Great. Let's jump right into it, everyone. Thanks for coming to today's Spaces. For those of you who don't know, I'm Pete Humiston. I'm the CMO here at DeFi Development Corp. We thank you all for joining us today. As you know, this is our monthly business recap and AMA, where we're gonna be covering everything that went down last month, where we made some progress, highlight various, you know, key developments, and of course, answer some questions that we've received from all of you. Joining me today is DFDV CIO and COO, Parker White. I'm gonna be talking to him. He's gonna be sharing his perspectives and answering the questions throughout the discussion. As always, if you have questions during this Spaces, feel free to drop it under the pinned comment on our profile, and we'll do our best to get to them. Of course, before we begin, just a quick reminder that today's discussions may include forward-looking statements. These involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected. For fuller discussions of these risks, please refer to our most recent SEC filings. We undertake no obligation to update any forward-looking statements, except as required by law. With that out of the way, let's just dive right into February. You know, some of the highlights of last month, we published a new research report on valuing Solana's native token, SOL. You know, it's a framework that basically treats SOL as a scarce digital real estate asset with expanding on-chain economy. Under our base case assumption for this piece that we published, the framework suggests a long-term valuation of roughly $10,000 per SOL. We also co-hosted Solana Breakpoint, which was the biggest digital conference the world's ever seen. We co-hosted that with one of crypto's biggest influencers, MartyParty. We had nearly 24 hours of conversations, more than 350,000 attendees, and more than 20 of the biggest names and projects in the Solana ecosystem, so there was a ton of alpha that came out of those conversations. On our YouTube, you can find a complete replay. It's been chopped up a little bit to make it a little bit easier to navigate through, but nonetheless, lots of good, insightful conversations there if you're interested in checking it out. We also continued just expanding our institutional investor education efforts, not just through some of the stuff we've published on our blog, but some of the conversations we've hosted, for example, through our Just Chatting series. Of course, we participated in a number of different kind of community engagement opportunities across X, YouTube, and other platforms. Most notably too, or at least in my opinion, we announced our investment into ApeX, which is a new protocol. It's actually the first dividend-backed stablecoin protocol that's designed to offer enhanced yield to stablecoin market participants by sourcing yield from preferred equity issuance by digital asset treasuries, such as MicroStrategy's Stretch preferred equity. There's a lot on that. We'll get into it, I'm sure, in this conversation, and we've posted about it too. Be sure to head over to our blog to catch up on that if you're interested. I will say that we're actually hosting a call tomorrow, a Spaces tomorrow with the team to just talk a little bit more about the investment and what ApeX seeks to achieve and, you know, how it relates and feeds into DeFi Development Corp. With all that out of the way, we can start to dig into questions. Parker, how's it going? How you feeling? What's the word? Feeling great. Let's jump in. Awesome. Cool. Well, I think we should get the tough one out of the way first or at least a couple of the tough ones. you know, we did last month announce a downward revision for our near-term guidance from 0.085 SOL per share, or excuse me, from 0.165 SOL per share to 0.085 SOL per share, but we did maintain our long-term guidance. What should folks know about that? What should we make of it? Yeah, I mean, ultimately this is a reflection of the bear market. You know, when we came out and released the guidance initially, obviously we're, you know, peak bull market, things were going really well, and more importantly, there were a bunch of positive catalysts in front of us. Obviously we've, you know, the CLARITY Act was in the works, U.S. adoption of crypto from the regulatory side. You've got liquidity metrics, you know, globally expanding. It really seemed like a bull market was gonna be continuing. Of course, we all saw October through, you know, February 5th, that basically crypto completely decoupled from all global risk assets, completely nuked. There's, you know, speculation on why, I've put out some pieces on it, bunch of others have. It's, you know, just a completely uncorrelated move. In that environment, obviously, you know, our NAV's compressed, which limited our ability to run the ATM, but more importantly, sentiment really dried up. You know, it