Can you all still hear Pete? Nope, he just dropped for me too. Pete, you there? Joseph, it might just be me and you. Yeah. Bummer. All right. But yeah, that's okay too. Stepping back into my OG role here on this space till Pete comes back. All right. Well, thanks all for joining us. Today is our August and September 2026 business recap and AMA. Joining me, we've got Pete Humiston, whenever he hops back on, Chief Marketing Officer, and Joseph Onorati, CEO. We'll spend some time talking about what happened in August and September, and more importantly, want to use today to step back and talk about where DFDV stands in light of current market conditions, recent developments, milestones, et cetera. As always, if you have questions, drop them under the pinned tweet. We'll try to get to as many as we can. And a quick reminder that today's discussion may contain forward-looking statements. These involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. Please refer to our SEC filings for additional information. We undertake no obligation to update said forward-looking statements except as required by law. With that, let us dive in. Joseph, I'll kick this to you to start. If you have to summarize August and September in one sentence, what fundamentally changed about DFDV compared with where the company stood at the end of Q2? Trick question. It is a trick question. Yeah. Nothing fundamentally changed about the business. The business is working as intended, which has been awesome in the last two months. DFDV's levered exposure to SOL. SOL went up, DFDV went up more. It is working. I love it. Nice and brief. I will take it and I will violate the rules of the question here for a second, which is not in one sentence. I guess if I had to put it in one sentence, nothing, as you said, about the fundamental structure or strategy of the business changed. With one caveat. Our ability to execute against the structure did change as SOL started moving, right? What do I mean by the fundamental structure or strategy didn't change? Well, the convertible debt is still there. Our high percentage ownership is still there. All those factors that we spoke about in our last shareholder letter, which we think make DFDV a very unique business, all those things are still true, right? The spring was coiled, if you will. Then SOL starts ripping, and the common equity did what it was effectively designed to do, which is provide amplified exposure to SOL. Amidst that backdrop, our trading volume surged. The net result of that is what you have seen in recent headlines, right? Our SOL balance is up double digits. We indicated that between August 12th and September 30th, we grew SOL per share double digits, which is, as far as we can tell, the fastest rate of growth in the space. NAV per share is expected to be up triple digits, when we report. Oh, and of course, CHAD exists, right? This is one of those weird things where nothing strategically changed, nothing really structurally changed, but in some ways, everything changed, which is a little bit of a paradox. It's pretty nice to say CHAD exists on one of these, because we've been talking about when CHAD will exist on these spaces for I don't know, this must have been like six or more of them, right? It's a lot of recaps where we're like, "Yeah, we're working on CHAD." Well, finally happened. Yes. I do look forward to one day when, I don't know, either you or I are on stage looking back on our careers, and we'll get to tell the story of how CHAD came to be. It'll make for a really nice story. Let's go on to and I'm just going to do a quick check right here. Pete, have you rejoined us by any chance? No. All right. Yes, I have. I think so. Can you hear me? There he is. Yeah, I got you. Okay, awesome. We can hear you now. Oh my God. Thanks again. I was getting uber rugged this morning by Twitter. I did my whole spiel and then, I just saw that, nothing went through. I'm sorry. That's why I'm naming. I'm sorry I stole your thunder, but you get to do the sign-off and we'll resume the questions from here. Yeah, no worries. I'm glad to, if I have to steal it from someone, it's from you, so all is good. Cool. I guess you guys just gave a quick summary right about August and September. Did you guys want to quickly hit on to talking a little bit about We had like a pretty meaningful jump in SOL and SOL equivalents. Held 2.31 million to 2.5, I think it's 5.8 million as of today. Do you guys want to just quickly riff on what allowed for the pace of that accumulation to suddenly just accelerate so quickly? Yeah. I'll take the first bit, and Joseph, please chime in. Despite my wishes to create money out of thin air, I've yet to figure out a way to do that yet. All I will say is we're not in a place to share yet exactly what the funding sources were, if you will, but it's a simple business model overall, right? Folks can connect the dots here. What I will note is that when we think about the various funding sources that were available to us, I think the last couple of months, we saw ample opportunities across any number of, I'm going to say, various instruments. So unlike some other deals you've seen in the space, we'd not do registered directs at a discount or share price or a discount to NAV and things like that. Now, these deals can sometimes make sense, but they also have some serious drawbacks, right? The first of which is the discount is often 5%, 10%, sometimes 15%. You bake in banker fees on top of that and the discount's even greater. The second is that if you do manage to get a deal done above your share price, you often have to deal with warrant coverage on top of that, which further muddies the cap structure, dampens your future vol, et cetera. And of course, the last is that these deals often require a standstill on, I'm