SharpLink's Joseph Chalom on tokenized assets and the ETH thesis

Transcript

Crypto is a $3.5 trillion industry. There are $700 trillion of world financial assets. If you could start trading more and more of those digitally 24/7 that settle instantly, Ethereum is going to be that programmable layer that is trusted, neutral, and decentralized that's going to start accumulating more and more. >> After years of attacks and FUD, Ethereum roared back to life in mid 2025. Leading the charge was digital asset treasury company SBET Sharplink Gaming. Some analysts are now calling ETH the biggest macro trade of the next decade. But the market is struggling a lot right now and everyone is wondering what is next for Ethereum. Hello and welcome to the Milkroad Show, the daily crypto show

that knows it's not a bare market until you go from being a bag holder to a community member. Today is Tuesday, November 16th, and we are joined today by one of the best communicators in crypto, Joe Shalom. Joe is the co-CEO of Sharpink Gaming, a NASDAQ listed Ethereum treasury company. He is the former managing director and head of strategic ecosystem partnerships at BlackRock. Joe and I used to work on the same floor at BlackRock where he helped lay the foundations for institutional digital asset management. And I'm very excited to talk about how ESBET is building on those foundations. Uh, and as a reminder, if you want to stay on top of the market, make sure you are subscribed to our newsletter and our YouTube channel. Today's episode is brought to you by Block Trust IRA. Let AI outsmart the market and grow your

crypto while you sleep. Bridge power your business with instant stable coin payments. No friction, no banks, just global finance made simple and figure markets. Earn solid returns on your cash because sitting idle is not a strategy. And without further ado, welcome to the Milk Road Show. Joe, shalom. How are you sir? >> Doing great, John. Great to see you. And I do remember you from that floor many years working in our Aladdin business at Black Rockck. Um, super happy to be on your on your podcast today. >> I'm very happy to have you, sir. It's been a long time coming for this conversation. Um, I thought a good place to start would be to dive into a report that was released on your first quarterly earnings report. Uh, this is the first quarterly earnings report that

ESBET has released as an operating uh, Ethereum treasury company. You guys made that pivot in June. This is a huge milestone for ESBet, but it also feels like an important moment for digital asset treasuries as an industry overall. And I'd like you to just start with that like what is the significance of this report in terms of the legitimization of Ethereum Treasury as a business model in the eyes of institutional investors? >> Yeah. So, um it's the first quarter where we had three months as a digital asset treasury and it was remarkable. We built uh an institutional team. We're doing most of the asset management, accumulation, and staking in-house because we want to be self-sufficient and really riskmanaged and aware. But

what's interesting is uh we went through a really good three-month cycle. We had $10 million plus of revenue from staking. People forget that when you stake um your ETH, the staking rewards show up in a public company as revenue. That should come with a forward multiple. And two is we had over a hund00 million of net income um because of the price of ETH rising during the quarter. And the most important thing is our northstar metric is increasing the ETH concentration per share. And since we started in early June to September 30th, we've doubled the ETH concentration. Meaning if you own a share of Sharplink, uh you now own twice

as many ETH as you did three months ago. I'm really really proud as a public company to have that transparency and we're going to do that quarter over quarter. That's what a NASDAQ listed company has to do. Very very different than being a private fund manager. >> I want to get into some of the methodologies and strategies that you guys are deploying to to get those results. Um but first I want to kind of dive into a couple things that stood out to me from this report. Um I saw that you had added 105 and I think this number is still growing but 105 new institutional holders of Ethereum. Um and the institutional ownership of ESPE is around 33%. So about a third of your clients are institutional um uh clients.

Why is ESP specifically resonating so much with institutional clients and what makes you stand out from some of these other ETH treasury companies in the eyes of some of these institutional investors? >> So I think there's three messages I want to share here. One is just the idea that institutions are coming to the Ethereum network and adoption across stable coins, tokenized funds and actually highquality DeFi is now here. Institutions are here in force. Because of that, institutions want to get exposure to Ether, the token that is essentially securing the Ethereum ecosystem. And they have a few ways to do it. institutions have a hard time owning spot, whether Bitcoin or ETH, and

they also uh some of them have a difficulty owning the ETH ETFs that are out in the market. Um, and even if they can, those ETH ETFs until recently have not been able to stake their ETH. And when you have a asset that's as productive as ETH, in contrast to Bitcoin, if you're going to own that exposure, you want to get the productivity. And the best way to do that is through a public wrapper of a digital asset treasury because we can we can stake nearly 100% and get that yield. And we'll talk more about that later. But interestingly, the debt phenomenon started as a retail phenomenon. Actually, a lot of Korean Asian investors uh were early investors in the DAT phenomenon whether it was

Bitcoin or ETH. We've seen the institutions come and these are the largest institutions in the world. You can see them in their 13F filings. It's really boring, but every quarter, 45 days after quarter end, institutions have to tell you what public entities they own. And we see the likes of Fidelity and Black Rockck owning Sharlink as well as other digital asset treasuries. And that percentage of ownership has tripled in the past quarter. So, it's a much more institutionally aligned strategy than even before. And a lot of that is because institutions want to own Ether in a better rapper.

