Michael Saylor Copycats Rush to Win the Solana Rat Race. Can Lightning Strike Twice?

As more companies follow the playbook of Strategy (formerly known as MicroStrategy) into becoming de facto bitcoin holding firms, the industry is starting to get saturated. So what’s the next best thing? Look for open fields to start anew. There are now at least three companies taking the Saylor playbook over to Solana, the $73.6 billion ultra fast smart contract blockchain.

But while these companies might seem to employ similar strategies, there is no guarantee that first movers will see the same type of massive gains. Additionally, these firms are starting out in a much more complex, and perhaps adversarial, environment than Strategy, which did not have to compete with ETFs, for instance.

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Michael Saylor Copycats Rush to Win the Solana Rat Race. Can Lightning Strike Twice?

With the bitcoin treasury company market getting crowded, companies are extending the Strategy playbook to Solana.

For much of history, companies had to build something tangible to create economic value, be it manufacturing cars, drilling for oil, or developing a ubiquitous social media company. The ethics and net impact of these various industries and firms can be debated, but few would argue that they did not produce a product or service that was desired by millions or billions of clients.

Strategy, formerly MicroStrategy, used to fit into this category, as it was principally known from its founding in 1989 in McLean, VA, until August 2020 as a business software enterprise. That is no longer the case. While it still offers a software business that one stock analyst says is worth between $1 billion to $2 billion, it is now known worldwide as the largest corporate holder of bitcoin. It has a stockpile of 553,555 bitcoin worth $52.5 billion. At an aggregate purchase price of $37.9 billion, it is sitting on a paper gain of $14.6 billion.

It did not get these tokens from mining or accepting bitcoin as a form of payment, but by leveraging capital markets and traders’ insatiable demands for volatility and outsize returns to acquire tens of billions of dollars in investible capital. 

It is hard for anybody to argue with the results. Since Strategy’s first bitcoin purchase in August 2020, the stock is up 2,587.7% and it is on the short list of next companies to be added to the S&P 500. This gain is 3.63x higher than bitcoin’s impressive 713.4% jump during that time. What’s more, investors continue to be impressed with the company’s ability to trade at multiples above the net asset value (NAV) of its bitcoin holdings despite dozens of competitors entering the fray in recent months. 

The efficient market hypothesis would expect its share price to achieve par with its bitcoin holdings at a point in the future, especially with dozens of other companies entering the fray. The fact that it hasn’t is making others feel opportunistic.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and companies are now starting to try and replicate its success with other assets, starting with $76.1 billion Solana, which was one of 2024’s crypto darlings as a primary beneficiary of the now dying down memecoin craze. 

Three publicly traded firms that have made the pivot are Sol Strategies CYFRF (OTCMKTS), DeFi Development Corp (NASDAQ: JNVR), and Upexi (UPXI NASDAQ). They even say that Solana could offer more upside to investors because of its ability to provide passive income in the form of staking yields for token holders. And much like Strategy, each of these firms had a life before becoming Solana holding companies in recent months. DeFi Technologies used to be a real estate-focused firm while Upexi offered medicinal mushrooms and pet supplies.

Many investors wish that they had the chance to go back to August 2020 and buy Strategy when it charted this new path. Solana copycats say that they are giving people another bite at the apple. The initial returns are promising,

But can they last?  

Solana’s Super 2024

In many ways Solana is the natural successor to Bitcoin for being the basis of a treasury holding company. It is rapidly gaining against Ethereum, the second-largest blockchain with a $220.1 billion valuation, which has been beset by political infighting and stagnant growth.

While the difference between the two blockchains is still a relatively high $143.75 billion, the gap is the narrowest it has been since November 2022. At that point, Solana was at its nadir as the asset had collapsed to a market capitalization of just $4.51 billion following the collapse of FTX and fanboy Sam Bankman-Fried.

The asset’s comeback since then is nothing short of extraordinary. It has gained 1,425.3% and was the primary beneficiary of 2024’s memecoin craze. It is also making sizable gains in the world of developers, which many investors look to as a sign of future asset growth. According to Electric Capital’s 2024 Crypto Developer Report, Solana increased its developer count by 83% in 2024. By contrast, Ethereum lost 22% of its developers. 

Key reasons mentioned by investors for this growth surge include a more user-friendly on-boarding process. It is a self-contained ecosystem — everything exists on the L1. In many cases people only need to use a single wallet and they do not have to keep track of which assets are on which L2s, a major problem for Ethereum. Plus, transactions on Solana only cost a couple of cents and are lightning quick, whereas they frequently average over $1 on Ethereum, making high-transaction volume applications prohibitively expensive. 

These reasons, plus a growing narrative that Ethereum is no longer guaranteed to be the dominant multipurpose blockchain outside of Bitcoin, could be the reason why no such companies exist for the world’s no. 2 blockchain.

While Solana's performance is down 24.29% this year as risk assets have struggled under President Trump’s economic policies, smart money investors are undaunted. The Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) began offering cash-settled Solana futures in March of 2025 and at least six Solana spot ETF applications have been filed at the SEC, including one from Fidelity.

Strategy’s Magic Volatility Machine

But while all of these figures are impressive, they may not be the deciding factor for investors. 

The real driver that will determine if these forms see long-term success is whether they can leverage Solana’s volatility to create liquid and deep-debt and options markets for their stocks craved by traders. 

This is what Strategy was able to do with aplomb, and what has in many ways made it a unicorn. 

