September 3, 2025
A crypto treasury revolution is sweeping Wall Street. Following Michael Saylor’s MicroStrategy breakthrough and Tom Lee’s BitMine explosion, institutional capital is hunting for the next DAT (Digital Asset Treasury) unicorn.
Enter TON Strategy (NASDAQ: TONX, formerly VERB)—the breakout story that captured headlines by securing $558 million in PIPE financing within 30 days, backed by over 110 institutional investors.
At the helm stands Manuel Stotz, a London-based financial veteran whose journey from Goldman Sachs investment partner to Kingsway Capital founder, and now TON Strategy Executive Chairman. His mission: channeling Wall Street’s smartest money into TON, positioning it as the financial backbone of Telegram’s billion-user network continent.
This exclusive feature draws from the institutional interview series TON of Alpha, unpacking Stotz’s journey, his “Satorica” blockchain vision, and TON Strategy’s bold blueprint for trillion-dollar scale.
Full video:
TON of Alpha（@TONofAlpha）is a premier interview platform connecting institutions and builders within the billion-user ecosystem, co-produced by TONX Studio (tonx.ai) and KTON—early TON miners since 2021.
Host: Mr. Z (@69420MrZ) · Guest: Manuel Stotz (@ManuelStotz)
From Frontier Markets to Crypto Pioneer: A Wall Street Maverick’s Evolution
Mr. Z: Manny, how did you get here? Walk us through your journey from Goldman Sachs to TON.
Manuel Stotz: I joined Goldman actually just before the financial crisis. The problems in the existing financial system were the genesis of Bitcoin in the end. The key with Goldman Sachs is to get more out of the firm than they get out of you.
I was always an entrepreneur, so I decided to start my own business coming out of Goldman—Kingsway Capital. We’re basically one of the world’s leading investment firms when it comes to frontier emerging markets. We don’t even invest in China—it’s too developed. We’re big in Bangladesh, Middle East, Africa.
We’ve always had trouble with the currency. I’ve got a $100 trillion Zimbabwean dollar note in my pocket right here. When we got into crypto, we realized there’s 3 billion people in the world who are underbanked or unbanked entirely.
Now they’ve got smartphones. What they’re doing is taking their local fiat currency and exchanging them into U.S. dollar stablecoins or Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, Toncoin. Everything is better than Zimbabwe dollar.
The future is already here. It’s just not evenly distributed.
We started with Bitcoin, my first love. We invested in Bitcoin mining, lending businesses, Lightning Network, then blockchain gaming — and eventually, Toncoin.
The “Satorica” Vision: Why Crypto is America in Cyberspace
Mr. Z: You’ve called Bitcoin the “new continent” and coined “Satorica.” How does TON fit into this framework?
Manuel Stotz: I might be one of the very few people in the world who would say Balaji Srinivasan doesn’t take it far enough. In my view, Bitcoin is more than a network state — it’s the discovery of a network continent.
Think of America’s discovery: at first the Wild West, then colonies, then the world’s reserve currency. Satoshi, maybe inadvertently, discovered America in cyberspace. I call it Satorica.
Here’s the story: America was named after Amerigo Vespucci, but he didn’t name it himself. A German cartographer from my village, Martin Waldseemüller, put it on the map in 1507. He asked: What should we call this place? And so, America was named.
In the same way, Satoshi found this new land. If anything, I see myself as the mapmaker — giving this discovery a name: Satorica.
Why does it matter? Because crypto isn’t just about today’s America or politics. It’s about life, liberty, and property. Bitcoin, and really all crypto, offers digital property, freedom, and hope to those without either. Even the IRS now agrees Bitcoin is property.
And like the Mayflower, it wasn’t kings or elites who crossed the ocean — it was people who believed in proof of work, starting fresh, building a better system from scratch. That’s what we’re doing now, not just with Bitcoin, but with crypto at large.
TON’s Nuclear Weapon: Telegram’s Billion-User Distribution Engine
Mr. Z: On that basis, where did you see TON fit into that part of history?
Manuel Stotz: Only a handful of cryptocurrencies are truly viable today—thriving with real users and real use cases. The killer app so far has been stablecoins, and Ethereum pioneered much of that. I take my hat off to Vitalik and Anatoly.
But Telegram is a massive force: 1B monthly active users, the #2 messaging app in the West after WhatsApp, and #1 in crypto. In my experience, the first billion is the hardest. From here, it can go to two, three, even four billion. That makes TON an N-of-1 asset.
