Let's get some facts. 37% of you aren't subscribed to this channel. That's almost four out of 10, just freeloading the alpha. So, come on, hit subscribe, and I promise to keep leveling up the show with the best guests and the juiciest insight. Go on, do it now.
Hi everyone. Here we are at day two of the Solana Breakpoint Conference in Abu Dhabi and we are joined by Kyle Samani, founder and managing partner of Multicoin Capital and chairman of Forward Industries. Kyle, thank you for joining us. How are you doing today?
Good, thanks for having me on the show. Pleasure to be here in this epic little square glass box in the middle of the show floor at Breakpoint.
Absolutely. We're on day two of course at Breakpoint. Just wanted to get your overall feeling on how the conference is going. Obviously, you feel the excitement in the air. The energy is contagious. What's your take on day two so far?
Yeah. You know, I kind of scrolled through the announcements from yesterday and I followed stuff this morning. You know, what I feel like my kind of thing I'm seeing here is that Solana is an integrated blockchain and everything works. And so like yesterday, State Street announced they were bringing a tokenized money market fund onto Solana, but they announced it in partnership with Coinbase and with Galaxy and I think they're going to do some stuff with some of the big payments companies and Circle and that's kind of exactly what I want to see. You know, like Solana, the whole point of it is that it's a one integrated system that can support all of payments and finance. And what we see here at Breakpoint is it's 6,300 people. It's the largest event in crypto ever. And you've got all of these different groups, whether you're a memecoin trader or a DePIN team or a Wall Street asset issuer or a payments company or a CeFi exchange like Coinbase and all of these people can work together on top of a single piece of shared global infrastructure. And that wasn't possible before. When you look at Ethereum, you see all of this segmentation into like well this chain is for payments and this chain is for DeFi and whatever. And here we get to just make all of money and finance work together as one cohesive whole.
Yeah. And then just as a user in general, I think that really kind of simplifies things, you know, kind of being able to essentially live your financial life in one ecosystem and, you know, not having that segmentation that you were referencing. So, kind of big picture. I know you kind of touched on it a little bit, but what are your expectations for this industry in 2026 and beyond?
Yeah, I mean I think in '26 the big thing we're going to see is going to be payments companies integrating stablecoins and rolling them out on Solana. Obviously Western Union is doing a big roll out in Q1. Cash App, you know, they just announced they're integrating Solana for USD payments for 67 million customers. Ferve and World Pay and Visa and all the merchant acquirer type of people are all ramping up right now their use of stablecoins all on Solana. And so I think when we look back at the end of '26 that I think that's going to be the thing that's like it's all happening quietly because they're all doing it in the background but I think like that might lead an incremental 50 or 100 million new wallets on mainnet next year.
Oh man. So we've seen, you know, it's not just here, right? But, you know, we've seen this building up. A lot of people are excited about Solana. They love using Solana. See it in the conversation a lot on crypto Twitter, and just everywhere really. What do you think it is that makes people so excited to, you know, engage with the Solana ecosystem and just kind of, you know, be building on Solana in general?
Yeah. I mean, it's like once you use Solana, you realize very quickly this is what finance should be. And what I mean by that is it should be next to free to use. It should be super fast. It should work even when the markets are volatile. You shouldn't get ADL and have your positions closed out. You should have access to the most number of assets that are available. And then now we have all of this leading intellectual capital building these perp AMMs, building these DePIN things, like all of that leading edge innovation is happening here. And I think that kind of both the user experience side which is like very clear you use Phantom or Solflare, Backpack or Fuse it's super clear and then on the developer side looking at like the quality of the intellectual capital, like it is the leading ecosystem today on both fronts and I think the people who come to Breakpoint kind of really viscerally understand that.
Yeah. So you touched on this as well. You know Solana has DePIN going for it like obviously DeFi, payments, stablecoins. So many things going on in Solana. They're having success as well on so many fronts. What do you see or what do you think has been maybe the most successful part of that and what would you like to maybe see be improved upon going forward?
Yeah, I mean look, we kind of helped create the DePIN category with our investment in Helium in 2019. So, it's been 6 years. And I'd say it's been a little slower than we would have liked. But I do think a number of the major DePIN teams are really turning a corner right now, in particular in our portfolio. You know, I'm most familiar with Helium, Hivemapper, and Geonet. And all three of them right now I think are kind of on the cusp of that where the exponential curve really turns upwards. And so I think that will be a major story of '26. With most of these DePIN things, you know, the incubation period takes a while. It's not like launching a DeFi protocol. You got to build up the network, you got to call the customers and ramp up the demand. But like all three of those teams now I think they've kind of completed the incubation phase and are now in the ramp up phase and I'm pretty excited for those guys.
Yeah. Now, another narrative that you know we and I have talked about in the past has been digital asset treasuries, right? And you have a very unique position in that you're chairman of Forward, the largest treasury on Solana, right? Can you talk to me about let's talk a little bit about this because I've seen a lot of criticism on DATs, right? It feels like people have a little bit maybe soured on the trade and they're worried about companies kind of selling those crypto assets, right? Can you what's your take on that and people that might be like worried about that narrative?
I mean look, I can't speak about other DATs and what their plans are. I assume they have plans. They may not have plans, but I can't speak for them. I can speak for myself and for Forward, so I'll do that. You know, launching Forward Industries has been a lot of brain damage for me just in terms of time. And like I didn't launch Forward Industries so that I could be like, 'Oh, the MNAV is 1.2 and like I can sell some shares and make some money.' I already own a ton of Solana. I've owned Solana since literally you could own Solana. I led the seed round. I'm not doing this much brain damage to myself so I can incrementally get a few more Solana tokens. That's like not worth my energy. What's worth my energy is having this publicly traded vehicle. We're the largest Solana DAT in the world by a factor of about four and we can use this to buy companies, operating businesses and do interesting things on top of Solana with those companies. We haven't done any deals yet and obviously I can't talk about deals that are in pipeline but what I can say is I think the most interesting opportunities available are going to be deals where we buy a company that today is either tangential to crypto or even not in crypto at all but where we can insert crypto as kind of a foundational element of that consumer-facing product and then really change the economics of that business in a very interesting way. And so we're now spending a bunch of cycles looking at a bunch of deals to that effect. I hope we can get some of those across the finish line and then share those with shareholders. In the long run, I think Forward Industries is going to look something more like Bending Spoons. Or if you're not familiar with Bending Spoons, the more classic example would be Berkshire. I think the difference between us and Berkshire is Berkshire is kind of a value shop. And we're going to be a growth shop. And you know that we want to offer investors a vehicle they can get access to. They'll get some SOL exposure obviously, but then you know our ability to identify interesting companies, buy them at attractive prices and hopefully accelerate growth by instituting crypto in very interesting ways.
Right. Now, speaking of growth, we're in a region that is just, you know, seeing massive growth and that's really really embraced kind of this industry that we're in and leading it in some ways and often in our conversations I found that we're very US focused right on it, but there's so many different parts of the world that are like developing this space. Why should we be bullish on the Middle East and regions like this?
