Unchained - How Ethereum Institutional Intends to Grow Ethereum's Market Share
Episode Date: July 3, 2026Joseph Chalom lays out why Ethereum Institutional exists, how it differs from Etherealize, and why he thinks Michael Saylor is in a pickle. ======================================================== T...hank you to our sponsor! Fidelity: Fidelity has been building in crypto and DeFi since 2014 — now they're hiring. Explore career opportunities at one of the most forward-thinking names in finance here: crypto.fidelitycareers.com. Cape: Your biggest crypto vulnerability isn't your wallet, it's your phone number. Cape is America's privacy-first mobile carrier that rotates your SIM identity daily and blocks SIM swaps before they happen. Get 33% off your first six months at cape.co/unchained (use code: UNCHAINED). ======================================================== Sharplink, BitMine, and Joe Lubin spent the past ten days launching two new organizations aimed at convincing Wall Street to build on Ethereum, backing them with commitments from more than fifty institutional supporters. Joseph Chalom, CEO of Sharplink and a board member of the new Ethereum Institutional, joins Laura Shin to make the case that Ethereum's real competition isn't Solana or Canton. It's inertia: the reluctance of the world's largest institutions to touch financial rails they don't already trust. Chalom walks through how Ethereum Institutional differs from Etherealize and the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, why Robinhood building on Arbitrum still counts as a win for Ethereum, and what it would take for ETH to capture the value flowing through the network as tokenized real-world assets grow past $31 billion. He pushes back on claims that the Ethereum Foundation's culture is broken, then turns to Strategy's preferred stock drama and says plainly that Michael Saylor is in a pickle. Host: Laura Shin, Host / Unchained Guests: Joseph Chalom - CEO of Sharplink Timestamps 🚀 01:33 Why Sharplink, BitMine, and Joe Lubin launched Ethereum Institutional 🧭 05:51 How Ethereum Institutional differs from Etherealize and the EEA 🃏 10:15 Chalom says institutional inertia, not Solana, is Ethereum's real threat 💙 14:40 Cape: Get 33% off your first six months with code unchained at https://cape.co/unchained 💼 15:34 Fidelity: Explore crypto careers that could change your future at https://crypto.fidelitycareers.com 🧩 16:20 Why Chalom says Robinhood building on Arbitrum is still a win for Ethereum ⚡ 20:54 Does value actually flow back to ETH the token 🏛️ 24:33 Chalom pushes back on the idea that Ethereum's culture is broken 🤝 29:01 Why Chalom says Sharplink's shareholders and Ethereum's ecosystem are aligned 📉 32:18 Chalom says Michael Saylor is in a pickle over Strategy's preferred stock drama Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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It has over a million validators when Solana has less than 800.
It has five or six credible, diversified software clients, whereas 92%, I believe, is the last
time I checked of Solana is running on one client software system.
All the elements that matter, uptime, liquidity, developer community, composability.
Ethereum is leading by miles.
Hi, everyone. Welcome to Unchained, your no-hyp Resource for All Things Crypto. I'm your host, Laura Shin. Thanks for joining this live stream. Before we dive into today's discussion, we'll hear a word from the sponsors that make this show possible. This episode is brought to you by Cape, America's Privacy First Mobile Carrier. Same premium service you'd expect from any other carrier, but designed so your number, your location, and your data actually stay yours. Get 33% off six months at Cape,
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Today's guest is Joseph Shalom, CEO of Sharplink.
Welcome, Joseph.
Great to be back, Laura.
Excited to have you.
This week, Sharplink, Bitmine, and Joe Lubin launched Ethereum Institutional, a new nonprofit intended to help large financial institutions make decisions about the platform for tokenizations, stable coins, and on-chain market infrastructure.
This comes on the heels of the establishment of ETH Labs, which was launched last week, and seems to be focused on ensuring that Ethereum is technically able to deliver to institutions building on it.
