Image credit: Powerus (https://www.power.us/).
Powerus went public Thursday. By Friday, its shares were on Solana
The Trump family backed defense technology company wants to put more intelligence inside machines so soldiers can stay farther from danger. Its rapid jump from Nasdaq to Solana points to a second kind of disintermediation now taking place in financial markets.
Image credit: Powerus.
On Thursday, Powerus became a public company on Nasdaq.
By Friday, its shares were on Solana.
The sequence captures two technological shifts that initially seem unrelated.
Powerus is building autonomous drones and counter-drone systems intended to move humans farther from the physical point of danger. At the same time, tokenized equities are beginning to move investors beyond the traditional brokerage infrastructure through which public stocks have historically been held and traded.
In both cases, more of the execution layer is moving into software.
Powerus completed its merger with Nasdaq-listed Aureus Greenway Holdings on October 1. Legacy Powerus shareholders emerged with roughly 83% of the common stock and approximately 93% of the combined companyās voting power, effectively transforming the listed entity into Powerus Corporation. (Thaler)
One day later, Backpack Securities issued a tokenized representation of PUSA on Solana through Sunrise. Each token is designed to be redeemable 1:1 for an underlying Powerus share and transferable back into traditional brokerage infrastructure for eligible investors. (Solana Compass). As of 2:45pm on the day of release $PUSA has reached $9.1m in trading volume.
Powerus announced on X: āWe’re now live on Solana. $PUSA is our common stock onchain, redeemable one to one for the Nasdaq-listed share.ā
We’re now live on Solana.
$PUSA is our common stock onchain, redeemable one to one for the Nasdaq-listed share, trading nights, weekends and holidays.
Powerus did not issue a cryptocurrency, and PUSA on Solana is not a corporate memecoin.
The underlying asset remains a Nasdaq-listed security.
What changed is the rail on which it can travel.
The battle-tested brain behind the machine
That distinction between the physical asset and the intelligence controlling it also sits at the center of Powerusā business.
The company isnāt positioning itself merely as another drone manufacturer. It is building autonomous aircraft, counter-drone interceptors and the command software connecting them.
Drone airframes are becoming increasingly commoditized. Motors, batteries, cameras and other components can come from a growing collection of suppliers.
The potentially more defensible layer is the intelligence deciding what those machines see, how they coordinate and what they do next.
Powerusā xNav AI architecture is designed to combine data from radar, visual sensors and other sources into a common operating picture, identify threats and coordinate autonomous systems.
In that sense, Powerus has built the battle-tested brain behind the machine: so the person behind it never has to be in the line of fire.
The background of co-founder and president Brett Velicovich helps explain why that philosophy runs through the company.
Velicovich served as a U.S. Army Special Operations intelligence analyst from 2001 to 2010, completing six combat tours in Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia. According to Powerusā SEC-filed biography, he worked within Americaās covert drone program tracking high-value terrorist targets. He later wrote Drone Warrior, an account of his experience with military drone operations, and earned an MBA from Duke Universityās Fuqua School of Business. (SEC)
His relationship with drones didnāt end with the military. Velicovich subsequently applied the technology to wildlife conservation in Kenya and other humanitarian work. He was also in Ukraine within days of Russiaās full-scale invasion, where he saw firsthand how inexpensive drones and rapid battlefield iteration were changing modern warfare. He has said Powerusā founders ultimately came together through their experience in Ukraine. (LinkedIn)
That gives Powerus an unusual founding perspective: not simply engineers asking what autonomous systems can do, but operators thinking about what someone in the field actually needs them to do.
The companyās Guardian counter-drone system, for example, is designed to intercept hostile UAVs before they reach personnel or critical infrastructure. Powerus reports an approximately 89% interception success rate per launch in manual and semi-autonomous operations, although that remains a company-reported figure rather than an independently verified government statistic.
Its subsidiary Tandem Defense has also secured a U.S. Air Force IDIQ contract for Guardian-2 with a ceiling of up to $90 million through mid-2028. The ceiling is not guaranteed revenue, but it gives Powerus a vehicle through which the government can place future orders.
Going public is intended to give the company more capacity to pursue that scale.
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āCompleting this transaction puts Powerus in a position to build at the scale our customers are asking for,ā CEO Andrew Fox said following the merger. (Nasdaq)
For Powerus, that means more manufacturing, more autonomous systems and potentially more acquisitions.
For investors, however, what happened immediately afterward may prove just as interesting.
From a Florida golf company to Nasdaq: and Solana
Powerus took an unconventional route to the public markets.
Aureus Greenway Holdings originally operated two Florida golf courses and completed its own Nasdaq IPO in February 2025. By late 2025, the small public company was evaluating strategic alternatives.
It ultimately became Powerusā route onto Nasdaq.
The merger was announced in March, Aureus adopted the PUSA ticker ahead of closing, and on October 1 the transaction was completed and Aureus renamed itself Powerus Corporation. (Nasdaq)
The transaction also brought prominent financial backers. The merger announcement identified Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. as notable investors in the combined company through American Venture Partners, alongside other investors including drone manufacturer Unusual Machines and a $50 million strategic investment. (SEC)
But what happened on October 2 represents a different kind of capital-markets experiment.
Backpack Securities took the newly combined PUSA equity and put a tokenized version on Solana roughly a day after the merger closed.
That speed is notable.
A company can complete a major corporate transaction inside the conventional securities system on Thursday and have an onchain representation of its equity circulating through blockchain infrastructure on Friday.
The gap between going public and going onchain is beginning to disappear.
Tokenizationās democratization story
Crypto has talked about democratizing finance for years.
Tokenized equities offer a more concrete version of that argument.
They do not necessarily create new assets. They change how existing ones can be distributed.
A traditional stock generally lives inside brokerage infrastructure. Moving it from one institution to another is possible, but ownership remains tied to a complex network of brokers, custodians, clearing systems and market hours.
Putting a compliant representation of that security on a blockchain begins to make the asset behave more like software.
It can exist in a wallet.
It can settle against stablecoins.
It can move through blockchain applications.
And, eventually, tokenized securities could interact with lending protocols, collateral systems and other programmable financial infrastructure.
There are still substantial limitations. Backpack Securitiesā tokenized-equity service is restricted in jurisdictions including the United States, and securities law does not disappear simply because an asset moves onto a blockchain. (Solana Compass)
So tokenization has not suddenly made every U.S. equity permissionless or universally accessible.
The more important change is portability.
Nasdaq can remain where a company establishes its public equity, while networks such as Solana become additional rails on which that equity can move.
That makes PUSA interesting beyond Powerus itself.
The significance isnāt that a drone company now has a token.
It is that a conventional public companyās shares could acquire a blockchain-native distribution layer almost immediately after a transformational corporate transaction.
And that brings the two sides of the Powerus story together.
On the battlefield, Powerus is trying to transfer more sensing, coordination and execution from humans to software so operators can remain farther from danger.
In capital markets, blockchains are transferring more ownership, settlement and distribution functionality into software so financial assets can move beyond the systems in which they were originally issued.
Neither eliminates humans or institutions.
Both make the underlying infrastructure more programmable.
Powerus is building the brain behind the machine.
Blockchain is becoming another rail beneath the asset.
PUSA managed to connect those two narratives in roughly 24 hours.
The author holds a position in $pusa