Original article byTony Edward
Compiled by|Odaily Planet Daily Qin Xiaofeng(@QinXiaofeng 888 )
Editor's Note: At the recent "Injective Summit 2026" in Washington, D.C., SharpLink Co-CEO Joseph Chalom gave an exclusive interview.
He stated that while current market sentiment towards Ethereum is pessimistic, there is a divergence between reality and market sentiment. In reality, multiple data points from the Ethereum ecosystem indicate a bright future: stablecoin transaction volume accounts for over 50%, tokenized RWAs nearly 60%, and its DeFi dominance remains unchallenged. He said, "Ethereum is winning, but there's a communication problem." SharpLink has already joined forces with giants like ConsenSys, investing heavily to support three core teams spun off from the Ethereum Foundation, focusing on institutional-grade scaling, privacy/compliance, and market promotion. More crucially, they adopt zero leverage and no borrowing during the bear market, insisting on making ETH "productive" to generate revenue, and predict that tokenization and 24/7 trading will ignite the next wave of institutional adoption.
This week, ETH once surged close to $2000, and the ETH/BTC exchange rate also reached 0.03, hitting a nearly 3-month high, seemingly indicating that things are improving. Additionally, after roughly 8 months without large-scale new purchases, SharpLink bought another 10,000 ETH in June this year at an average cost of about $1611; after this purchase, their total ETH holdings reached 886,725 ETH.
The following is the original 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., and with me today is Joseph Chalom, CEO of SharpLink. Joseph, great to see you.
Joseph Chalom: Great to be back with you. First, a quick introduction: we are a digital asset capital management firm. We've raised billions of dollars to buy Ethereum (ETH) and make it highly efficient. The two most interesting things in the last month: first, we returned to the public markets for an equity raise and actually bought back ETH at a very good price and repurchased some stock. Second, together with Joe Lubin from ConsenSys and Tom Lee from Bitmine, we've started to support and invest in spin-out projects from the Ethereum ecosystem, which will be very positive for Ethereum's new narrative and new era.
Host: There's been a lot of negative sentiment around ETH lately, including some skepticism towards the Ethereum Foundation. Do you think this negativity is just a symptom of the bear market?
Joseph Chalom: Actually, I think for about the last year and a half, there's been a divergence between reality and market sentiment.
The reality is, 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, and 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 because of the industry malaise and because the Ethereum Foundation—though it has done a great job for the last decade or so—made the decision to streamline and have more ecosystem participants support the roadmap. And the way that communication happened led to a lack of clarity and confidence in the ecosystem, even though it is actually winning.
So some of us as ecosystem stewards and large holders of ETH have stood up, and we're putting our money where our mouth is, and I'm happy to share some of the things we are doing as an industry collective.
Host: Dive a little deeper into that. What are some specific actions?
Joseph Chalom: Start with the positive. Ethereum is the longest-running blockchain other than Bitcoin, never gone down, most secure, most trusted, most liquid. It also has a multi-year, very aggressive scaling roadmap.
Now, their ethos and approach now is to get back to its roots. The Ethereum Foundation will focus on privacy and censorship resistance and some core tenets to ensure Ethereum stays credibly neutral for decades to come. But what that means is that some of the most critical talent and functions inside the Foundation have been spun out. In the last three weeks or so, three teams have spun out of the Ethereum Foundation and have gotten the backing of Joe Lubin, myself, and Tom Lee from Bitmine. These are actually super critical for institutional adoption.
I'll tell you who they are. The first is ETH Labs, some of the most powerful developers in the Ethereum ecosystem, building the scaling capability that institutions need. The second is Ethereum Institutional, which is the go-to-market front-end, the business development activities, spun out of the Foundation with our support. And just earlier this week, the three of us also backed EthSystems, who are building next-gen privacy and compliance capabilities on Ethereum, an absolute necessity for the largest institutions to transact and ensure their data privacy. It might sound like three disparate nodes in the ecosystem, but these are the three most important things that will drive institutional adoption over the next year and beyond.
