The crypto treasury rush continues. Sharps Technology, a small medical device and pharmaceutical packaging company, announced Monday that it plans to sell $400 million worth of its stock to fund a treasury for Solana, one of the largest cryptocurrencies by market capitalization. Large crypto investment funds like ParaFi, Pantera Capital, and CoinFund contributed to the raise.
The transaction, which would turn the biotech firm’s stock into a proxy for the price of Solana, is expected to close on Aug. 28. Alice Zhang, a venture capitalist and cofounder of crypto smartphone maker Jambo, will join the board of Sharps and become the company’s chief investment officer. James Zhang, another cofounder of the smartphone company, will join as a strategic advisor and consultant.
“We will have a team with deep ties to the Solana ecosystem and proven founder-level experience in scaling institutional digital asset platforms,” Alice Zhang said in a statement.
The more-than-$400 million capital injection positions Sharps to potentially become the largest Solana treasury company on the market. Upexi, its closest competitor, has about $394 million worth of the cryptocurrency, according to its most recent update on its balance sheet. DeFi Development Corp., another public company that amasses Solana, has a bit more than $250 million.
But Sharps’ position as frontrunner may be short-lived. Crypto heavyweights Galaxy Digital, Multicoin Capital, and Jump Crypto are in the market to raise $1 billion to start their own Solana treasury company, according to a report from Bloomberg, which cited anonymous sources.
A spokesperson for Jump Crypto declined to comment. Spokespeople for Multicoin Capital and Galaxy Digital did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The investment into Sharps comes on the heels of a slew of announcements from small public companies to establish so-called digital asset treasuries, or pools of cryptocurrency held on company balance sheet.
The strategy was first popularized by the data analytics software company Strategy, formerly called MicroStrategy, which started buying up Bitcoin in 2020. Michael Saylor, Strategy’s cofounder and executive chairman, became one of Bitcoin’s biggest boosters as his company added more and more of the token to its balance sheet.
As the price of the world’s largest cryptocurrency increased and Strategy added more and more of it to its balance sheet, the company’s share price surged, as traders bought up its stock as a proxy for Bitcoin.
Watching the meteoric rise of Strategy, which now boasts a market capitalization of almost $100 billion, copycats followed suit. Other small publicly traded companies began adding Bitcoin to their balance sheet in the hopes of pops in their stocks. And soon firms started to buy more exotic tokens, including Ethereum, XRP, and Litecoin.
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