DeFi Development Q2 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

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August 13, 2026

Key Takeaways

  • Neutral Sentiment: Management emphasized a “structure over path” strategy, focusing on controllable factors such as leverage, operating costs, insider ownership, validator infrastructure, and long-term SOL-per-share growth rather than short-term MNAV.
  • Negative Sentiment: The company has no immediate timeline for its next major SOL purchase, citing weak crypto capital markets and diverted investor attention; it also withdrew June 2027 guidance while retaining its longer-term target of one SOL per share by December 2028.
  • Neutral Sentiment: DFDV retired some convertible debt at discounts to par to simplify its capital structure, but remains highly leveraged, with $125 million of convertible debt and leverage exceeding the market value of its SOL treasury; management intends to re-lever when market conditions improve.
  • Negative Sentiment: A preferred-equity raise remains delayed because of SOL’s depressed price and weak investor appetite for digital-credit instruments, with management stating it will not issue a preferred security on unfavorable terms.
  • Positive Sentiment: Management highlighted continued Solana network growth, including rising transaction throughput, more than two years of uptime, increased compute capacity, upcoming Alpenglow upgrades, and nearly $9 billion of tokenized-equity volume in the quarter, while asserting that DFDV offers leveraged SOL exposure plus compounding SOL-per-share growth.
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Earnings Conference Call
DeFi Development Q2 2026
00:00 / 00:00

There are 4 speakers on the call.

Operator

Good morning. Welcome to DeFi Development Corp's second quarter 2026 earnings update call. I am Dan Kang, Chief Strategy Officer and Head of Investor Relations. Joining me today are Joseph Onorati, CEO, John Han, CFO, and Pete Humiston, CMO. Yesterday, August 12, after market close, we issued a shareholder letter with our financial results and commentary for our second quarter of 2026. These items are also posted on our investor relations section of our website. Before we begin, I would like to remind everyone that we will be making forward-looking statements during this call that involve a number of risks and uncertainties. Actual results may differ materially due to risks and uncertainties, which are outlined in our filings with the SEC, including our Form 10-K and Form 10-Q. Actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied in the forward-looking statements due to a variety of factors.

Operator

These factors are described under forward-looking statements in our shareholder letter and in our most recent filings with the SEC. That being said, we urge you to consider these factors and remind you that we undertake no obligation to update the information contained in this call to reflect subsequent events or circumstances. You should be aware that these statements should be considered estimates only and are not a guarantee of future performance. With that, let's kick off. Joseph, John, thank you for joining us. Pete, welcome to your first earnings call. For those who haven't met Pete, he's not only our CMO but leads all of our Solana-specific research initiatives. He's helped spearhead a number of reports that have gotten really good traction among our investor base, and excited that investors finally get to put a face to the man who puts out all of our killer content.

Operator

Welcome. All right. With that, let's get going on Q&A. First question, let's start with the key framing of the letter. You started this letter around the concept of structure over path. Unpack that for us a bit. What does this actually mean in practice, and why should an investor care about structure more than other things like MNAV?

Speaker 1

That's a great question. Let's unpack it a bit. Back in April of 2025, when we kicked off the Solana Treasury, we were the first and only non-Bitcoin digital asset treasury in the U.S. Of course, we were really inspired by Michael Saylor and strategy. But we understood back then, and even now, that we have to innovate and build on the foundation that they set. For us, that included owning and operating our own validator infrastructure and deploying our treasury on chain, and also finding other ways to enhance yield in a risk-adjusted way. Of course, if we're anchoring to a strategy, then the investor education is kind of automatically geared toward MNAV and understanding how digital asset treasuries are valued relative to each other. But at the end of the day, that's not something that we really control.

