.

Um, and so I think the, the opportunity to, again, bridge TradFi markets in terms of, like, raising the preferreds, raising the debt, bridging that into crypto markets, deploying DeFi, we are gonna be the largest entity in the world, I hope, that's really actively bridging these two worlds.

Um, and that's just an awesome, awesome place to be.

You just mentioned convertible bonds and something that's quite different with all the treasury companies coming to market now compared to what MicroStrategy did is issuing convertible notes or bonds.

And so far, all those new treasury companies have raised capital through a pipe and are now deploying that capital.

So are you inferring that this is a route that you would be willing to go, that you start also issuing convertible notes? We're certainly looking at, at these, these instruments beyond common equity. Um- Mm-hmm...

the in-instrument that I like the-- I'm not an expert in, in this stuff, but the instrument that I like the most is the perpetual preferred over the convertible, convertible debt for the same reason that, that Strategy has also publicly said they like the perpetual preferreds more than the converts just 'cause the, the principal is never due, and that's, uh, very appealing from a long-term risk management perspective.

Okay. And then something that's underlying to all of this is obviously that there needs to be institutional capital for Sol. Do you see that in the market or what, what's your general feeling there?

I mean, without question, there's institutional demand for SOL.

I mean, we ra- we just raised one point six five billion, you know, call it four hundred-ish of that was from the sponsors and, like, the employees of the sponsors, you know, myself included.

By the way, I, I did invest twenty-five million personally into the vehicle on top of, uh, Multicoin's hundred, hundred plus. But, like, if you look at the rest of the, the...

You call it the remaining one point two or one point two five, what-whatever that number is, a huge percentage of that is trad, tradfi money.

Um, some of it is crypto money as well, but a, a very substantial percentage of it is tradfi. Um, if you look at ownership of Solana today, there are, are-- I know there are sovereigns that own SOL.

Uh, I know there are, uh, endowments and pensions and such that own SOL. They're very quiet about it, but already SOL is, is owned by kind of large tr-traditional institutions.

I think with the advent of kind of tier one, uh, digital asset treasuries like ours at Forward Industry, along with the ETFs, which are coming very soon, I think SOL is gonna get...

is gonna, gonna really become a, a mainstream holding, um, crypto holding for tons of institutions.

One of the key things that needs to be in place for those treasury companies to work is the market-to-net asset value ratio. Can you explain our listeners a little bit what does this mean and, and how does this all work?

Yeah, so mNAV I, I just referred to as multiple of NAV, meaning, you know, the, the company has a balance sheet of, let's just say, a hundred dollars.

Um, if the company is trading at, say, a hundred and fifty dollars, then the mNAV would be, you know, one point five. Um, I believe Strategy has traded as high as roughly two point five X mNAV, something like that.

Um, BMNR, they have an mNAV. SBET, they have an mNAV. Others have, have mNAV. Some-- I think most of them are in the, like, point seven to one point seven range, I think, today. And so that's what it refers to.

A very reasonable question lots of people ask is, "Well, why would I buy, y-you know, equity in this thing at a, at an mNAV above, above one X?"

And the answer is, well, what can the team do that you cannot do as an individual, like, if you were to just buy the underlying yourself? Um, and there's, there's a handful of things to that effect.

One is, I think we have access to advanced DeFi, and we can leverage our reputation and our scale to actually negotiate preferential terms with, with DeFi teams, and we're working on a number of those deals now.

I'm, I'm optimistic we can announce those fairly soon. The second, uh, thing is obviously the credit spread arbitrage that I just described. Again, you can't do that as, like, an individual SOL holder.

You need scale that, that comes with that. Uh, and then third, and I think probably most interestingly, is M&A.

You know, it looks like there's gonna be thirty to forty kind of publicly traded DATs out there, um, some Bitcoin, some ETH, some SOL, some Avalanche, some Sui, some, you know, whatever else.

