The rise of digital asset treasury (DAT) companies will go down as a meta-narrative of 2025, but the longevity of the movement will be decided by capital management and sound business strategies.
According to Solmate CEO Marco Santori, all DATs have to contend with the value of the underlying token they hold on their balance sheets. This shouldn’t be a problem for revenue-generating businesses, but pure-play DATs will be in for a bumpy ride.
The Solana DAT space might be the most competitive out there (besides Bitcoin 😏).
— Gareth Jenkinson (@gazza_jenks) December 9, 2025
But what differentiates them? The amount of $SOL they hold? mNAV? Yield on staking? Diversified business?@msantoriESQ from @Solmate gave one of the best explainers I've heard - "I don't want to... pic.twitter.com/7bMCr46d78
“The multiple-to-net-asset value (mNAV) is how a lot of these treasury companies survive. If they’re trading at a high mNAV, meaning their market cap is bigger than the value of the coins they have on the balance sheet, then they can sell stock in an accretive way,” Santori said on Cointelegraph’s Chain Reaction X show.
“Every dollar of stock they sell, they take that and go out and buy the underlying coin with, and that increases their net asset value. So long as they can maintain the premium, they can just keep doing that. And that is the pure play treasury model. I actually think that has a future.”
Related: Sports group Brera pivots to crypto, rebrands with $300M for SOL treasury
But the issue is that mNAV will dwindle when the interest in the underlying token of a DAT wanes. Santori explained that falling token prices result in lower mNAVs.
“That means a lot of the treasury companies are kind of idle because they can’t grow efficiently and effectively. I didn’t want to be subject to that. I didn’t want that for our investors. I want to give them exposure to SOL and to the growth of the Solana network, but I didn’t want them riding an mNAV roller coaster,” Santori said.
The validator DAT strategy
Solmate is among a handful of major Solana-based DATs that have attracted significant capital in 2025. Santori, who initially helped DeFi Development Fund establish its Solana (SOL) DAT, took learnings away from that “pure-play” approach before steering the ship as CEO of Solmate.
The latter is heavily leaning into offering services based on a bare-metal server business model. A bare-metal server is a single-tenant, physical server that gives you direct access to the hardware. Unlike virtual servers, where resources are shared, a bare metal server is dedicated entirely to one user, making it ideal for high-performance computing.
Santori said that proof-of-stake protocols like Ethereum and Solana not only allow businesses to stake tokens but to actively participate in governance:
“To do that, you have to have hardware. You have to have bare metal. You have to be able to offer more services on top of your own validator. That’s why we believe it’s a virtuous cycle. We call it the infrastructure flywheel.”
In the Solana ecosystem, Santori sees a unique opportunity to offer bare-metal validator services, given that the protocol was uniquely designed for high-throughput services like exchanges and trading platforms.
“Hedge funds will pay top dollar for access to exchanges, low latency, high performance access to exchanges, so that they can get their orders in earlier than other traders can, and they can do that with more information about the market. They do that by co-locating and offering high-performance hardware,” Santori said.
Related: Solmate looks beyond SOL treasury model with RockawayX acquisition
The Solmate CEO said they aim to build infrastructure that enables that by using bare metal servers, offering co-location and loading validators with significant amounts of SOL.
“That allows us to be chosen as the leader more often in every epoch, which means we can validate more transactions, which means we can order more transactions within each particular block. The cash we earn from those services, we can plow right back into buying SOL.”
Solmate announced its acquisition of RockawayX’s operations in December 2025. This included its validator infrastructure and onchain liquidity business, as well as its venture and credit funds. The merger created a combined entity with more than $2 billion in assets under management.