And all of these developments come after this kind of two-year period of turmoil in the Ethereum
Community and the Ethereum Foundation, which culminated in the Foundation announcing that it would
be taking a smaller role in Ethereum's development. So, Joe, tell us how this idea for
Ethereum Institutional came about and what the organization plans to do.
Sure. Even taking two steps back, I think we're at a moment that matters in the Ethereum
ecosystem. We're obviously in a consolidation period of the price of Bitcoin and ETH, but the sentiment
has not been great. And some of that is leverage that was taken out of the system in October.
Some of it is the AI narrative. Some of it is risk off. But there definitely was a crisis of confidence
and communication relative to what the role of the Ethereum Foundation should be. So I believe very
strongly that the EF has a narrower mandate. That mandate is going to be on censorship resistance,
privacy, security. It has the greatest track record. But what we recognized is as the Ethereum
Foundation gets smaller, we need other parts of the institutions to step up. And this is the second
announcement, ETH Labs, which was announced as a not-for-profit last week, again, was funded by Joe Lubin,
personally, Tom Lea, Bitmine, and Sharplink, it's because we have a view that we are large
stakeholders in the ecosystem, and it means we need to be benevolent and stewards of the ecosystem.
So that first announcement was an incredibly talented ecosystem team that's going to be
building the future of Ethereum and the protocol for what institutions are looking for.
And then this week's announcement around Ethereum Institutional was a spinoff of the go-to-market
team, the education team, the team that engages with hundreds of financial organizations on a
neutral basis. And the support is meant to signal that there's no crisis in the Ethereum community.
There's no funding issues in the Ethereum community. And at a moment when Ethereum is winning
and has the license to win, we just need to inject more confidence that it is winning and has
the support. So you can think of these as back-to-back launches that build on,
one another and complement the Ethereum Foundation rather than compete with it.
And so what will Ethereum Institutional be focused on?
So Ethereum Institutional was actually a group of people who are working within the Ethereum
Foundation, almost as a BD type group, an educational group, their role is to help the largest
institutions in the world who are currently making like once in a decade decisions about the
future of their financial infrastructure. They're making these foundational decisions. We needed a
front door and a sense of one place you can go to. If you want to learn more about the Ethereum
options, it could be main net, it could be one of the layer two's. It's meant to be neutral.
And the beautiful thing about Ethereum is it doesn't force a rigid configuration. It lets institutions
think of their requirements, what approach they need. And then the same thing. The same thing,
second thing that this institutional group will do, will actually lead engagement in the community.
It'll lead educational conferences, and it'll help coordinate between lots of different stakeholders.
So you can think of it as being the front door, while ETH Labs, you can think of it being
the technical platform that's going to be delivering what institutions need.
And this is a one-two punch, and it's not competitive with.
It's complementing the core work of the smaller.
Ethereum Foundation.
So Ethereum has other organizations that are also focused on institutions, namely
Ethereumize, which launched a year and a half ago, and the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance,
which is quite a bit older, maybe about a decade older, and, you know, as we just mentioned,
also EFLABS.
So how does Ethereum institutional differ from these other organizations?
I think they have the depth of experience, having sat in the EFEL, and, you know,
They have the technical capabilities.
They have a couple of years of track record of having met 500 financial institutions, having
the contacts, having run 40 plus seminars.
And I think what you're going to see them do is really be the source of education as these
institutions are making these foundational decisions.
I'm not suggesting they're the only place in the world you can learn about Ethereum.
There are many of us who are talking about this long-term opportunity.
but you can think of them having technical expertise
and understanding the requirements of these institutions.
So we are moving to a world where it was more under one-tent,
the Ethereum Foundation, to a world where it is more distributed
and may require a layer of coordination,
but not control by any one party.
I think Ethereum's strength is that it's truly credibly neutral,
and you can't say that about the competitive chains
who have concentrated ownership of the tokens,
concentrated ownership in the software clients,
concentrated ownership in the validators,
and frankly a BD group that's completely aligned
with all those parties.
Credibly neutral matters to institutions,
and that's what Ethereum is defined by.
