In an announcement made earlier today, Solana-based (SOL) digital asset treasury (DAT) and crypto infrastructure firm Solmate – formerly known as Brera Holdings – stated that it had raised $300 million in a private placement in public equity (PIPE) offering.
Solmate Raises $300 Million To Push Solana Adoption
Nasdaq-listed sports club owner, Brera Holdings – now known as Solmate – is set to foster Solana adoption as it became the latest DAT to raise as much as $300 million to buy and stake the SOL token.
Notably, the PIPE offering was sponsored by Pulsar Group, a UAE-based technology and blockchain advisory firm. It was also backed by the Solana Foundation, RockawayX, and other investment firms like ARK Invest.
Solmate aims to increase shareholder value by accumulating and staking SOL, and developing new revenue streams from the rapidly expanding Solana staking infrastructure. The firm also stated it plans to cement the UAE as the global capital of the Solana ecosystem.
The firm added that Marco Santori, former Chief Legal Officer at Kraken, will become Solmate’s first Chief Executive Officer. Solmate intends to invest some proceeds from the funds into bare metal servers in Abu Dhabi, configured to outperform typical DAT validator strategies. Santori noted:
Solmate is not just another treasury. It will execute on a durably differentiated strategy in a crowded field of look-alike DATs by building real crypto infrastructure in the UAE. Our stakeholders have deep, long-term conviction in the SOL ecosystem and will demand that we accumulate SOL through bull markets and bear markets alike. Solmate is well-positioned as Solana adoption accelerates across institutional markets, DeFi, NFTs, and AI.
Solmate’s planned SOL validator would enable regional investors to leverage SOL’s native yield-generating capability with a performant SOL validator in the Middle East. Interestingly, the Solana network is expected to outgrow both Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH) networks in the next three years due to its high monthly developer additions.
Following the development, Brera Holdings’ shares spiked significantly, trading at $32.32 according to data from Yahoo! Finance. Similarly, SOL surged beyond $250, trading about 14.8% below its all-time high (ATH) at the time of writing.
Can SOL Compete With ETH?
While BTC remains the largest digital asset by market cap, SOL’s main competitor is ETH due to them both being smart contract platforms, unlike the Bitcoin network. Currently, ETH’s market cap is about $558 billion, compared to SOL’s $137 billion, but recent developments in the Solana ecosystem promise to bridge this gap.
For instance, publicly-traded firm Forward Industries recently bought $1.58 billion worth of SOL tokens as part of its treasury strategy. A recent report noted that close to 1.55% of Solana’s total circulating supply is now held by institutional investors.
SOL also received another nod of approval from Mike Novogratz recently, calling it the blockchain of choice for financial markets. At press time, SOL trades at $251.66, up 7.8% in the past 24 hours.
