In terms of time, it has only been about a year since the DAT (Digital Asset Treasury) company boom. But subjectively, it feels like a lifetime ago. Those financings of billions of dollars at every turn, the tenfold surge in stock prices overnight, and the days of buying tens of millions or even hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Bitcoin and Ethereum without batting an eye, pushing their prices to over $120,000 and nearly $5,000 respectively, seem like a distant memory.

With the rapid decline in the prices of Bitcoin and Ethereum, a large number of DAT companies’ mNAV fell below the “final warning line” of 1, putting a pause on this crazy story. If we take the cryptocurrency market as an example, last year’s market frenzy was like the bull market of 2021. If you wanted to make money, don’t ask, just buy. But now, the calmed-down financial market players can’t help but ask: What is the investment logic of DAT?

Joseph Chalom, who worked at BlackRock for twenty years and has been involved in BlackRock’s digital asset business since 2018, used his professional expertise in the financial field to answer this question in an easy-to-understand way after joining Sharplink as CEO. Because he believes, he chooses: “I chose to return because I firmly believe in the long-term opportunities of Ethereum.”

In June 2025, Chalom retired from BlackRock. However, a phone call changed his life trajectory. Consensys founder, Ethereum co-founder, and then Sharplink chairman Joseph Lubin invited him to join Sharplink. In the interview, Chalom did not shy away from saying that this was a mission-driven choice.

Before transforming into an Ethereum DAT company, Sharplink was a technology company headquartered in Minnesota, focusing on online sports betting and game marketing, connecting sports fans with betting platforms through affiliate marketing and data analysis services. This business model has stable revenue in specific markets, but the room for imagination is limited, which has caused its stock price to hover at a low level for a long time. The turning point occurred in May 2025, when Sharplink announced the completion of a private placement (PIPE) of up to $425.00 million, led by Ethereum ecosystem core company Consensys, with participants including Galaxy Digital, ParaFi Capital, Pantera Capital, Electric Capital, Ondo and other well-known crypto venture capital and infrastructure institutions. Along with this financing, Ethereum co-founder Joseph Lubin became the chairman of Sharplink.

10 years ago, Joseph Lubin founded Consensys for the application and commercialization of the Ethereum ecosystem, serving both the Ethereum consumer (2C) end and the enterprise and developer end (2B & 2D), and launched popular products including MetaMask and Infura. In June 2025, Sharplink officially announced the launch of the Ethereum Treasury strategy, making ETH the company’s main reserve asset. This decision made it the first Nasdaq-listed company to publicly announce Ethereum as its core treasury asset.

Since then, Sharplink has begun to accumulate ETH holdings at an astonishing rate: through PIPE, ATM (at-the-market offering) equity financing, registered direct offerings and other capital tools, the company has accumulated more than 800,000 ETH in just a few months. Sharplink’s stock price has also undergone drastic changes with this transformation. Before May 2025, the price of SBET had been hovering below $3.00 for a long time; by August 2025, the stock price once climbed to over $20.00, an increase of over 400%. Even after the subsequent correction, the company’s market value is still far higher than its valuation as a game marketing company.

The “re-hired” Joseph Chalom has a very clear positioning for Sharplink. Even after Sharplink started accumulating ETH for a month, other companies followed suit and frantically put ETH into the pockets of listed companies with exaggerated “performances”, it did not shake the underlying logic that this financial veteran had determined from the first day he stepped into the company building. This strategic focus comes from countless past practical experiences.

In the interview, Chalom divided his career into two stages: In the first twelve years at BlackRock, he participated in the construction and scaling of Aladdin, one of the world’s largest institutional-grade investment portfolio management and risk management systems, serving more than 1,000 top financial institutions and managing assets of over $10 trillion. During this period, he served as the Chief Operating Officer of BlackRock Solutions. Starting in 2018, Chalom turned to the field of digital assets. He recalled that BlackRock formed a blockchain team in 2018, but the crypto industry at that time was far from ready to welcome large institutions.

“We met hundreds of companies, banks, custodians and regulators, and we also met a lot of scammers,” Chalom said. “At that time, we thought the industry was not mature enough: the standards were too low, the security was too low, and we didn’t understand the requirements of institutions.” This wait lasted for three years. From 2018 to 2021, BlackRock’s digital asset team mainly did three things: First, become an important investor in Circle (USDC stablecoin issuer) and manage its stablecoin treasury portfolio; second, connect the Aladdin system with Coinbase, so that traditional investors can configure Bitcoin and Ether through a familiar interface; third, promote the approval of Bitcoin ETF and Ethereum ETF.