Speaker 1

So part of what we tried to do this quarter was to clearly identify the things that we control and really focus on those areas. Things that we control include cost to operate our business, the amount of stock that the founding team and management holds, so it is over 20% of the company, and the fact that we own the super voting preferred shares, which shield us from activist takeover. But maybe most importantly, we control our leverage levels. And leverage is, in particular, something we are proud of here. It allows us to be amplified expression of Solana. For instance, if you wanted leveraged or enhanced exposure to Solana, the alternatives, pretty well all of the alternatives, have more risk and a higher cost. So a core feature of our business is that we have $125 million of convertible debt.

Speaker 1

The earliest maturity on that debt is April of 2030, and this debt is designed to withstand a prolonged period of weakness in the crypto market. It is designed to not be margin called. Solana could drop 90% tomorrow, and that convertible debt wouldn't come due. We want to make the story for DFDV for investors as simple as possible. You have heard us use the mantra SOL on steroids. The idea is that leverage and the ability to grow SOL per share enable us to have a natural boost to SOL the underlying. SOL itself is down considerably year to date, which doesn't feel great, but we are confident that in a year from now, things will look very different. And with DFDV's leveraged exposure, DFDV passes on that leveraged upside to shareholders.

Operator

Thanks, Joseph. Next question: When will the next major purchase of SOL be? I will take that. It will be super quick. As soon as we can make it happen. Obviously dying to buy SOL here, but capital markets in general have not been great. I think this is largely a function of investor attention being diverted from crypto, as we outlined in our shareholder letter. So, nothing to share on this front at this point in time, but stay tuned. All right. Number 3. A key pillar of the story is your convertible debt. The letter also describes retiring convertible debt and leverage levels that are well above 100%, meaning your debt exceeds the market value of your treasury. Walk us through how you are simultaneously levering up and paying down, and what happens to that ratio if SOL falls another 30%. John, you want to take that?

Speaker 2

When the market price of the debt is attractive, we de-lever to re-lever later. We have disclosed in our shareholder letter that we have retired a portion of our convertible debt at pretty attractive discounts to par. Even though our July 2030 note isn't due for another four years, the fact that we are retiring some of the debt at these pretty attractive levels simplifies our cap structure and moves us towards the ideal end state, which is a capital stack composed mostly of preferred equity in the long term. The strategy is pretty simple. We run highly levered in bear markets and aim to equitize that leverage in bull markets. That said, we are not de-levering currently for its own sake.

Speaker 2

When the market offers us the chance to clean up the stack at a discount so we can re-lever later on better terms, we'll take that trade every time. Thank you.

Operator

Thanks, John. The next question, you've pulled June 2027 guidance, but you're keeping the one SOL per share target for December 2028. Can you talk about this decision a bit further? John, another one for you.

Speaker 2

Yeah. Basically, the way to think about this is that we manage DFDV for long-term Solana per share growth, which is not purely a point-in-time estimate. Last summer, we were pretty aggressive on our guidance for current June 2026. Our growth came in really different bursts. Really rapid growth in early 2025, followed by a slower growth in the back half of the year. That's basically the nature of how DApps grow and a function of crypto markets and TradFi capital markets. It depends on the opportunity, depends on how these markets are trending at any given point. We're still confident on the trajectory of the business, but we didn't want to get sucked into a false sense of precision. Over a multiyear horizon, we think the cycle noise washes out and the structural drivers do the work.

Speaker 2

Investors can already see the organic floor from our staking yields and DeFi activities, and that compounds regardless of where Solana trades. The question is how much inorganic growth we layer on top through capital markets activities. One could, depending on how you do the calculation, preferred equity issuances alone, depending on each individual person's and investor's assumptions, could drive Solana per share growth well in excess of our trailing 12-month growth rate. Net-net, we have multiple paths and opportunistic levers to pull to eventually reaching one Solana per share. Thank you.

