Joseph Chee, chairman and CEO of Solana Company, calls what the Nasdaq-listed digital asset treasury does “engineering”, but the engineering he has in mind is primarily financial.

The former UBS investment banker is using equity issuance, derivatives, staking and active treasury management to try to increase the amount of SOL attributable to each share. Validator infrastructure and advisory services support that objective, but Chee was unequivocal about where they sit in the business.

“Growing SOL per share is the core business,” he said.

That distinction is central to understanding Solana Company. It is not primarily an infrastructure company with a digital asset treasury on the side. Its core proposition is to use the capital markets and its SOL holdings to increase the amount of the digital asset backing each share.

The approach reflects Chee’s background. Before founding investment firm Summer Capital in 2017, he spent 17 years at UBS, where his roles included head of investment banking and global capital markets in Asia. He is also vice chairman of Swiss-regulated digital asset bank AMINA Bank.

An investor who wants exposure to Solana can simply buy SOL, the native digital asset used to pay transaction fees and help secure the Solana blockchain. Chee therefore has to make the case for inserting a listed company between the investor and the asset.

His answer is active capital management: raise equity when doing so increases SOL per share, repurchase shares when they trade below the value of the underlying assets, earn staking rewards on SOL already held, and use derivatives and other treasury strategies to generate additional resources for acquiring more SOL.

The company describes its digital asset treasury as its principal strategic focus and says it aims to increase the amount of SOL underlying each share through yield generation, public-market financing and treasury tools.

Engineering the capital structure

Chee pointed to Strategy, formerly MicroStrategy, and its Bitcoin treasury as the conceptual precedent.

The objective is not simply to raise money and buy as much SOL as possible. What matters is the relationship between the capital raised, the valuation at which Solana Company issues its shares and the amount of additional SOL that can be acquired for each share outstanding.

“When the share price trades at a premium, that is when we issue shares,” Chee said of Solana Company’s approach.

If Solana Company’s shares trade above the net asset value (NAV) of the SOL and other assets attributable to each share, issuing additional shares at that premium can be accretive. The company receives more capital from the new investor than the underlying NAV represented by the new share and can deploy the proceeds into additional SOL.

Chee illustrated the principle using a simplified example in which $100 of underlying SOL supported a share valued by the market at $200. Issuing equity at that premium, he argued, would allow the company to acquire proportionately more SOL than an investor deploying the same amount directly into the digital asset.

The company put that mechanism to work shortly before the interview. On 30 September, it priced a $15 million registered direct offering of 4.37 million shares at $3.433 each, which it said represented approximately a 5% premium to NAV per share at pricing. Investors also received warrants exercisable at $3.776, approximately a 15.5% premium to NAV. The company said proceeds could be used to acquire additional SOL and repurchase shares.

The transaction was notable because the issue price was also above Solana Company’s $2.86 Nasdaq closing price on 29 September.

The mechanism can work in reverse. When the shares trade below NAV, issuing more stock would dilute rather than increase SOL per share. Solana Company can instead deploy capital to repurchase shares. It bought back about $5.9 million of shares during the first half of 2026, including $2.3 million in the second quarter.

Chee said the company executes stock buy-backs when its shares trade below NAV and would raise when the valuation moved to a premium. The equity valuation is therefore not merely an outcome of the strategy; it is one of the inputs that determines whether the strategy can compound SOL per share.

“If you end up buying more SOL at a lower cost of capital, then you will definitely have a better return than buying SOL,” Chee said.

That was his investment proposition rather than a guaranteed outcome. It depends on the company retaining access to capital on terms that make additional issuance accretive.

Derivatives provide another capital-management tool. Writing puts is not simply another source of yield. It creates exposure if SOL falls sufficiently, while the company has also used call spreads to gain exposure to increases in SOL’s price. Its regulatory filings identify these derivatives alongside its direct holdings as another source of SOL price exposure.

Chee saw those instruments as part of the same capital-management exercise: using the volatility inherent in SOL and the company’s listed equity to generate additional resources for accumulating the asset.

Together, these tools give management several ways to add to the treasury beyond simply waiting for SOL to appreciate.

At 30 June, direct digital assets accounted for 86.2% of Solana Company’s total assets, before other SOL-linked exposures were included. Its filings warned that its financial condition was substantially dependent on the market price and liquidity of SOL.

By 24 September, the company said it held 2.3 million SOL and $2.3 million of cash and stablecoins. It put NAV at $278 million based on a SOL price of $119.

Staking puts the treasury to work

SOL differs from a passive treasury asset in another important respect: it can be staked to earn additional SOL.

Staking involves committing SOL to support the operation and security of the Solana network. Validators—the computing infrastructure that participates in verifying transactions and maintaining the blockchain—receive rewards for helping operate the network, which can be passed to holders who delegate SOL for staking.

For Solana Company, staking its own SOL is not an ancillary infrastructure business. It is part of the economics of managing the treasury.