But it is going to be a set of distributed organizations,
and we will have to find a way to coordinate them
without controlling them.
And so are you,
like talking with Ethereum Alliance and the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance about
sort of like creating your own swim lanes or will there be overlap or are the groups
competitive or how does that all work?
So I think you have to distinguish between the announcement last week, which was
Heath Labs.
Heath Labs is going to be run as a completely independent group of people.
It's a not-for-profit.
it will have independent board members, the largest backers, which are Sharplink, Tom Lee at Bitmine,
and Joe Lubin will not be board members. We will have information, but it's meant to be completely
neutral from a governance perspective. I think what you're going to see is Ethereum Institutional
will have a leader from the organization on the board, but I think we announced that Tom Lee
and I will also serve on the board, not to control the outcomes, but
Tom has 35 plus years of experience in macro and finance and a Rolodex like you've never seen
before.
I had 20 years of experience selling financial technology when I was at BlackRock to Aladdin
also deeply understand what institutions require.
So you can think of us not controlling them, but helping them make intros and when necessary
giving them guidance.
But the Ethereum institutional is also a not-for-profit.
It's credible. It's not going to push one solution over another, but it's going to have the backing of the largest stewards of ETH in the world, Tom, Joe, and myself.
And we're going to be a benevolent force. We're not deciding outcomes. We're helping institutions make those decisions.
So that's the way I would think about it. Etherial plays a really important role. The Enterprise Ethereum Alliance plays a role.
I think over time you'll see more coordination between these organizations, but no single party controlling them, which is,
what the beauty and strength of Ethereum is.
Okay, okay.
So basically, Ethelabs and Ethereum and, sorry, Ethereum institutional have the same backers,
but the way that they operate will be separate.
And then Ethereum, I mean, Ethereum, obviously, and Ethereum Alliance are obviously completely separate.
They were formed at different times.
So one other thing I want to ask about was, I believe recently on the show,
I could not find this episode.
So hopefully I'm not misquoting.
But I swear somebody who was from Ethereum said to me, or to somebody on one of our shows,
that in institutional pitch meetings, they've never fielded a question about Solana,
but they have fielded questions multiple times about Canton.
And I remember being very surprised when they said that, which is why I feel like somebody said.
It's just unfortunate.
It was Danny Ryan.
Oh, okay.
From Ethereum, I, and he and I were on a podcast together,
with you, which was wonderful. That was his quote, if I'm not mistaken, Laura. Does that ring a bell?
Okay. It's so funny, because I told somebody on the team to look at the Danny Ryan episode.
I thought that it was him. But anyway, okay. So thank you for remembering that and clarifying for the record.
You know, but so spinning off from that, I was wondering, like, who do you see as kind of the main
competitors to Ethereum right now in the institutional space? And how do you feel
Ethereum is best equipped to compete with them.
Yeah, I'm going to give you a controversial answer, but one I genuinely believe.
You ready for this?
Yeah.
The number one impediment to Ethereum winning is inertia at the largest institutions and the fear
of changing their rails.
That is the number one impediment.
It's not Solana.
It's not Canton.
And I'm just being very direct.
It is institutions have been running on rails that are predict.
And by predictable, they know how they perform.
They know when they're up.
They know when they're down.
They know it takes T plus 1 in the U.S. to settle a trade.
They know it takes T plus 2 and 3 in Asia to settle a trade.
So it's the predictability and the millions of proprietary databases and vendor lock-in,
which are actually the number one impediment of the progress that we know is coming on stable coins,
on tokenization, and on defy.
And my mental model is that stable coins are the money layer.
They're actually the first proof point of tokenization, highly successful.
Tokenization of real world assets are very early, but that's the asset and exposure layer.
And both defy and other rails will end up being the transaction layer of the future.
But I think right now the biggest impediment is not Solana or Canton or a particular L1 or L2.
it is fundamentally people getting ready for change, and these organizations are slow to move.
That said, I think Solana plays a really important role and will have a swim lane.
