Original | Odaily Planet Daily ( @OdailyChina )

By Wenser ( @wenser 2010 )

After the ETH reserve treasury helped to increase the price of ETH, the SOL reserve strategy took over.

As of September 16th, data from Strategic SOL Reserve shows that the 17 entities currently holding SOL treasury reserves have a total holding of 17.112 million SOL, representing 2.98% of the current total SOL supply and a market capitalization of $4.04 billion. Approximately 7.405 million SOL are staked, valued at $1.32 billion, with an average staking yield of 7.96%, representing 1.288% of the total supply. Meanwhile, Helius Medical Technologies (NASDAQ: HSDT), a US-listed company, announced last night that it has completed a $500 million private placement to transform into a SOL treasury company. Led by Pantera Capital and Summer Capital, the financing consisted of the sale of common stock at $6.881 per share and accompanying warrants at $10.134 each. If fully exercised, the total raised is expected to exceed $1.25 billion. If all proceeds are used to build the SOL reserve, Helius is expected to become the second-largest publicly listed company with a SOL reserve, after Forward. In this article, Odaily Planet Daily will analyze Helius’s establishment of the SOL treasury and use it to explore the estimated upper limit of the SOL reserve strategy.

This Helius is not that Helius, Pantera's SOL Treasury ambitions

First of all, it should be made clear that although the company abbreviation is the same, Helius Medical Technologies (NASDAQ: HSDT), a US-listed company, and Helius, the Solana infrastructure provider, are not the same company.

The former is a neurotechnology company that focuses on using an intraorally applied technology platform to improve the physiological compensatory mechanisms and promote neuroplasticity in patients with neurological diseases, thereby enhancing the brain's ability to cope with neurological deficits. The company's first commercial product is a portable neuromodulation stimulator. The latter is the Solana ecosystem developer platform, founded in 2022 by former software engineers from Coinbase and Amazon Web Services. It completed a $3.1 million seed round of financing in October 2022 (led by Reciprocal Ventures and Chapter One, with participation from Solana Ventures, Alchemy Ventures, Big Brain Ventures, Propel VC and other institutions, as well as angel investors such as Magic Eden co-founder Zhuoxun Yin and Squads co-founder Stepan Simkin), completed a $9.5 million Series A financing in February 2024 (led by Foundation Capital, with participation from Reciprocal Ventures, 6th Man Ventures, Chapter One and Propel), and completed a new round of financing of $21.75 million in September 2024 (with participation from Haun Ventures, Founders Fund, Foundation Capital, 6th Man Ventures, Chapter One and Spearhead).

The most important driving force behind Helius' entry into the SOL treasury reserve camp is actually Pantera, an important institution in the Solana ecosystem.

Pantera bets on Solana: SOL is the largest holding, with a book value of $1.1 billion

Earlier in an interview with CNBC, Pantera Capital founder Dan Morehead said that institutions hold $1.1 billion worth of SOL on their books, which is their largest holding.

He also stated that Solana is the fastest and best-performing blockchain, having significantly outperformed Bitcoin over the past four years. Regarding future competition among public chains, he believes it will not be dominated by a single dominant player, nor will it be a multi-million-dollar success. Only a handful of successful chains will emerge, such as Ethereum, Bitcoin, and Solana.

It is not difficult to see from his remarks that, like Kyle Samani, co-founder of Multicoin and chairman of the board of Forward Industries (FORD), who single-handedly pushed Forward to establish a $1.6 billion SOL treasury, Dan Morehead is also a die-hard "SOL bull."

At the end of August, according to media reports , Pantera said it planned to raise up to US$1.25 billion to acquire a Nasdaq-listed company and rename it "Solana Co." The company will focus on reserving SOL.

Now, although Helius has not changed its name yet, based on the current information, the company is likely to be the entity that Pantera will be betting on to list on the SOL treasury.

Pantera isn't solely betting on SOL and the Solana ecosystem; the firm has also invested in publicly listed Ethereum treasuries. In August, Pantera Capital first disclosed its cumulative investment in digital asset treasuries (DATs) exceeding $300 million. BitMine Immersion, a publicly listed Ethereum treasury, is a key holding. BitMine Immersion, the world's third-largest DAT, holds 1.15 million ETH, valued at approximately $4.9 billion. Currently, this holding has grown to 2.15 million ETH, valued at $9.72 billion .

ETH Treasury reserves are underway, and SOL Treasury reserves are following closely: SOL is expected to rebound to around $270

Following the rise of ETH treasury reserves by many listed companies, many listed companies began to set their sights on SOL, thus setting off another round of "listed companies hoarding currency arms race" after BTC and ETH.

According to media reports , Forward Industries recently announced the purchase of 6,822,000 Sol tokens at an average price of $232 per token, for a total of approximately $1.58 billion. This transaction represents the first deployment of the company's $1.65 billion PIPE financing, led by Galaxy Digital, Jump Crypto, and Multicoin Capital. All Sol tokens purchased have been staked, with some transactions completed through DFlow, the Solana on-chain platform. The company plans to increase the value of Sol tokens per share through active management and on-chain operations.

What is even more intriguing is that when participating in the ThreadGuy podcast today, Kyle Samani, co-founder of Multicoin and chairman of the board of Forward Industries (FORD), mentioned the possibility of the treasury company continuing to raise funds. He said : "I have done so much work, not just to raise $1.65 billion and then stop there. My ideas are much bigger." This may mean that Forward will continue to buy SOL in large quantities in the future. Perhaps affected by this news, the price of SOL has rebounded slightly, temporarily reporting above $235.

For comparison, we use the price increase of ETH after the establishment of the ETH treasury reserve as a reference system, and use this to estimate the upper limit of the capital size of the SOL treasury reserve and the resulting SOL price increase.

According to the increase in ETH price, SOL price may recover to $270

Since May 26, Sharplink announced the establishment of an ETH treasury. As of September 16, the listed company's ETH treasury holdings have gradually increased to nearly 5 million, worth US$22.55 billion , accounting for 4.13% of the total ETH supply; at the same time, the price of ETH has risen from US$2,500 to the current US$4,500, an increase of about 80%.

In comparison,SOL's price fell below $100 in early April, with the lowest price being only around $95. Now, with Forward joining the SOL treasury listed company camp with $1.6 billion in financing on September 8, the listed company SOL's holdings have increased to $4 billion, and the SOL price has also risen from $204 to around $235, an increase of about 15%.

If the holding value of SOL treasury companies such as Forward and Helius (calculated at the current highest holding value of US$2.85 billion) can grow to half of the holding value of the two major ETH treasury listed companies Bitmine and Sharplink (calculated at the current value of approximately US$13.5 billion), SOL will also usher in approximately US$4 billion in buying orders. By then, the SOL price is expected to rise to around US$270 (calculated at a 15% increase).

Combining the ratio of the current SOL treasury holdings value of listed companies to the ETH treasury holdings value, the total value of the SOL treasury needs to increase by about 5 times, and SOL may be expected to usher in a new price high. By then, the total SOL treasury reserves will increase to about 6% of the total SOL supply.

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