The rise of digital asset treasury (DAT) corporations will go down as a meta-narrative of 2025, however the longevity of the motion shall be determined by capital administration and sound enterprise methods.
In accordance with Solmate CEO Marco Santori, all DATs must take care of the worth of the underlying token they maintain on their steadiness sheets. This shouldn’t be an issue for revenue-generating companies, however pure-play DATs shall be in for a bumpy trip.
The Solana DAT house is likely to be probably the most aggressive on the market (moreover Bitcoin 😏).
However what differentiates them? The quantity of $SOL they maintain? mNAV? Yield on staking? Diversified enterprise?@msantoriESQ from @Solmate gave top-of-the-line explainers I’ve heard – “I do not need to… pic.twitter.com/7bMCr46d78
— Gareth Jenkinson (@gazza_jenks) December 9, 2025
“The multiple-to-net-asset worth (mNAV) is how loads of these treasury corporations survive. In the event that they’re buying and selling at a excessive mNAV, which means their market cap is larger than the worth of the cash they’ve on the steadiness sheet, then they’ll promote inventory in an accretive manner,” Santori stated on Cointelegraph’s Chain Response X present.
“Each greenback of inventory they promote, they take that and exit and purchase the underlying coin with, and that will increase their internet asset worth. As long as they’ll preserve the premium, they’ll simply hold doing that. And that’s the pure play treasury mannequin. I really assume that has a future.”
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However the subject is that mNAV will dwindle when the curiosity within the underlying token of a DAT wanes. Santori defined that falling token costs lead to decrease mNAVs.
“Which means loads of the treasury corporations are form of idle as a result of they’ll’t develop effectively and successfully. I didn’t need to be topic to that. I didn’t need that for our traders. I need to give them publicity to SOL and to the expansion of the Solana community, however I didn’t need them driving an mNAV curler coaster,” Santori stated.
The validator DAT technique
Solmate is amongst a handful of main Solana-based DATs which have attracted important capital in 2025. Santori, who initially helped DeFi Improvement Fund set up its Solana (SOL) DAT, took learnings away from that “pure-play” strategy earlier than steering the ship as CEO of Solmate.
The latter is closely leaning into providing providers primarily based on a bare-metal server enterprise mannequin. A bare-metal server is a single-tenant, bodily server that provides you direct entry to the {hardware}. Not like digital servers, the place assets are shared, a naked metallic server is devoted totally to at least one person, making it supreme for high-performance computing.
Santori stated that proof-of-stake protocols like Ethereum and Solana not solely enable companies to stake tokens however to actively take part in governance:
“To try this, you must have {hardware}. It’s important to have naked metallic. You might have to have the ability to provide extra providers on prime of your individual validator. That’s why we imagine it’s a virtuous cycle. We name it the infrastructure flywheel.”
Within the Solana ecosystem, Santori sees a novel alternative to supply bare-metal validator providers, on condition that the protocol was uniquely designed for high-throughput providers like exchanges and buying and selling platforms.
“Hedge funds can pay prime greenback for entry to exchanges, low latency, excessive efficiency entry to exchanges, in order that they’ll get their orders in sooner than different merchants can, and so they can try this with extra details about the market. They try this by co-locating and providing high-performance {hardware},” Santori stated.
Associated: Solmate appears past SOL treasury mannequin with RockawayX acquisition
The Solmate CEO stated they goal to construct infrastructure that permits that by utilizing naked metallic servers, providing co-location and loading validators with important quantities of SOL.
“That enables us to be chosen because the chief extra typically in each epoch, which suggests we will validate extra transactions, which suggests we will order extra transactions inside every explicit block. The money we earn from these providers, we will plow proper again into shopping for SOL.”
Solmate introduced its acquisition of RockawayX’s operations in December 2025. This included its validator infrastructure and onchain liquidity enterprise, in addition to its enterprise and credit score funds. The merger created a mixed entity with greater than $2 billion in belongings beneath administration.