going to say, overall fundraising for several weeks, which I guess if you were in a position where you had minimal fundraising options, you might be okay with. But that's not the case with us. Right now, we have ample funding opportunities. And we got looks at both types of these deals in the quarter, and frankly, we just passed because the opportunity cost was too great. So, again, not going to comment on the mix. We did obviously mention already, double-digit SOL per share growth is what we expect to report when we report earnings. And by the way, again, this is just from August 12th to September 30th. It doesn't consider the full quarter. It doesn't fully account for this most recently announced SOL buy. Right? And this is just based on our analysis, at least what we consider to be best-in-class growth. Speed is the name of the game here. This is actually a very common dynamic you see in, I'm going to say, across the DAT space, but also in traditional equities as well, right? Where the rate of growth is really the important factor. We are pretty happy with the results, but as I like to tell the team, job's not finished. Real quick on that. You said based on our analysis, this is best-in-class growth. I do not want to name any names, but are you alluding to some of the fundraising that our competitors have done recently, and is there anything that you want to say at a high level- I am alluding to it. -to that note? I am alluding to it, and I do not know. I do not pay too much. I like to pretend they do not exist, so I am not going to comment any further. Right. But we ultimately feel good about our means of accumulation, I guess, relative to peers. We do. Yep. Cool. All right. Moving along. August in particular. Some cost reductions, discounted repurchase of convertible debt. We did a ZeroStack divestment. There was some decisions to concentrate on a fewer number of on-chain protocols. Guys, what was the impetus behind some of these decisions in August? Joseph, you want to take that? Yeah. It is overall just simplifying the business, making it an easier story for the market to consume. We are still doing a couple of other things, have exposure to a few DeFi protocols and have some other tokens. We still hold some $DONT on the balance sheet, et cetera. But the idea is to, in general, simplify the business so that we are a cleaner, almost pure-play leveraged SOL exposure. Nice. Cool. Let us move on because I just know we got a lot of questions. I kind of want to do rapid fire, but we are going to talk about, or let us talk about my second favorite, or maybe it is first new favorite ticker. When my alarm rings, I promptly roll over the bed, pull out my phone, look at TradingView, and I am checking the CHAD ticker. I am looking at it right now, $9.74. The price action looks good. I will stop there. Number up, me happy. Guys, this is obviously the biggest new development, I think, since our last recap. I would assume there is probably some folks in here who understand CHAD, and what it is and why we are doing it. But for those who do not, can you guys just give a quick rundown? What is it? Why did we create it? And any kind of grander vision? Are you taking that or do you want me to? I can run with what is CHAD, and then Joseph, I think would be cool if you maybe take its strategic importance. What is CHAD? CHAD is our NASDAQ-listed variable rate cumulative preferred stock. The most directly comparable instrument, if you've been following digital credit, would be the Stretch and SATA of the world, if you will. We have a current annual dividend rate of about 13% based on a $10 par value. We pay dividends every business day, right? So 252 potential dividend payments per year. I like to say that DFDV was built to solve a leverage problem, and CHAD was built to solve an income problem. What do I mean by DFDV was built to solve a leverage problem? We've spoken about this before when talking about the structure of our business, as well as considering what DFDV offers investors in the context of alternate amplification options. If you have a bullish view on SOL like we do, and we think it's going up to $10,000, so call it more than 80x from today's levels, and you want as much exposure to that as possible. How do you amplify that view without, I don't know, a near term, call it one day unfavorable, one-week, one-month price action basically wiping you out? Frankly, the answer is before DFDV, there weren't very many good SOL amplification options. What we did was we built a business that was not only designed to accumulate as much SOL as possible as quickly as possible, but meant to withstand any of those adverse movements. For example, our July 2030 convertible notes are a very good example of what we deem to be intelligent, resilient leverage, right? Something that can actually withstand a prolonged bear market where our SOL treasury isn't going to get margin called, et cetera. If I were to characterize it as a metaphor, DFDV is like an engine or a rocket ship headed towards a destination as quickly as possible. What is CHAD, then? CHAD is like high-octane fuel. CHAD is basically the thing that is going to get us to our destination much, much faster. What I mean by CHAD solves the income problem is that today, if you look across the, I'm going to say traditional fixed income space, which is a market worth north of $160 trillion, the options available to your typical investor are just not very great. Compare this to average savings rate of, I don't know, 0.4%. The 10-year treasury offers you 5.3%. Private credit is riddled with all sorts of problems when it comes to transparency and illiquidity. CHAD basically solves all of this. It is high yield, it is a continuous stream of dividends that is paid every single business day. We feel it