Defense technology company Powerus Corporation completed its transition to a Nasdaq-listed entity on October 1 and, roughly 24 hours later, saw a tokenized representation of its common stock begin trading on Solana through Backpack Securities' tokenized-equity service.

The Trump family-backed company closed its merger with Nasdaq-listed Aureus Greenway Holdings on October 1, with legacy Powerus shareholders receiving approximately 83% of the common stock and about 93% of the combined company's voting power. Aureus, which originally operated two Florida golf courses and completed its own Nasdaq IPO in February 2025, adopted the PUSA ticker and renamed itself Powerus Corporation at closing.

On October 2, Backpack Securities issued $PUSA on Solana through Sunrise. Each token is designed to be redeemable 1:1 for an underlying Nasdaq-listed Powerus share and transferable back into traditional brokerage infrastructure for eligible investors. The token recorded $9.1 million in trading volume as of 2:45 p.m. on its release day, according to on-chain data cited by Solana Compass.

"We're now live on Solana," Powerus announced on X. "$PUSA is our common stock onchain, redeemable one to one for the Nasdaq-listed share, trading nights, weekends and holidays."

The company did not issue a cryptocurrency. PUSA on Solana is not a memecoin; the underlying asset remains a Nasdaq-listed security, with the blockchain serving as an additional distribution rail. There are constraints: Backpack Securities' tokenized-equity service is restricted in jurisdictions including the United States, and securities law still applies.

Autonomy as the defensible layer

Powerus builds autonomous drones, counter-drone systems and the command software connecting them. Co-founder and President Brett Velicovich served as a U.S. Army Special Operations intelligence analyst from 2001 to 2010, completing six combat tours in Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia and working within America's covert drone program tracking high-value targets, according to his SEC-filed biography. He later wrote the book Drone Warrior and earned an MBA from Duke University's Fuqua School of Business. He was in Ukraine within days of Russia's full-scale invasion and has said the company's founders came together through that experience.

The company's xNav AI architecture combines data from radar, visual sensors and other sources into a common operating picture, identifies threats and coordinates autonomous systems. Its Guardian counter-drone system 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, though that figure is company-reported rather than an independently verified government statistic.

Subsidiary Tandem Defense holds 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 gives the government a vehicle for future orders.

"Completing this transaction puts Powerus in a position to build at the scale our customers are asking for," CEO Andrew Fox said following the merger. The company says it intends to expand manufacturing, autonomous systems and potentially pursue acquisitions.

The merger brought prominent backers. The announcement identified Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. as notable investors in the combined company through American Venture Partners, alongside drone manufacturer Unusual Machines and a $50 million strategic investment, according to SEC filings.

Market-structure implications

The compressed timeline — a major corporate transaction completed inside the conventional securities system on Thursday and an onchain representation of the equity circulating on Friday — illustrates how tokenized equities can change distribution without creating new assets. A tokenized share can exist in a wallet, settle against stablecoins and move through blockchain applications, while Nasdaq remains where the company establishes its public equity.

Access is still limited, and the restrictions on U.S. participation show that tokenization has not made American equities permissionless or universally tradable. What has changed is portability: blockchain networks can now function as secondary rails for conventional securities almost immediately after listing.

For Powerus, the operational significance extends beyond the token itself. As additional public companies evaluate tokenized distribution and as regulators clarify the rules for onchain securities, the interval between going public and going onchain — 24 hours in PUSA's case — may become a standard feature of the listing process rather than an anomaly.