Specifically, it was able to raise $37.3 billion in capital from the sale of an additional $25.9 billion in stock and then the issuance of $12 billion worth of fixed income investments ($10.6 billion of which is in zero-coupon bonds) and the rest being in the form of two types of preferred stocks (STRK and STRF). STRK ($660 million) comes with a convertibility feature common in debt instruments and STRF pays a relatively high dividend of 10%. 

“If you go back to the other 90-odd companies [following the Strategy playbook], the issue with following Strategy isn't just that they only own a little bit of Bitcoin,” said Lance Vitanza, managing director and senior equity research analyst at Cowen Equity Research, in an interview with Unchained. “The issue is that they don't have the ability to go out and issue convertible debt. They don't have the ability to issue preferred stock. They don't have the ability to create a really thriving options market, all of those things. Now, I'm not saying that they can't someday have those abilities, but it's going to take, at a minimum, a long time.”

How does this increase Strategy’s stock price and protect its premium? A few things need to happen. 

These assets are scooped up by leverage traders, who value their already lower correlations to broader market indices like the S&P 500. But they then use leverage, i.e. borrowing funds to make even larger bets on the asset, either long or short, to try to generate alpha.

“It comes down to the inherent leverage in options in particular,” said Mark Palmer, senior equity research analyst at The Benchmark Company in an interview. “The value of an option per the Black-Scholes model is largely a function of volatility. And so the more volatility there is, then the more value there ultimately is to be captured by traders. Given the volatility of Strategy shares, which is of course a function of the volatility of Bitcoin itself, there is plenty of volatility in the story, even when the rest of the market may be relatively calm. And so this is a big part of the reason why the company's convertible bonds have been readily consumed by the market, even with little or no coupon involved. It's really the volatility associated with the instrument that enables the profitability for the traders. All of this activity lets Strategy then move forward its bitcoin purchases from the future to the present. As long as bitcoin continues to appreciate, the massive premiums eventually get covered by the NAV.”

In the following chart it is easy to see how MSTR’s heightened volatility, especially since it announced its plan to raise $42 billion in capital back in October, turbocharged its volatility and options markets.

Sol Vol

If there is one advantage for Solana, and the three companies mentioned above, it is the asset’s inherent volatility, which is higher than Bitcoin’s. 

According to a report from the CME, sol has been 80% more volatile than bitcoin or ether over the past three months. As demonstrated in the following chart, its realized volatility of 80% over the past three months is almost twice as big as bitcoin, which is in the high 40%. Additionally, its 14-day implied volatility, which is a term used to predict the expected volatility of an asset in the future based on the price of its underlying options contracts, is also around 80.

Plus, Solana offers something that Bitcoin cannot: annualized passive income in the high single digits. “Yield is a big differentiating factor here, especially when Solana has had a staking yield in the 7% context, which is obviously quite healthy,” says Palmer. For a point of reference its inflation rate is currently 4.8%. “You can imagine there are investors who are looking to leverage these plays and magnify their returns to an even greater extent.”

These companies are already wise to the game. “For now we're focused essentially on this attempting to harness the solve volatility to accrue, solve for share growth to shareholders,” said Joseph Onorati, CEO of DeFi Development Corp. Upexi also recently sold $100 million of privately issued stock to investors in order to kickstart its Solana treasury operations. Of that sum, $5.3 million will be used for expenses with the rest earmarked for buying and maintaining its Solana balance sheet.

Solana’s Implied 14-Day Volatility

If there is one exception to this rule, it could be Sol Strategies, which is trying to be seen as more of a Solana miner than a Strategy. “Here's the caveat that makes us completely different to the other companies that have recently come out,” said CEO Leah Wald. “I never thought being a MicroStrategy of Solana was a powerful thesis for me. I always wanted to be a Solana miner, if you will. So from the get go, it was running a validator business and accumulating sol, and that being the most powerful way to be a sophisticated Solana exposure play.” This may be true, but it could also face a threat from proposals such as the recently failed SIMD-228, which was designed to reduce the rate of inflation, and thus the rewards earned from staking.

That said, while the company is running extensive validator operations, where it has over 483,008 sol worth $70.9 million, it is also looking for ways to add more sol to its balance sheet. On May 1, the company closed a $500 million convertible note facility with ATV partners to fund additional purchases, with the first tranche of $20 million being released immediately. The remaining $480 million will be released subject to undisclosed terms and conditions, of which Wald would not elaborate. In many ways this deal is similar to the convertible debt sold by Strategy as the principal will be convertible in shares of Sol Strategies’ stock at the price on April 30, the date prior to conversion, which is $2.17.

In fact, the race between these companies is already starting. Upexi has already bought 45,733 Solana tokens for approximately $6.7 million to kickstart its treasury operations, and the DeFi Development Corporation announced a new $24 million private placement to further its solana treasury strategy and recently issued a filing with the SEC to raise up to $1 billion in additional equity.

The long-term impact of these strategies remains to be seen, but its early returns are positive, as their stock premiums above the NAV of their Solana holdings are eye-watering, even for Strategy.

Let the race begin.

Related content: 

• U.S. Bitcoin Mining Was on the Rise. Then Came Trump’s Tariffs

• Ethereum Is Lagging. Here’s How It Could Finally Shake Off Rival Solana

• U.S. Bitcoin Mining Was on the Rise. Then Came Trump’s Tariffs