made it much more difficult to get a preferred done, and basically made it almost impossible to raise capital in any fashion. You've kinda seen that. I mean, MicroStrategy's effectively been the only entity that's been able to raise capital since then at any kind of meaningful scale. The short-term guidance reduction is just a reflection of where we are in the market, and, you know, the time that we have left on that prediction, right? It was a short-term prediction. Our long-term guidance and target really still stands, and this is more just a timing thing. Moving the timeline for the next bull market and, you know, good conditions for the business to return, moving that target out, you know, a couple more months or maybe 6 months, maybe 1 year. You know, when those times return, I think we can make up lost ground and get back to the, you know, the 1 SOL per share target. Most certainly. Yeah, the near term, I don't wanna say it matters. I don't wanna say it doesn't matter, you know, like you said, things change, market conditions change. You know, nonetheless, just to reiterate what you said, like, you know, North Star is still at 1 SPS long term, which I think we feel good about for sure. You know, speaking of market downturn, missed things getting a little sour in the market. I think we've seen a few people voice some concerns about DFDV management getting awarded, you know, hefty bonuses and stock grants. I think someone even said that this was, like, the largest in history, which I'm not sure if that's, you know, talking about DFDV itself or relative to other DATs or capital markets or whatnot. Yeah, it seems like there's some confusion. Again, all of this is public information. Yeah, I think it can be a little tough to distill some of the stuff that is thrown out in the public, but we've got a good handle on it. That said, Parker, are there any kind of updates we wanna give on that front? You know, maybe we can use this also as a, as a good opportunity to remind market participants that we are undoubtedly the most shareholder-aligned DAT, you know, in the industry, maybe with the exception of some of the Bitcoin DAT behemoths. Yeah, I'll let you answer. Sure. Yeah, so, effectively, you know, for those that aren't aware, we gave out a options and RSU package to the entire team earlier this year. That was, you know, the management, myself, Joseph, John, I believe DK as well, are the only ones that have to publish the changes. You know, the entire team was given the allocation. This was part of our, you know, kind of annual comp review. Taking a look at, you know, where our compensation is at relative to peers, relative to benchmarks. Looking at, you know, other DATs, other crypto companies of similar size, some of smaller size even, and also comparing against, you know, stock performance and a number of other metrics, and then submitting a proposal to our compensation committee, all made up of independent directors to, you know, make the decision. You know, candidly speaking, we've had a number of, you know, executives get offers from other DATs and other crypto companies. You know, we kinda had the option of letting the team effectively disband and, you know, go their separate ways to different organizations. Saying, "No. Look, we're still committed to DFDV. We wanna build this business long term, and so we wanna retain the talent." I mean, obviously the answer is to retain the talent. We didn't really consider, seriously consider letting folks go, but that was a real threat and, you know, candidly remains a real threat long term as we perform well. As, you know, any good sports team knows, as you do well, your coaching staff are gonna be made offers, big offers, and so you gotta pay up. I know, you know, it can look tough on a relative basis compared to DFDV, right? Stock is way down but, you know, management is, and, you know, the entire team is getting these options awards. You know, on the flip side, if, for example, we lost our CFO 'cause the CFO went to another company, we'd have to hire a new CFO, and the CFO wouldn't come in and be like, "Yeah, you know what? Stock's down, so, I'll work for really cheap. I'll work for free," or, "I'll work for, you know, a $50K salary or something." We'd have to pay up. Ultimately, this decision was about protecting the team from some of those, you know, competitive pressures, and keeping the team together, keeping the team very long-term incentivized and excited for the future. Now, you know, I will stress that the company or rather the management team, myself, Joseph, John, others, we are the largest single shareholders in the company, so collectively we own a little north of 20%. You know, we're hyper-aligned here. It's not like we are a mercenary management team that doesn't have any skin in the game and just want some extra shares that we can go dump. We haven't sold any shares. We've acquired shares