SharpLink Gaming shares rose on Friday after the largest publicly traded Ethereum treasury firm said that it had acquired $30 million worth of Ethereum from the Ethereum Foundation.
SharpLink’s stock was changing hands around $20 per share, a 71% gain over the past week, according to Yahoo Finance. The performance coincides with Ethereum’s climb above $3,000 for the first time in five months, a 17% gain, according to crypto data provider CoinGecko.
The non-profit organization that funds research and development related to Ethereum acknowledged the sale on Friday, describing it on X as an over-the-counter sale involving 10,000 Ethereum sold to SharpLink for roughly $2,600 per coin.
https://x.com/ethereumfndn/status/1943642682825523320
Although the Ethereum Foundation has maintained since its inception that it does not own or control Ethereum’s network, the organization has faced scrutiny at times for its use of funds, with market participants complaining that selling Ethereum to fund initiatives weighs on the assets’ price. In 2024, the organization had a $100 million budget.
Because OTC sales are private, the funds sold by the Ethereum Foundation to SharpLink never hit the secondary market. On Crypto Twitter, however, some perceived the Ethereum Foundation’s sale as a creative way to address issues that the community has flagged.
“Guess that’s one way to fix [Ethereum Foundation] dumping,” Alex Svanevik, the c-founder and CEO of blockchain analytics company Nansen said on X on Friday.
Like most crypto treasury firms, SharpLink seeks to maximize shareholder value by growing the amount of digital assets it owns, in this case Ethereum, per fully diluted share.
The initiative is being spearheaded by SharpLink Chairman of the Board Joe Lubin, who is also Ethereum co-founder, and Consensys CEO. Other prominent Ethereum treasury firms include BitMine, which recently named Fundstrat co-founder Tom Lee as board chair. (Disclosure: Consensys is one of 22 investors in an editorially independent Decrypt.)
Lee and Lubin have both said that their respective firms will leverage decentralized finance applications and staking to earn yield, growing their treasuries partly through DeFi.
Although SharpLink shares have recently surged, the firm’s stock price is still far below an all-time high of $124 per share in May. That was before the firm’s registration-of-shares filing became effective and its stock price dropped 70% immediately after.
Prior to the shift, SharpLink focused on sports gambling marketing. But is now one of the largest Ethereum-holding entities with around 215,00 Ethereum worth $644 million, second only to the Ethereum Foundation, according to the website Strategic Ethereum Reserve.
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