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Galaxy Digital and its founder Mike Novograts have been a major force in the push by crypto into mainstream finance. Digital asset treasuries dats are the latest example, with an astounding eighty five and counting announced this year. They've raised billions from investors everywhere from the US to the Gulf to Asia. Galaxy among the top investors over the past six months. It's helped lead fundraising round for Forward Industries one point six billion dollars Solana Treasury. It's the largest
for that token. Forward share surged on the news, up now more than five hundred percent so far this year.
Let's bring in.
Galaxy Digital founder and CEO, Mike Novagrats, who's going to be hanging out with us for quite a bit of time during the show. Mike, Always appreciate your time. Always good to see you. We're going to talk about Solana in just a minute. First, though, I just want to get your commentary on what's happened in the last forty eight hours with the selloff and the volatility that we have seen. How do you explain it?
Yeah, listen, there are a few things that happened.
One.
Crypto had a pretty awesome few months, right. I mean, Ethereum went up almost three x, Solana went up a ton, and so market's at one point get a little bit long, and it takes just a little bit for people to get nervous and some of the leverage to come out. We saw what it looked like some big Chinese mining selling. You also had you know Arthur Hayes, who's one of the real thought leaders around crypto. He put out a
pretty bearish commentary around hyper Liquid. Hyper Liquid is the only token in the top ten that didn't exist a few years ago. Right. It's a decentralized version of binance, if you want to think about it. And it's a pretty spectacular story with the amount of growth it had. And Arthur said, hey, wait a minute, I think it's gone too far. The founders are going to sell, and so hyper liquid really got hit the hardest, and that I think kind of hit some of the overall element
in the market. And so I think this is just a pullback. You know, Crypto has been kind of soft. Bitcoin's been kind of soft because a lot of the action moved away from bitcoin. But if you had told someone four months ago that you're going to be nervous with bitcoin at one twelve, they would have a big grin on their face, right, And so you have to keep things in context. We're still up significantly on the year of both bitcoin Ethan and solon them.
Speaking of keeping things in context, a lot of people have been saying that crypto price movement can foretel stock prices as well. More broadly, you know, it's like a leading asset class.
Do you subscribe to that? Do you believe that?
Ah, I'm not sure.
Listen, I think sometimes it feels leading and sometimes it feels lagging. We are in a euphoric moment in stocks, and there is a lot of excitement all around this AI theme.
AI is powerful. It is going to change the way we do things.
I was literally just in a meeting with my management team talking about aiad galaxy, and every single C suite in the world is having that same conversation, and so that creates bubble like excitement. And we've got valuations in the in the NASDAC and the S and P as high as we see them, and so it's a really hard market because it's got husu momentum and excitement around a real story. But it's got valuations that get you
really nervous. And the interconnectivity of the video, open ai oracle, the vendor financing, you know, web that gets you nervous, like valuation creating more valuation. And so I think you've got a market that's that's nervous. That doesn't mean it's not going to go a lot higher. Right The last the last leg of great markets always surprises people and how powerful it can be.
And I'm not saying this is the last leg, but it very well could be.
So if you're looking at that in terms of the equity market right now, how does that translate over to the way you're thinking about crypto and where we could be in the cycle when it comes to crypto right now, and not every token is created equally. I know you love Ether and Solana, and you know you're traditionally going back to bitcoin, but what does it mean for crypto?
Well, listen, crypto traditionally has traded with four year cycles, and that would be ending in December, right halfway between the having is usually where our peaks have been. And you know the end of twenty seventeen, if you had sold everything in December, you look pretty smart. And the end of twenty twenty one, if you'd sold everything in December,
you look pretty smart. And now here we are October of twenty twenty five, at all time highs at almost every token, and you're wondering should you sell everything in December?
Listen? What could be different? And I think probably is different.
We have gotten one piece of legislation out of the US called the Genius Act stable coin legislation. In an all likelihood, sometime in mid October mid.
November, we're going to get.
The second piece of legislation, which will help define what a security and what a commodity is and a lot of other rules around crypto in America.
That's a big deal.
With those two bookends of legislation, it's going to unleash a tremendous amount of new participation, new participation in crypto.
I mean, think about it.
You can't use stable coins on your iPhone yet, there's almost zero chance in the next few years you will be able to use stable coins on your iPhone or on your Samsung Galaxy phone or in almost any social media app. You couldn't before because they weren't necessarily legal.
Now they are. Yeah, and once the.
US government puts its improper tour on this industry, which it has, we have the most crypto friendly sec one could imagine. Yeah, you know, you're going to have this new wave of participation and so we might not be in the traditional cycle.
