In a corporate treasury based in Toronto, there is a digital pile of assets that recently underwent a significant identity crisis. Until last September, this stockpile belonged to an entity called Cypherpunk Holdings, a name that evokes hackers in hoodies and encrypted basements. Now, the firm is called SOL Strategies, and they have taken over half a million Solana tokens—worth roughly $67 million—and decided that simply holding them in a vault is no longer enough. Instead of letting that capital sit idle like gold bars in a dusty safe, they have flipped a switch to turn the entire hoard into an active, revenue-generating machine, creating a ripple effect that regular investors can now ride along with.
- Firm holds over 500,000 Solana tokens, valued near $67 million.
- The new product launched by the firm is named STKESOL.
- The company rebranded from Cypherpunk Holdings last September.
The company has officially launched something called STKESOL. While the name looks like a license plate that fell off a tech billionaire’s car, it represents a specific financial product known as a “liquid staking token.” This move changes the company from a passive investor—someone who just buys and holds—into an active participant in the plumbing of the Solana network.
The coat check ticket
To understand what SOL Strategies is doing, we first have to tackle the concept of “staking.” In the crypto world, staking is very similar to putting your money into a Certificate of Deposit (CD) at a bank. You agree to lock up your funds for a set period to help secure the network, and in return, the network pays you interest.
The problem with traditional staking, much like a CD, is that your money is stuck. You cannot spend it, trade it, or move it until you unstake it, which often takes time. If the market crashes while your coins are locked up, you are forced to watch from the sidelines.
This is where “liquid staking” comes in, and it is the core of the new STKESOL product. Imagine you go to a high-end theater and check your coat. The attendant takes your coat (your Solana tokens) and puts it in the secure back room (staking it). In return, they hand you a plastic claim ticket.
In the physical world, that ticket is just a piece of plastic. But in the crypto world, that ticket (STKESOL) has value. It is worth exactly the same amount as the coat you checked. You can take that ticket, trade it, sell it, or use it as collateral for a loan. Meanwhile, your actual coat is still in the back room earning interest. When you eventually come back to trade your ticket in, you get your coat back plus the interest it earned.
SOL Strategies has essentially created a massive coat check room backed by their own 500,000 SOL tokens, and they are inviting others to use it too.
The “Wiz Score” and the validator army
When you stake cryptocurrency, you are technically voting for a “validator.” A validator is just a powerful computer that processes transactions and keeps the network honest. It is similar to a bank teller verifying checks. If the teller is honest and fast, the bank works well. If the teller is slow or corrupt, things break.
Most liquid staking services dump all their coins onto one or two massive validators. This is efficient, but it creates a “too big to fail” risk. If that one validator goes offline, everyone loses money.
SOL Strategies is taking a different approach. They are using an automated system to spread that $67 million worth of Solana across dozens of different validators. To decide who gets the money, they use a metric called the “Wiz Score.”
Think of the Wiz Score like a credit score or a health inspector’s grade for these computers. It comes from a website called Stakewiz.com, which analyzes how reliable a validator is. It looks at their performance history, their hardware quality, and whether they are located in a data center that is already too crowded. By using this score, SOL Strategies acts like a mutual fund manager, constantly shuffling funds to the best performers to reduce the risk of a crash.
From holding to building
This launch marks a major pivot for the company. As mentioned, they used to be Cypherpunk Holdings. In the second quarter of 2024, they began aggressively buying up Solana. By September, they rebranded entirely to SOL Strategies.
This is a bit like a company that used to buy and hold real estate deciding to start a construction firm. They are no longer just betting on the price of the land going up; they are trying to build a business on top of it.
Michael Hubbard, the Interim CEO, stated that this product proves they can build technology that helps the whole network, rather than just sitting on a pile of cash. By launching STKESOL, they create a new revenue stream for themselves. They earn money from deposit fees and they take a small cut of the rewards generated by the pool.
Where can you use it?
A liquid staking token is only useful if other people accept it. Going back to our coat check analogy: if the restaurant next door doesn’t recognize your claim ticket as valuable, you can’t buy dinner with it.
SOL Strategies has ensured that STKESOL is accepted at several major “DeFi” (Decentralized Finance) locations. These include:
- Orca: A place to swap different tokens, similar to a currency exchange booth at an airport.
- Kamino and Loopscale: Platforms that allow for lending and borrowing, acting somewhat like automated pawn shops or credit unions where no human manager needs to approve your loan.
- Squads: A tool for managing shared treasuries, like a joint bank account for companies.
The goal is to make the token as useful as cash, so users don’t feel the “lock-up” pain usually associated with staking.
The bigger picture
It is worth noting that SOL Strategies is a minnow swimming among whales. While $67 million sounds like a fortune, other entities hold significantly more. For example, a group called Forward Industries holds nearly 7 million SOL, and the Solana Company itself holds over 2 million.
However, the shift here is about accessibility and structure. By wrapping their holdings into a consumer-friendly product, SOL Strategies is trying to bridge the gap between complex crypto infrastructure and regular investors who just want a return on their assets without needing a degree in computer science.
For the average person looking at the crypto market, this is another reminder that the industry is moving away from “magic internet money” that does nothing, toward complex financial plumbing that mimics—and sometimes improves upon—traditional banking structures. You deposit assets, you earn a yield, and you keep your liquidity. It is banking 2.0, built on a blockchain, with a “Wiz Score” keeping score in the background.
