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Leah Wald has made a mark in the male-dominated crypto industry, from co-founding Valkyrie, to co-authoring Hyperwave Theory, to now being the President and CEO of Sol Strategies. In an exclusive interview with 99Bitcoins, Wald said, “I think Solana is fascinating. I see Bitcoin and everything else as just extraordinarily different, having different utility, use cases, and participation. For applications and truly reaching decentralized financial structures, I think that Solana is the one and only. It is fast, cheap, and has the best developers.”
Wald said,
“For me, it just seems like the winner is going to be Solana.”
“I’ve always been passionate about Bitcoin because of its potential to realize those real-world use cases. I think that it’s morphed and stablecoins are starting to fit that bill,” she added.
Your pivot towards Solana was a like a master move in a way. And it paid off in so many ways, right? But recently Vitalik Buterin said that he wants Ethereum protocol and ecosystem to be as simple as Bitcoin’s. Do you think the Solana ecosystem needs work or are you planning to make any such changes? Are there any upgrades that we should look forward to?
That’s where I’m proud of my team. So, the two main players to focus on, and they all came through the acquisitions. One is our CTO Max Kaplan, and it’ll answer your question. Max was the Senior Director of Engineering at Kraken. And so he was a developer at Kraken. And just absolutely brilliant. And then you have Michael Hubbard. Most people in the ecosystem know him as Lane. And they were one of some of the top core developers and operators in the Solana ecosystem. These guys are always putting through code commits. We’re always running testnet for everything.
Here’s our secret sauce.
Our bet and our belief is Solana and our bet and belief is that the important way to build a company on Solana is providing that type of goodwill in the ecosystem by being actively involved rather than a passive participant. So, we’re very much running all the testnets for new code and and putting through remits.
You mentioned ETFs and that is the hot topic. Very recently ETFs brought in record number of inflows. After the recent administration changes, after having a friendlier SEC and SEC chair, do you think that a SOL ETF could be a reality sooner rather than later?
I absolutely think so. I think it’ll be in spot form. I’m not sure when the administration’s going to get comfortable with staking, but there is such precedent in so many jurisdictions with successful trading of a staked SOL ETF and just generally staked products. Canada just approved their staked SOL ETFs about a month ago.
I believe that under (the new Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Paul) Atkins, the staff is trying to understand how staked products will work.
And they’ve had applications in from some of the top players for ETH for a while. So, I think that they likely will be assessing ETH first and then down the line.
To your question, I’m very bullish that SOL ETFs will come out soon because they’ve already started trading SOL CME futures. And then also the volatility shares, ETFs – both traditional and leveraged – including those SOL futures are trading well. So, I can’t see why that wouldn’t be a logical transition.
But if you had to put a rough timeline to it, you would say?
Before the end of next quarter. I think so, for spot, not staked. I don’t see why not, given the successful trading of the futures ETFs and that being previous precedent for approving the other ETFs.
After the Trump administration came in and the new friendlier SEC, we saw lawsuits drop like flies. So, is it motivating in a way for you to take some chances? Do you see some obstacles out of your way? Would the company bet on something it wouldn’t before?
That’s exactly right. We filed our Nasdaq application as well. A lot of the Canadian issuers are now moving down south and cross-listing. And that’s very specifically because of a pro-crypto administration in office. We’re very excited about tokenization of our stock. And we came out publicly two weeks ago. We’re going to try to be first on tokenizing our shares, and that would be in the US.
I don’t think talking about tokenization of public shares would have even been a conversation you would want to approach with the SEC. And now, instead, they’re very open to the idea, to the extent that Hester Peirce has even come out with comments to that effect. I think that’s maybe one of the biggest examples to show that this administration is different by having all these conversations.
I have concerns about some things, but I’m generally very excited about it being promotional. And the ability to have sandboxes and test it for products that have already been tried and true in different jurisdictions.
I think everybody is going through a learning curve, which means that we can’t hold our breath, but we can keep working as hard as we can to, to educate and get them there.
