SkyAI: The Solana Treasury Company That Sold 70% of Its SOL in a Month to Buy Back Its Own Shares
SkyAI raised $400M in 2025 to buy and hold Solana. By October 2026 it had sold about 70% of its coins and offered $201M to buy back its own shares.
Key numbers
~1.4M
SOL sold in a month
$201M
Buyback offer
54%
Loss on 2026 H1 sales
~600,000
SOL left (13 Oct)
On the evening of Sunday 11 October 2026, SkyAI, a small company listed on the Nasdaq stock market in New York, put out a press release that undid most of what it had been set up to do. It said it had "recently sold approximately 1M Solana tokens, representing approximately 50% of its Solana holdings". The money, with cash it already had, would pay for an offer to buy back up to 95 per cent of its own shares and warrants at $3.00 each. The maximum bill was about $201 million.
Fourteen months earlier the same company had raised more than $400 million to buy SOL, the coin of the Solana blockchain, and keep it. On 14 September 2026 it said it still held more than 2 million SOL, worth about $207 million. Then, in a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on 13 October, the figure was about 600,000. Bastion Trading, which owns about 9.99 per cent of the company, worked out that roughly 70 per cent of the coins had gone in less than a month, and demanded to know when, at what price and on whose authority they were sold.
From syringes to Solana
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Until 2025 the company was Sharps Technology, a medical device business in Melville, New York, that developed syringes and drug delivery systems. Paul K. Danner became its executive chairman in June 2025. On 25 August 2025 it announced a private placement, a sale of new shares directly to selected investors rather than on the open market, of more than $400 million at $6.50 per unit. Each unit was a share plus a warrant, a right to buy another share later at a fixed price, in this case $9.75 for three years. The buyers included ParaFi Capital, Pantera Capital, FalconX, RockawayX and Bastion Trading itself. The deal closed on 28 August.
Sharps shares closed up more than 40 per cent at $10.35 that day, according to Decrypt. Alice Zhang, co-founder of the investment firm Avalon Capital and of the web3 phone maker Jambo, joined as chief investment officer and director. "Global adoption of Solana's ecosystem is accelerating," she said.
Solana is a blockchain, a shared public ledger that runs code that moves money by itself. SOL, its currency, was trading near $190, below a January 2025 peak of about $293.
A fund that is not a fund
A treasury company is a listed company whose main asset is a cryptocurrency. A share trader already knows the shape of it: it behaves like a closed-end fund, a fund whose shares trade on an exchange and can be worth more or less than the assets inside. The crypto industry calls that ratio mNAV: the company's market value divided by the value of its coins, its net asset value. Above 1, investors pay a premium, and the company can sell new shares to buy more coins. Below 1, every new share sold destroys value for the old shareholders.
SkyAI staked nearly all its coins, lending the coins to help run the Solana network in return for new coins, much like interest on a deposit. In the second quarter of 2026 that brought in $2.3 million of net staking revenue, a gross yield of about 6 per cent a year.
The yield could not cover the price. According to its quarterly report, as summarised by CryptoSlate, SkyAI's coins had cost an average of $200.79 each. SOL fell to about $77 by early August 2026. The carrying value of its digital assets dropped from $250.11 million at the end of 2025 to $144.28 million on 30 June 2026. In the first half of 2026 it sold 135,399 SOL for $12.47 million, an average of $92.09 each, a loss of $14.72 million on what they had cost. CryptoSlate called it a 54 per cent loss. Running costs were $10.22 million in six months, including $5 million in consulting fees to related parties. The old syringe line, Sologard, brought in $192,780.
In May 2026 the company renamed itself SkyAI and announced a plan to become an "agentic finance" platform for the Global South: artificial intelligence plus stablecoins, digital dollars that live on a blockchain, for people with little access to banks in Asia, Latin America and Africa.
The takeover fight
The biggest Solana treasury company is Forward Industries, chaired by Kyle Samani, a co-founder of the crypto investment firm Multicoin Capital. In September it held 7,013,536 SOL, worth more than $722 million. On 15 June 2026 it offered to buy SkyAI for 0.367 Forward shares per SkyAI share, about $1.55, a 20 per cent premium to SkyAI's close of $1.29. According to Forward, SkyAI's board rejected it in July.
On 3 September Bastion Trading and related holders, reporting their stake through Wei Zhu, filed a Schedule 13D, the form an investor with more than 5 per cent of a company must file when it plans to influence how the company is run. They said they would vote "WITHHOLD ALL" on the five directors. They objected to bylaw changes, to a poison pill (a plan that floods the market with cheap new shares if any outsider buys more than a set stake) adopted without a shareholder vote, and to payments to Sol Edge Limited and Sol Markets. According to the filing, both companies are owned by James Zhang, brother of Alice Zhang. Forward's open letter of 9 September said the same.