since the initial acquisition. We acquired the company with our own cash upfront, selling other assets to, you know, make the acquisition. You know, I think I certainly see where people are coming from, but I think when you look at it in the context, look at it benchmarked to how competitors are paid, and then look at some of the rationale, you know, it was candidly really the only option here. You know, I guess the last thing I'd say is, you know, we are very long-term aligned with the company, wanna see it grow. Again, we haven't sold any shares. Just because options are issued, and by the way, they do vest over four years, but just because options are issued doesn't mean we are exercising and selling. You know, Saylor has famously sold a lot of shares, but we, you know, we've not, and that's because we believe in what we're doing here. I guess that's ultimately how I'd respond to that question kind of, you know, from a couple different angles. Awesome. Good deal. Yeah, I mean, won't linger on this one any further. I think we got two of the tougher ones out of the way. Let's just move along and actually talk about some of the more exciting and positive stuff. We published a report talking about this new valuation framework for Solana. It's on our blog. It's, we've also wrote an X article on it. We'd highly encourage folks to go check it out. There's also a model you can download and play around and plug in your own assumptions. You know, the management team all kind of played their own part in helping produce this one, but our giga brain chief strategy officer, DK, did lead it. he's probably, you know, the best person to really talk to us about, but Parker, I know you understand it very intimately. maybe if you wouldn't mind still just giving, you know, the audience a quick kinda rundown as to the report and, you know, our, our views and, you know, any additional insights you wanna share that will, you know, help people understand how the hell we came up with a $10,000 SOL price target? DK, did you just join? Are you able to jump in? I am here, but I heard Pete as, like, a massive echo, basically. Okay. Well, I can take it then. DK can jump in and correct me where I'm off here, but effectively, we wanted to take a step back and think about a new way to approach the valuation for Solana. A lot of people are valuing it like a software company, you know, and people out there have been throwing around revenue. You know, Solana's the leading chain for revenue, and so it's, you know, the leading network. People, you know, use all sorts of software metrics and they take a some type of revenue multiple or even, like, an earnings multiple, and you try to back in, and then you're like, "Oh, well, you know, SOL is trading at, you know, massive multiples relative to tech companies, and so it's, you know, overvalued and whatever." You know, Solana's a lot more than... and these, you know, digital economies effectively are a lot more than a software company. There's you know, they're much more sticky, the network effects are much stronger, and what can be built on them is much greater. It's much more expansive because it is permissionless. You know, we've been really playing around with this narrative or this idea of, like, Solana is a country, or Solana is like a city state, you know, like Singapore, Dubai almost or something. It's like this, you know, global finance hub, but digital finance hub. DK came up with this fantastic valuation framework of basically look at Solana as a city. Like, what if Solana is Manhattan back in 1800, right? It's this global finance hub, but it's very early. If that's the case, if the Solana network is like Manhattan, then you could think of SOL the asset as effectively real estate. You need SOL to not only transact in the network, but realistically you wanna have a balance sheet of SOL to maintain your position in the network. You don't wanna just be a tourist. If, let's just say, in the future, 10% of global finance is conducted on Solana, you don't just wanna be a tourist in this financial system. No, you wanna stake your claim. and that, you know, goes for or the reasons you might wanna do that would be around governance, and also capturing a portion of the economic value that the network creates, right? If you're BlackRock and you're gonna put $100 billion assets, $100 billion in assets on chain, and you're gonna do it on Solana, all that economic value is just gonna accrue to somebody else, unless you also own a whole bunch of SOL yourself. By the way, the SOL holders could do a governance vote to make some change that you don't want if you're BlackRock. It would make sense for BlackRock to own, you know, on a proprietary basis, a whole bunch of SOL. Then you could carry that logic forward to the big banks, to JPMorgan. You could even carry that forward to, you know, maybe some governments. You know, they're gonna wanna