Pantera’s Santori Hails DeFi-Driven Solana Strategy as Superior to ETFs

Pantera Capital general partner Marco Santori says DeFi Development Corp’s approach to Solana offers a more dynamic alternative to traditional ETFs —one that taps into on-chain activity, like DeFi and yield farming, rather than just passive price exposure.

Speaking during an X Space hosted by The Block on May 21, Santori said the company’s shift earlier this year, from real estate software to Solana accumulation, was designed from the outset to offer more than passive exposure.

Santori said:

The plan in the beginning was that this was going to be a much better way to stack solana than an ETF for a whole number of reasons, one of which is that we can do things like getting involved in DeFi.

Marco Santori, Pantera Capital

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Solana Staking & DeFi 

Pantera is an investor in DeFi Development Corp, and Santori sits on the company’s board. Pantera currently holds 400,091 SOL, after buying US$9.6M (AU$14.6M) worth of tokens in April.

One of the things that sets Pantera apart from regular ETF investment approaches is the self-staking capability. Most ETFs today are not allowed to stake tokens in the US.

Staking is the first strategy, and it’s something that ETFs can’t even do today. DeFi Dev Corp can also, because it’s an operating company and not just a fund, actually be a liquidity provider into DeFi, so they can participate in liquidity pools. They can do things that a simple, passive fund can’t.

Marco Santori, Pantera Capital

This comes at a time when Solana is going through important changes. A few days ago, Crypto News Australia reported on the recent Alpenglow upgrade, a proposal that may overhaul how Solana processes transactions on its network.

According to Roger Wattenhofer, Head of Research at Anza, this upgrade could be a “turning point” for Solana by reducing the block finalisation to roughly 150 milliseconds.

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Regarding price, SOL is looking pretty nice, currently trading at US$179.05 (AU$279), an increase of 4.6% on the daily scale, and 21.6% in the last 30 days. The SOL price increase aligns with the recent crypto rally led by none other than Bitcoin (BTC), which recently broke new records after reaching US$109,767 (AU$170,528).