Operator

Thanks, John. Helpful. All right, next question. Preferred equity has been the top capital-raising priority since at least Q1. Still hasn't happened. What is actually gating it, and realistically, who is the buyer? I'll take that one. I think realistically, the biggest gating factor is just the price of SOL. It's down considerably year to date, over the last year, and I do want to make clear that we're not just going to issue a preferred instrument at any price just to say that we got it done. A bad preferred is worse than no preferred. The DApp preferred complex obviously came under pressure in June with broader crypto prices as well. Digital credit, in quotation marks, is still a fairly nascent asset class, so there's a lot of education that needs to get done. So, what changes this calculus for us? Obviously, there's the crypto cycle itself.

Operator

If SOL jumped to $100 tomorrow, that would drastically change the calculus, both from our own, let's call it credit worthiness, as well as the risk investors are willing to underwrite. Then there's STRK. Likely need STRK to reclaim par to regain some investor confidence. You've seen some strong moves as of late out of Michael Saylor on the company, so that's obviously trending very well. I'd point out that everything we did this quarter is about being ready for when the window for Chad actually opens. Retiring converts at a discount, taking our cost base down, cleaning up the balance sheet. I think this will help to show up to market with a simpler capital stack and a clean digital credit story that's really unique to DFDV and really unique to us as the leading Solana treasury company. All right. Next question.

Operator

This is a good one for Pete here. What are the Solana use cases and upgrade projects you are most excited about? Pete, you want to take that?

Speaker 3

Yeah, of course. Thanks, DK. On the use case front, there's always various different sectors and verticals we're keeping our eyes on, but as of late, it's really centered around agentic finance and agentic payments, as well as just general adoption of tokenized equities or real-world assets itself. Meaningful interest in both of those sectors on Solana, and we really do expect those trends to persist in the quarters ahead. Switching over to just kind of network upgrades itself. In May, excuse me, in May, Alpenglow, which is actually going to be one of the network's biggest upgrades ever that's going to take finality from 12 seconds down to 100 milliseconds, which is going to be on par with Visa, actually entered into community validator testing.

Speaker 3

Not only that, but in July, we also saw a validator registration open up, marking yet another kind of step towards what is expected to be, say, an August or October launch. That is going to be a meaningful lift in terms of performance, and we've really started to see a lot of progress made over the past several months. Not only that, there was another big upgrade to the network that caught people's attention. Compute limit was actually increased by 66%, so a big lift in performance as well, and that's effectively going to just allow more room for the network to process activity during higher periods of chain demand. There's been two other developments too that I'd like to focus on, and this is really centered around also the value accrual and capture of the token itself.

Speaker 3

There was two SIMDs, or Solana Improvement Documents, that entered the discussion phase ahead of what is soon going to be a vote. There was SIMD-0550. This is centered around reducing the network's inflation schedule by increasing the disinflation rate to get to its 1.5 terminal inflation rate in half the amount of time. So that's on the supply side. Now, on the demand side, there was another SIMD-0553. Instead of the network relying on flat transaction fees, it's actually going to introduce resource-based fees that are burned. This is just going to create a much stronger link between network activity and SOL value accrual. And we've wrote extensively about both of these Solana Improvement Documents, so feel free to check out the blog to learn more.

Operator

Thanks, Pete. I'll also say for any investors tuning in, you should feel free to reach out to us to nerd out about any of these things. Pete and I are always happy to hop on the phone and chat through this stuff. It's really fascinating. All right. Next question. Recently, the Treasury Accelerator was framed as proof of a culture of experimentation that peers couldn't match. Then DFDV UK shuttered. Now it's closed. What did you learn? What are the remaining positions, and how do investors know the next strategic initiative won't follow the same arc? I'll take this one, guys. I actually think the program proved what it said it would prove, but that doesn't mean that shutting it down isn't the right thing to do at this point in time. What do I mean by that?

Operator

If you look historically at some of the wins, right? Zero stack was a good win for us. The way it was structured as a SOL-denominated convert, no upfront cash out the door. We recovered the foregone yield at settlement, was accretive to both NAV and SOL per share. I think that was a very clear example of the types of bets we like taking, right, with really good asymmetric risk-reward. Allied Architects, which we announced recently, was similarly structured with small upfront cost, good optionality attached. We don't think our thesis on, let's call it DAT on DAT investment, was wrong. What it did do in hindsight was make our story just a little bit harder to tell. For example, an investor trying to underwrite DFDV would then have to also go and underwrite a U.K. vehicle or a DAT on DAT convertible note, right?

