Solana Company Launches Natively Staked SOL Borrowing Framework for Institutional Markets

Solana Company (NASDAQ: HSDT), in partnership with Anchorage Digital and Kamino, introduced a groundbreaking institutional finance infrastructure that enables natively staked SOL to serve as collateral for on-chain borrowing. Announced in February 2026, this deployment represents a significant milestone in bridging regulated custody with decentralized finance, addressing a critical gap for enterprise-level investors seeking both yield generation and capital efficiency.

The innovation centers on a fundamental challenge institutional investors have faced: how to earn staking rewards on digital assets while simultaneously accessing on-chain liquidity without sacrificing regulatory compliance or operational oversight. This new structure delivers exactly that capability through a tri-party framework involving the three organizations.

The Institutional Investment Problem and Its Solution

Institutional portfolios have long faced a dilemma when holding productive digital assets like SOL. Investors want access to the highest-yielding opportunities, but traditional custody solutions locked assets away from productive deployment. The natively staked SOL borrowing model solves this by enabling institutions to maintain their assets within a qualified custodian’s segregated account while leveraging them for protocol-native credit operations.

As Cosmo Jiang, General Partner at Pantera Capital Management and board member of Solana Company, explained the strategic importance: “This structure demonstrates how institutional-grade infrastructure can unlock deeper participation on Solana. It’s a strong example of how regulated custody and on-chain borrowing and lending can work together within the Solana ecosystem. This scalable model is the blueprint other treasury companies will follow and institutional investors will demand.”

How the Tri-Party Custody Architecture Works

The operational framework involves three key components: Solana Company manages the overall treasury strategy, Anchorage Digital provides collateral management and custodian services through its Atlas platform, and Kamino operates the lending market where institutions access credit.

Anchorage Digital’s role centers on maintaining institutional-grade asset custody while simultaneously enabling natively staked SOL to function as productive collateral. Assets remain segregated in the borrower’s account at Anchorage Digital Bank—a federally regulated qualified custodian—yet their economic value is tracked within Kamino’s lending protocol. This dual-track system ensures that institutions maintain custody comfort while capturing on-chain yield opportunities.

Nathan McCauley, CEO and Co-Founder of Anchorage Digital, articulated the compliance perspective: “Institutions want access to the most efficient sources of on-chain liquidity, but they aren’t willing to compromise on custody, compliance, or operational control. Atlas collateral management allows institutions to keep natively staked SOL held with a qualified custodian while using it productively, bringing institutional-grade risk management to Solana’s lending markets.”

Automated Risk Management Operating Around the Clock

The Atlas collateral management system provides 24/7 automated oversight of critical risk metrics. The platform continuously monitors loan-to-value ratios, orchestrates collateral and margin movements in real-time, and executes rules-based liquidations when necessary. This automation delivers familiar risk management workflows while enabling direct protocol participation—combining the best of both institutional and DeFi worlds.

Cheryl Chan, Head of Strategy at Kamino, described the collaboration’s market implications: “This collaboration unlocks meaningful institutional demand to borrow against assets held in qualified custody. By partnering with Anchorage Digital, Kamino enables institutions to access on-chain liquidity and yield on Solana while continuing to custody assets within their existing regulated framework.”

Expanding the Accessible Collateral Universe

The framework accepts a full spectrum of collateral types beyond standard digital assets. Institutions can now pledge reward-bearing assets, natively wrapped tokens (native BTC, ETH, or SOL without token wrapping complications), and even fiat positions. This diversity broadens the universe of institutional borrowers who can participate in Solana’s lending ecosystem.

The natively staked collateral model is particularly significant because it preserves the actual protocol-level staking relationship. Unlike wrapped or synthetic representations, natively staked SOL maintains its full functionality while simultaneously serving as collateral—a technical achievement that opens new possibilities for capital efficiency.

A Replicable Blueprint for Enterprise Web3 Finance

Perhaps the most strategic element of this deployment is its intentional design as a repeatable model. Other venture firms, treasury companies, and protocols seeking to serve institutional markets can adopt and adapt this framework. The three-party structure—qualified custodian + collateral manager + protocol + borrower—creates a template that can scale across different tokens and different institutional participants.

Solana Company, established as an independent treasury dedicated to acquiring SOL, was specifically created in partnership with Pantera and Summer Capital to maximize SOL per share while exploring capital markets opportunities. This new borrowing framework represents an evolution of that thesis: Solana Company isn’t just a passive holder of network tokens, but an active participant in discovering how institutional capital can flow into and through the ecosystem’s infrastructure.

Why Solana’s Native Economics Matter for This Innovation

The timing and focus on Solana specifically reflects the network’s unique position in blockchain infrastructure. Solana processes over 3,500 transactions per second and currently hosts approximately 3.7 million daily active wallets. The network surpassed 23 billion transactions in the year-to-date period, demonstrating sustained institutional and retail adoption.

Crucially, SOL’s protocol design makes it inherently productive: the token offers a ~7% native staking yield. This fundamentally differs from non-yield-bearing assets like BTC, making the borrowing framework particularly attractive. Institutions can earn staking rewards while accessing on-chain liquidity—a compounding economic advantage unavailable in many other blockchain ecosystems.

Setting the Standard for Institutional DeFi Participation

This framework establishes what institutional investors will increasingly demand from blockchain infrastructure: the ability to participate in protocol-native finance without compromising on the compliance, custody, and operational standards they require. The natively staked SOL borrowing model demonstrates that these requirements are not contradictory, but can be engineered into the product architecture itself.

As the institutional market for digital assets continues to mature, frameworks like this—balancing regulatory clarity with capital efficiency—will become the competitive norm. Solana Company, through this partnership with Anchorage Digital and Kamino, has published the blueprint that others will follow.