All right, GM everyone. Let's get going here. Welcome, everyone, to today's Spaces. This is the DFDV May 2026 recap and AMA. I'm Pete Humiston, CMO here at DeFi Development Corp. Thank you guys for joining us today. As mentioned, this is our monthly recap. We're going to be going a little bit deeper into how we're thinking about the business, the market, and where we're headed from here. I'm super excited. It's been a little while, but I've got joining me here today, we've got Dan Kang, Chief Strategy Officer at DeFi Development Corp, and Joseph Onorati, CEO here at DeFi Development Corp. As mentioned, we're going to be walking through some of the accomplishments, progress made last month. We're going to unpack some key themes, and we're also going to open up things for the community to ask questions. That said, feel free to leave your question under the pinned tweet on our profile. We'll do our best to answer as many questions as possible. It's going to be first come, first served, so be sure to get in there ASAP. A quick reminder before we jump into today's discussion, today's chat may include forward-looking statements. These involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. Please refer to our SEC filings for more details. We undertake no obligation to update these statements except as required by law. With that said, let's get right into it. DK, Joseph, GM, what's going on, guys? How you feeling? Sir, I love the energy that you're bringing right now. I have to say, you're getting better and better at reading the forward-looking statements disclosure. Yeah, I'm trying, man. I have Big shoes to fill, now that I'm kind of running with this here and there. That used to be something you were running point on. Yeah, I appreciate it. Yes, I did a quick set of push-ups before hopping on the Spaces, which always gets the blood flowing and gets me hyped. It's also been a little while. How are you guys feeling? Joseph, how are you? GM. GM, sir. Yep, feeling good. Plenty of caffeine today. Thank you. Cool. Well, now that I know you guys are feeling good, we can jump into this AMA first with an interesting question or rather, just kind of gauge your guys' thoughts and overall vibe. Solana. We saw the price of SOL actually recently slip below $70 for the first time since November or 2023, so it's been quite some time. This is coming as a bit of a shock to, I think, a lot of people. To us, it's maybe not so much, in a lot of ways expected, but I won't speak for everyone. Just curious, what are your guys' thoughts? What do you make of the recent price action? Do we have any concerns here? Yeah. I'll start, and Joseph can certainly chime in if he's got additional thoughts. I guess near term, you're right, not surprised, but if you had told me this is where SOL would be trading a year ago, I certainly would've been very surprised, right? SOL has certainly underperformed our expectations on a long enough time horizon. I think crypto, in general, has obviously not acted well, and has not acted the way we thought it would over the course of this last year. I've mentioned this in a few different public forums, but I continue to believe that the main, call it driving force, is AI, right? AI equities are sucking up a lot of attention. They've obviously acted very well. Anything and everything down the, I'm going to say, infrastructure stack of AI, from memory to semis. Obviously CPU traction has gained a lot of momentum as well. You see strength in names like Intel. That's just a pretty easy theme to understand. It's in an industry where there are lots of, I'm going to say, clear, tangible outcomes happening, both on the productivity front and elsewhere. I know that we have certainly been using it a lot internally at DFDV as well. When you have something like that that's just taking up so much air time, it's not surprising to me that you would see underperformance in other risk-bearing asset classes, where maybe the education hurdles are a little bit tougher, right? Cryptos were the poster child for that. There have obviously been other, I'm going to say, pockets of tech that have underperformed as well, despite how strong the Nasdaq has been year to date. You can certainly find them. That's one element. As far as the near-term concerns, we got a big IPO coming, right? The biggest IPO in SpaceX. There obviously needs to be, I'm going to say, liquidity sucked from somewhere. The Nasdaq itself has, today being the exception, but I'm going to say recent weeks, been relatively weaker than it was throughout the month of May and certainly April. Not surprising to see that near-term dynamic play out as well. Yeah, I think those are some of the big driving forces. As far as concerns, now the beauty of the way that we have structured our capital structure, we'll get into some other nuances and details, but we've said this before. Our cap structure has been designed so that we can withstand a prolonged bear market, right? We don't have any maturities on our convertible debt until 2030, and we'll obviously have much bigger problems if SOL has not recovered by 2030. We did deliberately position ourselves to withstand a prolonged bear market. Joseph, anything you'd add? No, I agree with. Well, yeah, a little bit. I agree with everything you said, of course. Yeah, the company is positioned to hold the line for many years, right? That's the intention, right? We understand that crypto is extremely volatile. It comes in cycles. We've been through many cycles in the past, and this is just another one. That's why the capital stack is set up the way