Whenever we talk about crypto, we talk about the crypto community. But given the number of recent rug pulls and, essentially the breach in the feeling of community, how does Solana and Sol Strategies plan on winning community trust? Or maintaining the trust that they have established so far?
Wow. You know what? That’s the best question I’ve been asked ever. And it’s something I think about all the time. I’m going to write a blog post later.
I think it’s the most important thing for our success as a company is to always show that we’re not just engaging with the community, but in the trenches with the community and building with all the actual contributors. And therefore, keeping the community strong.
Tokens live and die by their communities. And we’ve seen that. You see a hot token – Layer 1, Layer 2, their communities are super excited, lots of developers, and then they move to the next and that project effectively dies a slow death or it just doesn’t innovate much.
Their stakers are loyal to that brand and to the people running those brands. So Max and Michael as an example. Then you see communities within a community. And that’s something important from the get-go for us – ensuring that we’re supporting all of our brands’ communities as well as supporting the general ecosystem as a whole. Because if we don’t, we won’t succeed the way that I want to succeed.
What is your opinion on the increasing institutional adoption of crypto – all kinds of crypto? Wiith changing regulations, we see more and more crypto companies applying for banking licenses and traditional banks entering crypto space.
I have very mixed feelings.
I think that it’s great that we’ve gotten to a point of market validity where we can start operating comfortably and confidently within traditional market structures. At the same time, at least Bitcoin was supposed to be an experiment to opt out of those systems. And sometimes my concerns are if we’re still holding true to our values and morals of what Satoshi originally had in mind of it being a peer-to-peer electronic system that launched very specifically on January 3rd, 2009.
On the one hand, I think it’s wonderful. Then on the other hand, I am concerned about the interests of the new participants being only about numbers going up rather than engaging and supporting the underlying Bitcoin core developers and community.
I think I’m losing faith on the newcomers. They have a lot of power over voices in the community that are really powerful, yet no longer listened to. In the earlier days with Bitcoin, we listened to the core developers a lot – as important voices. And I just hope that moving forward, their voices are always heard as well, because big money talks and that can be dangerous. Unless, it’s not. Unless, it remains true to some core pillars too.
Wald’s Journey So Far
“I worked Bitcoin asset management since the Lucid (Ivestment Strategy) days around 2017-ish. Then after Lucid, I co-founded and ran Valkyrie Investments. So, we launched some of the first crypto ETFs, but also just a bevy of structured products. Then I started really learning about, public market funds and how you could make them more crypto-native and more accessible for the vast public.”
“Valkyrie was sold last year. The ETF business was sold to CoinShares, the trusts were sold to Abra. I came on as the CEO of what was Cypherpunk Holdings. And I’ve been on the board since September 2021. So, a long, long time. Cypherpunk is really interesting because they were the first public equity to be a Microstrategy (Now Strategy) of Bitcoin. They put their whole treasury in Bitcoin. They were publicly listed in 2018, made Bitcoin investments, and they were this incredible vehicle. It just stopped seeing participation from investors in the market when the ETFs were launched, but it was still a well-run company.”
“When the board approached me to see if I wanted to come on as the CEO (of Sol Strategies) last summer, we all sat down together and thought that the writing was on the wall that. To do the same thing for Solana would be really meaningful and powerful. The caveat being, we also wanted to run it as a tech company. So, in 2024, we believe that there needs to be access to Solana in the public markets and there was no ETFs, but it can’t just be a shell. It needs to be a real company.”
About Sol Strategies
SOL Strategies (CSE: HODL | OTCQX: CYFRF) is a publicly traded Canadian company focused exclusively on the Solana ecosystem. The company focuses on traditional finance with blockchain innovation through a growing network of high-performance validators that secure and strengthen the Solana network. As a significant SOL holder and infrastructure provider, the company offers investors unique exposure to the Solana ecosystem’s growth while actively contributing to its development.
[Formerly Cypherpunk Holdings Inc.]
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