The rise of digital asset treasury (DAT) firms will go down because the meta-narrative of 2025, however the longevity of the movement will probably be determined by capital management and sound business strategies.
According to Marco Santori, CEO of Solmate, all DATs must address the worth of the underlying token they hold on their balance sheets. This shouldn't be an issue for revenue-generating firms, but pure-play DATs will probably be in for a bumpy ride.
The Solana DAT space is likely to be probably the most competitive on the market (besides Bitcoin 😏).
But what makes them different? How much $SOL do they hold? mNAV? Return on investment? Diversified business? @msantoriESQ from @Solmate gave the most effective explanations I've ever heard: “I don't need to… pic.twitter.com/7bMCr46d78
— Gareth Jenkinson (@gazza_jenks) December 9, 2025
“Many of those treasury firms survive on multiple-to-net asset value (mNAV). If they trade at a high mNAV, meaning their market cap is bigger than the worth of the coins they’ve on the balance sheet, then they will sell shares in a way that increases value,” Santori said on Cointelegraph's Chain Reaction X show.
“Every dollar of stock they sell, they take it and use it to purchase the underlying coin, and that increases their net asset value. As long as they will maintain the premium, they will just keep going. And that's the pure treasury model. I actually think that has a future.”
The problem, nonetheless, is that mNAV drops when interest in a DAT's underlying token wanes. Santori explained that falling token prices result in lower mNAVs.
“That means numerous treasury firms are form of idle because they will't grow efficiently and effectively. I didn't need to be exposed to that. I didn't want that for our investors. I would like to present them access to SOL and the expansion of the Solana network, but I didn't want them to ride an mNAV roller coaster,” Santori said.
The validator DAT strategy
Solmate is amongst a handful of enormous Solana-based DATs which have attracted significant capital in 2025. Santori, who initially helped the DeFi Development Fund arrange its Solana (SOL) DAT, took insights from this “pure” approach before steering the ship as Solmate’s CEO.
The latter has a robust tendency to supply services based on a bare metal server business model. A bare metal server is a single-tenant physical server that provides you direct access to the hardware. Unlike virtual servers, where resources are shared, a bare metal server is devoted solely to at least one user, making it ideal for high-performance computing.
Santori said that proof-of-stake protocols like Ethereum and Solana allow firms not only to stake tokens but additionally to actively take part in governance:
“To achieve that, you would like hardware. You need bare metal. You must have the option to supply other services along with your individual validator. That's why we imagine it's a virtuous circle. We call it the infrastructure flywheel.”
In the Solana ecosystem, Santori sees a singular opportunity to supply bare metal validation services because the protocol is specifically designed for high-throughput services resembling exchanges and trading platforms.
“Hedge funds pays premium prices for access to exchanges, low latency and high-performance access to exchanges so that they can get their orders sooner than other traders, and so they can do that with more information concerning the market. They do that by co-locating and offering high-performance hardware,” Santori said.
Solmate's CEO said they need to construct an infrastructure that makes this possible through the use of bare metal servers, offering co-location, and loading validators with significant amounts of SOL.
“This allows us to be voted leader more often in each era, which implies we will validate more transactions, which implies we will order more transactions inside each individual block. The money we make from these services we will invest directly back into purchasing SOL.”
Solmate announced the acquisition of RockawayX's operations in December 2025. This included the validator infrastructure and on-chain liquidity business in addition to the enterprise and credit funds. The merger created a combined company with greater than $2 billion in assets under management.
