SharpLink掌舵人：只买不卖，让ETH在寒冬里钱生钱

Original content from Tony Edward

Compiled by Odaily Planet Daily, Qin Xiaofeng (@QinXiaofeng 888 )

Editor's Note: At the recent Injective Summit 2026 in Washington, SharpLink Co-CEO Joseph Chalom gave an exclusive interview.

He stated that while the market is currently pessimistic about Ethereum, there is a divergence between reality and market sentiment. In fact, multiple data points from the Ethereum ecosystem indicate a promising future: it accounts for over 50% of stablecoin transaction volume, nearly 60% of tokenized RWAs, and its DeFi dominance remains unchallenged. He said, "Ethereum is winning, but the communication is failing." SharpLink has joined forces with giants like ConsenSys to fund three core teams spun off from the Ethereum Foundation, focusing on institutional-grade scaling, privacy compliance, and market adoption. More critically, during the bear market, they maintained zero leverage, didn't take on debt, insisted on making ETH "productive" and revenue-generating, and predicted that tokenization and 24/7 trading would trigger the next wave of institutional front-running.

This week, ETH briefly approached $2000, and the ETH/BTC ratio reached 0.03, a three-month high, seemingly signaling that things are improving. Additionally, after about 8 months without large-scale new purchases, SharpLink bought another 10,000 ETH in June this year at an average cost of approximately $1611; total ETH holdings post-purchase reached 886,725 ETH.

The following is the original text of the interview dialogue. Enjoy~

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Host (Tony Edward / Thinking Crypto): Everyone, we are recording at the Injective Policy Summit in Washington D.C. Joining me today is Joseph Chalom, CEO of SharpLink. Joseph, great to see you.

Joseph Chalom: Great to speak with you again. First, let me introduce ourselves: we are a digital asset treasury management company. We raised billions of dollars to buy Ethereum (ETH) and make it highly efficient. The two most interesting things in the past month are: First, we returned to the public market for equity financing, effectively buying back ETH and some of our shares at very good prices. Second, together with Joe Lubin from ConsenSys and Tom Lee from Bitmine, we started supporting and investing in spin-off projects within the Ethereum ecosystem. This will be very positive for Ethereum's new narrative and new era.

Host: There's been a lot of negative sentiment around ETH recently, including some criticism of the Ethereum Foundation. Do you think this negative sentiment is just a symptom of the bear market?

Joseph Chalom: Actually, I think over the past year or so, there has been a divergence between reality and market sentiment.

Let's start with the very positive side. The Ethereum ecosystem accounts for over 50% of all stablecoin transaction volume and nearly 60% of tokenized real-world assets. The vast majority of DeFi is built on Ethereum. So, if you look at the report card, they are winning. The sentiment is quite negative, largely due to the industry downturn and the Ethereum Foundation—despite its excellent work over the past decade or so—making the decision to downsize and let more ecosystem participants support the roadmap. This method of communication led to a lack of clarity and confidence in the ecosystem, even though it is actually winning.

Therefore, some of us, as ecosystem stewards and large ETH holders, stepped up. We support our position with actions, and I'd be happy to share some of the things we are doing collectively as an industry.

Host: Let's dive deeper. What specific initiatives are there?

Joseph Chalom: Let's start with the positive side. Ethereum is the longest-running blockchain besides Bitcoin, has never experienced downtime, and is the most secure, trusted, and liquid. It also has a multi-year, very aggressive scaling roadmap.

Today, their purpose and direction are to return to the basics. The Ethereum Foundation will focus on privacy, censorship resistance, and some core principles to ensure Ethereum remains credibly neutral for decades to come. But this means some of the most critical talent and functions within the foundation were spun off. In the past three weeks or so, three teams were spun off from the Ethereum Foundation and received support from Joe Lubin, myself, and Tom Lee from Bitmine. These are actually very important for institutional adoption.

Let me tell you who they are. The first is ETH Labs, consisting of some of the most powerful developers in the Ethereum ecosystem, building the scaling capabilities required by institutions. The second is Ethereum Institutional, the commercial development and market-facing front of Ethereum, spun off from the foundation with our support. Earlier this week, the three of us also funded EthSystems, which is building the next generation of privacy and compliance capabilities on Ethereum—an absolute necessity for the largest institutions to transact and ensure data privacy. While it sounds like three separate nodes in the ecosystem, these are the three most important things driving institutional adoption over the next year and beyond.

