The First Public SOL Treasury: An Exclusive Interview with DFDV’s Parker White

Parker White, Chief Operating and Investment Officer at DeFi Development Corporation (DFDV), the first public company with a Solana (SOL) treasury strategy, shared his vision with us for the future of finance and the corporate crypto playbook. He is among the speakers at the Digital Assets Innovation Summit in London, held on the final day of the three-day City & Financial Global 2025 conference.

Earlier in his career, White served as Director of Research and Trading at TCG Advisors and was also an Engineering Director at Kraken. Now he is one of the leaders at DFDV (formerly Janover), a Nasdaq-listed company that holds and stakes SOL, and also operates its own validator infrastructure. 

As of the end of June 2025, DeFi Development Corporation holds 621,313 SOL worth over $97 million. By holding SOL and participating in the Solana ecosystem, DFDV earns rewards to expand its holdings and benefit shareholders. 

Solana Is the Leading Network for DeFi, White Believes 

In response to our question about why DeFi Development Corporation adopted a Solana treasury strategy, while many companies focus on Bitcoin, Ethereum, or Ethereum Layer 2s, White said Solana is the primary network for DeFi.

Long-term, we believe Solana is and will be THE primary network for DeFi and ultimately Finance in general,- White said, adding, – On many metrics, Solana is already the leading network for DeFi by a very wide margin, e.g. transaction counts, app revenue, new wallets being created, etc.

Next, White mentioned that DFDV believes the user experience on Solana is superior to any other network from a DeFi perspective. Two other major advantages, according to White, are Solana’s rapidly growing builder community and its base layer infrastructure. Many new founders enter the space by launching their first project on Solana, while the base layer continues to improve with an unmatched drive toward Increasing Bandwidth and Reducing Latency (IBRL). 

Restaking and Liquid Restaking as Yield Farming Strategies 

In 2025, restaking and liquid restaking are among the hottest trends in the Solana ecosystem. Restaking on Solana allows users to reuse their staked SOL to help secure other protocols or services within the network, while liquid restaking protocols let users restake SOL and receive a liquid token (an LRT) that represents their position. This token can then be used across Solana’s DeFi ecosystem for lending, yield farming, or trading, without giving up staking or restaking rewards.

The Coinomist: The restaking and liquid restaking (LRT) narrative has dominated DeFi in 2025, promising high yields but also introducing complex, layered risks. From an investment officer's perspective, do you view restaking as a sustainable, new financial primitive for the long term, or as a temporary, high-risk “yield bubble” fueled by interconnected leverage?

Parker White: Within the restaking meta, there are quite a number of different opportunities, each with its own set of risks and yields. Long term, we think restaking generally has staying power as it solves a fundamental problem of having to bootstrap security for most new decentralized application; however, we expect the restaking meta to change quite a bit over the coming years as it matures and expect that some of the current use cases will not be sustained long term, although new ones will likely develop as well.

Retail vs Institutions: Bridging the Crypto Divide 

Bitcoin started a financial revolution. While institutions have been actively allocating to crypto, we wanted to learn DFDV’s views on retail and institutional adoption.

The Coinomist: The “crypto as anti-bank” narrative is strong among retail users, yet institutional adoption is key for growth. As an investment officer, how do you bridge this cultural and philosophical gap when speaking with conservative institutional clients? How do you sell a “revolution” as a stable investment?

Parker White: Our mission here at DFDV is to “Bridge TradFi and DeFi.” Ultimately, capital flows to where it is most free and has the greatest returns. We believe that is in DeFi. We also think that DeFi offers many things that institutional TradFi investors want, e.g., transparency, free movement of capital, attractive returns, reduced counterparty risk, lower friction, etc. 

We think both types of investors want the same end thing,

White told us. 

Outdated Regulations Can Hurt Countries

Institutional adoption isn’t a threat to DeFi’s spirit, according to Parker White, but regulatory scrutiny in certain countries could harm their citizens.

The Coinomist: As more institutional capital enters DeFi, what is your biggest fear? Is there a risk that institutional influence could “tame” the permissionless and innovative spirit of DeFi, making it a more rigid and less interesting ecosystem?

Parker White: I don't have any great fears for the crypto industry with institutional capital joining. My concern is that certain jurisdictions will attempt to apply outdated regulations to the space and therefore cut themselves out of the market. 

Crypto is FAR bigger than any one country or class of investors, so bad regulations only serve to hurt the citizens of the country imposing the regulation. So, my hope is that democratic-republics globally will get onboard with regulations that are sensible and not onerous, for the sake of those countries,

he says.

White Is Bullish on Real World Assets 

At the end, we asked White about his vision for the future of DeFi and the most underrated on-chain use case.

The Coinomist: Beyond the obvious answers like payments or lending, what is one on-chain use case that you believe is currently the most underrated by the market, but has the potential for explosive growth in the next 2-3 years?

Parker White: Real world assets. I think stocks and bonds are going to be trading onchain in a very big way this year, which will challenge traditional markets for liquidity and innovation. This is because traditional markets have largely been stagnant for the last decade, and crypto promises a blistering pace of innovation. For example, exchange-traded perpetual swaps, 24/7/365 trading, instant settlement, frictionless asset issuance, and frictionless voting (proxy voting), to name a few. I think these innovations and more will force traditional markets to also innovate or die as capital leaves TradFi for DeFi.