But if you're thinking about the capital markets use case, and I just want to start with facts,
I'm, you know me, I'm the most optimistic, positive person in this industry.
I will not fud other people, but I'll share facts.
Look at the scoreboard.
Ethereum has more than the Ethereum community has more than 50% of all stable coin settlement
and activity on it relative to any other chain.
I think 10x Solana.
tokenization, it's over 55%.
And my guess it will grow.
And then in the defy land, defy was built on Ethereum largely in the early days.
And if you talk about high quality defy, borrowing, lending, and swaps, it's dominated.
on Ethereum by the Aves and the morphos of the world.
So I think each one of these chains is going to offer something that's unique.
I just happen to think that in capital markets where you want a decentralized player
that's never gone down, where you're not having vendor lock in, and you actually have liquidity,
and I mean real transactions, not transactions hopping off chain that you then represent on chain,
Ethereum is a clear winner.
We need to get our narrative right.
And I think this past 10 days with these two announcements are turning the corner on the idea that Ethereum is winning and has the license to win.
We just need to tell the story and make it easier for institutions to choose the Ethereum ecosystem.
But it has all the characteristics that are winning.
That's my honest, straightforward opinion.
It's inertia and storytelling.
All right.
So in a moment, we'll talk a little bit more about Ethereum's road to adoption.
But first, we'll take a quick word from the sponsors who make this show.
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Back to my conversation with Joseph. So there's been a lot of conversation about the fragmentation and alignment issues due to Ethereum's modular structure.
and one could argue that the likes of Coinbase, even now maybe Robin Hood, have benefited from Ethereum without giving much back.
So I wonder, you know, how institutions usually react to Ethereum having the structure with a split between the L1 and L2s and what questions or concerns they have about it, particularly around things like, you know, fragmentation of liquidity, etc.
You know what's quite interesting is it's kind of weird to get a question about fragmentation of liquidity when Ethereum is over 50% of liquidity of stable coins, defy, and tokenized real world assets.
So like the first thing is you have that problem when you're the deepest pool.
And I think you're right.
You know, these L2s came into being because Ethereum at the foundation made an intentional decision.
that until such time that it had the throughput and the block space,
they would seed scaling and custom configuration to the L2s.
On the one hand, it's been wildly successful because, again,
they're over 50% market share in the things that matter, 10x the next chain.
So, like, that's a good problem to have.
I think the decision around the price of ETH
and how fees are charged and how fees accrue is something that will at some point be revisited.
You know, the technical decision was to seed, roll up control to a lot of the layer 2s,
I think in order to get scale, but also to get market share.
And the fees accrue to Mainnet, the fees accrue to ETH, largely when you had congestion
issues.
That was a technical decision.
But there weren't stewards of Ethereum who wanted to take a step back and say, wait,
Maybe in the future, there's tremendous value being provided to the L2s on Maynet for the security that it has to really focus on what matters.
And I think over time, Ethereum Institute, the ETH Labs, the largest Stewart, will continue to make that decision of do we grow market share or do we have more token value accrue to Ether itself?
but I'll tell you, I'd much rather be in a situation where you're winning market share,
you're winning on trust, liquidity, and security, and then you figure out the economics.
I'd rather be in that situation than focus on tokenomics before what the clients require.
So I think you'll see the industry become much more intentional.
And I have an analogy, maybe a good one, maybe a bad one, but like Uber, when it started,
was expressly subsidizing its drivers.
It was expressly subsidizing its riders.
And look at the market share it created.
I think they have over 47% of the ride share market share in the U.S.
And over time, more and more values started accruing once they built that followership,
once they essentially built a new business model.
In that case, ride share, in this case, global settlement on a neutral platform,
which is what Ethereum is, they ended up figuring out.
the economics for the investors, and they ended up becoming in a much better position
than if they've focused on economics first and market share second.
So I'm trying to be very, very direct that I think over time, as Ethereum becomes that
global settlement layer that's dominant, but neutral and decentralized, the stakeholders will
figure out how to make sure that more of the value inures to Ether.