And, uh, I think there's gonna be, uh, a, a very large amount of M&I-- M&A that happens. Uh, I don't think f-the mar-the market is gonna sustain forty of these things.

Uh, and we fully expect to be the leading company on that front. Um, and, and I think the opportunity for accretion to our shareholders via M&A, um, is incredibly exciting.

Arthur Hayes said a couple of weeks ago that he expects a lot of, uh, those DAT companies coming to the market, and, and we've already seen that now in, in the last weeks, and that these mNAVs are eventually going to decrease.

How do you see this play out? The market doesn't yet know what the correct mNAV is for one of these companies in the long run.

And look, I think we're still minimum six months away from that, that point, maybe twelve, maybe longer. So hard to say. Look, do I think two point five is sustainable? Definitely not.

Can I make an argument for one point three or one point four? Yeah, I can. Maybe even one point six or one point seven. So, you know, I think we just kinda have to see.

And look, I think it's the job of management to prove to the market that they can deliver accretion in SOL per share terms.

We've been very clear that our North Star is SOL per share, um, and, and we have a lot of ideas on ways that we can, uh, effectuate that. We'll see if we can do it, um, but we're certainly gonna try.

And then a, a, a question that a lot of people have as well is what's gonna happen if we enter another bear cycle, and we have a downturn in crypto prices? How are those mNAVs going to behave?

What happens to that mNAV flywheel that those treasury companies create? How do you see this play out, and what's your strategy there?

Yeah, I mean, look, um, if mNAV is below one X, I expect we'll sell balance sheet assets to, like, get up over one X. Um, our, our mandate is to increase SOL per share, not to increase absolute SOL holdings.

So I'm not super worried about that. I do expect we're obviously gonna have another brutal bear cycle. It always happens.

Multicoin's been through it at least twice before, so we know what it's like, and look, we know how to survive. Multicoin is turning eight years old on October first. So in two weeks, we're gonna turn eight years old.

We've been through some shit, and we know, we know how to survive a bear market.

And, and a cynical question to that would, would probably be: Wouldn't it be better to own Solana itself or Ethereum or Bitcoin itself than the stock of a treasury company in a bear market?

I mean, there's no empirical data to use to answer that question. Um, so we don't know. But again, like, it's gonna come down to, does the market believe the management team can accrete SOL per share?

Um, and look, if we can demonstrate that we can accrete SOL per share at some reasonable rate over the next twelve months, then I would hope that, you know, we would trade even well north of one X, um, even through, even through a brutal bear market, so long as we can prove that we can continue to figure out ways to accrete SOL per share.

The discussions that you have with your investors, are you talking solely about price accumulation and the additional return that you can create, or do you approach that more of the perspective of a long-term thesis of Solana as an infrastructure layer?

Yeah, I mean, look, I think it's both. Like, the vision for Solana is to be the foundation for internet capital markets. Um, and today, Solana, uh, really is the best positioned to deliver that.

Solana today can process, like, something on the order of nine, ten, twelve billion transactions in a day.

Uh, and that's enough to settle Every single securities market across the world, meaning NYSE, NASDAQ, LSE, Singapore, et cetera, all combined, there are not twelve billion completed stock trades per day across all these venues.

And so we're very excited about the vision of Solana to get there.

We've obviously been in-- Multicoin has been instrumental in Solana's success thus far, having led the seed round all the way back in two thousand and eighteen.

And now we're in a position via Forward Industries to further accelerate that as it pertains to, like, institutional adoption, getting publicly traded companies tokenizing their equity on Solana, and then starting to use Solana for core operations of the business.

Yeah, exactly. And I think last week was it when, uh, Galaxy was the first company to officially put their stock on Solana. I think that was a big step.

When you talk now about Solana, and you mentioned internet capital markets, Multicoin, obviously seed investor in Solana, you've been instrumental in driving Solana's growth.

What was your initial thesis, and how did you see Solana compared to other Layer One chains like Ethereum and, and Bitcoin is a bit more obvious, but wh-where did your conviction come from? Yeah.