Operator

It would just introduce some additional layers of complexity. In a market where DAT prices are obviously compressed and investor attention is scarce, complexity just becomes an unnecessary barrier, if you will. We do want to be clear that on our remaining position, like with Allied Architects, we are not dumping it. When we have something to share there, we will, and we do expect this to be accretive to SOL per share. Look, I think in our letter, we made it pretty clear that anything we do has to sharpen our identity as leveraged SOL exposure rather than dilute it. I would point you to what we did this quarter rather than what we have been saying on this front, right?

Operator

Whether that was publishing the SOL Boost framework that puts this front and center, shutting down the TA program that we feel had some pretty good wins as well. Then, of course, making it clear that we were going to, I am going to say, minimize the complexity of the business, whether that is finding some additional efficiencies to cut costs or minimizing our overall on-chain surface area so that investors did not have to underwrite smart contract risk at very small protocols. We do have a pretty high bar for anything outside of, let us say, the core business SOL purchases right now, and you should expect that to remain the case. All right. Next question. Your organic yield thesis assumes somewhere around 8%-11% is a normal range versus today's lower cyclical troughs. Native staking APY is down year-over-year.

Operator

Your own Solana Reborn research argues for network changes that push the net issuance closer towards zero, which would compress staking rewards further. What gives you confidence that you will return to higher yields over time? Joseph, you want to take that?

Speaker 1

Sure. Yeah, thanks. First, our organic yield has never been just the base stake rate, because we run our own validators, and the validators are fairly high-performing. Then historically, we have generated additional yield through on-chain deployment, namely stake looping as the primary strategy, and we expect to continue to do that going forward. Base staking yields have compressed, that is true, and today, somewhere between 5.5% and 6%. But like I said, we are definitely generating more than that. The compressed yields that we have seen recently are a function of network activity rather than something structural in the tokenomics. The whole point of reducing Solana issuance is bullish for the asset in the SIMDs Pete described. If those came into effect, we think it would drive value to Solana.

Speaker 1

Even if the yield on the treasury went down, for example, we would rather earn 6% yield on SOL at $500 than 11% yield on SOL at $75. The yield percentage is not really the number that matters for us over the long term. What matters is the dollars of yield relative to dollars of cost base.

Operator

Thanks, Joseph. All right, next question: Can you discuss the Solana blockchain metrics, such as contract developers, transaction counts, et cetera, that give you confidence in your thesis? Pete, you want to take this?

Speaker 3

Yeah, of course. I guess real quick, the question is what is the thesis? I think everyone has a little bit of a different thesis as it relates to Solana. But for us in particular, we are really under the belief that Solana is effectively the one and only chain that can do it all. We do not know necessarily what sectors and applications will achieve mass adoption tomorrow, but we do know that the industry is here to stay and set to disrupt various different centralized applications. Solana is, as of right now, the only chain that is capable of housing those applications. We have seen this time and time again. The question is, where is the proof of that? We can look at none other transactions per second, or TPS, as we like to say in the industry.

Speaker 3

For the quarter, we saw 9% growth year-over-year at nearly 1,300 transactions. Actually, as of the time of recording, we are just under 2,000 transactions. So continue to see really good performance on a day-by-day, week-by-week basis. I do want to point out that over the past five years, Solana TPS has grown nearly 600%. This compares to just under sub 200 transactions per second when Solana had just launched. It is also worth acknowledging, too, that all other chains effectively remain under 50 transactions per second. So this is not only just signaling an inability for these chains to scale as they have all promised all over the years, but really failing to live up to this industry expectation that, again, DeFi DApps will be able to one day surpass centralized applications and take over.