is structurally one of the best instruments out there, set to, I'm going to say, open up the total addressable investor base for DFDV. Again, we sort of think of it as fuel for the rocket ship, and really probably the most important development of the company over the course of the last year. That's high level characterization. Joseph, I don't know if there's anything else on CHAD you would add or things that you would like to emphasize. Yeah. Emphasize probably. You said it expands the total addressable investor base for the company. Yeah, 100%. I think that's the major strategic advantage for CHAD. With CHAD, we can issue more of it at $10, which is the idea. Issue at $10, pays 13% dividends every trading day. That appeals to a different investor base than DFDV common does. Of course, DFDV common shareholders are welcome to, and I think are likely to participate in CHAD, but we could target a different segment. That segment doesn't have to know anything about crypto. It doesn't have to know anything about Solana. A segment might just say, "Oh, 13% looks like a pretty good deal. These guys have dividend coverage for 150 years. This looks like a fairly safe investment." Those purchases of CHAD at par result in additional SOL purchases for DFDV, which accrues essentially to common shareholders because we get more exposure to SOL. We get to pass on that leveraged exposure enabled by CHAD to common shareholders. By the way. Awesome One thing I'll add is if we do end up closing at $9.75, that would imply that CHAD is pacing ahead of comparable instruments on the race to par. Love it. The memes are going to be really good. They are. The memes are going to be phenomenal. I guess on that note, real quick, there's been a number of things that we've talked about internally, too, as it relates to just marketing CHAD and how to position it. I just want to drive home the point, Joseph, you said we have this view internally that for now, and this could, of course, change, that CHAD should very much just be positioned as it is this high-yielding preferred equity by NASDAQ-listed company with more than 160 years of dividend coverage and keep the story as simple and clean like that. We've seen Strive very much follow this similar kind of model. It's done well for them. I think that's just something that I want to hammer home and also maybe use this as an opportunity to let folks know that we've pursued a number of different marketing channels for this, including radio, billboards, your traditional platform advertising. Call it LinkedIn, Reddit, kind of experimenting all across the board. We want to keep the story as clean as possible, and that's why even our funnel pages like whoischad.com, which I'm sure folks have seen from the billboard photo on our Twitter. It's just trying to keep the story as simple and clean as possible. We think that there is still a massive market opportunity just going after retail folks who want income yield. Of course, there's still a big cohort of crypto natives who I think will see CHAD and understand how it works with the crypto engineering behind it and want to ape it. I just wanted to call some attention to that. I guess also there's a number of things I want to ask on CHAD, but one real quick. This morning, we did also announce this repurchase program. Do you guys want to hit on that real quick? What was that all about? Yeah. I'm going to try to nail a couple of questions on CHAD and talk about the issuance strategy for CHAD and some of the levers that the company has available for supporting the CHAD trading to par and potentially staying there or around there. Yeah, just go crazy on it. Sure. Okay. We pay a lot of attention to Stretch. Stretch launched in July last year and then went through de-pegging, we could call it, in June or July of this year. We have seen debate quite a bit internally on causes, the difference between Stretch and SATA. We have spent a lot of time on thinking about this and how to make CHAD resilient. What we have tried to do here is issue an instrument that accomplishes the goal of allowing us to get leverage exposure to Solana without diluting common shareholders, for the benefit of, ultimately, long-term common shareholders. How that has come about or the outcome of that line of thinking was a relatively small issuance that we hope quickly trades to par. We have an ATM available on CHAD. Once CHAD trades to $10, we can issue more CHAD and sell it into the market at $10, or higher potentially. The idea would be that we issue additional CHAD shares at $10, sell them to the market, use the proceeds to buy more SOL, and then the mechanisms available for maintaining or nudging the price toward $10 is, one, is we can change the dividend up. If CHAD does not trade to 10 or it comes down from $10, we can increase the dividend. For example, we could theoretically increase the dividend from, say, 13% annually to 13.25% annually or 13.5% annually. The board makes this decision, and it can happen pretty quickly. There can be month-to-month changes in dividends, no problem. Up. There are terms on reducing the dividend. The stock has to trade above a particular price for a particular amount of time in order for the dividend to come down. For example, right now, the terms of CHAD prevent decreasing the dividend because it has not traded up to par and it has not been above the particular price level for any period of time yet. It is like a one-way ratchet when CHAD is not at par or right around par on the dividend. We have the potential to increase it a bit if it comes down. The next instrument available is what we announced, was it this morning? The buyback program. If we are not issuing CHAD, like if we are out of the market, it is below $10, then the company has the ability to buy CHAD back. Let