Well, this week, Brera Holding says it will be renamed Soulmate to become a Solana based digital asset treasury following a three hundred million dollar fundraise. It's newly named CEO, Marco Sentori, joins us now along with Galaxy Digital's Mike Novograts. Marco's formerly worked at Pantera and Kraken. Good to have
you on the program. Another digital asset treasury company. I was shocked to see an Olga Krieff's article today actually about Mike Novograts and other Princeton folks, that there have been eighty five digital asset treasury companies just this year.
Why another one listen to. First of all, thank you for having me.
Second of all, you've got to stop looking at treasury companies as trades.
These things are notes.
There are going to be as many treasury companies as there are coin accumulation strategies over the next twenty years. This is not a fad, it's not a trend, it's not going away. This is a replacement for the traditional foundation model. So historically, what digital asset innovators have had
to do is sequester all of their new coins. They're newly created coins in these not for profit corporations or nonprofits in the Caymans, in Switzerland, and basically these companies have watched their treasury go down into the right over time.
That is clearly an inefficient model.
We think treasury companies are going to take the place of these foundations over time. They have access to the capital markets, they can be more dynamic, they can generate revenue, and they can still steward the ecosystems that they're supposed to steward. So you can't look at this thing like a trade. You have to look at it as an evolution.
Having said that, and your company is rebranding itself as Soul, which really shows that you're betting on that particular coin. Can you explain why you've said walste will be building on Solana and not ethereum, what's the basis for that view?
Well, I'm a big Solona believer. Everybody at Soul made it's a big Salona believer. Bitcoin is special. Bitcoin was and remains and I think for a very long time will be special. It's a new monetary system, a new kind of money. Then Ethereum came on the scene, and Ethereum said, you know what, there's actually more we can do with these blockchains. We can do more than just move value around. We can create smart contracts, they can be composable, they can be decentralized, they can be hardened
against attack and interference. But then it didn't scale, it didn't go anywhere. Ethereum still can only handle a small number of transactions per second at the base layer, and instead it chips off the large numbers of transactions, all the high throughput, highly performance transactions to these second layer servers where it's really just somebody else's computer, and sacrifices so many of the values that made decentralized technology valuable.
Solana doesn't do that. Solana doesn't have to do that.
It can scale to hundreds of thousands of transactions per second at the base layer, at that foundational layer that made all of those promises about financial services and what financial services could do with blockchains. So when I discovered Solana. I wasn't as early as the party as some I'll tell you that, but it was a light bulb moment that went off.
This is clearly the future.
This is what sophisticated high throughput transactions are going to run on in the future.
Mike. I want to bring you into the conversation because Tim mentioned they're about eighty five companies that are involved in dahs, and you've said that you don't think all these dhs will be successful. But if you get critical mass, enhance yield on the underlying token, and build the ecosystem, I think they're net positives for crypto. These are public companies that will be around for a long time.
Mike. What will determine success and longevity?
Listen, I think you're going to need scale, right because scale begets scale, and so you know, you think of something like micro strategy, which came out first, and now strategy it's got scale, and you know it will it will.
Probably What do these companies do?
They bring energy into the ecosystem in lots of ways.
And what I.
Was a little wrong on early on, and then it dawned on me, was the access to capital through the equity infrastructure is so much greater than it was through the crypto infrastructure. Right, crypto' is a twelve year old business, and equities have been.
Around for a long long time.
That the wonderful thing about these data center company, of these treasury companies is they've brought in so much more capital at a quick pace.
And that capital is what will build this industry.
And so I think in each of these buckets, like I love the fact that that Marco is doing another Salona company because it's also based in a different part of the world. It's going to attack a different set of new investors. You know, we're you know, foreign Industries is a very US focused investor base and company, but it's a global technology and so in some ways, the more of the merrier, I think, in order to survive, you're you're going to have to prove to the investors
that you bring value. Right, Like listen, if we all trade to nav it's hard to it's hard to raise
a lot more capital. And so you've got to do something that allows you to think, hey, on our one point six billion dollars of Solana, just through staking and other things, if we can get that yield from seven to ten percent you're making one hundred and sixty million dollars a year in dividends, and you can use that one hundred and sixty million dollars a year to do other cool stuff with You can use that leverage to maybe get a good deal on getting free free equity
in a program that's building on top of the blockchain.
And so you're gonna have to be creative.
We partnered and forward with Jump Capital and multi coin. Jump is probably the premier builder of architecture, of financial market architecture on blockchains and certainly on the Salona blockchain. And so to me that's just thrilling. Right, there are four companies in the world I think that can coind of Pete with Jump right, like frequency trading, and so they see the Salona blockchain as what will be the.
Foundation for capital markets in America.
And when you have the new head of the SEC, Paul Ack and saying I want everything to move on, Shane, that's a big deal.