Host: This is interesting. I see many institutions preparing for tokenization and diving into DeFi, starting with Ethereum first, and then eventually expanding to other chains.

Joseph Chalom: Exactly that. As I said earlier, Ethereum has the characteristics that institutions need. I worked at BlackRock for 20 years. I know that before migrating financial rails that have existed for 40, 50, or 60 years, you want to migrate to a system that is trusted, never goes down, is secure, and has the highest liquidity. Most importantly, people don't talk enough about decentralization.

A truly decentralized blockchain means that once a decision is made, the rules cannot be changed. Therefore, having a fully distributed, decentralized chain, controlled by no single person or single treasury, is very important for institutions because they are making a once-in-a-generation infrastructure migration.

Host: Totally agree. So, during the bear market, how did SharpLink create value for its shareholders? Was it through staking DeFi protocols to generate passive income?

Joseph Chalom: Of course. During the digital asset treasury management boom last summer, about six or seven Ethereum digital asset treasury management companies launched, and maybe five Solana ones. Only a few of us managed to raise billions of dollars and achieve scaled launch speed. In this industry, you need scale to compete.

What we did was first buy ETH with all that capital, and then from day one, make it yield-generating, because ETH itself is a productive asset. You can stake it and get a 2.5% to 3% return. We've been doing that and making it more efficient than that benchmark. We also participate in DeFi. We announced a $125 million fund in partnership with another public company, Galaxy, to deploy our ETH into new protocols, helping them launch and gain what's called TVL (Total Value Locked) or initial capital. So, we make ETH's yield higher than native staking.

Lastly, when you encounter a consolidation period, a crypto winter, and a cycle just 3 months after starting a business, you truly see who is operating a public company in an institutional manner. We didn't take on debt, didn't issue preferred shares, and didn't borrow against our ETH collateral. We decided to be conservative during the crypto winter. A few of us survived, holding billions of dollars worth of ETH. That's how we protect our investors.

Honestly, going through a crypto winter isn't fun, but treating investors with respect has always been our motivation. You know, after winter comes spring and summer. When the market recovers, we are in a very good position. And we are starting to see ETH's recovery. Just since these recent announcements, ETH has risen about 20% from its lows. Short-term conditions are indeed challenging, but the long-term adoption story has never been more optimistic.

Host: That's really great to hear. I love that you didn't take on debt because I think that's risky and somewhat against the spirit of crypto.

Joseph Chalom: Yes. You know, I have admiration for Michael Saylor. He truly invented a new vehicle for asset exposure. You can own a public company to gain exposure to Bitcoin.

The challenge in the Bitcoin space is that it's not productive by itself. The only way to make your Bitcoin continuously accumulate and generate yield is to financialize your stock, issue convertible bonds, preferred shares. Then you can get into trouble and eventually have to sell your reserve assets. This has always been a challenge for the Bitcoin community, because digital asset treasury management companies, including Michael Saylor, have gone from being large net buyers of Bitcoin to now sellers, which is very negative for short-term price action.

Host: Exactly right. Joseph, with your background at BlackRock and traditional finance, you have extensive experience. How do you see the outlook for institutional adoption of this technology? It seems like everyone on Wall Street is looking at tokenization, participating in stablecoins, and DeFi.

Joseph Chalom: Yes, I think the tokenization space, whether it's tokenizing dollars into stablecoins or tokenizing treasuries or real-world assets, has been a phenomenon for about 8 or 9 years now.

Progress has been quite slow so far due to a lack of regulatory clarity. I want to describe in very simple terms how these things work together and how they stack on top of each other.

You can think of stablecoins as the dollar or value layer of future finance. You can think of tokenized assets as the asset exposure layer. DeFi is the execution layer. If you have the money layer, the exposure layer, and the execution layer, you are ready to go. You are starting to see not just the tokenization of new funds, but also the tokenization of existing multi-billion dollar funds and the tokenization of equities. To make it a bit more complex, there is another layer: you have cash, assets, and execution. Agentic (smart agents) will be the automation layer.