it is. As DK mentioned, 2030 expiration on the convertible debt. Hopefully, we can get some longer duration capital in coming months or years that will allow us to weather even longer, hopefully not longer, but potentially longer draw-downs in SOL price. We're long-term bullish, and that's how the business is designed. Cool. Thanks for the commentary on that, guys. Yeah. I don't know. Maybe this is just cope and quite frankly, I honestly think coping is underrated anyways, but all the excitement and momentum in other pockets of capital markets would seem to suggest that if the air starts to get let out, maybe there is a rotation of sorts to Bitcoin and of course, other top-performing L1s, namely Solana. While the picture might look a little bleak, it does seem like there's an interesting setup here. I don't know if you guys have any commentary on that, but I know you guys kind of. [inaudible]. Yeah. I actually had an investor the other day mention that when you think about what these IPOs represent, they're going to be such massive wealth generation events for all the employees of these companies and early investors that certainly some of them may just sit in cash or they're not wanting to take risks, but I'd wager that a lot of them are going to say, "How do I deploy this? Where do I want to deploy?" When you look at the underperforming sectors of the market, crypto feels like a screaming buy. Of course, a little biased as someone at a crypto company, but I thought that was an interesting perspective that actually you may have an overhang in the lead-up to the IPOs, but post-IPO start to see some strength. Good deal. Fingers crossed. Yeah. Hopefully, we see crypto start to take a bit. My God, my 2017 car has outperformed Bitcoin at this point, so surely that's got to be a bottom signal. Moving along here. Another quick question. This didn't necessarily happen in May, but it is relevant to the company and rather fresh, should I say. We did announce an executive transition with Parker stepping away from his role. I think there were some questions. People were seeking just greater clarity. I know we got some investors who reached out, but would love to hear directly from the horse's mouth. You guys, can you just kind of walk us through that and explain why folks should still remain confident in DFDV maintaining its execution velocity through this transition? Sure. Yeah. Thanks. At first, yeah, Parker left. We are appreciative of all of his contributions and without him, the company wouldn't have gotten off the ground. We're very happy to have had him around at DFDV when he was. Thank you, Parker. It's been awesome working with you. On the execution velocity stuff, yeah. We've all been, not all of us, but most of us have been on the team since the beginning, right? Parker and I had the first conversations about launching this company to the transition from Janover to DFDV, the transaction in the first place, launch the SOL treasury, et cetera. John, our CFO, came in just a few days after, really, we started talking about the plan. The two of you guys have been around since right around that time, very early on. We have the context, right? Parker's departure doesn't result in some context loss for the business. We've been across what he's been working on. We overlap on really almost all of the work. From a perspective of what we're actually going to be able to produce, I don't think there's going to be much of a change here and expect DFDV to continue to focus on SOL per share growth as it has since the initial change of control last year. Yeah. Only things I'll add, as far as execution, as Joseph mentioned, still focused on SOL per share growth. It's not lost on us that SOL per share growth has slowed in recent months. This isn't unique to DFDV, right? It's happened to all DATs, right? If you just compare the crypto accumulation rates this year versus the earlier part of last year when the DAT craze really kicked off. It's night and day, right? Market's crowded. Crypto obviously hasn't acted well, which has been the primary driving force in all of this, which weighs on mNAV, et cetera. Mission is largely the same. I won't say any more on the DFDV front, largely because I just want to get in the business of talking less and doing more. I'll stop on that. I will note that Parker going to Apyx is bullish for Apyx, anything that is bullish for Apyx, ultimately, given what we have commented on potential lower cost of capital for DFDV is obviously positive for DFDV. That's probably all I'll say on that front. Cool, guys. Thanks for the additional context. Yes, Parker played a pivotal role in getting DFDV where it is today. As a reminder for folks, we've always believed that DFDV represents the best leverage vehicle for Solana exposure, we stand by that. Actually with that said, today, what do you guys believe differentiates DFDV from other SOL treasury companies in the market? We've prided ourselves on being leveraged Solana exposure. We've done a number of different things to generate shareholder value. As DK mentioned, Apyx being one of them. Would love your guys' take on that. I think this still goes back to the team, right? This gets a little bit to what Joseph Onorati was mentioning before, which is the, yes, Parker White's gone, but the core team here is still intact and has been operating in crypto for quite some time. As a second order effect of the team, all the advantages we've outlined in the past also remain intact. What's one that comes to mind? Speed, right? Not just being first to market, but certainly I'm going to