So I think context and a little history is, is important to understand. So I got into crypto in twenty sixteen, um, and at the time it was just Bitcoin and Ethereum, and, uh, I never cared for Bitcoin.

I still don't really care for Bitcoin. Uh, but I was very, uh, excited about Ethereum because I recogn-ized the opportunity to be able to program finance. We now call that DeFi or permissionless finance.

At the term-- At the time, neither of those terms existed, but I understood that core seed of an idea that would eventually blossom into DeFi. Uh, and, and I got very excited about Ethereum for that reason.

By the end of twenty seventeen, so I'd now been following Ethereum and, and, you know, the s- vast majority of my net worth was Eth at the time.

Uh, uh, I had grown very disenchanted with Ethereum, um, because it, it was a year and a half that I'd been following, and as far as I could tell, they had made no discernible progress on a scaling roadmap.

And they, they, they knew very clearly they had to scale this thing. Um, and so by the end of seventeen, I said, "You know what? I don't think these guys are, like, focused enough to actually get the job done."

So I began very seriously looking at alternative, um, systems. Ult-ultimately, that, that search, you know, led to our investment in Solana. We ended up tripling and quadrupling down on Solana over the next few years.

Um, and today, Multicoin is one of the largest investors in the Solana ecosystem. I think we've made twenty-five or thirty investments in the Solana ecosystem at, at this point in the last five or six years.

Uh, but I, you know, I gained conviction because, um, Anatoly, um, was singularly focused on building. He had a vision. At the time, we called it decentralized NASDAQ.

Today, w- that really has evolved into the broader vision for internet capital markets. And, uh, he had the right background to do it, and he was hyper-focused.

Uh, and we, we believed that the, the, these, uh, technology and scaling strategy they were gonna employ was gonna work, and obviously, it, it turned out that it to be correct. It did work.

So, so that's kinda what, what got us to Solana. Um, and yeah, it's been, it's been a really, really fun journey since then. And y-you mentioned internet capital markets. Can you just lay that out a little bit?

How does that now compare to a chain like Ethereum? I mean, if you, if you look at, uh, for example, stablecoin volume, Ethereum is a massive leader. How does that compare now?

So Ethereum does have, uh, a lot more stablecoin supply, but the, the capital is, is latent. It just sits there. The tur- the rate of turnover of capital on Ethereum is dramatically lower than Solana.

Moreover, the, the use of capital is also much more inefficient, meaning basically all on-chain trading-- As an example, all on-chain trading on Ethereum today is effectively via these a-automated market makers like Uniswap that are extremely capital inefficient.

Um, almost all on-chain trading, uh, in USDC and USDT on Solana today is via an order book or these new prop AMM things, whi-which are, uh, super interesting.

And, um, those systems are between ten and a hundred x more capital efficient. Uh, and so, um, it's a little deceiving. You have dollars on Ethereum. They're there, but they're just sitting there doing nothing.

On Solana, the, the rate of turnover of capital is much, much higher, and we actually think this is a sign of the health of the Solana ecosystem and actually a sign of, of the decline of the Ethereum ecosystem.

Money sitting there that's not moving is not good. I mean, if, if you talk to any economist, they tell you GDP, not-- You know, no one talks about gross wealth. They talk about GDP, right?

You, you need economic activity. You need turnover. Um, and today, Solana is in a much, much, much healthier state to that effect.

You see this if you look at, uh, velocity of stablecoins in Solana, daily stablecoin settlements per day.

What I think is actually most important is daily trading volume on-chain, and Solana has been consistently above Ethereum for probably twelve months, maybe eighteen months at this point,

in terms of, of daily on-chain trading volumes. Solana has- Right...a very healthy lead over Ethereum, uh, um, as of today.

Twenty twenty-five was also the year where we saw a lot of, like, corporate Layer One chains launch, probably most prominently Stripes, Tempo, Circle started with Ark, a lot of focused Layer Ones that wanna grab market share for specific use cases.