But you mentioned Robin Hood.
Robin Hood just went live on Arbitrum L2.
but in the Ethereum ecosystem, that could be one of the largest case studies on the use of Ethereum
globally in financial markets, and they still use Ethereum and Ether to secure transactions
and to get economic security.
So that is a net positive for the Ethereum ecosystem, not a negative because it didn't happen
on Mainnet or the L2.
And I think most other chains would die to have a relationship like this with Robin Hood.
So I think we're going to be much more intentional around economics, but it's never been a bad strategy to get the trust and the market share first.
So, you know, you already kind of naturally led into this question around Eith the asset.
And I had Onscar Dietrichs of Eith Labs on the show the other day.
I saw there was like a little controversy on Twitter about a post that I made about something he said.
but I asked him about the value of ETH and how the Ethereum, it has been perceived that the
Ethereum Foundation was not very focused on that. But I wondered if the value of ETH is something
that Ethereum Institutional intends to focus on. And if so, how do you plan to positively
influence the value of Eith? So let me state a thesis first before I talk about, you know,
who controls the value of Eith. And just to be clear, none of us stewards have an ability to
independently control the value of ETH. However, let me just give you two mental models.
The first is this idea that Ethereum and Ether cannot exist without one another.
And for a long period in Ethereum's history, there has been a correlation between the value of the
assets secured on Ethereum and the price of ether. That correlation held for a while.
It seems to be challenged at the moment. And it's not clear if that's because of
of sentiment or because the speculation left the market.
So that's number one.
The first thesis is there is going to be a correlation between the price of ether
and the asset secured on the network, even if it's not linear.
The second is at some point, the transaction volumes that are coming on Ethereum
are going to be many, many multiples of what we see today.
Right now there's a lot of block space.
We're not triggering the burn.
But when you start seeing stable coin growth like we expect, you start seeing tokenization.
There's only $31 billion of tokenized real world assets.
The estimates, whether it's BCG or Citigroup or B. Riley or others is that it's going to be measured in the trillions.
And then Defy has had a bit of a hiccup from a security perspective, but wait till RWA joined Bitcoin and ETH in borrowing and lending markets, you're going to see massive transactions.
volume. And that's even before you get to agentic. And when you start seeing that volume,
and again, this stuff is compounding. If stable coins, tokenized real world assets, and defy are largely
happening on Ethereum, this is going to be a righteous circle. And more and more share of transactions
are going to happen on Ethereum. And at some point, we'll start triggering the burn. And then the final thing
is people in the industry who hold ETH, whether you're an ETH provider, a debt, a high net worth
individual, another steward, now have a focus on being intentional about the economics and the
relationship between Ethereum and ETH. I would expect over the next several years, as we see usage
grow, you might see proposals to have more of that benefit, ether, the token. But again,
I'd rather start with a position of winning massive market share. Jeff Bezos did that in bookselling
and then in e-commerce, and Uber did it in ride share, and over time, it benefited the investors.
So that is the thesis.
I'm not suggesting at all that it's rudderless.
There are these correlations, but just wait till you see the bullish level of activity that's coming.
I think we're vastly underestimating it, and the stewards have an interest of making sure
that not only Ethereum is productive and winning, but ether the token accrues value.
So let's also now talk about culture because Ethereum has been a leader for quite a long time.
You know, it's had the place of the second blockchain for, I don't even know.
I think it was maybe close to a decade, we'll say.
But part of the community angst the past couple years has been this perception that Ethereum and in particular the Ethereum Foundation is non-competitive.
And it almost felt like the community sort of seemed to realize before the foundation did that we're in this new era where it's all about adoption. And you have to go out and get users and not just wait for them to come to you, whether it's everyday people, businesses, institutions. So, you know, do you think of Ethereum institutional as having that kind of infinite garden culture that the Ethereum Foundation has? Or do you plan to,
try to foster a different type of culture?