say first to a number of various areas over the course of the last year, whether it's tokenizing our equity, acquiring validators, deploying on chain, et cetera, sort of translates into the creativity that the company has displayed as well. I think there are bets that we've outlined in our most recent shareholder letter, which I'd highly encourage folks to go and check out. There are bets that we'd like to sort of let brew and simmer, if you will, before we start swinging at non-core things with sort of that same velocity. I think I'd also note that we've been a very good, I'm going to say, advocate for not just Solana, but SOL, the asset itself. We've spoken at length about our DFDV SOL model. We continue to engage with institutional investors on that and try to help folks, I'm going to say, bridge between what we believe is the end state where Solana is the winner of all chains to the actual value accrual on the token, which is obviously a pretty crucial component to the story. You can't be bullish on DFDV if you're not bullish on SOL. Those are a few of the things that come to mind, and we'll have more to say in the future. Joseph Onorati, anything you'd add? No, I think you crushed that one. No, thank you. All right, good deal. Moving along. One of the more notable developments in May was repurchasing some convertible debt at a meaningful discount. Guys, would love to hear how do we evaluate the trade-off between repurchasing debt, buying additional SOL, and preserving dry powder for future opportunities? What's the thought there? Yeah. I'll start, and I definitely want Joseph to chime in. One of the core tensions we actually discussed fairly early on and throughout the last year is the balance between SOL per share and NAV per share accretion. The reality is that we're a levered SOL vehicle, SOL on steroids, whatever you'd like to call us, not a levered NAV per share vehicle. However, there are obviously moments in which you can, I'm going to say, take actions that are both NAV per share accretive and SOL per share accretive. In this instance, the repurchase of the convertible debt, I think accomplished both of those and also sets us up well for long-term SOL per share accretion. It obviously has to be a, I'm going to say, very compelling near-term opportunity. Again, in our most recent shareholder letter, we outlined the average cost at which we were repurchasing said convertible debt. We'll frankly take that deal all day. Not just because it reduces our near-term liabilities, but it reduces interest expense and additionally reduces the future dilution associated with said convertible debt. It's a massive win whenever we can retire debt at a steep discount. I do want to emphasize, though, that the objective here is not like let's delever as much as possible because we should delever in a bear market. I think that would go contrary to what we've publicly stated before. The idea is to delever so that you can find, I'm going to say, additional pockets of leverage elsewhere so that you can coil the spring accordingly going into the next bull market. We haven't been shy about indicating what some of those levers for additional leverage are. Maybe Joseph wants to add to that. Yeah, sure. That's like public information disclosure. We filed an S1 some time ago now for a variable rate perpetual preferred instrument similar to STRK issued by Strategy or SATA issued by Strive. If we were to pull this off, it would be the first of such instrument on Solana treasury, which we think is very interesting. However, if you look at it from an IPO participant in a variable rate perpetual, the same participant might look at buying back the, or not buying back, but buying the convertible debt. If the debt's trading at a discount and at par value yields 5.5%, but the discount's steep enough, the investor thinks, "Well, why should I buy a pref in the IPO when I can buy the convertible debt?" If the convertible debts would be senior in the capital stack to the future pref. It's safer from that perspective. The headline yield might be a little lower than the yield from IPO purchase for the pref, but they kind of compete with each other. I think a natural thing or a reasonable outcome or a rational choice for a company or management team to make who wanted to get a pref done, would be to buy back their debt. We saw this with Strive, where when they put the deal for SEDA together, or coming right up to the deal for SEDA, they attempted to take out all of their debt and have SEDA be the highest instrument in the capital stack. I think that's very compelling. I think Strive has outperformed other treasury companies in part because of that approach. I think coming from that perspective, it's interesting to, let's say, emulate Strive's behavior. Yeah, Strive's behavior. Cool. Thanks for the additional context on that front, guys. Just moving along here because I know we're quickly approaching time. MNAV compression. If the market starts to continue to remain challenging and we do see MNAVs across the DAT space compress, what do you guys think are going to be the most important milestones management can control versus the ones that are ultimately going to depend on market sentiment? I won't say too much that'll be gratifying for folks to hear. Not because I don't have thoughts, but because we're spending this time going back to the drawing board to see what makes most sense. I'm certainly of the view that hoping and wishing is not a strategy. I mean, yes, we are all bullish on SOL. We obviously need to do something that is also within our control