How do you see that development, and what's your take on corporate Layer Ones versus open Layer Ones, and, and what does that mean for Solana? Yeah.

So I think the first thing to appreciate is corporate Layer Ones have been tried many times, and they have, uh, their success rate thus far is zero percent. I'd say the most recent attempt at that is probably Sony.

Sony launched an L2, I don't know, six months ago, twelve months ago. I think demand is, like, less than one transaction per second. It's probably somewhere in that range. No one's using it.

So generally, people should appreciate some history here. Second thing I'll say about Ark and Tempo is neither of them are live, so I think you're giving them a little too much credit. Uh, they haven't shipped anything.

Pretty hard to judge something that's not, that's not in production.

Third thing I'll say is, um, I think the existence of s- of corporate chains is probably pretty good for Solana in the long run because the world is inherently political And Solana is a, is not perfectly credibly neutral, but it is far, far, far more credibly neutral than Tempo or Arc.

And if you are any company that either directly competes with Stripe or Circle or maybe is adjacent to Stripe and Circle and think you might compete with Stripe or Circle, or you're just afraid of those guys because you know how they've done business in the past and maybe you don't like them for whatever reason, you're gonna have a very strong aversion to building on either of those, those systems.

The probability that, that Adyen, Square, Worldpay, Fiserv, any of those guys use Tempo is round to zero, because all of those companies directly compete with Stripe, right? Um- Mm.

And, and, uh, like, the world is global, and yeah, Stripe has strong market share amongst US internet companies, but Stripe does not have dominant market share across all internet companies, let alone non-internet companies outside the world.

And so the kind of interesting opportunity this creates is Stripe announces Tempo, all the other guys maybe-- Look, they were all thinking about crypto.

I, I'm sure most of them had- hadn't really announced anything as of yet. That's actually Fiserv and Worldpay have.

But, you know, it probably all of those guys, their C-suites now are gonna have meetings and say, "We need to accelerate our plans." And honestly, it makes Solana look like a lot more appealing of an option, right?

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And so it's very funny that the, kinda the history of crypto is people trying to close source and bring things in-house, and it's, it typically had the opposite effect. Mm-hmm.

I suspect that dynamic will continue to be true into the future. I agree. We, we saw the same with Hyperledger from IBM, saw similar things with Libra. Solana has always competed with speed and efficiency.

Do you think that credible neutrality will become more important in positioning Solana in the future? Yeah, I mean, I, I think Solana is already sufficiently credibly neutral.

And credible neutrality is, is a very squishy construct. There's no one objective measure of it, but it is kind of a thing of, like, you can see-- Like, you know it when you see it.

And I think any reasonable person today in the world looks at Solana and views it as a, as a fundamentally, like, credibly neutral system. And this is as a result of a lot of things.

Um, there are multiple validator clients, um, Agave, Firedancer, and Sig is coming very soon. Um, obviously, all of the code is open source. The system is permissionless.

The validators are on all, I think, all continents except Antarctica. I, I don't think there's a node in Antarctica. So we've got six of seven continents.

But we've got validators in Brazil and in South Africa, right, in Australia a-and such. Um, uh, those groups are all heterogeneous, and those groups are competing with each other on Solana Mainnet.

The foundation, um, is, is I think been pretty Switzerland in its approach to how they've managed their balance sheet and interacted with the community.

And today you have, look, tons of companies that compete with each other on Solana. You have Circle and Tether. You have Pump and Bonk, you know. Like, right? So and, and there's plenty of more examples.

And so, um, I think that that demonstration of being an open system, w-we now-- There's enough accumulated evidence over the last, you know, five and a half years that reason-- basically any reasonable person will look at the system and say, "Yeah, this is clearly an open, permissionless, credibly neutral system."

Um, and that's an incredibly exciting place to be. And, uh, it's extremely, extremely hard to get there. It takes years, um, and it's one of those things that, like, one wrong move, and you can totally screw it up.