No, I think whether it's Ethel Labs or Heath Institutional or Sharpling or Joe Lubin, like all of us
have a view that there are principles around decentralization, neutrality, trust, privacy,
that the Ethereum Foundation is building the most foundational layer that's required for us to be
credibly neutral. And then we're going to be focused at Sharplink, at Bitmine, at Heath,
labs at Ethereum Institutional on the adoption and the use case of capital markets.
Again, Ethereum has the license to win.
And you know what's interesting is I would politely and respectfully challenge the culture issue,
which is I wrote about this recently.
You know, there's this view that Ethereum has something around the narrative that's missing.
Just look at the scoreboard again.
It passed a million contributors to the code and the ecosystem.
No blockchain is even close.
I'm not sure there's any open source blockchain project that's even close.
It has over a million validators when Solana has less than 800.
It has five or six credible, diversified software clients, whereas 92%, I believe, is the last
time I checked of Solana is running on one client software system.
like all the elements that matter uptime liquidity developer community composability
Ethereum is is leading by miles and I think sometimes the angst is more self-inflicted
because if you take a step back and just look at the facts not fud it is really really doing well
and yes the Ethereum foundation went down a different ideological route and you know it didn't
communicate well, but I would still rather have a foundation that's credibly neutral where the
system has never gone down, where the software clients are actually diverse, where you have
real economic security. The last estimate I saw from the EF is it would take over $50 billion of
concentrated ownership to try to attack Ethereum security. That is massively important.
So I'm going to fight back politely on there's a cultural issue.
The cultural issue is there's principles here and we're not creating another vendor lock-in.
So we're going to stick to the principles, but we are going to focus on the use case and adoption of capital markets.
And that's why you're seeing this one-two punch of announcements.
And it wasn't just Joe Lubin and Tom Lee and Sharpling supporting this.
In each case, you had over 50 influential supporters who put their money where their mouth is to
contribute to create this long-term endowment, so to speak, and the runway. So no one would think
there's a funding challenge. But I'd much rather have this than a concentrated treasury or a
foundation who can change the rules of the game. The Ethereum Foundation owns less than half percent
of all ETH, so it's credibly neutral and it's not going to change the rules of the game like another
foundation could. So I would take this nine times out of 10, despite the fact that there's been
some noise. So I'm bullish, I'm positive, and I'm not just shilling because we're one of the
largest owners of Eath. These are the facts if you just look at them. So Ethereum, and in particular,
I guess the foundation has somewhat famously been dismissive of the financial aspects of crypto
with DFI founders complaining that the foundation doesn't support DFI, didn't use it for a long time.
And, you know, here we are where now there are these two new organizations that are essentially being funded by two Ethereum debts, which, you know, obviously have their own shareholders who have their own rights. They have legal protection. They have, you could say, a different alignment even than from direct holders of ETH. And I wonder, you know, if there's any issues there around either incentives or, yeah, just, I'm,
just curious, like, what rights or what influence does, you know, their needs and wants have
on the funding for these organizations?
So, sure, we're a public company, and I can't speak for Joe Lubin or Tom Lee, but I'll share
my view.
I've never seen a more aligned set of interest.
Just think about it.
Our thesis as a public company, a Sharplink, is to give people access to the Ethereum
opportunity.
and you get linear exposure to the price of ETH,
and then we do something quite unique.
We make our ETH really productive in the ecosystem.
So just think of that.
We're giving someone directional access to ETH
and we're making it productive.
How is there not a better alignment of interest
for our end shareholders
than to support the ecosystem,
support the people who are going to be shipping
and delivering the code from ETH Labs?
And it's starting with five people,
but we expect it to be much larger.
and then people who are helping the first use cases, which are capital markets.
So I think our interest are beyond aligned.
Our investors should be really, really happy that we're helping support the ecosystem.
At the same time, as I said, ETH Labs is as an independent board.
Sharplink, Joe Lubin, and Tom Lee do not sit on that board.
We let ETH Labs come up with their roadmap, let them build.
It's all auditable.
It's all public.
Ethereum Foundation, we do have influence on, and Tom and I are going to sit on the board
because they need our help with introductions to the world's largest financial institutions.
