Original｜Odaily Planet Daily（@OdailyChina）

Author｜Hao Fangzhou

On-site Interview｜Cody

“E Guardian,” are you still there?

In the current atmosphere of low enthusiasm, I heard a statement - “ETH not involved in staking generates no productivity” - first, let’s take a look at the person who said this:

Matt Sheffield (X@sheffieldreport), CIO (Chief Investment Officer) of SharpLink.

Recently, SharpLink, positioning itself as a “next-generation digital asset treasury,” has boldly announced that it will place $200 million worth of ETH directly on-chain through qualified custodians Anchorage Digital, and will engage in a two-year revenue enhancement cooperation with Linea, ether.fi, and EigenCloud. This move aims not only to earn yields that exceed native staking but also to establish a normative framework for institutional-level DeFi operations. The core logic is quite clear: firmly believing that Ethereum is severely undervalued, the company is maximizing the number of ETH per share at a pace suited to itself.

Why does this listed company dare to stake its balance sheet almost entirely in ETH? Are bullish statements driven purely by their own positions, or do they, standing on high mountains, see different distant horizons? How do large institutions and regulators trust on-chain excess yields? Faced with book losses amounting to billions of dollars, how do they persuade traditional investors?

In New York, Odaily Planet Daily was fortunate enough to meet Matt for an in-depth conversation, asking the above questions.

He clearly articulated SharpLink’s "ETH-centric" philosophy, a robust strategy centered on “maximizing the number of ETH per share” as the core KPI, and how they aim to become the “best way to hold Ethereum” through native staking, on-chain collaboration, and pioneering compliance practices, while charting a safe path for the entire industry from compliant custody to DeFi yields.

The following is the edited interview transcript, enjoy~

Odaily Planet Daily：Hello, Matt. I am Cody from Odaily Planet Daily. Today, I am honored to visit the SharpLink team in Midtown Manhattan. Could you please briefly introduce yourself?

Matt：I am the Chief Investment Officer of SharpLink, which is a publicly traded digital asset treasury listed on NASDAQ with approximately $3 billion in equity capital. Our goal is to allocate this capital on our balance sheet in the most efficient way to hold Ethereum and to demonstrate a "safety first" philosophy to the world.

Odaily Planet Daily：What experiences and advantages can you reuse from your previous work before joining SharpLink?

Matt：I come from a traditional finance background, initially working at Bridgewater Associates, trading interest rate and credit products, then branching out on my own in 2022 to start a crypto hedge fund with a few former colleagues.

More recently, I led the spot trading team at FalconX, one of the largest digital asset prime brokers and dealers in the world. My interest in the digital asset treasury space developed at FalconX, and I connected with the team at SharpLink. My career has been focused on native yield and the “productivity” of assets.

Odaily Planet Daily：After joining SharpLink, what is the core KPI as CIO?

Matt：It is to maximize the number of ETH per share. My job in this position is to build what we believe to be an efficient frontier portfolio in ETH terms that generates higher risk-adjusted ETH returns for SharpLink.

For instance: we initially staked all of our ETH natively to showcase to the market that Ethereum is a fundamentally different asset. It has “productivity” and can become even more productive in the right hands. An ETF that does not participate in staking has no productivity and fails to leverage the full value that Ethereum can create.

Odaily Planet Daily：So, does the company prioritize maximizing dollar profit or maximizing the number of ETH per share (ETH-per-share)?

Matt：In fact, we believe that these two are essentially the same. Because our core philosophy is: Ethereum is an undervalued opportunity with immense upside, stemming from the growth curves we observe in tokenization, smart payments, and other areas. Thus, since June of last year, SharpLink made a strategic decision to allocate almost all of our treasury to Ethereum, which we believe is the best decision we can make for our shareholders.

Since Ethereum is undervalued, we wish to accumulate as many ETH per share as possible, serving as the growth driver for our shareholders, which ultimately equates to creating the highest dollar value over time.

Odaily Planet Daily：This question also relates to SharpLink's positioning. Is it more accurate to describe it as a listed company, a digital asset treasury company, or a proactive fund within the Ethereum ecosystem?