Yeah, and I think it's, it's even harder if you start as a centralized chain or a corporate chain, and you, you wanna become credibly neutral afterwards. C-correct.

I mean, obviously, cl-closed source on day one, you're sending a very strong signal to the market about your values and what you're trying to be.

Doesn't mean you can't-- They have good business, but that's not gonna be the foundation of global payments and, and banking the unbanked.

If you look across the Solana ecosystem today, is there any project that you feel like is a good example of how those internet capital markets will play out on Solana or something that you think is extremely interesting that people should look at?

Yeah, I mean, like, I think the simplest-- simple here is, is better, and the protocol that comes to mind here is Camino. Camino today is the dominant borrow-lend protocol on Solana, and it's widely used.

I'm a big customer of it. Multicoin is an investor in it, and it's dead simple to use. It works phenomenol- phenomenally. I think they've been live for three years.

They've never had a bad liquidation, um, or, like, any, any, uh, you know, bad debt in there. Um, they've never had an Oracle attack. They've never had a hack.

They have been extremely stable from day one, and today they're the dominant borrow-lend.

Um, obviously, borrow-lend and, and the ability to earn yield and to lever up are, are foundational to, to financial markets, and Camino is very well positioned to, to capitalize on that, uh, as, as Solana continues to grow.

I'm, I'm sure with Multicoin Capital, you also have a perspective on whether SOL is under or overvalued or, uh, SOL price outlook.

How do you value SOL as an asset, and where do you see SOL going in the next couple of years? Yeah.

Um, I'm not gonna provide any price predictions, but what I can tell you is there are methodologies you can use to build a DCF effectively for Solana.

Uh, my co-founder, uh, at Multicoin, Tushar, gave a presentation, uh, at the Multicoin summit in twenty twenty-two valuing L1s as a function of their MEV.

Um, so it's on, it's on YouTube, fifteen-minute presentation or thereabouts. Today, the Solana network is produce-- it produces cash flows to SOL stakers.

Um, those, those cash flows are paid out in the form of additional SOL tokens roughly every two and a half days. It's roughly every sixty hours or so.

And, uh, the total rate of tokens being issued is, I think, seven and a half to eight percent versus the total, uh, supply of coins that exist today in perpetuity.

Let's just say SOL is a roughly one hundred billion dollar asset. And it's-- I think it's a little higher than that, but let's just say it's a hundred for simplicity.

That means if you're a SOL staker today, you can earn your pro rata portion Of call it seven and a half or eight billion dollars, um, that's being paid out. So there's real value there.

Some of that comes from inflation, and then some of that comes from trading, uh, fees that p-people are paying to use the system. Um, but you're gonna get that dividend payment in your pocket every two and a half days.

Okay. And then last question on Sol. We've seen a big, big change from the US government in the last year. Trump administration heavily pushing crypto. They started building up, uh, US crypto treasury.

I think most of that is still Bitcoin, and then they also include Ethereum, Sol, and, and Ripple. Did that change anything on your thesis on Solana, or, or what's your general view on that?

You know, I'm very fortunate to have met David Sacks, who's now the crypto czar in the White House. I met him, I guess, probably close to eight years ago.

Uh, and, and his v- his venture firm, Craft Ventures, was one of the first investors in Multicoin.

So I've, I've known Dave for a very long time, and, uh, obviously, when he got appointed to his new role in the White House, we, we were incredibly excited, and it's been a pleasure to work with him and his team over the last, call it nine months or so, in, in, in his capacity.

You know, I think-- I don't think anything the White House has done directly has influenced our view on Solana. Um, we're obviously very happy that the administration is embracing crypto.

We're very happy about the Bitcoin Reserve and the stockpile of Solana and other assets. But, but I, I don't think that's the stuff that we really care about from the administration.

Holding, you know, some tokens on the balance sheet is nice, but what really matters is, is policy, um, and that policy comes from a number of places. It comes from Congress. Obviously, we just had the Genius Act passed.