Wait, I'm sorry.
When Tom Lee are going to sit on the Ethereum Foundation board?
Not on Ethereum Foundation on Ethereum Institutional's board.
I'm sorry if I spoke.
On Ethereum Institutional, along with David, the executive director, because why wouldn't you
take advantage of 60 to 70 years of capital markets and institutional
experience and introductions. But again, this is intended to help guide the Ethereum community,
but there's no one controlling this. There are a series of nodes, as you mentioned, you have the
Ethereum Foundation, you have ETH Labs, you have Ethereum Institutional, you have great parties
like the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance who have a spokesperson role and an education role.
You have a theorized with Danny Ryan and Vivek, who are wonderful doing their
job. I mean, that's okay. We're not a centralized organization like others.
Okay. Last quick question. I'm sure you have been watching this MSTR drama with
STRC and obviously you yourselves are also a dad. And I was just wondering, you know,
what you are thinking as you are watching this kind of situation that a strategy has been
navigating amidst also this sort of drawdown and then we've seen across the board with dads.
Yeah, so I would say, first of all, we tip our hat to Michael Saylor for coming up with this idea that
there's another exposure vehicle for owning a crypto asset. You could own spot, you could own an
ETF. And when I was at BlackRock, we launched the largest crypto ETFs in history.
But for many investors, you'd rather own a public equity. So he coined that model, he built that
model, I think the difference between Bitcoin and Eith and Solana is that Bitcoin is not natively
productive. It doesn't have a yield. So if you're running a Bitcoin debt and you want to drive
outsized returns beyond just holding Bitcoin, you need to financialize your stock. And that could
take the form of convertible bonds. It could take the form of preferred stock. It could take both.
With Ethereum, you don't natively need to do that because it has a two and a half to three
percent native yield. And at Sharplink, we've been around for at this point one year,
and we've largely stuck to issuing common stock and only when it's accretive to shareholders.
We've not raised common stock and diluted our shareholders. So we have not yet chosen to take
on debt. We've not yet chosen to offer preferred. We've kept a very clean balance sheet.
And I'll tell you one thing. I definitely feel like Michael Saylor is,
in a pickle. We have a lot of respect for him. The thing I think that's overhanging the market
is the lack of clarity and kind of daily announcements as to the direction he's taking. But we've
a lot of admiration for coining and building a new business model. It's just harder with Bitcoin
than it is with Eith. And so it's funny. When I started, I used to get the question last July,
August, and September, how is a DAT going to survive a crypto downturn? And it's very rare when you
start a new business and three months later, you're in a downturn, you're in a winter,
you're in a consolidation period. And we actually survived perfectly fine. Why? We prioritized
our investors. We didn't dilute them. We didn't take complicated structure. We made our
ETH productive like we've promised. And yes, the stock will go up and the stock will go down,
but we've survived a downturn because we did the right thing at every step. And we did it with a
institutional client base, that said, those deaths that took out really weird structure or started
selling their eth or started investing in housing or started tokenizing aircraft engines,
they didn't survive. And it feels like in the Ethereum space, there's BitMine and Sharpling
that have survived. And the other ones either didn't get off the ground or at this point
had pivoted from becoming debt. So I'm actually quite proud of what we've accomplished. Like,
very few businesses hit a wall on the price of their product in the first few months and are
able to come out perfectly fine. So we're quite proud of it. We've just tried to season first
before taking on capital structure, which I think has been the right thing for investors.
And we've over communicated it every step of the way.
All right. Well, Joseph, it was such a pleasure talking with you. Thank you so much for coming on Unchained.
Great to have. Thank you for having me. I look forward to being.
back soon. Thank you, Laura. Yes. And thanks to everyone for joining us on this live stream.
We will catch you next week. Bye now. Now, thank you hear on Unchained is investment advice.
This show is for informational and entertainment purposes only, and my guest and I may hold
assets discussed on the show. For war disclosures, visit UnchainedCripto.com.