us say what happens to Stretch happens to CHAD. CHAD trades down from $10 to $7.50, maybe because Bitcoin went down or there was some other situation, right? Then the company has the ability to buy back CHAD, which can have the effect of stabilizing the price. Also just reducing the ongoing dividend cost to the company. Or maybe we just think the issuance got too large and we are in a bull market and we say, "Okay, we think we are getting close to the top and we want to de-lever." The company has the ability to buy CHAD back. There is no intention to buy back to reach par. There is only an intention after CHAD reaches par, more of it gets issued to support the price if needed. We also see Strategy doing. They've been buying back Stretch for, I think now more than $100 million a week on average over the last at least six weeks, which I think has been effective in nudging Stretch back to par as well. Y'all think I missed anything? No, I think you hit most of it, actually. Look, I always have said that capital markets vehicles are about maximum flexibility, right? That's at the end of the day what matters most. So having any number of options available to us to support the instrument at par in the future when it matters is really the impetus behind putting this in place. It was, as I'll emphasize again, not meant to signal that repurchases are beginning on CHAD right now. The intent is to make sure it gets to par first, but making sure that we have the full arsenal available to us to support par over the course of the long term. Guys, maybe one thing I would love to quickly riff on or get your thoughts is, we have our own views internally as an issuer of digital credit and, dare I say, experts. But maybe you could quickly hit on how we view the competitive landscape and how we view CHAD being able to attract capital when there are arguably competing, we don't view it as competing, but someone might say they're competing products out there like Stretch or even Strive. How should folks be thinking about the competitive landscape? DK, you want to take a shot at that one or shall I? Yeah, I can talk about it a little bit. Look, to some extent, yes, these are competing products when you think about the investor bases that these instruments are tapping into, right? If you are going after the income investors, preferred investors, yield buyers, folks who typically index towards these I am going to say steady yield instruments, then yes, definitionally, you are trying to attract the same investor base. At the same time, there are also a subset of folks, I think who are more willing to underwrite, I am going to say in big quotation marks, the digital credit worthiness of an instrument that is backed by Bitcoin versus backed by Solana, right? Bitcoin obviously, I am going to say has more favorable outlook among institutional investors just by virtue of being better known, and Solana is just a lesser known quality. But one of the things that has resonated particularly well as we have been chatting with a lot of investors on CHAD is that when you look at the funding options available to service the dividends, by virtue of CHAD being a Solana-backed instrument, we have a funding mechanism that is not available to Stretch or SATA. Let us go through those mechanisms. Historically, Stretch and SATA have had to pay their dividends doing what? Either selling the underlying BTC on the balance sheet in order to shore up the cash or running the common equity ATM to service cash obligations. We obviously have those options available to us as well if we wanted to, but we are not beholden to those funding sources because SOL has native yield, and our organic yield has been best in class in the space. Simplistically, if you are able to service your obligations from the treasury itself being productive and earn consistent recurring economics from the assets that exist on your balance sheet, it sort of puts the instrument into a league of its own, right? In some respects, again, yes, they are competitors in that we are going after very similar investors, but mechanically, the sources of funds come from quite different places. I think Joseph had a good phrase of this pretty recently, which is to say that CHAD doesn't actually require us to consume the treasury, right? The treasury works to pay CHAD itself, and I think given the relative size of our treasury, the yields we have historically been able to generate, we obviously have ample room for CHAD to scale. Awesome. Joseph, anything you want to add on that or should we move on? No, I think that's great. Cool. Just a couple more. I know we're coming up on time. DK, maybe this one's for you. The SOL Boost Framework. That launched in a much weaker market. Actually, third quarter I think gave us the first real opportunity to watch it work in the other direction. Anything that we've learned from the last two months that have taught us about our ability to deliver amplified SOL exposure? I know you highlighted it on socials and folks can of course see it on stateofsol.com. But the common outperformed SOL quite handsomely. Anything you want to note on that front? Yeah. It's working exactly the way we intended it to. I have much more to say on it. It's funny. It's always really interesting to highlight a framework or provide a new lens of thinking about these things when the market is not acting well, right? We obviously introduced the SOL Boost Framework before SOL started running, before our common equity started running. Frankly, I think the last few months are a really good affirmation that the way we've been thinking about the structure of the business has been more or less right. So what are some proof points? I think in the SOL Boost Framework, we talk about two various sources of return to amplify SOL price