Today I’m excited to announce that Multicoin Capital, Jump Crypto (the largest trading firm in crypto), and Galaxy (the largest financial conglomerate in crypto) have successfully led a $1.65B PIPE into Forward Industries, Inc. (NASDAQ: FORD), which will use the net proceeds to initiate a Solana treasury company strategy. Each sponsor committed over $100M in USD. I also personally committed an additional $25M on top of Multicoin’s commitment because I believe in the long-term opportunity for the company.
In addition to the sponsor group, the PIPE received support and participation from several global investment firms and leaders across the digital asset ecosystem, including:
- Firms/Companies: Big Brain Holdings, Bitwise Asset Management, Borderless Capital, Coinlist Alpha, CyberFund, C/M Capital Partners, LP, FalconX, Graticule Asset Management Asia, Jupiter, L1D, ParaFi, Ribbit Capital, RockawayX, and SkyBridge Capital.
- Angel Investors: Cindy Leow (Drift), Guy Young (Ethena), Howard Lindzon (Stockwits), Lucas Bruder (Jito), Lucas Netz (Pudgy Penguins), Robert Leshner (Superstate), Tarun Chitra (Gauntlet), and Tory Green (io.net).
The PIPE closed today, and in connection with the closing, I have been appointed to the company’s Board of Directors as Chairman. As one of Solana earliest and loudest supporters since leading Solana’s seed round in early 2018, I jumped at the opportunity to step into this role. As for my role at Multicoin, nothing is changing; I will continue to serve as Managing Partner.
As part of the closing, Saurabh Sharma, the Chief Investment Officer of Jump Crypto, and Chris Ferraro, the President and Chief Investment Officer of Galaxy, were granted board observer rights. I’m incredibly excited to collaborate with them.
SOL DATs
Solana has a dynamic, heterogenous, competitive, thriving DeFi ecosystem comprised of dozens of mature teams. As such, Forward Industries has the opportunity to put its SOL treasury to work in DeFi with the goal of generating differentiated sources of yield for shareholders, which could further accelerate SOL acquisition.
While we expect the SOL treasury to participate in staking and DeFi, we have also identified additional strategies that Multicoin believes the company is well positioned to explore:
- First, Multicoin believes the company will be in a unique position to acquire discounted and locked SOL by tapping the sponsor group’s deep network within the Solana ecosystem, which dates back to the seed round in 2018.
- Second, beyond the obvious onchain activities like staking and participating in DeFi, the firm also sees a potentially large and lucrative design space to arbitrage the spread in cost of capital between what banks can offer a publicly traded company and what DeFi can offer. We think this arbitrage strategy could manifest in many different ways with numerous counterparties.
- And third, given the pedigree of the sponsors, the size of the company’s treasury, and the sponsors intimate knowledge and relationship with the Solana ecosystem, the firm believes the company can leverage those relationships to strike deals with major Solana protocols and applications to help improve liquidity while also aiming to increase yield for the company’s shareholders.
Michael Saylor pioneered the Digital Asset Treasury (DAT) company strategy using BTC as the corporate reserve asset for Strategy, Inc. In doing so, he’s defined the company’s north star as increasing “BTC per share.” Forward Industries is now looking to build on the model Saylor pioneered, with SOL as the reserve asset for its digital asset treasury strategy. Similarly, Multicoin invested in the company with the expectation that the company’s north star will be increasing SOL per share with the goal of driving shareholder value through bespoke strategies and active management of the company’s treasury.
We believe that SOL is the optimal asset to underpin a DAT; it possesses several unique properties that BTC and ETH lack.
SOL can natively produce real yield via staking. SOL’s “yield” is derived from organic economic activity and MEV. Multicoin has written and presented about MEV many times over the last few years. For Solana, as of September 2025, SOL stakers captured an average 8.05% yield comprised of approximately 6.19% inflation and approximately 1.86% real yield from organic economic activity and MEV,. This yield is paid out to SOL stakers every ~2.5 days. Although the 2025 YTD nominal yield for staking ETH is approximately 3.21%, 2.81% is inflation and only about 0.41% is real yield. As a foundation for a permanent capital vehicle, we think this makes SOL an incredibly attractive asset for a DAT.
We believe that the convertible and perpetual preferred structure that Strategy popularized works far better for a SOL DAT than a BTC DAT given the native properties of SOL. The company can use these sources of yield to service obligations in a way that BTC-DATS simply cannot. Bitcoin has zero real yield.
I’m excited to explore and operationalize these strategies with the company as their Chairman. The company is aggressively hiring for many roles, including senior and executive positions. To learn more, visit the company website.
Disclaimer: This blog post is written by Kyle Samani in his role as the Managing Partner of Multicoin Capital Management LLC and not in his capacity as Chairman of Forward Industries, Inc.
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