I think we are still in the bottom half of the first inning. We are waiting for more regulatory clarity, but institutions have moved from the learning phase to the experimentation phase, and are now entering the production phase. It's now a race not to fall behind.

Host: Do you feel that once the Clarity Act passes, it will provide a catalyst or confidence for institutions to innovate and invest more?

Joseph Chalom: 100% agree. I think the Clarity Act is very important in two aspects. One is clarifying that if you are a DeFi developer, you are a software provider, and you are not responsible for the actions that occur on your software. But if you hold customer assets as a DeFi protocol, then you are regulated and responsible for everything that happens. So the future of DeFi is brighter because of the Clarity Act.

Second, I think it will also impact market sentiment and momentum. In the crypto space, even a small tailwind can lead to massive development.

Thirdly, if you are in a large institution and your leadership is interested in digital assets, having the government's "good housekeeping" seal of approval gives you more leeway to accelerate things that would otherwise be done slowly. I think we'll see a lot of momentum this summer. And I think we will reach a point where tokenization becomes the norm, not the exception.

Host: Do you think there will be major challenges when some companies are tokenized while traditional markets still exist? For example, you could have a tokenized version of Tesla stock, but the stock market still has the traditional stock. What differences or issues do you foresee?

Joseph Chalom: I think the biggest challenge is the existence of different liquidity pools. For tokenization to succeed, we need to ensure that the digital version of a stock or fund has comparable trading volume and liquidity to its traditional counterpart. But anytime there is technological progress, analog and digital coexist. It's like slow trains and high-speed trains running on parallel tracks; eventually, they all become high-speed.

But I think the more important inflection point is this: imagine a world where your government announces war in the Middle East on a Friday night. Suppose your portfolio holds the analog version of a certain stock, and you want to sell it. If you hold the digital version, you can trade 24/7 and express your opinion. You want to go long on oil companies, you can. You want to sell consumer cyclical stocks, you can.

At some point, a fiduciary deciding whether to buy the analog version or the digital on-chain version will almost certainly choose to buy and hold the on-chain version because it can be traded 24/7, is programmable, and allows for instant settlement. So, the fiduciary will reach a point and say to themselves: I can't hold the slow analog version because I can't express my opinion over the weekend. So sometime in the future, a tipping point will occur, and I think this is still a few years away.

Host: That's a very good point. As the market moves towards 24/7 trading, you are almost at a disadvantage if you are still using the analog version. You have to move to the tokenized digital version.

Joseph Chalom: Yes. But you need liquidity to tilt towards the more liquid version because that's also important.

Host: I suppose that's why stock exchanges, large institutions, and banks are moving towards a 24/7 market. It makes a lot of sense.

Joseph Chalom: Yes. Nasdaq and NYSE are transitioning to 23 hours a day, 7 days a week, or 24-hour trading. Just this week, DTCC (Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation)—the clearing and settlement institution handling approximately 400 trillion transactions annually—just launched on-chain collateral tokenization. So, I find this very exciting. You see announcements daily that seem so ordinary now, but would have shaken the market three or four years ago. That's when you know momentum is building.

Host: Exactly right. It feels like this asset class is maturing. We are entering a new phase of adoption. This is remarkable. One last thing, can you share your roadmap?

Joseph Chalom: I think the most important thing SharpLink is doing, besides accumulating ETH and making it yield-generating (we have always been one of the highest productivity digital asset treasury management companies for our ETH), is stepping up to do something we never anticipated needing to do: become ecosystem stewards. Not just with words, but by investing capital into new capabilities, into the spun-off projects of the Ethereum Foundation, and essentially helping bring Ethereum to market.

I am often asked: whose interests does this serve? The answer is our shareholders' interests; it is completely aligned. So, helping Ethereum win, whether it's Layer 1 or Layer 2, and telling the story of why the ETH token will become a highly demanded settlement and trust commodity, is actually in the best interest of our investors. Therefore, we will invest alongside our ecosystem partners and strive to be very good stewards. What we won't do is participate in the core protocol; that is completely decentralized. We won't participate in the governance of Ethereum, but we will participate in funding talent and funding market development capabilities, which is in the long-term interests of our investors.

(End)