here. Something that'll drive SOL per share growth beyond just the organic, I'm going to say, deployment of our treasury on-chain and our staking business. Yeah, Joseph, anything you'd add to that? No, I think that's fair. Yep. All right, cool. A couple more here. One we got from Peter Lee. This isn't in relation to May per se, but first quarter he had noted that G&A spend of SOL 6 million off SOL 2.6 million in revenue. He's just asking, what is all this money for? What is the spend here, basically, especially considering it's a rather small/remote team? Dare I preface this by saying legal bills are expensive for a public company. Yeah. Joseph can take a little bit of this. Yeah, sure. Yeah. I too am bothered by this amount of spend. The primary costs in that bucket include legal and accounting. It turns out that participating on-chain in a meaningful way as a public company has challenges. How do we account for a looped position for staked Solana? How do we account for some of the other deals or methods that we've participated in Solana DeFi? It's not just how you account for it from a GAAP perspective, but also what's the tax implication? The tax accounting and the GAAP accounting are often very different. That's been a challenge and it's expensive, and we're using high-end service providers for this work to make sure that we get it right and it's defendable. Then there's also a legal component. In some cases, we need a legal opinion on one piece or another piece of how to treat the positions that we're taking on or participating with in DeFi. We've also had capital markets work, whether it resulted in an outcome yet, like the S1, for example, for the variable rate perpetual preferred. The legal work for this stuff is not cheap, which is a contributor to some of these expenses. Cool. Thanks for answering that. Yeah, it's funny. Anytime DFDV, I think we run into hard and expensive problems, we always just take a step back and we just take a moment amongst the team and be like, "Hmm, how could we do this better and cheaper?" Needless to say, I think we one time spent a couple of hours thinking about how we could create a law firm out of AI and basically do what we were getting charged for a little bit cheaper with no overhead. Yeah. Needless to say, to summarize what Joseph said, accounting, legal, very expensive. If someone's got ideas out there to make it cheaper, please let us know. Yeah. Maybe I'll also say, I'm confident that DFDV is doing things on-chain that no other public company is doing. We've been clear about this, right? We run a stake looping strategy on Solana. We're participating on Solana lending markets. We run our own validators. This is one of the ways that we're able to generate the organic headline yields that we've put up for the last, I don't know, four quarters. The accounting for this stuff in a public company, and even the tax prep for it in a public company, I think has never been done before. Not only is it expensive to do this generally, but we have to get accounting memos that we give comfort to our auditors on the accounting being done correctly. The approach to it, not the numbers in the spreadsheet, but the approach to how we would do it and how it fits into GAAP or not. The tax side of it, like I said, is different. While we have incurred, I'd say, significant expense to get a clean or clear path on how to actually do this stuff, the projected forward cost to continue to do it is significantly lower because we've overcome that hurdle already. We know how to do the accounting for, say, stake looping and the tax calculations for stake looping. I keep using this as an example, but there's several other DeFi strategies that we employ that have to have the same analysis rigor. We can continue with these often high-yielding strategies going forward with relatively less cost associated with them. Awesome. Thanks for that last tidbit there, Joseph. Guys, we're just over time here. Before we close out, would love to get both your thoughts. Looking back six months from now, what would you say are one or two achievements that would make the team say, "Man, that was a very successful second half of 2026? I've got a lot of thoughts. I'll leave it with a successful fundraise and SOL per share growth returning to double digits and a return of the NAV premium. Look, at the end of the day, everything is in service of becoming the world's number one Solana treasury company by volume, by SOL, by market cap, right? By any measure. It's a bold mission, but it's very easy to understand. The strategy to get there is, as I mentioned, we're going back to the drawing board. Copy-paste MSTR is not a strategy. Waiting for SOL to rip back is not a strategy. I expect us to take an incredibly high agency approach going forward that involves leaning into our creativity the way we have historically. We're not going to be rash. We're going to act incredibly rationally. I would say urgently. Those are some of the milestones I'm looking for. All right. Yep. Sorry, I'm aligned there. All good. Cool. Well, thanks, guys. I think this is a great place to wrap. Thank you for both of you joining. Big shout-out to everyone listening and as well as those listening to the replay. As always, if you guys have questions, comments, feedback, any concerns, don't hesitate to reach out. We are open to any and all feedback. Please don't be a stranger. With that said, we can conclude here. Thanks, guys, for showing up. Thanks again, everyone in the audience. In service of SOL per share growth, this is Pete and team signing out. Take care, guys.