I was very fortunate to be, uh, at the White House for the signing of the Genius Act. The Clarity Act, we believe, is coming very soon.

When it-- We have, of course, Project Crypto that SEC Chair Paul Atkins announced a few weeks ago.

Uh, I think these are the things that really matter for Solana, and it's been incredible to see the, the administration there and, and all of the work that, that David Sacks has done in working with these, these different groups to make all this happen.

A couple of days ago, uh, Tether announced to bring Tether USAT to the US, a US version of Tether. What's your take on that, and how do you ensure that, uh, a lot of that volume will also happen on Solana? Yeah.

Uh, look, I can't speak for the Tether folks, uh, or the, or the Solana Foundation, but, uh, what I can say is, look, it's very exciting to see Tether enter the US. Uh, and they have assembled an all-star team to do it.

You know, I've now had a chance to know Beau Hinds for almost a year now, and he's gonna be a, a phenomenal CEO for Tether US.

Uh, and I'm sure they have a, a pretty exciting go-to-market strategy they're working on to, uh, knock it out of the park for USAT. And, uh, we'll, I'm sure, start to see what that is over the next few months.

Arthur Hayes recently said that i-investors underestimate the scale of liquidity that is flowing into the markets.

Even this year and beginning of next year, we will see extended money printing, and that would extend the crypto cycle well into twenty twenty-six.

How do you see this cycle playing out, and what are for you the key catalysts or risks that you're looking at? Yeah.

I'm not a, a cycle timer guy, but I'd say I'm generally more optimistic than pessimistic here, partially for, you know, interest rate reasons, as Arthur Hayes alluded to.

But I actually don't think that's the primary reason this time will be different. I think the primary reason this time could be different will be because of legislation.

Obviously, we have Genius passed, which is groundbreaking. I think Clarity is gonna pass here. We have, obviously, ETFs now. Bitcoin is here. Ethereum is here. I think Sol is gonna be live in the next few weeks.

And then, you know, uh, the SEC chair has announced Project Crypto.

And when I look at all of these things combined, you know, crypto has always been the, like, ugly red-headed stepchild of finance, basically from inception in two thousand and nine all the way until kinda now.

And now it's like, okay, it's a member of the family.

And if you look at still, like, the main members of the family, like NYSE and Nasdaq and these guys, they're like, "Oh, they're bad and they're evil," but like, "Okay, fine, you're a member of the family now."

And look, I, I think the legitimacy that comes with that is pretty hard to understate. And look, global capital moves slowly.

And so, you know, to the extent that this cycle does go into 'twenty-six or even 'twenty-seven, it's likely going to be because of the, the legitimacy of crypto on a global stage and, you know, capital coming into crypto as-- because it is finally allowed and legitimate to do so.

You know, even with the passage of Genius and even with the existence of ETFs, life insurance policies still cannot own crypto. We're still probably a couple of years away from that.

Mutual funds don't own any crypto, right? We're probably still years away from that. And those are just two very US-centric statements. I assume other capital markets around the world will, will generally lag the US.

And so, you know, the opportunity-- Or I think it'll probably take another decade before you have crypto fully recognized as, like, as legit of an asset class as equities, like, around the world.

That's, that's hard to believe that's closer than five years, and, like, quite possibly closer to ten. And so, you know, that's the opportunity that is ahead for us in crypto.

And do you think it will take equally long until the internet capital market thesis will play out for Solana or longer?

I mean, look, I think it's one of those things that, like, continues to compound for a very long time.

I, I mean, look, most internet companies, whether they were founded in nineteen ninety-four or founded in twenty-twelve or founded in, in twenty-twenty, are growing. Uh, Amazon's still growing, right?

Google's still growing. Microsoft is still growing. So all of these, these things are, are compounding over very long horizons, and I expect internet capital markets will compound for decades.

Um, if you just look at the history of finance over the last hundred years, liquidity has grown every decade. Trading volume has grown every decade. Um, and I don't expect that's gonna change anytime soon.

