Company: STAA
Filing Date: 2025-10-09
Form Type: DFAN14A
Source: 0001213900-25-097833
Chunk: 11

Company: STAAR SURGICAL CO
Filing Date: 2025-10-09
Form: DFAN14A
Chunk 11
---
 good one for the buyer and a bad one for the seller, and disclose them both. But it kind of makes sense!

Crypto narrow banking

A theme around here is that
the funding model of banking, though common, is risky. Banks take money from depositors who can ask for it back at any time, and they
use that money to make long-term loans. There is a duration mismatch: If the depositors all doask for their money back
at once, the bank won’t have it, and disaster will ensue. This is a well-understood problem, and there are important mechanisms
— central banks as lenders of last resort, deposit insurance, liquidity and capital regulation, etc. — to mitigate it.

But even so, in recent years, we have seen a bit
of a retreat from this traditional “maturity transformation” in banking, and a bit of a move toward narrow banking. Some depositors don’tput
their money in traditional banks, but instead put it in “narrow banks” (like money-market funds and stablecoins)
that park it in safe short-dated government-backed instruments (Fed reserves, Treasury bills). Meanwhile risky long-term loans are increasingly
made by private credit funds, which get a lot of their money from, paradigmatically, life insurance companies. The idea
is that life insurance companies — unlikebanks — have long-term, stable funding: They get money from customers
and give it back in the form of annuities (with fixed payments over some term) or death benefits (hopefully many years later). So life
insurers are natural sources of long-term loans.

| 5. | Citi’s fairness opinion includes a discounted cash flow                                                                              
 analysis valuing the company at $17.70 to $37.50 per share. If I just naively increase those numbers by 26% (that is, the difference 
 between $142 million and $113 million of projected EBITDA in the terminal year for the July projections), I get $22.24 to $47.12 per 
 share. So $28 is still in the range.                                                                                                 |

<div align='center'>Exhibit 2-4</div>

Crypto relearns a lot of the lessons of traditional
finance, including this one. In 2022 there was a crypto banking crisis: There were a lot of crypto shadow banks (lending platforms and
exchanges) that took crypto from depositors who could ask for it back at any time and used