have a stake in this system, in this economy. A stake really starts to look like, you know, land ownership, like real estate. If you think about it as real estate in a sense, and you modify it a little bit to think of it as like digital real estate, that kind of creates this very different valuation framework from a standard software company. DK's piece really dives into that, and I would highly recommend you guys check it out, and we're gonna be continuing to peel back the onion over time, digging into further pieces of that and kinda fleshing out this view. Ultimately, we think valuing Solana like a software company is massively undervaluing it, and we think it should be valued more like, this, again, digital economy, and SOL the token as real estate in that digital economy. That's the, that's the teaser on the piece, and I would highly encourage folks to jump in on it. Great. Thanks for giving that overview. Yeah, highly encourage folks to head on over to our blog and check it out. It's a great read, and there's of course a model too that you can play around with if you're so inclined. Cool. Shifting gears, publishing that report and getting all the feedback was, you know, great. One of the other things too that we saw some really interesting positive feedback and a number of questions around was relating to our investment into ApeX Protocol. You know, mentioned this at the beginning of the spaces, but it's the first dividend-backed stablecoin protocol. The development of it's being supported by the team behind DeFi Development Corp. It offers enhanced stablecoin yield by way of leveraging the yield offered by preferred equity, such as MicroStrategy's Stretch prefs. We're an early investor helping support it. Parker, what should the folks know about our involvement in ApeX, and ApeX as a whole too? Yeah. Ultimately I think of ApeX as a decentralized stablecoin project. I would definitely think of it different than, say, a Tether or a Circle. You know, it's going to have a governance token. There's going to be a DAO with governance votes. It's set up as an owner-less foundation and an offshore entity. The idea here is that, you know, we want this to exist. We think it makes a lot of sense for it to exist. Saylor went out on stage in December at Bitcoin MENA and said it should exist and has been supporting this idea since, you know, had DK on stage at MicroStrategy World last week to announce. We think this thing should exist, but we don't think it should be owned by any one company, especially not any one DAT, because that would create some impartiality and ultimately limit the upside potential of what this project can be. You know, we raised a little bit of money from angels and ourselves. We put some of our own money in to have some initial OpEx to get things going. DFDV did write a small check relative to the balance sheet in, and so we'll have certainly some upside economics on it, DFDV that is. But the real idea here is that we want this to be a, you know, multi-hundred or 10, eventually a $100 billion-dollar protocol, you know, stable value asset that will essentially provide yield into the crypto ecosystem in a very transparent way. You know, I think one of the big benefits of public companies is the transparency requirements. When you look at a project like let's take an Ethena, for example, or let's just famously look at Tether, right? Where the balance sheet, it's not very transparent, right? We get quarterly kind of, sign-offs or not even full audits. You know, I personally think Tether is backed, but the fact that I have to say I think it's backed is a bit of an indictment. Ethena is, you know, a lot worse. If we can launch a project that is backed by these DAT preferreds, it's much more transparent. We can do heck, we could do daily attestations. We're just holding these assets in brokerage accounts. The assets are all there. We can get accountants to audit it, and provide that transparency to the community that, you know, the assets, the yield-generating assets are here. We think this is just a better way to create a yield-bearing instrument in the crypto ecosystem, and we think there's a lot of demand for it, especially now in a bear market where, you know, yields have dried up, yield on stables is couple percentage if you lend it out and 0 if you just hold the stable. We think there's a big opportunity here for this thing to exist. Now, how does it benefit DFDV? That's what we're here to talk about. The first one obviously is the investment, but the bigger one is as a source of capital for DFDV. We've been trying to get this preferred off the ground, but we continually get feedback that, you know, we're too small, we're subscale, and there's not a lead investor, there's not an anchor investor. And, you know, we're not alone in this, right? Most DATs have not launched a preferred and are just simply holding equity on the balance sheet. Some