Shares For Cathie Wood-Backed Solmate Infrastructure Soar 30% On M&A Plans And SOL Buys

The Cathie Wood-backed Solana treasury firm Solmate Infrastructure saw its prices surge over 30% after the company announced its plans for an aggressive mergers and acquisitions (M&A) strategy and confirmed additional SOL buys at discounted prices.

That’s as institutional adoption for Solana continues to grow, with Fidelity also recently rolling out Solana trading access for both retail and institutional clients. 

Solmate Infrastructure (SLMT), which rebranded from Brera Holdings, saw its share price reach an intraday high of $13 in the latest trading session.

SLMT share price (Source: Google Finance)

It then retraced to close the trading day off at $11.41, marking a 36.65% gain for the day. However, there has been some pre-market selling activity that has pushed the stock’s share price down more than 13%. 

The price of Solana also rose more than 1% in the past 24 hours, according to CoinMarketCap data. 

Solmate Infrastructure To Launch UAE’s First “Performant Solana Validator”

The Nasdaq-listed firm announced that it has completed the assembly of its first validator hardware in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and is gearing up to launch the region’s first “performant Solana validator.” This validator is part of the company’s plan to integrate real infrastructure with its growing SOL treasury. 

Solmate Infrastructure also said in a recent press release that it has purchased SOL tokens “at a historic discount to market prices” to support its validator operations. The company left out details about the size of this purchase, but did confirm a $50 million acquisition of SOL tokens at a 15% discount earlier this month. 

Those tokens were bought around the same time the crypto market suffered a record liquidation on Oct. 10. 

Aggressive M&A Strategy Unveiled

In the press release, Solmate Infrastructure also said it will pursue “an aggressive M&A strategy, exploring opportunities across the Solana value chain.”

“Acquisition targets will be selected with rigorous criteria designed to ensure synergy and supercharge SOL-per-share growth,” the company added. 

With regards to what type of companies Solmate Infrastructure will be looking to acquire or merge with, the company’s CEO Marco Santori said that they are not not interested “in simply bolting on smaller companies to generate revenue.” 

“We are targeting businesses for which our SOL treasury will be fuel for their engine of growth – just like it is for ours – and will use that growth to accrete more SOL-per-share for Solmate investors,” the CEO said. 

The upcoming validator launch, token purchases, and M&A strategy come after asset manager Ark Invest disclosed that it holds an 11.5% ownership stake in Solmate Infrastructure. 

Fidelity Gives Clients Access To SOL Trading

Solmate Infrastructure’s moves in the Solana ecosystem is part of a broader trend of institutions adopting SOL and its underlying blockchain.

Among those firms is Fidelity, who added SOL trading to its suite of crypto products. As such, institutional and retail investors can now trade the altcoin.

The firm said that it will add SOL trading to its Fidelity Crypto, Fidelity Crypto for IRAs, Fidelity Crypto for Wealth Managers and Fidelity Digital Assets platforms. 

Nick Ducoff, who is the head of institutional growth at the Solana Foundation, confirmed the news on X.

On Thursday, Fidelity posted an explainer that described the Solana blockchain as a network that processes around 60,000 transactions per minute on average. This is far more than the estimated 250 per minute for Bitcoin and the 800 for Ethereum.

The company also highlighted Solana’s low fees, which come in at just a fraction of a cent. 

20 Firms Control $3.9 Billion In SOL

Other firms have also bought into SOL. Data from Strategic SOL Reserve shows that there are currently twenty companies that hold the crypto as part of a strategic reserve. 

Together, those companies hold 20.312 million SOL tokens, which is around 3.53% of the crypto’s total supply. At current prices, the combined holdings equate to around $3.9 billion. 

Forward Industries leads the institutional holdings with 6.82 million SOL. Solana Company is the next-biggest SOL treasury with around 2.2 million tokens, while DeFi Development Corp comes in at third with its holdings of 2.196 million SOL.