Western Union, Visa, PayPal, Meta: Why Major Payments Giants Are Racing to Solana

**Kyle Samani** (0:00)
Bear markets are actually where winners are born, and in a bear market like this, with a company like this, you need to have a strong balance sheet, you need to cut costs, and you need to figure out ways to optimize revenue.

**Scott** (0:14)
All right, so you guys at Forward had a big announcement this morning, and I think it speaks to the direction I think the treasury companies may need to go in right now, so maybe you could just break down what happened and what you announced.

**Kyle Samani** (0:25)
Yeah, thanks for having me here, Scott. Thank you everyone for being here this morning. Consensus on Tuesday.
So this morning, Forward announced our first major deal since doing our data transaction about six months ago. Forward is investing in a company called Henri. Henri is a reinsurance company. I think they manage 150 million or so, 150 million of assets, the political reinsurance. It's issued as an RWA on-chain on Solana. You could buy it today.
It yields 12 or 13 percent. So the deal Forward did is Forward acquired a pretty substantial minority stake in Henri, the parent company, and then also committed pretty substantial capital into Henri's fund, which is yielding 12, 13 percent. The really cool part about this transaction for Forward is that we also announced a dead vehicle with Galaxy where we can get access to cost of capital of roughly three and a half percent. So we can actually earn that spread of call it three and a half to 12, 13
I'm particularly excited about this because when we first announced Forward, I was doing the first round of press tours around that. I said explicitly, there's a lot of cost of capital arbitrages to be had, bridging TradFi and crypto, and also crypto and TradFi, there's arbors of both directions. So we're now capitalizing on that for our shareholders, and as a result, can deliver real strong outperformance for them.

**Scott** (1:45)
Yeah. I think a lot of the question marks around treasury companies early were, what were they going to do beyond just buy assets and hold and wait? It seems like there's a trend now, and you, as you said, announced it from the very beginning that this was your intention, but to either buy cash flowing businesses or find ways to actually put the assets to work. Do you think that that's going to be the next iteration of treasury companies in general?

**Kyle Samani** (2:09)
Yeah. Look, we launched this thing at basically the top more or less.
We're grateful we got off the ground. The reality right now is like there's a lot of apathy in the market.
We have the good fortune of all of us have been through apathy in crypto before, myself, Ryan, Mark, Georgia, the executive team, Garrison, and everyone. So we all know that bear markets are actually where winners are born, and in a bear market like this, with a company like this, you need to have a strong balance sheet. You need to cut costs, you need to figure out ways to optimize revenue. We're doing all that stuff now to put ourselves in a position that when excitement comes back, that we're going to really emerge as the strongest winner there.

**Scott** (2:44)
It feels like all it would take for excitement to come back is just prices going up 50 percent.

**Kyle Samani** (2:49)
I mean, that solves a lot of problems.

**Scott** (2:51)
It's unbelievable. It's really driven by sentiment more than fundamentals still, I think.

**Kyle Samani** (2:56)
I mean, if Bitcoin goes across 100K, I'm guessing you're in raging bull market territory at that point.

**Scott** (3:02)
Yeah. So you've got Solana shoes on.

**Kyle Samani** (3:05)
I do.

**Scott** (3:05)
Which are pretty awesome. I'm jealous.
I don't have Solana shoes. But so obviously, your focus continues to be on Solana. So there's been a few announcements, I think, of late that have been really pretty powerful. Western Union launching their stablecoin on Solana, saw that Meta is testing creator payments on Solana and Polygon with stablecoins. So clearly, there's a race right now by chains to sort of draw the attention of institutions and be the place where people are building. So maybe set the table for what's happening on Solana right now from the RWA and tokenization side.

**Kyle Samani** (3:40)
Yeah, so I think broadly about kind of RWA is in two major buckets, two or three. One, it's kind of like the Wall Street side of the world, and there's some sub-components there, equities, fun products like the honoree product that I just talked about. And then the other side is like kind of stable coins, payment slams.