Pavel Durov might be the greatest of all time. Telegram has just one product manager—and that’s Pavel. His brother Nikolai may well be the best mathematician, computer scientist, and cryptographer of their generation.
So TON has the best founders and builders. And more importantly, it has a nuclear weapon called Telegram.
If content is king, distribution is the queen. Solana has maybe 15M active wallets, Ethereum 100–200M. But every serious user of those chains is also on Telegram—and Telegram has another 800M users untouched by crypto.
In Asia you know the power of WeChat—how Tencent became a trillion-dollar company because of it. The West has no super app yet. Elon is trying with X, but Telegram already has over 50% more users, and it already integrated blockchain.
This is the biggest thing in crypto outside of Bitcoin. Think about it: of the five apps bigger than Telegram globally—WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, WeChat—none can yet integrate blockchain. Telegram can. It’s live. I can send you Toncoin, USDT, or any asset on TON instantly, anywhere in the world, with one tap.
Wall Street’s $558M Bet: Inside TON’s First DAT
Mr. Z: You just closed a $558 million PIPE with over 110 institutional investors — led by Kingsway and anchored by Blockchain.com, Vy Capital, and others. Truly a one-of-its-kind TON DAT. How did you convince institutions to bet on TON at this scale?
Manuel Stotz: The case for TON is very simple. It’s not like, oh, we have a blockchain with better tech but no users—trust us, they will come. We’ve got Telegram.
Michael Saylor pioneered the DAT model with MicroStrategy, proving these firms can operate as permanent capital vehicles. Unlike ETFs—where redemptions force asset sales—companies like MicroStrategy or TON Strategy can trade at a premium or discount, raise or buy back stock, and stake, while the underlying coins remain untouched.
Originally I thought this only worked with Bitcoin. But now we’ve seen Solana and Ethereum treasury firms emerge. In Ethereum, Bitmine outdid Saylor — 15x in 45 days, while ETH itself only 2x.
TON, in my view, has even more upside. Ethereum is 50x larger than Toncoin, Solana 10–12x, but TON could end up with more users than both combined. The biggest delta is in Toncoin.
Saylor took five years to reach 3.5% of Bitcoin’s supply. From day one, we already held a larger share of Toncoin than he ever did of Bitcoin.
And I see TON Strategy itself as at least a $100 billion company, unfolding in two chapters: first, from $1 billion to $10 billion; then, from $10 billion to $100 billion.
If you believe, as I do, that TON belongs among trillion-dollar protocol candidates, the math speaks for itself. With roughly 5 trillion coins in total supply, that’s $200 per coin. If we own 10%—likely more—that alone is a $100 billion position, even before applying any NAV multiple.
TON Strategy’s Five Pillars of Institutional Edge
- Premium Amplification: Trading at 1.5x net asset value, TON Strategy (TONX) stockholders capture leveraged upside versus direct TON exposure. As the company scales from billions to hundreds of billions, this premium multiplier compounds exponentially.
- Exclusive Market Access: Regulatory constraints prevent most institutional capital—pension funds, endowments, insurance companies—from direct crypto exposure. TON Strategy (TONX) provides the sole compliant pathway to TON upside. Notable backers include Sequoia, Benchmark, Ribbit, and multiple Ivy League endowments via Kingsway.
- Telegram Proxy Play: Pavel Durov’s private ownership structure makes Telegram uninvestable for public market participants. TON Strategy (TONX) effectively packages Telegram’s blockchain infrastructure for public consumption, offering indirect exposure to the platform’s billion-user economic potential.
- Yield-Generating Asset Base: Unlike Bitcoin-only treasury companies, TON Strategy (TONX) generates 4-5% annual staking yields on its TON holdings—currently producing $30 million in annual cash flow. This creates dual growth engines: asset appreciation plus recurring income.
- First-Mover Time Arbitrage: TON remains absent from major US exchanges including Coinbase and Robinhood. TON Strategy (TONX) provides early access to what Stotz believes is a massively undervalued growth story awaiting mainstream discovery.
The Untapped Upside: Why Stablecoins Are TON’s Killer App
Mr. Z: There’s also another thing I want to touch on — stablecoins. Last April we saw Tether (USDT) launch on TON, and it’s been growing at record speed. In the near future, should we expect more stablecoins to come?
Manuel Stotz: Absolutely. The US dollar stablecoin is arguably the killer app beyond Bitcoin. It went from zero to roughly $250B — with Tether at $160B, about two-thirds of the market. And with the new U.S. policy framework, it’s fully aligned.