Later, institutions including BlackRock successfully broke the SEC’s years of blockade and officially launched the Bitcoin spot ETF in early 2024, becoming a milestone moment in Web3. In addition, Chalom also deeply participated in the creation of BlackRock’s tokenized fund BUIDL, a money market fund built on the Ethereum mainnet that issues corresponding tokenized shares, allowing investors to freely switch with stablecoins within 24 hours while obtaining returns. It can be said that BlackRock’s continuous exploration of crypto assets over the past 8 years has shaped Joseph Chalom’s understanding of this emerging industry.

Unlike many crypto native young people, Chalom may not be able to fully understand many novel experiments on the chain, but he has a unique understanding of how to plate and carve Ethereum and serve it to institutional investors. Why Ethereum? Why not buy Ethereum directly? If you were to interview Joseph Chalom, I believe this would also be the first question you would think of: Why use Ethereum as a reserve asset? Why don’t investors buy Ethereum directly, but buy Sharplink’s stock instead?

For the first question, Chalom gave 5 reasons. First, Ethereum is a “productive asset.” Both Bitcoin and Ethereum can be used as a store of value, but Ethereum’s unique staking mechanism allows it to generate native returns. “You can get about 2.75% APR,” Chalom explained, “Ethereum’s productivity is what makes it very different from Bitcoin.”

Secondly, the structural defects of ETF products give opportunities to DAT companies like Sharplink. The US Ethereum ETF initially did not allow staking. Even if some ETFs were later approved for staking, due to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)’s requirements for daily liquidity, ETF issuers can only stake about 50% to 70% of their holdings. Staking requires a queuing time of several tens of days, and unstaking also requires a queuing time of about a week. The ETF must meet investors’ redemption needs at any time. In addition, the ETF will also charge management fees and retain about 18% of the staking income. “If you invest in Sharplink,” Chalom emphasized, “we stake almost 100% of our holdings.”

The remaining three points are not critical, mainly emphasizing the advantages of Ethereum, such as the transformative power of instant settlement, 24/7 trading, cross-border circulation, and programmability on traditional finance, as well as security and liquidity depth. Chalom said, “55% of stablecoins are in the Ethereum ecosystem. Coinbase’s Base, Robinhood’s technology stack, and BlackRock’s tokenization attempts are all built on Ethereum.” He believes that Ethereum will become the “chain of capital markets,” while other chains may serve more games, meme coins, etc. that are more sensitive to speed and cost but have lower security requirements.

The more critical question followed: Since Ethereum is so good, why don’t investors directly buy ETH, but instead “settle for second best” and invest in Sharplink’s stock? Chalom’s thinking is very clear: “This is actually two questions, one is why investors should gain exposure through Ethereum DAT companies, and the other is why choose Sharplink as the target.”

Before DAT, investors could directly buy ETH, or indirectly gain exposure through centralized institutions. For high-net-worth investors, directly buying ETH means you either choose to build your own security system, or you have to spend extra costs for custody. As for the latter, the institutions that exploded in 2022, such as BlockFi, Celsius, Genesis, and Babel, have already explained the problem: you need to face opaque counterparty risks. In addition, if you want to obtain additional income through staking, it is even more complicated: What kind of staking method should you choose? How to choose a safe and reliable supplier?

Chalom said that as a US-listed company, there are strict disclosure, audit and other regulatory requirements. How the company handles reserve assets, which staking supplier to choose, how to ensure security, etc. all need to be considered carefully. Previously, for a long time last year, DAT companies were emphasizing mNAV, that is, the ratio between the company’s market value and the crypto assets it holds. When this number is greater than 1, the flywheel of issuing shares to hoard cryptocurrencies has the motivation to operate. But in my opinion, Sharplink may not need these “parameters”. For this DAT company, it only needs the market value and the value of ETH held not to deviate excessively. Because in essence, Sharplink is more like a fund that specializes in managing Ethereum.

The difference is that you don’t need to pay management fees, the fund itself doesn’t have to prepare liquidity for redemption, and it doesn’t share the staking income. From this perspective, you will find that although Sharplink is firmly in the position of “second largest Ethereum DAT company”, its exposure is far less than that of another Ethereum DAT company. The core is that there is a fundamental difference in the underlying logic between the two. This is the second question that Joseph Chalom wants to answer: Why choose Sharplink as the target?

Sharplink started staking after the first batch of ETH it purchased arrived, and it chose to build its own team and manage it independently. The company hired professionals from the traditional financial and crypto fields to complete the purchase, custody and staking of ETH on its own. “Our asset management cost is fixed, which is our employees’ salaries. If the price of ETH doubles, our treasury value doubles, but our cost will not double. I would rather bear the fixed cost than pay extra fees for the growing cake.” Data shows that this difference directly affects the institutional holding structure: about 46% of Sharplink’s shares are held by large institutional investors, who obviously prefer its pure, low-cost, institutionalized ETH exposure model.

