Brian Rudick

Chief Strategy Officer @UpexiTreasury. Formerly Head of Research @gsr_io, hedge funds @Citadel, Balyasny, Millennium. Opinions are my own & NFA

[Brian Rudick @thetinyant]

I’m excited to share that I have joined @UpexiTreasury - the leading @Solana treasury company - as Chief Strategy Officer responsible for the cryptocurrency strategy and public visibility efforts 🏎️ 🏎️ 🏎️

[Brian Rudick @thetinyant]

Smart contract blockchains like @Solana are a new computing paradigm. We went from mainframe computers to PCs to blockchain-based computers.

The TAM is literally global compute. Users need the token to pay for transactions so as usage increases, so does demand. And there are network effects, which will only get stronger once you add in privacy since that reduces interoperability and makes state more valuable

[Brian Rudick @thetinyant]

Some of these were right, some were wrong. But pretty good for 2+ years ago!

https://t.co/ZCRbRKbPhw

[Brian Rudick @thetinyant]

Going to drop 33 digital asset-related core beliefs, key learnings, and interesting thoughts over the next 33 days, gathered after three years in the industry full time. Please don’t kick me out of crypto!

[Brian Rudick @thetinyant]

@0xSpideySense Arguably, they do.

[Brian Rudick @thetinyant]

Ex macro, IMO the two largest items (by far) that can impact the crypto markets the most over the next month are the CLARITY Act and MicroStrategy...

[Brian Rudick @thetinyant]

Very possible HL will increase its lead, but I tend to think the @perps race remains wide open for two reasons:

1. The dominant perps DEX has been a rotating door throughout history, and
2. Perps are a drop in the bucket compared to what it will become

[Brian Rudick @thetinyant]

Obv many items go into valuation, but with $ETH market cap 5x that of $SOL, I think the following is severely underapprciated:
All else equal, monolithic chains should be more valuable than modular protocols, since they accrue value from all parts of the stack 🤔

[Brian Rudick @thetinyant]

@UpexiTreasury 4/4

YIELD GENERATION
Focused on increasing treasury yield in a low-risk and recurring manner. If successful, this may be additive to the multiple and help sustain a premium valuation and employment of the capital markets flywheel.

[Brian Rudick @thetinyant]

1/4

What is @UpexiTreasury focused on?

• CAPITAL MANAGEMENT
• EXPENSE REDUCTION
• YIELD GENERATION

A mini 🧵

[Brian Rudick @thetinyant]

@UpexiTreasury 3/4

EXPENSE REDUCTION
@UpexiTreasury reduced employees to 9, exited manufacturing / logistics / warehousing, and is guiding for staking revenue to cover total company cash expenses starting next quarter"

[Brian Rudick @thetinyant]

Great convo hitting on (IMO) the two biggest items impacting crypto today:
• AI sucking the wind out of everything else
• Unclear value accrual for many tokens
What changes these? Highly recommend today’s @Crypto_TownHall 🙌
https://t.co/1TbWihSDol

[Crypto Town Hall @Crypto_TownHall]

https://t.co/L4HjINdxPh

[Brian Rudick @thetinyant]

IMO, crypto's biggest problem from a price perspective is AI stealing attention and capital. After all, Goldman's S&P ex-AI Index ($SPXXAI) is flat since its launch in early Feb, while the full market is up 8% over that time, showing the gains are fully driven by AI companies.

While I prefer a crypto breakout sooner rather than later, all scenarios around timing look pretty good to me:

• Near-term: Catalysts like CLARITY passing or central bank BTC buying ignite crypto
• Medium-term: Market realizes AI and crypto and symbiotic to take crypto higher
• Long-Term: Digital assets are a show-me story, rerating after mass adoption of stablecoins, tokenization, and agents occurs

[Brian Rudick @thetinyant]

Stablecoins.
Tokenization.
AI Agents.

[Brian Rudick @thetinyant]

Nice increase in @Solana @perps trading volume last two weeks compared to HL, Ethereum, and off-chain (includes Aster), per @Defillama 👀

[Brian Rudick @thetinyant]

.@MorganStanley filed an S-1 for a spot @Solana ETF (proposed ticker MSOL) last week per reports, with the filing reportedly including provisions for staking. That would be a structural difference from the current ETF lineup, which is split between staking and non-staking products.