Matt：We are a digital asset treasury — a term commonly used in the industry — but I would say we are a fundamentally different treasury because we focus more on Ethereum's native productivity rather than financialized yields.

Odaily Planet Daily：Could you elaborate on the parts that focus on native productivity that differ from other treasuries?

Matt：People’s understanding of digital asset treasuries originally came only from Michael Saylor’s strategy. Buying digital gold (BTC) fundamentally represents a different asset choice, belonging to a financialized yield structure type — leveraging common stocks and introducing variable Gamma (the acceleration of option price changes) — to create equity returns from yields that do not exist in Bitcoin-centric transactions.

But we try to cater to completely different participants interested in linear accumulation of yield. We are currently earning about $1 million a day solely from staking, and furthermore, we currently have no debt.

Odaily Planet Daily：This means that external concerns about “the treasury needing to sell assets to mitigate cash flow pressures during high volatility or price declines” are unlikely to occur at SharpLink? More specifically, at what price point for ETH would trigger your “liquidation”?

Matt：We indeed do not have a liquidation price like those treasuries holding convertible bonds or preferred stocks, which would continually face degradation or could face liquidation if they engage in some form of over-collateralized lending.

This brings us back to why we believe “having Ethereum on the balance sheet is so powerful”: you have recurring income from staking, which helps protect the network, and can also generate excess income through more productive on-chain activities.

Odaily Planet Daily：Besides staking, what on-chain operations will generate excess income?

Matt：SharpLink will deploy with DeFi partners over several years to earn additional ETH beyond the native staking rate. Currently, the ETH we are earning has already exceeded the native staking rate. We are taking on slightly more risk and also pushing the business boundaries outward a bit.

Our goal is that if the native staking rate of Ethereum is viewed as the risk-free rate in crypto, it should be our benchmark, and we should strive to surpass it on a risk-adjusted basis. That is my focus.

Not just establishing partnerships on-chain, SharpLink is also seeking external partners to explore ways to achieve this goal on and off-chain. Ultimately, holding a large amount of Ethereum will provide dual benefits — creating excess value for shareholders and benefiting the Ethereum ecosystem.

Odaily Planet Daily：Apart from continuing to increase ETH holdings, does SharpLink have more proactive participation plans this year regarding RWA, the Ethereum ecosystem, etc.? Or will it maintain a relatively passive treasury management role?

Matt：I don’t see this as passive; we are actively managing the Ethereum treasury. It’s just that right now, we are not interested in diluting our value proposition.

While we are very interested in providing help in RWA liquidity, yield-generating strategies, smart payments, etc., such as providing liquidity for protocols to generate more ETH per share, these are not core businesses; SharpLink’s objectives are very focused.

Odaily Planet Daily：In January of this year, SharpLink announced the deployment of $170 million worth of ETH on Linea, aimed at enhancing staking yields. How do you assess liquidity risk and on-chain risk? How receptive are institutional investors to this?

Matt：The news you mentioned is a very interesting deal not only for us but also for the entire industry. Because historically, institutions have not gone on-chain. I think this time they compromised on critical risk values to achieve greater trade-offs. Part of this is due to market structure issues and part to incentive issues. Previous institutions participating in DeFi were too small to invest the time and resources to reduce trading risks.

That’s why we partnered with Linea, ether.fi, and EigenCloud for a two-year deployment. Just to update the figures, it is now $200 million; we have added another $30 million since the initial announcement.

We are not only earning on-chain liquidity and interest rates, but our partners also offer Long-term stability that is essentially nonexistent in the crypto space, along with Ethereum-denominated incentives.

We hope to establish institutional-level partnerships and maintain institutional-level durations, which is essential.

Another partner, Anchorage Digital, is an OCC-chartered compliant custodian. We hope to be the first to complete financial operations without leaving a qualified custodian, avoiding the use of hot wallets by minting assets internally from the custodian and bridging across via LayerZero. I don’t think any listed company has done this before.

This is setting a "safety first" example, both raising the standard and paving the way for others to access DeFi more easily and with greater trust.

Odaily Planet Daily：As a publicly traded company, the SEC has very strict regulations on the accounting treatment of crypto assets (such as fair value measurement). How do you ensure that complex DeFi yield strategies (like LST, LRT) comply with the regulations required for listed companies?

