Marco Santori on Solmate, Solana’s Infrastructure Flywheel, and Why the UAE Matters | Ep. 506

In an exclusive interview with Cryptonews, Marco Santori, CEO of Solmate and the attorney who helped popularize crypto capital formation through the SAFT framework, breaks down why he believes tokenization is accelerating—and why Solana is positioned to benefit from it. Santori, formerly Kraken’s Chief Legal Officer and a long-time industry operator, explains that Solmate is essentially a “big bet” that capital markets increasingly move on-chain, where open, permissionless ledgers can outperform traditional intermediated systems. From his perspective, Solana’s performance advantages—high throughput and low latency at the base layer—make it far better suited for institutional-grade finance than architectures that rely heavily on more centralized scaling layers.

Santori also details Solmate’s strategy as more than a passive SOL treasury play. After raising a $300 million oversubscribed private placement, the company is pursuing a model where a growing treasury supports infrastructure deployment—and infrastructure revenue helps grow the treasury further. He describes this as an infrastructure flywheel designed to reduce reliance on “MNAV roller coasters” that typically define treasury companies, shifting instead toward a durable operating-company profile built around recurring revenue and long-term execution. That strategy includes bare-metal validator operations and a planned combination with RockawayX, a Solana early backer with infrastructure, liquidity, and asset management businesses that align closely with Solmate’s direction.

Marco Santori on Why Abu Dhabi Is Strategic for Solana Infrastructure

A major theme of the conversation is geography as a competitive advantage. Santori argues that Abu Dhabi and the UAE offer more than capital access: they provide a unique position “in the middle” of major trading and validation hubs across the U.S., Europe, and Asia, where even the speed of light becomes a limiter for latency-sensitive markets. Solmate’s focus on the UAE reflects a belief that high-performance blockchain infrastructure will increasingly resemble high-frequency market infrastructure—where placement, connectivity, and reliability matter. Santori also highlights the UAE’s pro-innovation stance toward digital assets, describing it as a jurisdiction actively welcoming blockchain businesses rather than hindering them through hostile enforcement.