SOL Strategies Appoints Bitcoin Foundation Co-Founder as Chairman as Staking Surpasses 3.6M SOL

SOL Strategies (CSE: HODL / NASDAQ: STKE) has appointed Jon Matonis as Chairman of the Board, effective May 11, 2026, according to a company press release. Matonis, a founding director of the Bitcoin Foundation and a more than two-decade veteran of financial cryptography, stepped down as Chief Economist to take the board chair role.

The move comes as the company reported its May 2026 operational metrics on June 3: 3,649,585 SOL under delegation across its validator network, serving 33,591 wallets, and a treasury holding of 521,174 SOL (approximately CAD $57.6 million as of June 1). The company's proprietary validators maintained 100% uptime in May and generated 780 SOL in monthly staking earnings, with peak APY reaching 5.92% against a 5.59% network average.

Matonis: Privacy Pioneer Takes the Chair

Matonis has been a SOL Strategies director since May 2020 and a company employee since 2018. His career includes executive roles at Visa and VeriSign. He co-founded the Bitcoin Foundation in 2012, at a time when the organization was among the first institutions to organize Bitcoin development and advocacy.

CEO Michael Hubbard framed the appointment around the company's privacy-focused direction: "Jon's understanding of this industry and his lifelong commitment to privacy-first technologies make him exactly the right person for this role."

Matonis described the thesis in his own words: "I've spent my career making the case that financial privacy matters. Few companies in crypto are actually building toward it in a serious way: SOL Strategies is one of them."

Privacy Infrastructure Push

The chairman change follows a sequence of privacy-related moves at SOL Strategies. In April 2026, the company acquired Darklake Labs and its Zyga zero-knowledge proof system, per SOL Strategies' April 14 press release. On June 2, the company closed its $18 million purchase of HoudiniSwap, a non-custodial cross-chain swap aggregator with 32 exchange partners including Jupiter and Solflare, approximately $2.5 billion in cumulative swap volume, and $13 million in 2025 revenue. More than half of HoudiniSwap's trailing 12-month volume touches Solana.

Together, Zyga (confidential execution) and HoudiniSwap (cross-chain routing with privacy properties) form a layered infrastructure stack under a chairman whose public identity has long been built around the case for financial privacy.

May 2026 Metrics: 3.65M SOL Delegated, 521K SOL Treasury

The company's STKESOL liquid staking platform held 624,274 SOL with 1,353 unique holders at the end of May. The broader delegation figure of 3,649,585 SOL includes treasury holdings, liquid stake, and third-party delegations.

The cash component of the HoudiniSwap deal was financed through DeFi protocols on Solana using balance-sheet assets, per the acquisition press release, without liquidating treasury SOL. HoudiniSwap CEO Louis Goldberg cited the depth of that validator network in the rationale: "SOL Strategies brings established relationships with institutional partners, a validator network already trusted by over 34,000 wallets."