Host: That's interesting. I see a lot of institutions, when they're preparing to do tokenization and dive into DeFi and other areas, they start with Ethereum, and then they eventually expand to other chains.
Joseph Chalom: Exactly. As I said before, Ethereum has the characteristics that institutions need. I worked at BlackRock for 20 years, I know that before you want to move financial rails that have been around for 40, 50, 60 years, you want to move to a system that is trusted, never goes down, secure, and most liquid. Most importantly, people don't talk about decentralization enough.
Truly decentralized blockchain means that once you make a decision, the rules cannot be changed. So, having a fully distributed decentralized chain, not controlled by a single individual or a single treasury, is super important for institutions because they are doing a generational infrastructure migration.
Host: Absolutely agree. So during the bear market, how is SharpLink creating value for shareholders? Is it through staking, DeFi protocols to generate passive income?
Joseph Chalom: Of course. During the digital asset capital management craze last summer, about six or seven Ethereum digital asset capital management firms, and maybe five Solana capital management firms launched. Only a few of us were able to raise billions of dollars and achieve scale-out speed. You need scale when you compete in this industry.
What we do is, first, use all that capital to buy ETH, and then from day one make it productive, because ETH itself is a productive asset. You can stake it, get 2.5% to 3% yield. We've been doing that and making it more efficient than that benchmark. We also participate in DeFi. We announced a $125 million fund with another public company Galaxy, deploying our ETH into new protocols, helping them launch and get so-called TVL (Total Value Locked) or initial capital. So, we make ETH produce more than the native staking yield.
Finally, I'll say that when you start a business and 3 months later hit consolidation, winter, cycle, you really see who is running a public company in an institutional way. We didn't take on debt, didn't issue preferred stock, didn't borrow against our ETH. We decided to be conservative during the winter. A few of us survived, holding billions of dollars worth of ETH. That's how we protect our investors.
Honestly, going through winter is not fun, but treating investors with respect has always been what motivates us. You know, after winter comes spring and summer. When the market recovers, we are positioned very well. And we are starting to see the recovery in ETH. Just since these recent announcements, ETH is up about 20% from the lows. Short term is 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 goes somewhat against the spirit of crypto.
Joseph Chalom: Yes. You know, I have respect for Michael Saylor; he basically invented a new asset exposure vehicle. You can own a public company and get exposure to Bitcoin.
The challenge in the Bitcoin space is that it's not inherently productive. The only way to have your Bitcoin compound and generate yield is to financialize your stock, issue convertible bonds, preferred stock. And then you might get into a pickle where you ultimately have to sell your reserve asset. That's been a challenge for the Bitcoin community because the digital asset capital management firms, including Michael Saylor's, have gone from being large net buyers of Bitcoin to now being sellers, which is very detrimental to short-term price action.
Host: Absolutely correct. Joseph, with your background at BlackRock and in TradFi, you have a wealth of experience. What's your outlook on institutional adoption of this technology? It seems everyone on Wall Street is looking into tokenization, getting involved with stablecoins, DeFi.
Joseph Chalom: Yes, I think the tokenization space, whether it's tokenizing the dollar into stablecoins or tokenizing treasuries or real-world assets, has been a phenomenon for about 8 or 9 years now.
Progress has actually been fairly slow so far, largely due to a lack of regulatory clarity. I want to describe to people in very simple terms how these things work together and how they layer 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, and DeFi is the execution layer. If you have the money layer, exposure layer, and execution layer, you are off to the races. What you're starting to see is not just the tokenization of new funds but also the tokenization of existing multi-billion dollar funds and the tokenization of stocks. Getting one step more complicated, there's another layer, which is you have cash, assets, execution layer. Agentic will be the automation layer.
I think we are still in the bottom of the first inning. We are waiting for more regulatory clarity, but institutions have gone from a learning phase to an experimentation phase to now moving into production, and now it's a race not to be left behind.
