Choon Wee Chee
Analyst · B. Riley
Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to Solana Company's Second Quarter 2026 Earnings Call. On our first quarter call, I detailed our multifaceted digital asset treasury platform and flywheel strategy for the first time: advisory, validated infrastructure, taking and treasury, each designed to strengthen the others and diversify the Solana Company's revenue sources. Today, I'm pleased to report on the progress of this buildout. Our first institutional validated cluster is operational in Tokyo. We secured our first third-party stake commitment of around 0.5 million SOL in July and expect to report the results in the third quarter of 2026. We also addressed the legacy elements of the business by divesting the cash-consuming medical device business. We swapped the legacy business unit out with the acquisition of a Hong Kong regulated trust company, a profitable enterprise that allows us to better realize the financial focus of our new operating model. The assets in our treasury also continue to generate value. Staking rewards contributed to $2.5 million, or 31,200 SOL in the second quarter. So we did not have to buy and did not have to raise capital to acquire. Every one of those actions serve a single purpose: to generate momentum behind the flywheel to fuel the advancement and development of our core business lines. We are not only holding SOL as an asset. We are helping to build the infrastructure that Asia Pacific institutions need in order to use it. And we are doing that as a trusted partner of the Solana Foundation to help drive institutional adoption for realization of Internet capital markets visions. Asia Pacific accounts for the majority of the world's crypto users and a substantial share of global cross-border payment volume, yet it remains significantly underserved by Solana's existing validator footprint. We believe a passive vehicle like an ETF cannot capture adequately the opportunity that comes with offering our own Solana infrastructure and advisory services to institutional market participants. Our flywheel of treasury, validator infrastructure and advisory is designed so that each pillar makes the others stronger and so that every turn adds SOL per share. I want to spend a moment on the state of Solana Network as Internet capital markets and Solana's continued institutional adoption, given it has significant impact on our business growth. The second quarter saw accelerated growth in 2 areas that are directly relevant to our business. First, Solana's on-chain real-world asset market reached a new all-time high of $3.62 billion at the end of June. As tokenization spreads across financial markets, institutions are choosing Solana for distribution. In fact, 5 of nearly 30 globally systemically important banks have already announced partnerships with or that leverage the Solana blockchain. Second, tokenized equities on Solana generated $4.8 billion in trading volume during the second quarter, up from $1.1 billion in the first quarter. Monthly volume grew from $670 million in April to $871 million in May before reaching $3.3 billion in June alone. As of late July 2026, 97% of all on-chain tokenized equity spot volume to date had settled on Solana, which underscores its position as the leading infrastructure for institutional tokenized securities. The institutional demand for tokenized assets on Solana is real, it is accelerating and it is arriving in parallel with our buildout over the past 2 quarters. We would like to reiterate our conviction in the Solana ecosystem. We believe Solana Company is the accountable listed counterparty those institutions can actually transact with and that's what the second quarter was spent making possible. Before I turn to our operating businesses, I want to highlight the additions we made to our team and our Board because our talent is our greatest asset. Bringing on leading Web3 native talent is what allows us to scale effectively and to execute at the highest level. On our first quarter call, we welcomed Madelene Gani as CFO and COO. Madelene brings experience with Ernst & Young, Gemini, JUUL, Hedera, Aptos, et cetera. And 1 quarter in, her impact is evident in the rigor of our reporting and in the buildout of our core business lines. In March, we welcomed Teddy Hung as Head of Business Development and Advisory. Teddy joined us from Boston Consulting Group, where he partnered with financial institutions and regulators on digital asset and money, following roles at JPMorgan and Oliver Wyman. Since 2022, he has published on digital money, stablecoins, tokenized deposit and CBDCs and on tokenization, including tokenized funds and institutional DeFi. He leads our institutional engagement with financial institutions and strategic partners and is the driving force behind the advisory pipeline I will come to in a moment. We also strengthened our Board of Directors. On April 23, the Board increased its size from 7 to 9 members and appointed Michel Lee and Sergio Mello as directors to fill in the newly created positions. Michel is a cofounder and investment partner at Cybertech Partners and a cofounder at Hashkey Group, now a Hong Kong listed company which owns 1 of the largest licensed crypto exchanges in Asia and the largest blockchain technology investment fund management company in Asia. He also brings with him more than 25 years' experience in traditional capital markets, in particular in multiple roles as product structurer, originator and risk manager across Hong Kong, Beijing, Tokyo and London. Sergio is Global Head of Stablecoin Solutions at Anchorage Digital, where he leads business development and platform offerings for stablecoins. He previously founded Lago Finance, a consortium of financial institutions built to improve settlement using tokenized cash. Last quarter, I outlined our diversified revenue engine comprised of 3 integrated service lines designed to serve institutional demand in one of the fastest-growing digital asset regions in the world, Asia Pacific, and I will touch on each service line every quarter. Advisory