SharpLink CEO Chalom: Ethereum Dominates Security, Trust, and Liquidity
SharpLink CEO Joseph Chalom told The Rollup that institutions seek security, trust, and liquidity, and Ethereum excels in these three areas. He views these as hard thresholds for the on-chain settlement layer of traditional capital migration, rather than mere slogans.
Chalom has worked at BlackRock for about 20 years, participating in the launch of spot Bitcoin and Ethereum products as well as on-chain treasury funds, and now leads the Ethereum treasury of this Nasdaq-listed company. Since shifting to a treasury strategy, the company has raised over $3 billion, with public holdings peaking at approximately 860,000 to 890,000 Ethereum, making it the second-largest holder globally, close to full staking, with custody managed by licensed custodians.
He emphasized that Ethereum has over a decade of uptime, more than 900,000 validators, and deeper liquidity for stablecoins and tokenized assets. The company invests permanent capital into native staking, liquid staking, and layer two solutions, including allocating about $200 million to combinations like Linea, ether.fi, and EigenCloud, layering staking, re-staking, and layer two incentives, while keeping positions in compliant custody.
He compared exchange-traded funds: the latter must provide daily liquidity, while treasury companies hold permanent capital that can exchange longer lock-up periods for risk-adjusted on-chain returns. The company also provides anchor funding to EthLabs, Ethereum Institutional, and EthSystems, covering protocol scaling, institutional onboarding, and privacy compliance, with the chairman being a co-founder of Ethereum.
He also shifted the focus from cryptocurrency market capitalization to traditional financial market structures on-chain, stating that instant atomic settlement is the largest risk reduction in the history of financial services. Internally, metrics look at daily trading, management, and stock liquidity, as new issuances often follow market capitalization issuance channels, depending on secondary market depth.
In market mechanics, buyers are institutions and index funds packaging listed company equity as Ethereum leverage, while sellers are spot Ethereum continuously drained from the secondary market. This is driven by both narrative and capital expenditure: stock premiums exchanged for coins, coins re-staked for yield, and yields further increasing the per-share coin amount. Beneficiaries include staking stacks, layer two, and compliant custody channels, while those under pressure can only provide passive exposure and cannot convert assets into productive reserves, along with public chains with weaker validator depth and settlement credibility.
On-chain, nearly full staking locks circulating supply into an exit queue, raising the visible staked ratio for institutions alongside treasury companies, foundations, and exchange reserves.
Source: Public Information
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Chalom's path is to bring spot Bitcoin, spot Ethereum, and tokenized treasuries from BlackRock into mainstream portfolios, then jump to publicly traded company balance sheets to hoard coins directly. He no longer acts as a product distributor but integrates stock issuance, coin purchases, staking, and re-staking into a single machine. With the founder of ConsenSys as chairman, this effectively welds protocol politics, client ecosystem, and treasury balance sheets together.
The flow of money is clear: private placements and market cap-driven issuances bring in dollars, which are exchanged for Ethereum through OTC and trading platforms, then layered into native staking, liquid staking tokens, and layer two re-staking. The motivation is to transform "price beta" into "per-share coin amount + on-chain coupon," with the strategy to occupy the neutral settlement layer in the eyes of institutions before tokenized stocks, stablecoin settlements, and agency finance expansion. The benchmark is not just to hoard one more coin but to make Ethereum an auditable reserve interest rate anchor.
Similar cases include MicroStrategy for Bitcoin, BitMine for Ethereum's arms race, and BlackRock moving treasuries onto the same chain. The industry phase has shifted from retail consensus to permanent capital expansion by publicly traded companies, but has not yet reached a point where a few treasury companies substantially control the protocol layer. Solana is used to contrast validator numbers and downtime risks, with shale companies discussing free cash flow logic being rewritten into high staking rates discussing coupon yields.
The structural change is the transfer of pricing power: whoever can provide non-downtime, custodial, and exitable deep liquidity will take on the migration of traditional clearinghouses. The mechanism is that institutions first buy trust and then throughput, while treasury companies use equity premiums to prepay future settlement shares, rewriting the public chain security budget from retail gas fees into publicly traded company capital expenditures.
ABAB News · Cognitive Laws
- Institutions first buy non-downtime, then buy high throughput.
- Permanent capital consumes coupons, liquid capital consumes volatility.
- The settlement layer earns trust, allowing the application layer to price.