I mean, it's a stunning Dear.
We're going to talk more about the regulatory environment in just a moment. In the meantime, I do want to thank soulmate CEO Marco Santori for joining us on set. Mike nograts is sticking with us now.
I'm committed to this company because they did everything they could to try and cancel us. They did everything they could, I'm talking about traditional finance to put us out of business. I was the guy that was getting hundreds of letters from the big banks, Capital One, JP, Morgan, you know, I mean all of them, Bank of America. I saw Moyhand was just on trying to take away accounts for for golf courses, for hotels, for residential buildings, for doing
absolutely nothing wrong. And it drove me into crypto because I realized that there was nothing that couldn't be done in crypto better, faster, cheaper, more transparently, and it's amazing industry.
That was Eric Trump speaking to us last week. We're back with Galaxy Digital founder and CEO Mike Novogratz.
Mike, the White.
House, as we know, has ushered in this new era for crypto in terms of regulation and of course in terms of this friendly stance toward growing the industry. Are you comfortable with the First family being this act of so active in this industry. Some make the argument that there's an inherent conflict of interest. There.
Listen what I've said before, and I'll say again, as long as the Trump family and their associates by the rules, I'm completely fine by it.
And you know, the one thing.
About this new SEC is they're all about disclosure and you know people, and it's a little bit of a buyer beware SEC.
And I would guess if you read.
Through most of the the different protocols the Trump guys that have participated in it's everything they do is pretty well disclosed, and so I don't think there should be any mystery around, you know, what they're doing.
Listen, if they break the rule, if I break the rule, we should get in trouble. But I don't think you can you can prevent.
The children of people in power from participating in business. I do think it's an issue in politics right The Democrats are going to make a big deal about what they perceive as grift, that the president shouldn't be doing this, and that that has a potential to slow down the market structure bill. The far left will push. I think the optimistic news is is there's enough Democrats.
Right, you know, and you can think about guys.
Like Mark Warner, Ruman, Diego's our own New York Senator Kristian Jildebrand that see the value in crypto, that see the political value in being seen as pro technology, pro innovation, that market structure will get passed, and we'll probably get passed with a lot more than ten Democratic votes.
So it sounds funny we spoke I just want to jump in because there'red a ton of time. But we spoke to Dan moorehead last week, and he made the point of saying that it really seems like this is important to voters. I push back a little bit on that, because we saw in the last election a year ago that even the pro crypto candidates weren't being messaged in a way that even mentioned cryptocurrency in a lot of cases.
Do you think that Democrats now are getting the message if you think that they have to be on board with this type of asset, I do.
I think Democrats a lot of them think, oh shit, crypto swayed the election Trump's way. Why were we so dumb not to like you think that the election. I think crypto had a big deal. If it had the big deal in the election in the Ohio.
Senate, but was that crypto or was that just the messaging around Bernie Moreno, I think.
It was crypto. It was the money that crypto brought.
Crypto was the crypto pack was the single largest donor to the Trump campaign.
But they didn't message around crypto. They message around the border. They message around other issues that seemed to resonate more with voters.
They listen. There were eighty million crypto owners in America.
A lot of them are single issue voters who care a lot about this issury that more people own crypto.
Than owned dogs.
You know, can you imagine being the party that said, I don't like dogs, I don't care about like like. It was so dumb for Democrats to be anti crypto. It turned people off. It was It wasn't the only thing, but it was a pile on effect of all those issues that swayed young men. I mean, young men voted for Trump much more than they did in any press election.
And young men are the crypto people.
Yeah, yeah, go ahead, No.
No, no, I think that's a good point, and it's something that's a distinguishing factor.
We only have about a minute left. I'm just wondering.
As we wrap up our conversation here. It's been a banner year for crypto overall? What is next on your to do list?
Mike, listen.
I think any cryptocurrency company has to be looking on Shane to figure out how do we move more of our business on Shane. How do we bring on Shane access to our traditional customers. Right when the head of the SEC says we think markets should move on Shane, we should listen. And so we spend a lot of time here figuring out that exact question. We are building, we're investing. You look at our stocks, it's gone from the lower left to the upper right in a pretty
good line. So we feel good about you know, we're having a great core order in a great year, and so it's a whole different, different feeling here than it was twelve months ago.
Hey, Mike, we only have ten seconds. You're known for that Luna tattoo that you got a few years ago. Did you get the Solana the sole tattoo?
Yet?
All my tattoos are are going to be kept hidden for a long time.
Yeah, we'll keep talking about him as long as you keep coming on. We appreciate it.
Mike Murrats, founder and CEO of Galaxy Digital, really appreciate your joining us for the entirety of bloomber Crypto,