30th October 2025 > > Spot SOL ETFs & MSTR.

tl;dr

Spot SOL ETFs have had a positive start. MSTR reports results today, perhaps leading to being included in the S&P 500.

Market Snap

Market Wrap

The Fed manipulated both the short end and long end of yield curve yesterday by cutting rates and announcing the end of QT (quantitative tightening), ahead of the restart of QE (quantitative easing) next May. These frequent interventions in the market pricing of interest rates by the hapless Chair of the Fed, Jerome Powell, raises the cost of capital for all businesses, making everyone poorer in the process.

Be gone with you, Sir!

Curious Cryptos’ Commentary – Spot SOL ETFs

Three spot SOL ETFs started trading on Tuesday, with $65mm of inflows, dominated by Bitwise’s product BSOL, which has attracted the most investment of any ETF launches in 2025, which is an encouraging sign. CIO of Bitwise, Matt Hougan, admittedly a touch biased perhaps, cheers everyone up with his prediction:

To a certain extent he is right, but he is wrong too.

Staking rewards for SOL can be up to 7%, which taken at face value sounds like a juicy yield. But it is a common fallacy to look at staking rewards in that light.

It is more accurate to view staking rewards as an inflation in the number of coins issued. All other things being equal (which they never are), the market cap remains unchanged, implying that the cash price of each individual coin reduces by the same amount as the inflation caused by the staking rewards. Staked coins retain their value, whereas unstaked coins lose value because of the inherent inflation.

What this means in practice is that all investments in proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus coins should be staked to avoid losing value, but that staking process means that the coins are less liquid than before. I think the unstaking queue for ETH was recently quoted as being as long as fifty-five days. There are liquid staking options in the form of LSTs (Liquid Staked Tokens) but apart from ETH most LSTs are, well, not liquid.

There is therefore a natural benefit of investing via spot ETFs for PoS coins, as they can be bought and sold during trading hours, with no delay.

So yes, Matt Hougan is right that the spot SOL ETFs will be attractive to institutional and retail investors alike compared to investing directly into SOL, but not for the reason he states.

Curious Cryptos’ Commentary – Strategy (MSTR)

MSTR is expected to report healthy quarterly profits later today, perhaps as much as $3.6bn from mark-to-market gains on its vast holdings of BTC.

The stock has ranged from $220 to $543 during 2025, closing last night at $275, which is very close to its net asset value of its BTC minus debts. Speculation about inclusion in the S&P 500 is rife, as demonstrated by Markus Thielen of 10x Research:

“At today’s price, with the NAV premium largely gone, volatility trending higher, and a potential catalyst in the form of strong Q3 earnings and renewed S&P 500 inclusion speculation, we see Strategy as attractive at current levels."

If MSTR does make it into the S&P 500, all those passive tracker funds will be forced to buy, re-inflating the NAV premium. It is the NAV premium that allows MSTR to issue new debt to buy BTC increasing its BTC yield and encouraging a virtuous circle underpinning the price of BTC.

The CC Treasury remains deliberately over-exposed to MSTR, a situation unlikely to change anytime soon.