DATs probably realistically don't deserve to be issuing preferreds, but there are a couple, you know, I could count them on maybe two hands, that really would perform better and their shareholders would benefit from having a preferred on the balance sheet. In, in the capital stack rather. If we can provide that via ApeX to DFDV and to others, we can not only create a lot of value for ApeX token holders, but we can create a lot of value for these debt holders. The fact that, you know, we've launched this as the DFDV management team, you know, we can make sure that, you know, DFDV gets a really good look here. We think this will be a really big catalyst for DFDV's fundraising ability. You know, we've seen MicroStrategy now buying Bitcoin pretty aggressively again, and that's been because of their STRC instrument. We would like to get back to buying SOL, get back to trying to hit our, you know, 1 SOL per share target. We think issuing a preferred equity. We've got one filed already. It's ticker symbol CHAD. We think this will be the biggest unlock for our business in the last, say, six months to nine months, and maybe the biggest unlock going forward. To the extent that we can leverage ApeX to help get this done on the DFDV side, I think it'll be a massive unlock for DFDV. That's kind of the thinking here and effectively why we did it. Yeah. actually one more Yeah, go for it. ... one more piece here. To clarify, you know, I mentioned earlier this is a, you know, decentralized or meant to be a decentralized project. The team here at DFDV is kind of, you know, I'd say the founding team, if you will, or the founding contributors. We've brought together a team of engineers, product folks, designers, marketers that are separate from us that only work on ApeX. The goal is, over time, as this thing gets going, we can kinda hand the reins over to the community and take a increasingly reduced role. In the short term, we might be a little more hands-on getting this thing off the ground, but our intention is not to long-term split time between ApeX and DFDV. Our intention is to be full-time on DFDV, help get this thing going, and then pass it off to the community, and then, you know, continue to build and focus on DFDV. Yeah. Just, you know, more broadly too, I'll say that, you know, we don't really know what's gonna come of ApeX. Obviously, we're bullish. you know, DFDV of course comes first, but this is part of what I think is gonna soon be a year-long track record of us just continuing to try and innovate and push forward and do anything but sit around and just sit on our hands, like a lot of competitors are doing. you know, while everyone might not agree with it or not understand it, you know, I think that, you know, what people should keep in mind is that we're of course putting DFDV shareholders first and we're trying to do something, while others are doing nothing effectively. I'll just leave it at that. Yeah. I do think that's a great point. you know, I mean, DeFi Development is in our name. Our goal is to be continuing to build. you know, we could sit on our hands, but that wouldn't benefit the stock in the way that we would like to benefit the stock, obviously as big shareholders. We wanna keep building. We know we're not always gonna be successful in every single thing that we build, but we're gonna keep going and we think have a pretty high hit rate. Well said. Cool. We'll keep pushing along here. Speaking about the debt landscape and lack of innovation and just kind of tough markets, you know, one of the things someone had asked us is that we had said previously quarters ago that in a bear market, we're expecting to see a lot of consolidation of sorts. You know, we haven't really seen any of that yet. Any hunches as to why? Yeah, I mean, look, unfortunately the incentives at a lot of these debts are to just hang on. It's a pretty cush job to basically not do anything to collect a nice management compensation, and just wait. You've seen a few kinda takeover attempts or board fights already. You're gonna see a few more. Management's just very incentivized to not change anything and to sit on their hands. It's making M&A a lot more difficult. We always kinda thought it would be somewhat difficult, although we thought maybe with some of our relationships we could overcome that. It's proving to be even more difficult than we thought. I think time may be the bluntest weapon to get folks to eventually come to the table. For the time being, these management teams definitely want to stay entrenched. No doubt. Awesome. Well, I know we're coming up on about half an hour. We're already over a little bit, but, I know we've covered kind of quite a bit here. Of course, too, we published our monthly recap yesterday. It's on our blog. It's on our Twitter as well. If you're curious, everything that we did, you wanted to catch up on any kind of, you know, pieces of