Morgan Stanley's wirehouse distribution channels carry meaningful weight relative to crypto-native issuers, both for product visibility and for allocator access.

[Brian Rudick @thetinyant]

US spot @Solana ETFs have logged net inflows every month since launch in late 2025, despite SOL price being meaningfully negative YTD. Cumulative inflows have surpassed $1B per @FarsideUK.

Steady accumulation through volatility is a different signal than rotation chasing rallies. Typically indicates allocators building strategic positions, not traders chasing momentum.

[Brian Rudick @thetinyant]

Why can DATs trade at a premium? Here is a brief magic bank account thought experiment to demonstrate:

[Brian Rudick @thetinyant]

EXPLAINING THE MICROSTRATEGY PREMIUM

Given misunderstanding and healthy skepticism around MSTR's premium, the following thought experiment may help:

If I had a magic bank account with $100 USD in it that paid you a 66% interest rate going forward, how much money would you pay me for that bank account right now?

I'm sure the answer was much more than $100, meaning this bank account would trade at a premium to its underlying USD. This is exactly what is happening with MSTR, except replace USD with BTC in the above example, as MSTR has increased its BTC per share by a 66% annual rate since it began investing in Bitcoin in Aug 2020 until today. Yes, this increase in BTC per share (ie. in-kind yield) is higher during bull markets and lower during bear markets, but it has generally risen pretty steadily (pic below). There is no guarantee it will continue, but MSTR is guiding for it to be 6-10% in each of the next three years, and its historical track record suggests it may be much higher.

There are some additional differences between my magic bank account and MSTR. With MSTR, you're taking on basis risk, since instead of having USD in a bank account, you have BTC that may move up or down. You are also taking on risk around the premium that the market assigns to each Bitcoin that MSTR holds, which may rise or fall (ie. maybe you are willing to buy my $100 bank account for $200, but in a year, someone may be willing to pay you $150 or $280). But, the premium is there because investors believe that MSTR will continue to increase BTC per share and they are willing to pay for that now.

@MicroStrategy @saylor @matt_levine @MSTRUpdates #MSTR $MSTR

BTW, this is not financial advice and makes no comment on whether MSTR will go up or down.

[Brian Rudick @thetinyant]

Quick tokenized treasuries breakdown: Tokenized US Treasuries crossed $15B in distributed asset value by the end of April per @rwa_xyz, up from $13.5B earlier in the month.

The top five products by AUM are:
Circle's USYC ($2.9B),
BlackRock's BUIDL ($2.58B),
Ondo's USDY ($2.14B),
Franklin Templeton's BENJI ($2.05B), and
Janus Henderson's JTRSY ($1.24B).

Collectively ~$10.9B. Three of the top five are issued by traditional asset managers (BlackRock, Franklin Templeton, Janus Henderson); two are crypto-native (Circle, Ondo).

[Brian Rudick @thetinyant]

Whole lot going on here!

• @NYSE creating a tokenized stock trading platform
• @Nasdaq creating tokenization infrastructure and received SEC permission for tokenized equities to trade on the same orderbook as traditional securities
• @The_DTCC announced a goal to make all 1.4m securities it custodies digitally eligible
• The SEC doing great work on Project Crypto and we may soon get an innovation exemption.

[The Kobeissi Letter @KobeissiLetter]

BREAKING: The SEC is set to release its so-called "innovation exemption" for tokenized stocks which will pave the path for trading digital versions of securities, per Bloomberg.

Details include:

1. In a "surprise move," the SEC is leaning toward allowing the trading of tokenized assets

2. These tokenized assets would be tradeable on decentralized crypto platforms

3. The move could "reshape the landscape of the American stock market"

4. This would also be one of the US' biggest shifts into crypto infrastructure yet

Tokenized assets are rapidly expanding.

[Brian Rudick @thetinyant]

@freddialpha @intangiblecoins Timing matters less than the substance.

[Brian Rudick @thetinyant]

Amazing progress on CLARITY last week in the US Senate...and much work left to be done. Here is a potential timeline per @intangiblecoins

• June 1: Banking and Agriculture reconciliation begins, completed the following week
• June 15: Senate floor consideration begins
• June 22: Senate final passage
• July 13: Senate-House process
• July 20 or July 27: House final passage of reconciled version
• Aug. 3: President signs CLARITY into law

[Alex Thorn @intangiblecoins]

https://t.co/2DOIlh5t9t