Cypherpunk Holdings ‘significantly’ ups its Solana holdings

Cypherpunk Holdings has significantly increased its solana holdings, according to a statement on Tuesday. The Toronto, Canada-based publicly-traded investment firm’s SOL +1.33% bag now stands at over 63,000 tokens valued at nearly $14 million up from 6,131 SOL last month.

At the end of the first quarter of 2024, the firm held “nil” tokens. In addition to buying SOL, the company announced it will run its own Solana validator and stake 49,917 tokens (worth about $11 million), a majority of its holdings, using its own Solana node. It is also operating a SOL options trading strategy.

Leah Wald, who was founder and former CEO of crypto fund pioneer Valkyrie Investments, joined Cypherpunk as chief executive in early July . She previously sat on the board.

“The Solana ecosystem is presenting a lot of interesting opportunities,” Wald previously told The Block in an interview. “There's a lot of community activity on the chain at the moment and I do believe that a blockchain’s growth can be directly correlated to community and developer activity.”

SOL is up about 2% to $160.04 in the past 24 hours, according to The Block’s price page .

Wald said Cypherpunk’s largest investment is “far and away” in bitcoin, which it first started purchasing in April 2019, the year the firm went public on the Canadian Securities Exchange under the ticker HODL.

Last month, the firm disclosed that it started investing in solana, buying about $1 million worth of the cryptocurrency at an average price of $163.11 per coin. Around the same time, Cypherpunk sold nearly $1 million shares in Hong Kong-based metaverse firm Animoca Brands, its second-largest position.

Valkyrie, the first firm to launch a bitcoin futures exchange-traded fund on Nasdaq, amassed $1.3 billion in assets under management under Wald’s stewardship. CoinShares International exercised an option to acquire the firm in January.

Cypherpunk’s total assets increased $14.3 million to $31.3 million in the last six-month period, according to its latest financial statement. It uses Coinbase as a custodian for its BTC and SOL, and has positions in the Chia Network, hardware wallet NGRAVE and the bitcoin mining sector, among other equity investments.