return. There's obviously intelligent leverage, which we've spoken about as long duration capital, low coupon, stuff that again can withstand a prolonged bear market. CHAD is a very good example of intelligent leverage, and I expect is going to be the primary form of intelligent leverage that we lean on. But our convertible debt was really the first, let's call it first iteration of that we took on last year. Then there's SOL per share growth. Throughout various market environments, we've actually seen both of those factors kind of toggle and deliver some kind of boost, if you will, versus SOL price. So when I think about, let's say the common equity versus SOL year to date, common equity is up, SOL is still down a little bit, right? Again, I think that speaks to the element of SOL per share growth offsetting what you would expect to be a natural amplification on the way down. But we've actually gotten a little bit of a cushion by raising the NAV floor of the business, if you will. When you look off of the lows, we've outperformed SOL off of the lows. In Q3, we delivered 1.5x SOL's return roughly. The common was up 83% versus SOL 57% in Q3. August was really like if you isolate just August's performance, I think we delivered nearly 3x SOL's price return. SOL was up somewhere around 38% and the DFDV common was up over 100%. Again, you can chop this up any number of ways, but again, it speaks to this very simple idea that if you have conviction in this asset the way that we do, how do you structure your business so that you create amplification of that asset, amplification of that return? Again, one year is maybe just a little bit of a taste of what's to come and certainly one quarter as well. But we think structurally we're going to try to do whatever it is that we can do to create more amplification going forward. Excellent. Last one here. What do we think, I'd love to hear from both of you guys, and maybe it's the same answer, but what do you think is the biggest growth opportunity for DFDV going forward? CHAD. Yep, 100%. Let's get it to par. We put the $300 million ATM on it. It'll only run at $10, or I think I have to say right around $10. That's going to give us more leverage, give us more SOL Boost. Yeah, it's the biggest opportunity we've got. It's our number one focus. So far, I know it's early and it's small, but it looks like it's working. The memes will continue until par is reached, and even once par is reached, the memes will continue. Everyone has that to look forward to. I will add one thing to this. I am going to give credit to Matt Cole over at Strive for this framing, but it is something I have thought about for quite some time, which is that I think a lot of folks focus a lot on protecting downside risk and do not spend a lot of time focusing on maximizing total returns to the upside. I actually encountered this dynamic a lot on the buy side, where I was lucky, at least for the time that I was on there, to work for a portfolio manager who was not afraid to take very concentrated positions and really swing for the fences. His whole philosophy was like, if you are investing in tech the way we were, tech typically outperforms most sectors of the market, and you might as well try to go for as many wins as possible and go for a 30% year, a 40% year, a 50% year, whatever it is. Traditionally on Wall Street, you are taught to manage risk. You are taught that a steady 5% here, a steady 6% here is really the best way to go about it. Again, that can be a great business model. I do not want to diminish the idea that small wins can really compound and build up over the course of the long term. I think we have certainly demonstrated that in our near-term execution. Despite being, I am going to say, focused on as many base hits as possible in the near term, the goal is not a single base hit over the long term. The goal is we have this asset that sits on our balance sheet that we think is going to go up 80x. How do we focus on maximizing the total returns of that asset? How do we focus on amplifying this as much as possible? Frankly, our focus every single day, our whole purpose for waking up and working at DFDV is to structure the business to amplify to the maximum extent possible. I think it is absolutely crucial that we work to get this right over the course of the next year, two years, five years. We have seen some, again, really encouraging early proof points, but CHAD is going to be absolutely crucial to this vision. Great. Thanks for that last little bit there. Guys, we can call it a wrap. Before just concluding remarks, I want to take a second to maybe acknowledge or point out the fact, maybe folks have forgotten, that we are actually four days out from 10/10, where, of course, we saw the biggest crypto liquidation in history, and that kicked off what has been roughly a one-year-long bear market. I think, needless to say, the vibes are starting to feel good. We're feeling really optimistic. I've personally never have felt like there's been a better time to be at DFDV, and super excited for what's coming, and I think I speak for everyone when I say that as well. With that said, thanks everyone for coming on in. Also thanks to those who submitted your questions. DK, Joseph, thank you guys both for attending. Any final remarks? Yeah. Thank you for sticking with us, for everybody who's on here and listening. I really appreciate it. Of course, it's been a tough year or a little over a year. But we're optimistic and appreciate you all sticking around. Yeah. Well said. Cool. Let's wrap. Thanks, everyone. If you have questions, comments, concerns, please don't hesitate to reach out to us. As always, any and all constructive criticism is welcome. With that said, let's close out here. In service of SOL per share growth, this is-