services: we provide bespoke advisory to traditional financial institutions and corporates, helping unlock tangible business value through blockchain adoption. On our first quarterly call, I said we expected this initiative to contribute meaningfully to revenue this year. We maintain that view. The second quarter was spent building the foundation for that revenue. Our team delivered 15 institutional education sessions and advisory workshops with banks, asset managers and exchanges across Asia Pacific. Developing a pipeline of durable recurring relationships is a crucial step in generating revenue and that work is now converting. We are in negotiations with a third party and we expect to finalize terms in due course. In this phase, advisory is doing 2 jobs: it will generate revenue over time and, just as importantly, it is our demand generation engine because the institutions that ask us how to adopt Solana are the institutions that will later need an institutional-grade validator for their operations. We are being engaged as a trusted growth partner rather than just a vendor. Validator infrastructure: Pacific Backbone is a branded, compliant, high-performance infrastructure that regulated institutions require in order to scale staking and validation on Solana. Last quarter, we said our validator nodes would be operational in late June and our first validator cluster came online early July after intensive assessment. We now have 3 machines running in Tokyo, which altogether constitute 1 validator cluster, which provides us with redundancy and an independent test environment ahead of any deployment. With institutional standards as a north star, initial deployments carry a high redundancy ratio by design and that ratio is expected to decline as we add operating validators and build operating history. Beyond Tokyo, we are working on additional validators in APAC to address growing demand per plan, and we plan to launch over the course of the year as favorable conditions arise. Now to third-party delegated stake. We have secured a commitment of an external third party of around 0.5 million SOL as of this earnings call, and we expect to report our revenue from the validator business in the third quarter of 2026. This is our first institutional client stake and we believe it is the proof point that matters most because it demonstrates that the established counterparty will move real size onto infrastructure operated by a named listed entity. We differentiate ourselves through stability, compliance and transparency beyond simply headline yield. We are pursuing ISO 27001 and SOC 2 certification to further strengthen this differentiation. Platform business: our AI-powered orchestration and compliance stack is a long-term build and we continue to develop deliberately. When complete, the platform is expected to be the combination of our staking, validator and advisory lines, giving partners a single source of execution across their digital asset operations. These initiatives sit on a multiyear trajectory and we expect their operational impact to continue building throughout this fiscal year. Together, these 3 service lines create the flywheel I highlighted last quarter. The reason that the whole is worth more than the sum of the parts is that these businesses feed 1 another. Advisory work identifies where institutions need infrastructure as we support their utilization of Solana for their business growth. Infrastructure generates recurring non-NAV fee revenue. That revenue recycles into SOL accumulation. And a larger, better-run treasury makes us a more credible counterparty for the next advisory mandate. This design was reinforced this quarter by 2 partnerships. In May, we announced a strategic partnership with the Jito Foundation to expand institutional-grade Solana infrastructure throughout Asia-Pacific. By combining Jito's market layer technology with Pacific Backbone, the partnership supports the deployment of high-performance validators and the development of institutional staking solutions tailored to regulated financial institutions and asset managers. As demand for institutional staking and validator infrastructure continues to grow across the region, this partnership is expected to strengthen the foundation supporting financial institutions building on Solana. It is also already contributing measurable yield to our treasury, which Cosmo will quantify later. In June, Solana Company announced a partnership with Alatau City, Kazakhstan's future-oriented city, to collaborate on blockchain infrastructure, enterprise adoption, education, research and policy development. Throughout this partnership, we aim to support the development of blockchain infrastructure while expanding opportunities for enterprise adoption in one of the region's fastest-growing digital asset hubs. Alatau is a clear illustration of how our offerings open doors that a pure digital treasury company alone would not because we are being engaged at the level of policy and infrastructure design, not simply as an asset holder. The second quarter also marked the continued transition towards our core business operations. The divestiture of the PoNS medical device business was finalized on April 8, 2026. This was disclosed in our first quarter Form 10-Q but bears repeating. Madelene will take you through the financials but the key takeaway is that we have exited a cash-consuming noncore operation, removing its ongoing costs from the business and we now report as a focused digital asset treasury and infrastructure company. On March 17, we acquired a Hong Kong-based trust company and the transaction closed on July 15. Total consideration was $2 million in a combination of 50% payable in cash, 50% payable by stock issuance. Hong Kong is the primary focus for our operations. Here, we believe the institutions we service do not simply need performance infrastructure; they need a licensed in-region named counterparty they are permitted to transact with. With that, let me hand the call over to Cosmo to walk through our treasury and capital markets results. Cosmo?