Original 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 within the Ethereum ecosystem indicate a bright future: stablecoin transaction volume exceeds 50%, tokenized RWA is close to 60%, and its DeFi dominance remains unchallenged. He said "Ethereum is winning, but the communication is failing." SharpLink has joined forces with giants like ConsenSys, investing substantial funds to support three core teams spun off from the Ethereum Foundation, focusing on institutional-grade scaling, privacy/compliance, and market outreach. More crucially, they employ zero leverage and take on no debt 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 approached $2,000, and the ETH/BTC exchange rate also hit 0.03, marking its highest point in nearly 3 months, 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, with an average cost of around $1,611; 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, an introduction: we are a digital asset treasury management company. We have raised billions of dollars to purchase Ethereum (ETH) and make it highly efficient. Over the past month, the two most interesting things have been: first, we returned to the public markets for an equity financing, essentially buying back ETH and repurchasing some stock at a very good price. Second, together with Joe Lubin from ConsenSys and Tom Lee from Bitmine, we began supporting and investing 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 recently, including some questioning of the Ethereum Foundation. Do you think this negative sentiment is just a symptom of the bear market?
Joseph Chalom: Actually, I think there's been a divergence between reality and market sentiment for about the past year and a half.
The reality is, let's start with the very positive side. The Ethereum ecosystem accounts for over 50% of all stablecoin transaction volume, 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 fairly negative largely because the industry is in a downturn and the Ethereum Foundation—though it has done a fantastic job over the past decade or so—made the decision to streamline and let more ecosystem participants support the roadmap. That communication created a lack of clarity and confidence in the ecosystem, even though it's actually winning.
So, some of us, as ecosystem stewards and large holders of ETH, stepped up and we are putting our money where our mouth is, and I'm happy to share some of the things we're doing as a collective industry.
Host: Go deeper. What specific initiatives?
Joseph Chalom: Let's start with the positive side. Ethereum is the longest-running blockchain besides Bitcoin, never gone down, most secure, most trusted, most liquid. It also has a multi-year, very aggressive scaling roadmap.
Now, their ethos and direction is about going back to basics. The Ethereum Foundation will focus on privacy and censorship resistance and some core tenets to keep Ethereum credibly neutral for the coming decades. But that means some of the most critical talent and functions within the Foundation are being spun out. In the past three weeks or so, three teams have spun out of the Ethereum Foundation, supported by Joe Lubin, myself, and Tom Lee from Bitmine. These are actually critically important for institutional adoption.
Let me tell you who they are. The first is ETH Labs, some of the strongest developers in the Ethereum ecosystem, building the scaling capability that institutions need. The second is Ethereum Institutional, the front-end marketing, business development arm of Ethereum, spun out of the Foundation with our support. And just earlier this week, the three of us also funded EthSystems, who are building the next-generation privacy and compliance capabilities on Ethereum, an absolute necessity for the largest institutions to transact and ensure their 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: That's interesting. I see a lot of institutions, when preparing for tokenization and diving into areas like DeFi, start with Ethereum first, and then they eventually expand to other chains.
Joseph Chalom: Absolutely. As I said earlier, Ethereum has the properties institutions need. I spent 20 years at BlackRock, I know that before you want to migrate financial rails that are 40, 50, 60 years old, you want to migrate to a system that is trusted, never goes down, secure, and most liquid. Most importantly, there's not enough talk about decentralization.
A truly decentralized blockchain means once you make a decision, the rules can't be changed. So, having a fully distributed, decentralized chain where no single person or single treasury controls it is massively important for institutions, because they are doing a once-in-a-generation infrastructure migration.
Host: Totally agree. So during the bear market, how does SharpLink create value for shareholders? Through staking DeFi protocols to generate passive income?
Joseph Chalom: Absolutely. In last summer's digital asset treasury management boom, about six or seven Ethereum digital asset treasury management companies, maybe five Solana treasury management companies launched. Only a handful of us were able to raise billions of dollars and get to scale quickly. You need scale when competing in this industry.
What we do is, first, take all that capital and buy ETH, and then from day one make it yield, because ETH is inherently 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 partnership with another public company, Galaxy, forming a $125 million fund to deploy our ETH into new protocols, help them launch and get what's called TVL (Total Value Locked) or initial capital. So, we get the ETH to produce more than the native staking.