Speaker 3

Another metric that we can look to for superior performance for Solana is the median fee and the median fee volatility. Solana remains the lowest across both fronts. Actually, we developed our own proprietary indicator or measurement called the Fee Stability Ratio, FSR. Again, this looks at not just how low fees are, but how consistently low fees are. Because a lot of the times in the industry, we will see competing chains say, "Oh, we achieved X level of average median fee," and that doesn't last long. We developed this indicator to basically help read the consistency of low fees, and Solana came in for the quarter at a reading of 650. For some comparison, the second-ranked chain was Base at a score of 30, and none other than Ethereum itself sits at a score of one. So a meaningful difference across the board.

Speaker 3

For the reading itself, this does mark, on a quarterly basis, more than 400% increase year-over-year. That's something that we think folks should really be paying attention to with time, and we do expect it to improve. The last other metric that I would point to as proof that Solana is the chain that can do it all. Solana was able to, last quarter, notch what is finally two and a half years of being 100% up and running. There had been several instances in the past where the network experienced outages, scaling problems, and was really criticized for being a chain that couldn't stay up and running. Here we are, two and a half years later, the network has experienced some of its craziest bursts of demand that the industry has ever seen, and still alive and kicking.

Speaker 3

While those are some of the metrics, I do want to also acknowledge that Solana is where the innovation is going to live and breathe, and this can be seen in the recent adoption and just boom as it relates to tokenization and real-world assets. For second quarter, Solana actually notched nearly $9 billion in tokenized equity volume. That is twice as much as the second-most active chain and represents a near 350% increase quarter-over-quarter. So really promising, really exciting to see. We think investors and market participants should be paying close attention to some of these metrics with time.

Operator

Thanks, Pete. Speaking of tokenization, what is the update on the Apyx investment? I will take that one, guys. Nothing to share at this moment in time. We do continue to be excited by all things that relate to tokenization, and Apyx is, by our measures, the largest single holder of tokenized equity in the world via STRKX. Obviously, also just launched on Solana, which we are incredibly excited about as well. The project has made it clear they intend to do some other, I am going to say, more exciting and innovative things in the weeks and months to come. So stay tuned. All right. Last one, guys. If I want SOL exposure, I can buy Spot or, increasingly, an ETF with no operating costs and no balance sheet risk. Make the case for owning DFDV instead. I love this question because the answer is actually very simple.

Operator

If you want SOL, go and buy SOL. We're not going to talk you out of it. We love buying SOL. It's a core part of our business. Spot is a great product, and ETF is a great product. You should know exactly what you're buying. You're buying SOL minus a fee basically for forever. There's no mechanism in a Spot position or an ETF that gives you more SOL over time. You will end up the next year or 5 years out or the next decade with the same number of coins you started with, again, minus fees. DFDV is fundamentally a different instrument. It is amplified or leveraged SOL. Every share of DFDV is backed by SOL and the amount that SOL per share grows over time.

Operator

It's SOL per share, and it's up north of 20% over the trailing 12 months and was up triple digits in 2025, all through a bear market. On top of that, we have the ability to run leverage. What you're getting is the SOL move, SOL price move over time, plus leverage on that move, plus the compounding of SOL per share growth underneath it. That is effectively what we refer to as SOL Boost. I'd argue again, that structure matters most here, particularly at the bottom of the market, because we got through the worst of this without being forced to sell SOL.

Operator

If your view is that SOL is going to be meaningfully higher 3 years from now, 5 years from now, 10 years from now, the way we have a very bullish outlook on SOL, you just need to ask yourself whether you want one unit of it or a structure that's built to give you more than one unit over time. That's effectively what DFDV is. All right. With that is the end of our Q&A. Thank you, Joseph, John, Pete, for your thoughtful responses. We thank all the listeners for tuning in to our earnings call. As always, please do not hesitate to reach out to us if you have any questions. In service of SOL per share growth, we'll see you all next quarter.

Speaker 3

Thank you

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