Janover Inc. set to receive some of Kraken’s staked SOL
Publicly-listed Janover announced last week that a group of ex-Kraken employees had acquired a majority stake in the company
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Kraken has signed a non-binding letter of intent to delegate some of its current and future staked Solana tokens to validators operated by Janover Inc., the real estate company turned Solana treasury play told Lightspeed exclusively.
Publicly-listed Janover, which intends to change its name to DeFi Development Corporation, announced last week that a group of ex-Kraken employees had acquired a majority stake in the company and raised $42 million via convertible bonds from a group of firms including Kraken.
With this LOI, Kraken appears to be doubling down on its Janover backing — although details on the deal, such as how much Kraken stake Janover will oversee, are still scant. Interestingly, Janover does not yet own a validator operation, so Kraken is essentially pledging its stake to validators Janover intends to operate.
Janover chief investment officer and chief operating officer Parker White did note that Kraken would receive more Janover stock consideration as part of the deal.
The new Janover team — which includes Joseph Onorati as CEO alongside White in the C-suite — acquired the company founder’s shares for about $4 million, per SEC filings. It then managed to raise $42 million in debt and has already snapped up around $21 million in Solana.
The Janover debt is converted when the company reaches $100 million in market capitalization, so investors appear to be valuing the company at a far higher level than what the new owners paid to acquire it. JNVR stock is up over 1,700% since right before the company’s new ownership was announced.
The company’s real estate business is still operational, but the value appears to be coming from the treasury. In an interview, Janover executives pitched the company as a sort of better investment vehicle for Solana compared to ETFs — and a spiritual successor to Michael Saylor’s bitcoin treasury strategy.
“A lot of people said, ‘The [bitcoin] ETFs are going to kill MicroStrategy. Actually the exact opposite happened,’” White said, later adding: “I think in 10, 20 years people are going to look back and be like, ‘Of course the ETF is not the best way to hold digital assets, especially yield bearing digital assets.’”
White argued that potential staked Solana ETFs would not be able to stake their entire balance due to liquidity demands, and ETF issuers cannot run their own validators, so they have to pay extra fees. Janover isn’t the first company to make this bet: Canadian holding company Sol Strategies has also been likened to MicroStrategy on Solana.
Since solana tends to be more volatile than bitcoin, and much of Strategy’s business model revolves around bitcoin volatility, White argued that Janover could play the convertible debt strategy even more successfully.
Either way, Kraken appears all-in on its former employees’ Solana venture. Onorati was previously chief strategy officer at the exchange.
“I messaged [Kraken co-founder Jesse Powell] about this, and his first response was something like, ‘Hell yes, where do I send the check?’” Onorati said.
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