On 15 September Forward raised its offer: 0.306 Forward shares per SkyAI share, worth about $2.13, a 50 per cent premium to SkyAI's $1.42 close the day before, with a cash option. "SkyAI's stockholders have waited long enough," said Ryan Navi, Forward's chief investment officer.
At the annual meeting on 18 September, shareholders withheld between 67 and 75 per cent of the votes cast from each director. All five kept their seats. Under plurality voting in an uncontested election, a withheld vote does not count against a candidate, as Forward had warned in advance. Shareholders did reject a new share plan for staff, 22,464,708 votes to 5,048,520. The board said the results "reflect significant concerns among our shareholders."
Selling the coins to buy the shares
The 11 October release explained the sale. SkyAI's board rejected Forward's latest proposal, which it said "undervalued SkyAI and provided no certainty over timing or value". Instead it offered a tender offer: a public offer to buy shares from any holder who wants to sell, at a fixed price, for a limited time. The $3.00 price was a 65 per cent premium to the close on 9 October, which puts that close at about $1.82. It covered about 46.37 million shares and 20.72 million warrants, and was expected to start on or about 15 October and run for 10 business days. It would only go ahead if at least half of each class of securities was tendered and if SOL closed above $100 every day it was open.
The logic is the closed-end fund playbook. Bastion put SkyAI's net asset value at about $3.30 a share with SOL at $110. At $1.82 the market was paying roughly 55 cents for every dollar the company owned. Buying shares back below their asset value raises the value behind each share that stays. Bought back at 95 per cent, though, there is little left of the treasury company that was sold to investors in 2025.
The selling showed up on the blockchain before the announcement. On 10 October the tracking account Lookonchain reported 568,000 SOL, about $63.9 million, moving from SkyAI-linked wallets to exchanges over three days. On 12 October the analyst EmberCN reported another 211,623 SOL sent to Coinbase Prime, Coinbase's brokerage for institutions. A transfer is not proof of a sale, and SkyAI gave no dates, prices or proceeds.
Then came the 13 October filing with about 600,000 SOL left, some 400,000 fewer than SkyAI had described two days earlier. In a letter released on 14 October, Bastion called the sales a "fundamental departure" from the company's treasury strategy. It asked for the dates, amounts, prices, fees and approvals of every sale, an independent review, new independent directors, and a price of at least $3.50. It wanted the strategic advisor warrants held by Sol Markets kept out of the offer. It said it would not tender at $3 and was "prepared to pursue all available legal remedies."
The aftermath
As of 15 October 2026 the tender offer had not formally begun. The release itself said the offer "has not yet commenced and may not commence", and the definitive offer documents had not appeared on the SEC's filing system by 14 October. The shares jumped about 25 per cent before the market opened on 12 October, to about $2.26, and closed at $2.55 on 14 October, still below the $3.00 on offer.
Nobody outside the company knows exactly what the October sales fetched. SOL traded between about $104 and $111 in those days. On those prices, the roughly 1.4 million coins that left the treasury between mid-September and 13 October would have raised around $150 million, against roughly $280 million they cost at SkyAI's average price of $200.79. That is a CMZ estimate, not a company figure, and the remaining balance raises its own question. On 30 June about 509,650 of SkyAI's coins were locked, unable to be sold until dates running to the end of 2028. If those coins are among the 600,000 left, almost all of the sellable SOL is gone. Bastion has asked for exactly that split.
SkyAI is not alone. Forward Industries, still the largest holder, kept buying SOL in 2026 and kept bidding for weaker rivals. Upexi, another Solana treasury, reported a $109.3 million quarterly loss in May, mostly the fall in the value of its coins. Strategy, the bitcoin company that invented the model, began selling bitcoin in mid-2026 as its own premium disappeared.
The idea that died is the one SkyAI was sold on: that a listed company could hold a cryptocurrency, earn a yield on it, and be worth more than the coins. At SkyAI the market valued the company at about half its assets, the coins were bought near the top, and the cheapest way to give shareholders their money back turned out to be selling the coins and buying the shares.
What this teaches
- A treasury company is a closed-end fund in all but name. Its shares can trade far below the coins it owns, and for long periods.
- Buying a volatile coin near its high with money raised from new shares leaves no margin. SkyAI paid an average of $200.79 a SOL and was selling below $100 within a year.
- Staking income of about 6% a year does not offset a coin falling by half.
- Plurality voting means directors can lose three quarters of the vote and keep their seats.
- When a company sells most of its main asset, shareholders need the dates, prices and approvals. SkyAI's figures moved from 2 million to 1 million to 600,000 SOL in a month.
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