Nasdaq-Traded Solana Company Plans to Tokenize Shares via Superstate

Solana Company (HSDT)—formerly Helius Medical Technologies—intends to tokenize its shares on Superstate’s Opening Bell regulated platform, the SOL-focused treasury company announced Wednesday.

HSDT investors will be able “to hold and transfer tokenized representations” of the company’s shares on Opening Bell, giving them round-the-clock access to trading and real-time settlement, Solana Company said in a statement. The shares will retain their “current regulatory structure and investor protections.” Opening Bell allows companies to move stocks on-chain.

“The tokenization of HSDT through Superstate represents a major step toward realizing the vision of global, around-the-clock capital markets, and we believe the majority of that activity will take place on Solana,” said Cosmo Jiang, a Solana Company board director and general partner at venture capital giant Pantera Capital. 

Pantera co-led Solana Company’s $500 million private investment in public equity (PIPE) financing, which closed in September. The crypto-focused venture capital giant, which has invested heavily in treasuries in recent months, reportedly intends to raise $1.25 billion toward Solana Company, which trades on the Nasdaq and rebranded from Helius in late September. Pantera was also an early investor in Superstate.

Other publicly traded treasury companies have also been eyeing tokenization initiatives, including Ethereum treasury FG Nexus, which last month announced a partnership with Securitize to tokenize its shares. In September, Forward Industries, the largest of the Solana treasuries, also announced its intention to tokenize its stock. 

Treasury companies following the model of Bitcoin-focused Strategy, have faced challenges in recent months amid market volatility.

In an aggressive move last month that could test confidence in its strategy, Solana Company finalized its resale registration, granting private placement investors the right to sell shares tied to its digital asset treasury pivot.  The filing unlocked previously restricted stock from its September funding round, allowing early backers to offload positions and triggering a sharp sell-off in HSDT shares.

HSDT shares were trading at $5.26, up nearly 2% on Wednesday, although they have tumbled about 64% over the past month, according to Yahoo Finance.

Solana was recently trading at about $152, down 3.4% over the past 24 hours, amid a wider downturn in crypto markets on Wednesday, according to crypto data provider CoinGecko. SOL is off about 22% over the past two weeks. 

In a Myriad prediction market, nearly 90% of respondents do not expect Solana to break its current record high of $294.33 by year’s end. (Disclaimer: Myriad is a unit of Dastan, the parent company of an editorially independent Decrypt.)