[Long Read] Exclusive Interview with Pantera: The Logic Behind Spending $1.25 Billion on "Solana Coin Stocks"

Chainfeeds Guide:

In the view of Pantera partner Cosmo Jiang, the rise of "crypto treasury companies" is not just hype, but the birth of a new financial organizational structure.

Source:

Author:

BlockBeats

Opinion:

Cosmo Jiang: When we first started deploying this strategy, it was actually a completely non-consensus bet. At that time, we received a lot of pitches for similar projects, but we never fully understood their significance until we encountered Defi Dev Corp (DFDV)—a team trying to replicate a Solana version of MicroStrategy in the United States. Their setup was very clear: the team is based in the US and can directly access the US capital markets; the main treasury position is Solana, and we ourselves are extremely optimistic about Solana's prospects. This combination was very attractive to us at the time. So we chose to invest in DFDV. It was a very forward-thinking project, with almost no other institutions entering the field. We were among the earliest and few investors willing to make a significant bet. Although it seemed very niche at the time, we were willing to bear the uncertainty and be the first to take the plunge. There were a few other capital parties investing with us, but we were the lead and main investor. We even thought at the time that this might be the only one—there might only be this one digital asset treasury company in the US. All of our funds actually have long-term investment goals—we are long-term believers in this industry, and we participate from the perspective of long-term investors, not short-term traders. For example, our venture capital fund is a closed-end fund with a 10-year life cycle and an 8-year lock-up period, truly designed for the growth cycle of early-stage projects, with a very long holding period. On the other hand, we also have a more "liquid" product—our "liquid token hedge fund," which has quarterly liquidity. Of course, we also hope that investors will walk with us from a multi-year perspective, so that they can truly enjoy the returns brought by our research and investment process. But we also provide a certain degree of liquidity. And this DAT (Digital Asset Treasury) fund happens to be somewhere in between. Because we are helping these companies start from scratch, we set certain lock-up periods and liquidity restrictions. But at the same time, we also believe that whether these projects can succeed can actually be seen in a relatively short period of time. So the holding period of this fund will be shorter than that of traditional venture capital funds. Moreover, since we are investing in "public company stocks," we also hope that investors can hold what we consider to be "long-term winners" for the long term. Therefore, in terms of exit methods, we will also use "in-kind distribution," meaning we will directly distribute these stocks to investors, allowing them to choose whether to continue holding or not, rather than being forced to sell. In this way, we can both implement a long-term investment strategy and give investors greater freedom. Overall, the valuation multiples of these DAT (Debt Asset Tokenization) projects are generally between 1.5x and 8x. So the current premium is still quite high. It should be noted that many projects have very low early circulation, so the valuation may be high at the beginning of trading, but after shares are unlocked and truly circulating, there is usually some pullback. So some projects currently have very high premiums, but they have these liquidity restrictions. Therefore, in the future, we may see a valuation correction for such projects. But even after full circulation, many projects are still between 1.5x and 8x, which overall is still a fairly healthy premium range, right.