In this Lightspeed takeover edition of 0xResearch, Jeff Albus reports how DeFi Dev Corp’s SOL stash sits just one token shy of a million. Its latest haul pushes its treasury past $200 million and underscores a broader trend: public companies leveraging crypto volatility to compound per-share value. With $5 million in dry powder left, the SOL arms race isn’t over.

— Macauley

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DeFi Dev Corp now holds 999,999 SOL

DeFi Development Corp is now just one token shy of a million Solana.

The Florida-based firm announced on Monday that it acquired 141,383 SOL between July 14-20 at an average price of $133.53, bringing its treasury to 999,999 SOL and equivalents.

The value of those holdings sits just north of $200 million at the time of publication.

The haul included spot purchases, discounted locked tokens, as well as 867 SOL earned through staking, validator operations, and other onchain activity.

It staked all newly acquired SOL immediately, the company said, which earns revenue by running its own validator infrastructure that accepts third-party delegation.

The model is part of a new class of public-market strategies focused on treasury compounding. The idea is that more volatility equals more opportunity to issue shares, buy tokens and boost per-share value.

So far, it's a strategy that appears to be working.

DeFi Dev Corp has issued 740,000 shares this month, raising $19.2 million, with the majority of the proceeds allocated to SOL. Another $5 million in dry powder remains available, enough to purchase roughly 24,000 more tokens at current prices. 

The firm's SOL-per-share metric increased 13% last week to 0.0514, equivalent to $10.39 in SOL value per share. Whether that number continues to rise depends not just on SOL's price action, but on DeFi Dev Corp's ability to keep stacking without spooking equity markets.

Meanwhile, Upexi, another aggressive entrant in the Solana treasury race, announced it purchased an additional 100,000 SOL for $17.7 million on July 17. That brings Upexi's total holdings to 1,818,809 SOL, valued at approximately $367 million — making it the largest SOL-holding public company to date.

Over half of these tokens were reportedly acquired at a discount in locked form, helping secure an unrealized gain of around $94.7 million over the last quarter.

Teams like this represent a rising breed of publicly traded treasury builders who seem less interested in diversification than in weaponizing volatility to grow crypto-denominated reserves and per-share value at scale.

— Jeffrey Albus