content that we produced or podcasts we're on, you know, encourage folks to go check that out. You know, maybe just to kinda close things out, any kinda thoughts as to the broader market, how things are trending, you know, what's how the team is feeling internally given market conditions? Yeah, what do you make so currently of where crypto's at? Yeah, you know, I think, maybe I'll state the obvious from today, but, like, we are in a bear market. There's just no way around that. I think that's just. You know, just look at the drawdown. You're in a bear market. Just call it what it is. Now, setting that aside, bear markets typically last, you know, peak to trough, let's call it 12 months, give or take, you know, a couple months maybe. Now, you know, typically is in crypto is kinda silly 'cause it's only been around for a couple, you know, couple cycles. This has been the fastest decline, the fastest bear market in recent history, so, you know, prior or post, say, Mt. Gox days, in the last decade, which is shocking because we thought, "Hey, with all the adoption, with all the institutional flows and everything, this would make the asset class more stable, not more volatile." Actually, this has been the fastest decline in history according to a whole number of metrics, technical indicators, just speed to decline, all these things. The negative sentiment is off the charts. Worse than it was during FTX from a, say, fear and greed basis or, again, some technical indicators. I think it's very possible that because of the speed here, the speed and violence of the bear market, that we may actually see a rebound also quicker, you know, sooner and more violent than previous rebounds. I like to use the, you know, the ball underwater analogy, but I think there's a decent chance that we rip higher in the next, let's call it six months. Certainly, that's maybe not the likely outcome, but I think it's certainly a decently probable outcome. We do build the business to weather kinda all environments. Well, I shouldn't say all environments. If SOL goes to zero and stays there for a decade, obviously our business is in trouble. We build the business to weather all reasonable environments. Even if SOL stays where it is or goes lower for 12 months, the business is fine. We're not having issues. I think there might be a scenario where actually SOL is back above $100, back above $150, maybe back above $200 before the end of the year, and this, you know, is some weird, anomalous kind of bear market. We debate this a lot internally. Pete, I know you've got your own views, but yeah, I wouldn't, I wouldn't count crypto out and write it off as dead for the next two years per se. Yeah, well said. I mean, if there's anything we know about crypto, it's, you know, always expect the unexpected. It's a, it's a wild industry. It always has been. Probably will be for quite some time. It is evolving. It is becoming more adopted. The volatility, you know, in Bitcoin at least and some of the majors is starting to come down as reflected by, you know, the returns generated last cycle and, you know, even kind of maybe the drawdowns we've seen to date, knock on wood. Yeah, nonetheless, sentiment, I will just reiterate like sentiment internally amongst the team is still very positive. This is not our first rodeo. A lot of us have been through multiple bear markets. I personally like building through a bear market. I remain super optimistic, and I know the sentiment is very much the same across the team. Yeah. Great. Parker, is there anything else that you wanna hit on before we close out here and call it a wrap? I guess the last thing I'd just say is, you know, wanna thank everybody that's been supporting us. You know, I know it's tough to see these types of drawdowns, especially in the stock, you know, more so than in Solana, you know, the stock being levered Solana effectively. You know, again, just looking back to my past bear market days and the projects that I followed that kind of stayed consistent and stayed building through the bear market, you know, typically I was not disappointed with those investments or attention, focus, however you wanna call it. Yeah, I just wanna appreciate everybody that's stuck with us and continuing to help us push forward and very excited for some greener pastures here, hopefully sooner rather than later. Well said. Just to reiterate that, thanks everyone for your support. Again, if you have questions, comments, feedback, whatever it might be, no matter how big, how small, please send it our way. We'll take a look at it. We'll digest it internally. We'll try and, of course, answer questions. Any and all constructive criticism and feedback is more than welcome. With that said, we can close out. Thanks again, everyone, for joining today and sending in your thoughtful questions. In service of SOL per share growth, this is Pete and team signing out. Thanks, everyone.