Chee said the company was earning about 5.5% to 6% annually from staking and cited a 6.18% rate for the previous quarter. Staking the company’s SOL treasury generates most of its revenue, with economics that Pacific Backbone and the advisory business would struggle to match in the short term.

The company’s reported results demonstrated the significance of staking. Second-quarter revenue was $2.5 million, almost entirely from staking, while it earned 31,200 SOL in staking rewards that were automatically restaked. First-half revenue reached $6.1 million. At 30 June, it held 2.3 million SOL.

The distinction becomes important when Solana Company stakes SOL belonging to other institutions. Staking its own treasury generates additional SOL for the company. Providing validator and staking infrastructure for somebody else’s SOL is an operating service from which Solana Company earns a fee or margin.

The former is integral to the treasury strategy. Chee described third-party validator and staking services, along with advisory, as ancillary businesses that add revenue and support the Solana ecosystem.

Ancillary businesses reinforce the treasury

Those businesses nevertheless have a strategic relationship with the core treasury.

Chee described Solana Company’s advisory role as a bridge between conventional financial institutions and the Solana ecosystem. Its work includes educating institutions about the ecosystem, formulating implementation plans, identifying appropriate technology providers and managing execution.

Pacific Backbone provides the infrastructure side. Solana Company is developing validators across Asia-Pacific through which institutions can stake SOL. Its Tokyo validator cluster went live in July and attracted about 500,000 SOL of third-party delegated stake.

The resulting model can reinforce the treasury strategy. Solana Company helps an institution adopt Solana; the institution may acquire SOL to use or invest in the network; some of that SOL can be staked through Solana Company’s infrastructure; and the company earns income from providing the service.

Chee said the infrastructure and advisory businesses required substantial management time because they were human-intensive and still being developed, but their revenue contribution remained much smaller than that of the treasury.

He described advisory as ancillary and argued that, in the short term, its cash flow would not approach the economics available from staking the company’s SOL treasury.

The operating businesses therefore support rather than supplant the treasury strategy.

The underlying bet is on Solana

All of these mechanisms depend ultimately on the value and utility of the underlying asset.

Solana is a public blockchain, while SOL is its native digital asset. SOL is used to pay transaction fees and can be staked to help secure the network. Chee’s treasury strategy therefore rests on a broader investment thesis that Solana will become more widely used as infrastructure for financial activity.

Chee argued that its low transaction costs and high throughput made it particularly suited to payments, trading and other high-frequency applications. He contrasted this with Ethereum, which he regarded as a more tenured but more expensive environment for frequent transactions. These were Chee’s assessments rather than an established hierarchy among public blockchains.

In the near term, he identified payments, including payments initiated by AI agents, and corporate treasury and cash-management applications as among the more viable institutional uses of blockchain, alongside the growing tokenisation of investment assets.

Chee saw asset managers as having a relatively straightforward reason to experiment. Blockchain can become another distribution channel through which investment products can be subscribed to, redeemed and monitored. Banks face a more difficult transition because of more rigorous regulatory requirements and internal controls developed around conventional financial infrastructure.

He said the blockchain industry continued to underestimate the regulatory requirements facing banks, while financial institutions struggled to identify counterparties they trusted to help implement the technology.

“The hardest thing for large institutions and corporates is to identify the right party they can trust to work with,” Chee said.

That provides a rationale for Solana Company’s advisory and validator businesses without making them the centre of its economics.

The premium is part of the flywheel

The more immediate test of Chee’s strategy lies not in blockchain adoption alone, but in the interaction between two markets.

SOL needs to retain sufficient value, liquidity and utility to justify accumulating it. At the same time, Solana Company needs sufficient investor demand for its own shares to access equity capital on terms that increase rather than dilute SOL per share.

When the shares command a premium to NAV, the company can issue equity and potentially acquire additional SOL accretively. Increasing SOL per share can in turn strengthen the investment proposition and potentially sustain demand for the stock.

But the mechanism can also run in reverse. If the shares trade below NAV, issuing additional equity becomes dilutive to SOL per share and one of the company’s principal mechanisms for compounding the treasury becomes less attractive. Buybacks can help when sufficient capital is available, but they do not provide the same ability to expand the treasury.

Staking adds SOL to existing holdings, while derivatives give management additional ways to deploy capital and take exposure. Advisory and validator infrastructure can encourage institutional adoption and generate ancillary income. None removes the company’s fundamental dependence on SOL or the importance of its own equity valuation.

Chee’s ambition is for the listed vehicle eventually to deliver a higher return than direct ownership of SOL, potentially allowing an investor to earn a much higher return through Solana Company than the same investor would by buying SOL directly. This is an aspiration rather than a guaranteed return.

Solana Company’s experiment therefore depends on two markets at once. SOL must retain sufficient value and utility to justify accumulating it, while the company’s own shares must command sufficient investor demand for Chee to use the equity market accretively.

The test is whether capital-market engineering can keep increasing SOL per share through both rising and falling markets. If it can, Solana Company offers something more than simply holding SOL. If it cannot, the rationale for adding a listed corporate structure to largely the same underlying asset exposure becomes harder to sustain.