Host: Do you feel that once something like the Clarity Act passes, it would serve as a catalyst or give confidence to institutions to innovate and invest more?
Joseph Chalom: 100%. I think the Clarity Act is super important in two ways. One, it clarifies that if you are a DeFi developer, you are a software provider, you are not responsible for the actions that happen on your software, but if you as a DeFi protocol hold client assets, then you are regulated and responsible for everything that happens. So the future of DeFi becomes brighter with the Clarity Act.
The second point, I think it also affects market sentiment and momentum. In crypto, even a little tailwind can lead to an outsized move.
The third point is, if you are at a large institution and your leadership is interested in digital assets, then with the "good housekeeping" seal of approval from the government, you have more room to do things faster that you might have done slowly. I think we'll see a lot of momentum this summer. And I think we'll get to a point where tokenization will be the norm, not the exception.
Host: Do you think there will be major challenges when some companies tokenize while traditional markets still exist? For example, you could have a tokenized version of Tesla stock, but there's still the traditional stock on the stock market. What differences or issues do you see arising?
Joseph Chalom: I think the biggest challenge is having disparate liquidity pools. For tokenization to succeed, we need to ensure the digital version of the stock or fund has similar trading volume and liquidity as the traditional version. But any time there is technological progress, there is analog and digital side-by-side. Like slow trains and fast trains running on parallel tracks, eventually they all become fast.
But I think the more important inflection point is this: Imagine a world where your government announces a war in the Middle East on a Friday night, and suppose you hold the analog version of a stock in your portfolio and you want to sell it. If you hold the digital version, you can trade 24/7 and express your view. You want to go long oil companies, you can. You want to sell consumer cyclical stocks, you can.
At some point, the fiduciaries 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's 24/7 tradable, programmable, and instantly settles. So fiduciaries will get to a point and say to themselves: I can't hold the slow analog version because I can't express my view over the weekend. So at some point, there will be a tipping point, and I think that's still a few years away.
Host: That's a great point. As the market moves towards 24/7 trading, if you're still using the analog version, you're almost at a disadvantage. You have to move to the tokenized digital version.
Joseph Chalom: Yes. But you need the liquidity to tip in favor of the more liquid version because that's important too.
Host: I guess that's why stock exchanges, large institutions, banks are all moving towards 24/7 markets. That makes a lot of sense.
Joseph Chalom: Yes. Nasdaq, NYSE are transitioning to 23-hour-a-day, 7-day-a-week or 24/7 trading. Just this week, DTCC (Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation) – the clearing and settlement house that processes about 400 trillion transactions a year – just launched on-chain collateral tokenization. So, I find that super exciting. When you see announcements that have become so commonplace every day, whereas three or four years ago they would have rocked the market. That's when you know momentum is here.
Host: Exactly. It feels like the asset class is maturing. We are entering a new phase of adoption. It's pretty remarkable. Last item, could you share your roadmap?
Joseph Chalom: I think the most important thing SharpLink is doing right now, besides accumulating ETH and making it productive (we've consistently been the highest yield producer on our ETH among digital asset capital management firms), is stepping up to do something we never anticipated we'd need to do, which is become ecosystem stewards. Not just with words, but putting capital to work into new capabilities, into the spin-outs from the Ethereum Foundation, and basically helping Ethereum go to market.
I'm often asked: Whose interest does this serve? The answer is, it serves our shareholders' interest, it's completely aligned. So, helping Ethereum win, whether it's Layer 1 or Layer 2, and telling the story of why the ETH token will be the demanded settlement and trust commodity, actually serves our investors' interest. So, we're going to lean in with our ecosystem partners and try to be very good stewards. What we won't do is participate in core protocol, that's fully decentralized. We won't participate in Ethereum governance, but we will participate in funding talent and funding go-to-market capabilities, which serves the long-term interest of our investors.
(End)