Matt：Interestingly, we always seem to be "eating crabs." When SharpLink began native staking, we recognized that — native staking flows into revenue, and liquidity staking tokens are currently considered intangible assets and are subject to impairment — the market must have an understanding of our financial statements.

Whenever we do something, we communicate with both internal and external large teams to ensure compliance. We are setting compliance examples so that others can follow in our footsteps, giving Wall Street and investors peace of mind while allowing the entire industry to develop. This is a very time-consuming process, which is why we are methodical in our approach.

We have been adopting digital asset strategies for less than a year, with assets under management at around $30 billion. This number may not sound dramatic in terms of accumulation speed, but it is already the right balance point.

Odaily Planet Daily：What might be frustrating for ETH holders is that currently ETH underperforms compared to other mainstream coins like BTC. What are your thoughts on this?

Matt：The major benefits of ETH are just beginning to be noticed. I believe one of the most important points is RWA. When looking at market size, data charts, you must assess “how much of digital assets are tokenized, compared to the size of the entire financial world.” For instance, BlackRock intends to tokenize everything. Their single ETF series alone has a staggering $4.5 trillion, which is multiple times the current total market value of RWA.

Thus we are still in the very early stages of a massive on-chain transformation of assets. Ethereum will be at the center of this transformation. This is why we see the opportunity in Ethereum — substantial network growth and embedded potential for price appreciation.

Over the past month or so, the fundamentals have become more solid and healthy, especially during U.S. trading hours, where trading behavior tends towards rationality. The clarity in U.S. regulation and the support for ETFs have created favorable winds.

We try to avoid predicting prices because ultimately, each person must assess whether the opportunity presented by Ethereum suits them. But we absolutely hope SharpLink is the best way to hold Ethereum.

Odaily Planet Daily：The downturn in ETH’s price has also led to significant book net loss for SharpLink. How do you explain this “high growth accompanied by large losses” financial performance to traditional shareholders?

Matt：This is a great question. We have conducted extensive investor communication and education to accurately explain SharpLink’s strategies to the market. This way, you know exactly what you are investing in, rather than putting money into a black box.

The results of market education are: when we submitted the 13F file in June last year, our ratio of institutional holdings was 5-6%, while the rest were retail. The most recent 13F file shows our institutional holding ratio has now reached 46%, with many institutions on the list having not previously invested heavily in digital assets.

This is also why I have consistently attended meetings, given interviews, explained strategies, and conveyed ideas — if you are interested in going long on Ethereum, we hope to be the best way to achieve that in a public and regulated vehicle. If you are not interested in going long on Ethereum, I also want people to understand that SharpLink may not be the right stock for them.

Odaily Planet Daily：Have you had cooperation with the Asian market before?

Matt：Yes, I have traded in the Asian market and spent some time there. The growth space in Asia is enormous, especially for digital assets. When I attended the Consensus conference in Hong Kong in February, I was pleasantly surprised by the surge in interest. We also visited Korea, Japan, and recently the Gulf region, meeting with large institutions and sovereign funds to discuss the opportunities for Ethereum, SharpLink’s opportunities, and what kind of ecosystems they are trying to build locally.

I have observed tremendous interest in RWA in both Hong Kong and the Gulf region. Regulators have an incredible cooperative spirit and foresight; they are trying to figure out how we can do this safely and advance it to be seen as an innovative center. Local builders also view it as home.

We hope to be located where early protocols are found, becoming a bridge between traditional finance and cryptocurrency.

Odaily Planet Daily：Aside from Ethereum, what are SharpLink's other points of interest?

Matt：In the entire on-chain ecosystem surrounding it. RWA, smart payments… are all within our willing participation scope. However, venture capital and liquidity funds seek high-risk, high-return investment opportunities; ETFs tend to buy and hold, which may not yield productive assets; while SharpLink's objective is to hold this almost permanent capital priced in Ethereum.

We hope to reach out and work with partners that drive the Ethereum ecosystem forward in various aspects. We can invest capital to boost their plans, thereby earning additional ETH per share and increasing the value of the Ethereum ecosystem, thus starting a flywheel effect. Fortunately, there is never a shortage of innovative people doing novel things on the EVM.

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