Looking back now, Sharplink had already thought about this path from the beginning: instead of relying on storytelling to gain attention, it focused on how to create an investment target that institutions would favor and that would be enough to replace Ethereum itself.

Judgment on the future: Ethereum’s long-term ecology and application infrastructure

When asked if he would be disappointed or shaken in his beliefs when the price of Ethereum fell, Chalom’s answer showed the maturity of an institutional veteran who has experienced multiple cycles. “The volatility of the crypto market means it will go up and it will go down.” He recalled that in the past seven years, he has experienced six similar cycles: prices soared, a large amount of speculation and leverage poured in, followed by a correction of about six months, and finally a new high. “After each correction, the market will come back with better standards and security.”

What surprised Chalom was the extreme optimism of the fundamentals in the second half of 2025 and the divergence from the price performance. “For about five months, the price of Ethereum has been sluggish, but every signal and every announcement around it has been the most optimistic: the New York Stock Exchange announced 24/7 trading, Nasdaq followed suit, BlackRock tokenized everything, the Hong Kong stablecoin bill, the new Korean legislation, Japan passed new regulations… The price is so low under these real news, which is very unusual.” He attributed this divergence to the macro environment: geopolitical conflicts, tariff disputes, and trade tensions between Trump and China have led to a decline in overall market risk appetite. “I believe Ethereum will be successful in the long run. What I worry about is that the overall macro economy is negative for gold and stocks. There are too many wars, too many tariffs, and too much risk. People are unwilling to take more risks.”

For the ceiling of Ethereum, Chalom refused to give a specific price prediction, but put forward two judgment benchmarks: First, is on-chain activity growing? Is the economic activity of stablecoins, real-world asset tokenization, and DeFi expanding? Second, is Ethereum’s market share in these activities increasing or decreasing? If the answers are all yes, that is the best signal for ETH. Sharplink chose to suspend ATM financing when its mNAV was below 1 before, and instead used cash and staking income for repurchase. This also shows Sharplink’s discipline to some extent.

Regarding the future evolution direction, Chalom revealed several possibilities in the interview, but his wording was cautious: “Our primary strategy is to become the most important digital asset treasury of Ethereum. But maybe in the future, we can build an Ethereum full-ecosystem company with real application scenarios, maybe an Ethereum protocol, maybe an infrastructure company, someone needs to write blocks, confirm blocks, sort blocks, and get fee income from it.” But Chalom also emphasized that the core principle is risk management and compliance first: “We manage $2.00 billion worth of ETH, you can’t make mistakes.”

The bridge linking “new assets” and “old money”: the door to Ethereum’s institutional ecology

Sharplink’s story is essentially a story of a bridge connecting the traditional financial world and the crypto native world. Joseph Chalom’s twenty-year career at BlackRock has given him a deep understanding of the pain points and thresholds of institutional investors; and the technical characteristics of Ethereum happen to provide solutions to meet these needs. Unlike the aggressive expansion of other DAT companies, Sharplink has chosen a path that is more Ethereum native, more returning to the core concept of Ethereum, more institutionalized, and more focused on cost efficiency and risk management.

Building its own asset management and technology team, staking close to 100%, a fixed cost structure, strict compliance standards, and independent coverage by 8 bank analysts, these elements together constitute Sharplink’s brand core: it is not a crypto speculation company trying to create topics, but a public market tool that allows traditional investors to safely and most efficiently obtain the long-term value of the Ethereum ecosystem. The Ethereum co-founder serves as the chairman, the head of the financial system and the early promoter of digital assets of the world’s largest asset management company serves as the CEO, plus the CIO (Chief Information Officer) who used to work at Bridgewater Fund and the CDO (Chief Data Officer) who is responsible for business at Consensys, this combination is the most representative of the underlying digital asset ecology among all DAT companies. In Chalom’s words, “We understand Ethereum best.”

10 years ago, Joseph Lubin left the Ethereum Foundation to found Consensys in order to more efficiently improve the tools and infrastructure necessary for the development of the Ethereum ecosystem. 10 years later, Joseph Lubin jointly launched Sharplink, opening the door to the institutionalized ecology for Ethereum, and invited the veteran of the world’s largest asset management company who is also a digital and financial technology product expert to serve as the CEO. The purpose of this “second revolution” initiated for Ethereum is the same as it was back then, to lay a solid foundation for an ecosystem that is about to explode.

Chalom also expressed a very confident view in the interview: “The asset is Ethereum, the code is SBET.” Behind this simple and powerful equation is a Wall Street veteran’s deep belief in the Ethereum ecosystem, and also an increasingly close link between traditional finance and the decentralized future. Regardless of the short-term fluctuations in the price of Ethereum, this trend of structural integration may be the most noteworthy signal behind the Sharplink phenomenon.

[Foresight News]