Upexi, a consumer-brand owner, is pursuing a Solana-focused digital-asset treasury strategy through its cryptocurrency portfolio, led by Chief Strategy Officer Brian Rudick. Rudick, who previously worked in traditional finance and led research at GSR, helped spearhead the investment into Upexi’s $100 million equity private placement to establish its Solana treasury before joining the company to push its development as a canonical Solana treasury. The idea to create a Solana treasury came about for four reasons: 1) simply observing MicroStrategy’s wild success, where it has been the best performing stock in the US since it pivoted to a Bitcoin treasury strategy in August 2020, 2) a deep understanding of where the value a treasury strategy emanates from, as issuing equity above book value is by definition accretive, 3) a deep belief that Solana has the best chance to be the end-game winning high performance blockchain, with immense upside given a market cap 4% the size of Bitcoin’s and a TAM that is global compute, and 4) a more open SEC gave us additional comfort to embark on this journey.
Upexi is a consumer brand owner, selling pet care supplies, energy supplements, and medicinal mushroom products direct to consumers and via Amazon. That said, Upexi holds $350 million worth of the cryptocurrency Solana, and thus the preponderance of value comes from its Solana treasury operations.
From investors thinking treasury companies were meme stocks to investment banking partners not being comfortable working on crypto projects to companies not wanting to bet on digital assets, we faced immense pushbacks at the outset. We overcame these challenges with a deep knowledge and belief in the value such a strategy creates and a relentless pursuit of the goal. Every day is getting easier as the model continues to demonstrate its value. While we are still a consumer brands company, we have jumped knee-deep into cryptocurrencies, specifically by accumulating Solana’s native token SOL.
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