Aiming to perhaps replicated Strategy’s bitcoin (BTC) playbook, except with solana (SOL), fintech commercial real estate platform Janover (JNVR) has built a SOL stack worth roughly $21 million and seen its share price rise nearly 20-fold in less than a month.

The company today purchased another 80,567 SOL tokens valued at approximately $10.5 million, bringing its total holdings to 163,651.

Janover is positioning itself as the first publicly-traded U.S. company with a treasury strategy centered around Solana’s SOL. The pivot came after a team of former executives of crypto exchange Kraken, led by Joseph Onorati and Parker White, bought majority ownership of the firm earlier this month.

The board appointed Onorati, former chief strategy officer of Kraken, to chairman and CEO of Janover. White, former engineering director at Kraken, serves as chief investment officer and chief operating officer. Marco Santori, former chief legal officer of Kraken, also joined Janover’s board.

The firm raised $42 million via convertible notes and warrants for its Solana acquisition plans, and said it also aims to operate one or more validators to participate in Solana’s proof-of-stake network.

Since its crypto pivot, Janover’s stock has gone bonkers: share prices surged over 1,700% following the announcement in early April, when it traded around $4-$5 per share. It’s up another 12% to $73.74 on Tuesday after the latest SOL acquisition.

“After building in the crypto industry for more than a decade, we are at a tipping point in mass DeFi adoption. We’re proud to be the first to introduce a digital asset treasury strategy in the US public markets initially focused on Solana,” Onorati said. “We’ve brought together an exceptional team with deep digital assets and public market expertise to make it happen.”

Despite the crypto pivot, Janover isn’t abandoning its real estate roots. The firm’s artificial intelligence-powered commercial real estate platform will continue operations, led by founder Blake Janover and chief financial officer Bruce Rosenbloom.

Matt Cole, CEO of Strive Asset Management, fresh from persuading video retailer GameStop to convert some of its cash reserve into bitcoin (BTC), wrote to urge financial software developer Intuit (INTU) to reverse what he described as «censorship policies» and an “anti-bitcoin bias” that could jeopardize long-term shareholder value.

In an open letter dated April 14 addressed to Intuit CEO Sasan Goodarzi and board Chair Susan Nora Johnson, Cole pointed to a recent incident in which Intuit’s Mailchimp email marketing platform disabled the account of the Trojan Bitcoin Club, a student organization at the University of Southern California, for mentioning the cryptocurrency in emails to its members.

“We are concerned that Intuit’s censorship policies and anti-bitcoin bias threaten to destroy the shareholder value the company has worked so hard to create,” Cole wrote saying he was writing on behalf of his clients, who include Intuit shareholders. Although Mailchimp later reinstated the account following public pressure, Cole said the episode reflects a “broader pattern of deplatforming” that includes bitcoin developers, educators, and businesses.

Cole said such actions expose Intuit, known for its TurboTax tax preparation software and QuickBooks accounting software, to reputational and legal risks, particularly as public concern around tech censorship grows and federal regulators — including the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) — begin investigating platform discrimination based on speech or affiliations.

“Mailchimp’s Acceptable Use Policy is being used as a political weapon, rather than a tool to mitigate legitimate business risk,” Cole wrote, adding that “customers and shareholders alike are starting to question whether Intuit is making decisions based on ideology rather than fiduciary duty.”

The letter called on Intuit to reinstate accounts banned for bitcoin-related content, revise Mailchimp’s content policies to eliminate political considerations. It also urged Intuit to consider adding bitcoin to its corporate treasury as a hedge against artificial intelligence disruption.

“We believe TurboTax, Intuit’s flagship product, has a high risk of being automated away by AI,” Cole wrote. “While we appreciate Intuit’s investments in AI internally, we believe an additional hedge is warranted—and that a bitcoin war chest is the best option available.”

The move follows Coles’ February letter to GameStop, in which he urged the company to convert its $5 billion cash reserve into bitcoin. Since receiving the letter, GameStop confirmed that it will add bitcoin to its balance sheet and has successfully completed a $1.5 billion convertible note offering — positioning itself as one of the first major retailers to align its treasury strategy with what Strive called the “Bitcoin standard.”

