It can be called a market roller coaster triggered by a governance game.
$YHC surged to near $11 before plunging to the $2.5 range (after-hours). The rise and fall are highly synchronized with Leshner's acquisition of a controlling stake in $YHC.
Yesterday @rleshner announced its exit from the race for control of $LQR (YHC). Despite holding 57% of the shares, the board of directors continued to sell shares through ATM offerings, resulting in its governance being diluted and ineffective. This is not an emotional expression of "equity is useless", but a visual demonstration of TradFi's complex governance structure.
This acquisition experiment initiated by DeFi OG was originally intended to buy the company, replace the board of directors, and switch to a crypto treasury strategy, but it hit the defense toolbox precipitated by Wall Street: ATM issuance, installment directors, poison pill plans, etc. Although the rules are public in SEC filings, the game is complex.
Crypto is used to real-time, public, and auditable state on the chain. However, TradFi's cap table involves delays in transfer agents, brokers, and settlements, and requires continuous tracking of public disclosure during operations. Leshner's actions exposed the seemingly straightforward SEC filings and the dynamic dynamics of actual execution.
This also reveals that the real pain point of Tokenization is not simply "mapping assets", but in governance ownership. T-bills are easy to go on-chain, but if the control structure cannot be reconstructed on-chain, RWA narratives will not be stable. Leshner himself emphasized that tokenized shares bring real-time transparency, leaving TradFi brokers and exchanges a few streets behind.
So, this is not a failed acquisition, but a head-to-head confrontation between DeFi ideas and TradFi governance systems. Leshner did not choose to proxy fight or lawsuit, but withdrew from the competition, while pushing $LQR to publicly disclose its financial and equity structure, and also planned to attract community experts to help build a crypto treasury.
This conflict made us realize that TradFi's governance structure is like a "smart contract with no gas limit". You think you're buying assets, but you're actually playing a game of rules. If you want to participate in DeFi, you must first understand the rules.
More broadly, the next stage of RWA is not just assets onchain, but governance structure onchain, from SEC-compliant issuance to on-chain native governance.
From Compound to Opening Bell: Leshner's $2M Pry On-Chain IPO Experiment
@rleshner (Compound & Robot Ventures Founder) Recent Action Fryer:
Invested $2.03M to acquire a 56.9% stake in LQR House ($LQR, community abbreviation$YHC), a NASDAQ shell company, and then put on-chain compliant securities on Solana through the Superstate he founded, and began to promote the "on-chain stock market".
This is not a simple shell arbitrage, but a narrative docking experiment of DeFi × RWA × TradFi.
Shell acquisition + on-chain infrastructure opening
On July 14, Leshner filed Form 13D with the SEC, formally taking control of $LQR, a company that used to be an online liquor retailer and now has little actual business, with a negative net worth and a pure shell. He bought at an average price of ~$3.77, with a market cap of only $2.5M, and took a controlling stake outright, planning to purge the board of directors and redirect it (including BTC treasury, on-chain securities).
This isn't the first time he's explored TradFi
Superstate, the RWA asset manager he founded in 2023, raised $18.1M from investors including Distributed Global, CoinFund, Galaxy, Arrington and others.
Its two main products:
$USTB: On-chain T-bill fund, AUM > $700M, rapid growth, support ERC-20 liquid transfers
$USCC: carry-based fund, the structure is USD cash + T-bill + crypto basis trade (BTC/ETH), which shares the clearing/auditing/on-chain base with $USTB
The total AUM of the two is ~$856M, all of which are for qualified investors, and they take the route of "compliant on-chain asset management".
Opening Bell: The Nasdaq of on-chain securities
In May 2025, Superstate launched Opening Bell: a native on-chain issuance + trading platform (based on Solana) that supports the entire process of U.S. stock securities (no packaging, no synthesis).
In the tank:
Shareholder registration, auditing, and compliance tracking on the whole chain
Direct issuance of on-chain original shares (SEC filing) to support secondary trading
Building a composable financial layer (e.g. token dividends, stock collateral, etc.)
$LQR may serve as Opening Bell's first "real-world" shell injection vehicle, becoming a pilot for on-chain IPO + M&A experiments.
As @MapleLeafCap said: this is the proof-of-concept of the three-line fusion of "shell company + tokenization + SEC compliance".
Patch in the last piece of the puzzle for RWA
There has always been an on-chain bond (T-bill) RWA in the market, but the on-chain equity is a gap.
Now, Superstate has completed the bootstrapping of "native on-chain securities" with TradFi tactics (13D control shell) + DeFi infra (Solana, token, on-chain clearing and settlement).
This is different from traditional tokenization: instead of packaging traditional stocks into on-chain tokens, it allows the original equity to be directly issued on-chain, traded on-chain, and compliant on-chain
The potential financial stack will become: Stock Registration → Stock Token → Account Opening + Compliance → Investment/Trading → Portfolio into DeFi System (Lending, LP, Options, Automatic Distribution of Dividends)
If this stack runs through, it may bring a "new entrance to hundreds of billions of TVL".
It's not a narrative, it's an offense
From Compound to Superstate, Leshner has been building on-chain native versions of finance.
This LQR acquisition is crypto native's direct move into financial infrastructure, taking into account compliance, market, technology, and asset structure.
If that happens, Opening Bell could become an onchain alternative to Nasdaq.
If successful, it will be one more key for many founders who want liquidity in U.S. stocks. Is there another way to play currency stock trading?
— ArkStream Daily Alpha 7.17
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