I think probably the-- maybe the question you meant to ask was:

When will it be kind of commonly accepted knowledge that internet capital markets is, like, a thesis and that Solana is kinda, like, the main winner of that thesis? I, I think that's probably the better question.

Mm-hmm And, like, I'm optimistic that that'll come to become a consensus view within a few years. Hmm. Within a few years, okay. Yeah, I, I, I think, I think we're a few-- I think we're within a few years away.

You know, like, in the same way that iPhone came out in 2007, and, like, probably most people didn't really... like, it didn't click for them mobile until, like, sometime between 2009 and 2013.

Um, and then it turns out, even if you bought Apple stock at kind of anywhere during that period, it was still a great time to buy Apple stock, all right? Um, because, like, it just k-kept compounding for a long time.

And, like, cloud came around, about around the exact same a-time, and obviously cloud and mobile grew hand-in-hand.

Um, and I would just say, like, you know, if you were to say, like, pick one moment in time and, like, okay, the world kind of accepts cloud and mobile as, like, a mega thesis, I would pinpoint that at, like, kinda 2012 if you forced me to pick, like, one year.

And, uh, I think that we're pro-- Like, I think that year probably ends up being, for, like, the world, ends up being 2027 or 2028. So it's still early, uh, and there's an incredible amount of growth still out of us.

Yeah. And do you think this will play out as a multi-chain world, or will this be a winner-takes-it-all market?

It's definitely not gonna be winner take all, but I do think it's gonna be winner take most because, look, the world is inherently political, and, like, different people will have different chains just simply for political reasons.

So, um, it's not gonna be winner take all, but I do think that Solana is in the prime position to be the dominant chain for internet capital markets. And then

last question: if you could send one message to Wall Street today, one message about Solana, uh, something that you think is still misunderstood, something you think Wall Street really needs to know about Solana as a technology, Solana as an asset class,

what would you tell them? You know, there's been this, uh, myth that, like, Ethereum is more institutional than Solana, and I just think that is nonsense.

Ethereum and Solana are both secured by the same public key cryptography. Uh, they're both pr-open source systems. They both have permissionless consensus. They're both proof of stake.

Um, they both have globally distributed validator sets. They both have multiple code bases.

They're both even both stewarded by Swiss-based nonprofits, and they both have global legitimacy and recognition, trading volume on all major exchanges.

There are regulated securities and other, other regulated assets issued across both chains.

So, you know, when I look at-- That's probably the biggest misconception I see, is that people somehow think, like, Ethereum has some special magic touch that Solana somehow lacks, and that's just not true.

They're both very mature, robust systems. Solana has way more usage than Ethereum on a daily basis. And look, it's gonna be-- It, it should be a fair fight.

They both have all of the, the major regulatory blessings they need to. Solana will have an ETF within a few weeks here. And, uh, with when that happens, they're on level playing field. And look, let the best man win.

And what are you personally most excited about, uh, in crypto digital assets over the next couple of months?

I mean, I'm incredibly excited to be chairman of Forward Industries and everything we can do via this company to accelerate the vision of internet capital markets.

We're in such a unique position to be the first company to do lots of things natively on-chain as a publicly traded company, and then also to be the most on-chain first or, or on-chain native publicly traded company in the world, and that's incredibly exciting place to be.

And so that-- I'm gonna make that happen. Cool. Kyle Samani, thank you very much for coming on the show. Where can people learn more about you, about Fort, about Multicoin? Mark, pleasure to have me on the show.

Thanks so much. Uh, you can follow me on Twitter. My Twitter handle is actually just my name, so @kylesamani. Um, and if you wanna follow, uh, Forward Industries, um, the ticker is FWDInd. It's Forward Industries.

Again, FWDInd. Cool. All right. Kyle, thanks for coming. All the best with Fort and Multicoin, and talk soon. Mark, thanks for having me on the show. [outro music]