The move marked a significant early win for Strive’s broader campaign to reshape corporate finance and governance around what Cole describes as “apolitical excellence” and long-term shareholder value, free from ideological agendas.

The competition for stablecoin dominance is entering a third phase and companies such as Tether, issuer of the largest token, and Circle, the No. 2, are setting up their positions as the industry faces increased regulation in the form of the European Union’s Markets in Crypto Assets (MiCA) regime and U.S. legislation that is working its way through Congress, according to digital asset cryptography and custody specialists Fireblocks.

This latest stage will feature banks, large and small, as well as incumbent payment firms that are weighing up the best way to integrate the tokens into their existing businesses, according to Ran Goldi, SVP of payments at Fireblocks.

Stablecoins, blockchain-based tokens that mimic U.S. dollars for the most part, have become big business. Tether’s USDT is the clear leader, with a market cap close to $145 billion. Circle’s USDC has over $60 billion in circulation and the company is considering a public listing on the New York Stock Exchange. The stablecoin market could grow to $2 trillion by the end of 2028, Standard Chartered said in a Tuesday note.

“We are going to see banks issuing stablecoins, as they are under MiCA,” Goldi said in an interview. “You are seeing financial institutions that are fintechs entering such as Robinhood, Ripple and Revolut. By the end of this year, you are going to see maybe 50 more stablecoins.»

The industry has already passed through two stages, Goldi said. The first occurred when USDC went up against U.S. regulated trading firm Paxos, which had partnered with crypto exchange Binance to issue BUSD. For regulatory reasons Paxos had to drop BUSD and so Circle won that round, Goldi said, adding that Paxos’ new USDG consortium is growing in stature and likely to play a major role in the future.

The second stage was between Circle and Tether.

“USDC was trying to be bigger than USDT, but then USDC tumbled a bit with the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank etc. It was harder for people to accept that product, especially people outside the U.S. Meanwhile USDT has really grown tremendously. I think USDT will remain the dominant dollar stablecoin outside of the U.S. I believe Circle will have to put up a really good fight, which they’ve done in the past and are very good at doing.”

It’s worth noting, though, that USDC is licensed under MiCA, giving it access to 27 EU nations with a total population of about 450 million people. USDT is not.

Growth in international payments

Stablecoins grew to prominence as an essential way of moving money between volatile cryptocurrencies, meeting a particular need given the industry’s shortage of fiat on and off ramps. Dollar-pegged coins of various sorts blossomed further with the explosion of decentralized finance (DeFi).

Looking further back, the early days of crypto show an evolution of payment service providers (PSPs), starting with those who wanted to use cryptocurrencies to settle their bills. This was followed by a second wave of business-to-business PSPs like Bridge, recently acquired by Stripe, and Zero Hash, Alfred Pay, Conduit and others.

“Some of these PSPs are firms you may not have heard much about, but they are actually moving billions in stablecoins, servicing businesses to pay to other businesses most of the time,” Goldi said. He pointed out that less than 20% of Fireblocks’ total transaction volume was stablecoins in 2020, increasing to some 54% last year.

For a typical use case, consider an importer in Brazil that wants to bring in a container and pay someone in Turkey or in Singapore. It takes the Brazilian reals, converts them to a stablecoin, and either sends the funds directly to the exporter or changes them to the destination currency and pays with that, Goldi said.

Some banks have already caught on to the cross-border payments use case, with the likes of Braza Bank in Brazil, BTG Bank and DBS in Singapore catering to business clients with accounts that support stablecoins. Others are still weighing the best use case for them.

“We have been approached by dozens of banks,” Goldi said. “They are asking whether they should be on/off ramps, or holding reserves, or perhaps they are thinking about issuing a stablecoin. There are several things banks can do to make money out of stablecoins, from credit to on/off ramps to FX.”

Based on those conversations, Goldi said he believes most of the banks are writing strategic plans that will probably be submitted by the end of this quarter.

“It will be interesting to see if banks build something on their own, or use BNY Mellon, for instance, that serves banks, or a vendor like Fireblocks. I think the large tier-1 banks like JPMorgan, Citi and Morgan Stanley will build their own tech, while the tier-2 banks will want to use some hosted tech provider,” Goldi said. “Of course they are banks and they move slowly, so I think they would be looking to approve those plans by the end of this year and perhaps do something in 2026.