The last thing I'll say is, when you start a business and 3 months later you hit consolidation, winter, cycles, you really get to see who is operating a public company in an institutional way. We didn't take on debt, we didn't issue preferred shares, we 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 investors.
Frankly, going through a winter isn't fun, but treating investors with respect has been a motivating force for us. You know, after winter comes spring and summer. We are positioned incredibly well when the markets recover. And we're starting to see the recovery in ETH. Just since these recent announcements, ETH is up about 20% from the lows. The short term is definitely challenged, 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 a bit against the spirit of crypto.
Joseph Chalom: Yeah. You know, I have admiration for Michael Saylor; he really invented a new vehicle for asset exposure. 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 get your Bitcoin to compound and generate yield is to financialize your stock, issue convertible notes, preferred shares. And then you can get into trouble and ultimately have to sell your reserve asset. That's been a challenge for the Bitcoin community, because digital asset treasury companies, including Michael Saylor's, have gone from being large net buyers of Bitcoin to now being sellers, which is very negative for short-term price action.
Host: Absolutely. 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 like everyone on Wall Street is looking into tokenization, participating in stablecoins, DeFi.
Joseph Chalom: Yeah, 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 to 9 years.
It's actually been quite slow so far, due to a lack of regulatory clarity. I want to describe for everyone 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, DeFi as the execution layer. If you have the money layer, the exposure layer, and the execution layer, you're off to the races. What you're starting to see is not just tokenization of new funds, but tokenization of existing multi-billion dollar funds and tokenization of stocks. To make it more complex, there's another layer, which is you have cash, assets, execution layer. Agentic will be the automation layer.
I think we're still in the bottom of the first inning. We're waiting for more regulatory clarity, but institutions have moved from learning to experimenting to now going into production, and it's now a race not to be left behind.
Host: Do you feel that once the Clarity Act passes, it will give institutions a catalyst or confidence to innovate and invest more?
Joseph Chalom: 100%. I think the Clarity Act is massively important in two ways. One, it clarifies that if you're a DeFi developer, you're a software provider, you are not liable for what happens 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.
Secondly, I think it will also affect market sentiment and momentum. In crypto, even a little bit of tailwind can lead to massive moves.
Thirdly, if you're in a large institution and your leadership is interested in digital assets, having the government's 'well-managed' seal of approval gives you more leeway to do things faster that you would have done slowly. I think we're going to 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 any significant 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 do you see, what issues might arise?
Joseph Chalom: I think the biggest challenge is having separate liquidity pools. For tokenization to succeed, we need to make sure the digital version of a stock or a fund has comparable trading volume and liquidity to the traditional version. But any time there's technological advancement, you have analog and digital coexisting. 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, assume 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 cyclicals, you can.
At some point, the fiduciary who decides 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 tradable 24/7, programmable, and instantly settled. 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 view over the weekend. So there will be a tipping point at some point, I think it'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 liquidity to tip in favor of the more liquid version, because that's important too.
Host: I think that's why stock exchanges, large institutions, banks are all moving towards 24/7 markets, it 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 quadrillion transactions a year — just launched on-chain collateral tokenization. So, I find that incredibly exciting. You see those announcements every day that have become so commonplace, whereas three or four years ago they would have moved markets. That's when you know the momentum is here.
Host: Absolutely. It feels like the asset class is maturing. We're entering a new phase of adoption. It's pretty incredible. Last one, can you share your roadmap?
Joseph Chalom: I think the most important thing SharpLink is doing right now, aside from accumulating ETH and making it yield (we've consistently been the most productive digital asset treasury company with our ETH), is stepping up to do something we never anticipated having to do, which is being an ecosystem steward. Not just talking about it, but putting capital into new capabilities, into the spin-outs from the Ethereum Foundation, and essentially helping Ethereum go to market.
I'm often asked: whose interest does this align with? The answer is, it aligns with our shareholders' interest, it's perfectly aligned. So, we're going to help Ethereum win, whether it's Layer 1 or Layer 2, and tell the story of why the ETH token will be the in-demand settlement and trust commodity, which actually aligns with our investors' interests. So, we're going to lean into that with our ecosystem partners, try to be a very good steward. 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 aligns with our investors' long-term interests.
(End)
