DAT longevity focuses on avoiding the ‘mNAV roller coaster’: Solmate CEO

The rise of digital asset treasury (DAT) companies will go down as a meta-narrative in 2025, but the longevity of the activity will depend on capital management and sound business strategies.

According to Solmet CEO Marco Santori, all DATs have to contend with the value of the underlying token they hold on their balance sheets. This shouldn't be a problem for revenue-generating businesses, but pure-play DATs are in for a rough ride.

The Solana DAT space is probably the most competitive out there (besides Bitcoin 😏).

But what sets them apart? Amount of $SOL you hold? mNAV? Are you sold on winning? Different business? @msantoriESQ gave one of the best explanations I've heard from @Solmate – “I don't want to… pic.twitter.com/7bMCr46d78

— Gareth Jenkinson (@gazza_jenks) December 9, 2025

“Multiple-to-net-asset-value (MNAV) is how many of these treasury companies survive. If they're trading at a high MNAV, that means their market capitalization is greater than the value of the coins on their balance sheet, then they can sell shares in a cryptographic way,” Santori said on Cointelegraph's Chain Reaction X show.

“Every dollar of stock that they sell, they take that and buy the bottom coin and that increases their net asset value. As long as they hold the premium, they can continue to do that. And that's a pure play treasury model. I think that really has a future.”

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But the issue is that when the demand for the DAT base token decreases, the mNAV decreases. Suntory explained that falling token prices will result in lower MNAVs.

“This means that many treasury companies are idle because they cannot grow effectively and efficiently. I don't want to be subject to that. I don't want it for our investors. I want them to be exposed to the growth of SOL and the Solana network, but I don't want them to ride the mNAV roller coaster,” Santori said.

Validator DAT strategy

Solmate is among the major Solana-based DATs that have attracted significant capital by 2025. Santori, who first helped set up Defy Development Fund Solana (SOL) DAT, learned from the “pure play” approach before leading the ship as CEO of Solmet.

The latter are engaged in providing services based on the bare-metal server business model. A bare-metal server is a single-tenant, physical server that provides direct access to hardware. Unlike virtual servers, where resources are shared, a bare metal server is completely dedicated to a single user, making it ideal for high-performance computing.

Suntory's proof-of-stake protocols like Ethereum and Solana allow businesses to not only hold tokens, but also actively participate in governance:

“You have to have hardware to do that. You have to have bare metal. You have to be able to provide additional services on top of your own verifier. That's why we believe it's a virtuous cycle. We call it infrastructure planes.”

In the Solana ecosystem, Suntory saw a unique opportunity to provide bare-metal authentication services, a protocol specifically designed for high-yield services such as exchanges and trading platforms.

“Hedge funds pay top dollar for access to an order exchange, access to a low-latency, high-performance exchange, so they can get their orders in earlier than other traders, and they do so with more information about the market. They do this by looking together and providing high-performance hardware,” Santori said.

Related: Solmate looks beyond SOL treasury model with RockawayX acquisition

Solmet's CEO stated that they aim to build the infrastructure that enables that by using bare metal servers, providing shared space, and installing high-volume SOL validators.

“This allows us to be selected as the leader in each epoch, which means we can confirm more transactions, which means we can order more transactions in each unique block. The money we get from these services, we can immediately farm to buy SL.”

Soulmate announced acquisition of RockawayX operations in December 2025. This includes the validation infrastructure and the onchain liquidity business, as well as venture and loan funds. The merger creates a combined entity with more than $2 billion in assets under management.