On TON, we had one of the fastest Tether launches ever — zero to $1B in 6–7 months. We’ve since launched Ethena and FDUSD, and given our U.S. entry, you can guess which comes next — starts with a U, ends with a C.
On TON, with Telegram distribution, we’re positioned uniquely. Maybe TON becomes the stablecoin chain — not just B2B but true mass adoption, hundreds of millions of users.
Pavel’s Commitment: TON as Telegram’s National Currency
Mr. Z: You’ve called TON the national currency of Telegram. How does TON underpin Telegram’s monetization model across apps, wallets, ads, and bots?
Manuel Stotz: Yeah, I think it’s very misunderstood. People often question how committed Pavel or Telegram really are to TON. Let me be clear: Plan A is TON, Plan B is TON, Plan C is TON. Only later comes refinancing debt or other options.
This is very much like Elon Musk’s approach. Elon doesn’t go to Mars to make more money. For Pavel, the mission is freedom: freedom of speech, freedom to transact, privacy, and banking the unbanked. He doesn’t want to monetize by selling your data. Instead, Telegram makes money through Premium subscriptions, non-invasive ads, and bonds — and most importantly, TON.
TON is the key piece of Telegram’s monetization puzzle. Users can own usernames or numbers on-chain. Telegram can’t take them away. It’s like owning a piece of Manhattan or Alaska early on — small now, but a great investment later. On TON, you can own dollars, Bitcoin, assets, usernames, NFTs. Developers, advertisers, creators can all get paid in TON.
It’s almost like what the dollar is to the United States. I think Sartorica will be bigger than America. Sartorica includes Bitcoin and the whole ecosystem. In my mind, Telegram is the U.S. of it. If this is North and South America, then you’ve got Mexico, Canada, Guatemala — but the most important country is the U.S., and that’s Telegram. At the core, the blockchain is Toncoin.
Mr. Z: Network continent.
Manuel Stotz: Exactly. And Bitcoin, for me, is the denominator. It’s like gold. We measure the price of Toncoin in Bitcoin terms. But it’s not competing for market share.
The Billion-Dollar ATM and Beyond
Mr. Z: One last question. Since we’re on the TON of Alpha — is there any source of news, any alpha that nobody’s talking about but should be?
Manuel Stotz: Yeah, I think people still haven’t really understood what it means that we now have a billion-dollar Nasdaq-listed company, run by real people, with the sole purpose of buying Toncoin. This is not like Tom, Dick, and Harry waking up one morning with a huge amount of capital. This is a billion-dollar ATM — and there’s more to come.
And the point is, there’s so much more money in the equity markets than in the coin markets. That’s what people underestimate. So this is a short window where, if you’re listening to this now, you’re ahead of the curve.
Of course there will be ups and downs — Bitcoin has always been like that. But the key is to have the vision to see it, the courage to act on it, and the patience to stick with it. Sometimes patience is the hardest part. But I believe this will have a massive impact. The U.S. market entry is real, the Korea entry is real, the stablecoin wave is real. We’re just getting started.
About TON Strategy (NASDAQ: $TONX, formerly $VERB)
TON Strategy represents the world’s premier publicly-traded digital asset treasury company focused on The Open Network (TON). Through innovative capital allocation strategies, the company provides institutional and retail investors direct exposure to TON ecosystem growth. Led by Kingsway Capital founder Manuel Stotz, TON Strategy bridges traditional finance and decentralized economics.
About TON of Alpha
TON of Alpha（@TONofAlpha）is a premier interview platform connecting institutions and builders within the billion-user ecosystem, co-produced by TONX Studio (tonx.ai) and KTON—early TON miners since 2021.
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About TONX
Founded in 2021 by Dr. Awesome Doge, an early contributor to NEWTON (now TON Core), TONX (TONX Studio, domain tonx.ai) has been part of TON’s journey since the testnet stage and is the earliest certified partner of the TON Foundation in the Asia-Pacific region. TONX builds trusted tools, staking solutions, and infrastructure that power the TON blockchain and Telegram’s Web3 SuperApp economy.
TONX staking solutions are backed by 4+ years of validator expertise and delivered through KTON, offering three specialized products: KTON Liquid Staking enables retail users to earn staking rewards while maintaining liquidity for DeFi opportunities. KTON Single Nominator provides institutions with secure, straightforward staking for long-term positions. KTON Premium, our flagship product, combines security with flexible reward withdrawals and comprehensive analytics for institutional investors, fund managers, exchanges, and digital asset treasuries (DATs) with TON vesting contracts.