>> So given your history and your your current role, I think you're you're maybe more plugged into a lot of what the the conversations around this look like in terms of actually interacting with institutional clients, hearing their concerns. the the perception that I've heard from others has been that it the conversation has shifted from one of like don't touch this it's you know rat poison squared to now it's almost becoming like a career risk move to not have a strategy around digital assets what has the evolution of that been like and how has Ethereum been centered in that conversation >> sure I if I'm really direct it started with Bitcoin and it started in 2018 to 2021

institution utions were starting to understand that Bitcoin was a store of value and it had some uncorrelated relationships in the long run with other things in a common portfolio. And if you owned a little bit of it, you had asymmetric upside in an uncorrelated asset, but they couldn't own spot and there weren't ETFs. Ethereum was harder to explain five, six years ago. It is a store of value at time times. It's deflationary, but unlike Bitcoin, it does two things differently. One is it's fully programmable. Meaning Bitcoin, the network is great for storing and moving Bitcoin. Ethereum is something that could have exchanges on it, DeFi on it.

You can move value like stable coins and dollars, and most importantly, it's much more programmable and flexible. So when we speak to institutional clients, we're telling them that it's not only a good store of value for capital appreciation, but two, it is going to be the world's financial ledger over time. You see that in the adoption curve. Therefore, you want to own as much ether as possible now because that is going to be what's essentially securing the future of financial transactions in Rails. That said, it's also the idea that this has a network effect. And if we're at the point where stable coins are going to go up by 10x and real world um tokenization

of funds and stocks and bonds and commodities and real estate are going to go up much larger as firms like Black Rockck and Fidelity and others start tokenizing funds. you almost have an internet effect and investors and institutions want to get into this early. Even though Ethereum's been around for 10 years, we're very early in this new super cycle. And that's what they're telling us and they want to get it through institutional grade firms and risk management. They're very very clear that they understand this now in a way they did it five six years ago.

>> Gotcha. Yeah. And I, you know, I wasn't expecting to go in this direction off the top, but since the the the subject has come up, um the the bank list podcast guys are very fond of saying that the biggest value unlock for Ethereum is being understood. And you know, in those metrics I showed about the institutional clients that you've got at ESP shows that, you know, you've been one of these the most effective communicators in telling the story um to institutional clients. Uh how what have what has been the most effective thing in your mind at telling the story? because I think Ethereum is not as simple of a narrative for communication as Bitcoin was. How have you been effective at getting people over that hurdle and for people who are still struggling with that? What would you say to them?

>> Sure. I think it's worth taking a step back and you can make an argument that in the previous three or four years, Bitcoin was dominating the narrative and then Salana came and Salana spent a massive amount on marketing and did a lot of work in the gaming NFT and memecoin space and [snorts] it's fair to say that Ethereum lost its narrative and I think one of the best things about these digital asset treasuries that have come out and we talk about coopetition while we're competing with Tom Lee and others we actually have more in common than you could imagine. And the two most important things we're doing in common is we are accumulating really large amounts of ether which the Ethereum ecosystem had too much block space. And

when you can go out and accumulate a lot of this ether, it's not only healthy for the price of ether, it's healthy for the network. And the second thing is we're on podcasts, great ones like this. We're on TV. We're at conferences and we are telling the Ethereum super cycle story where finance is going to be moving onto Ethereum. And I think that has as much of effect telling that story over and over and explaining it to retail to institutions to traders has actually been as effective as accumulating ETH in driving that mind share. And I think they they go hand in hand and you see it. Um, I think we're at a moment where there's a flight to quality. We can talk

about the price and the fear in the crypto marketplace, but Bitcoin and Ether have held up pretty well this year. And you see the less quality uh tokens and old old coins have really really struggled. And I think it is about telling of the story about utility and a flight to quality. And it is happening more in the last year than it happened in the prior three years in the Ethereum space. And I do credit the digital asset treasuries for telling that story in a very public way. >> You all were one of the biggest and first movers in this Ethereum digital asset treasury space. Um, and before we get into some of the the specifics of where we are in the market and how you guys are deploying your Ethereum, um, I

do want to hear some more about that coopetition piece because you've used this before this word um, combination of cooperation and competition. What has been the cooperation like? What has the cooperation been like with other Ethereum DATs and what has the competition been like? What's been your experience of that from from your perspective as ESP? >> I think it's been really positive and the cooperation is having a shared mission. Meaning we are not against Bitcoin. I don't wake up every day trying to flip Bitcoin. I do think Ethereum has higher quality use cases beyond just owning a token and moving a token, which is what the Bitcoin network does. It's got a very unique singular narrative around store value. But I

think in the long run, if you talk about the potential use cases, Ethereum is going to lap Bitcoin um in a very significant way. And if really smart people backed by really institutional investors have the same thesis, we should be cooperating and telling that story even though there might be nuance in how we tell it. For example, I'm not out here telling people what the price of Ether is going to be in three months or six months. I'm telling an adoption story. The competition is there's a race to accumulate Ether uh at the current price. I think it's a really good entry point at roughly 3,000, which is the price of Ether today. [snorts] Um that said, I think others uh have put limits

on what that accumulation will be. I think Tom Lee's been very very public. He will own 5%. I think we're of the same sentiment. You don't want to destabilize the network. So I think we're are in a race to accumulate not to be the first to get to 5%. But to accumulate it for investors at the lowest price possible as we believe the price will go up significantly over time. So we compete to accumulate and get to that 5% number, but we have the same mission and we're on the same panels, we're at the same locations, we're at the same venues telling the story. Maybe slightly different ways.

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Stable coins are the biggest use case in crypto right now. But let's be real, using them on chain is still way too complex. That's exactly the problem Bridge is solving. Recently acquired by Stripe. Yep, that's Stripe. Bridge helps businesses send, store, accept, and launch stable coins instantly. Explore the future of global financial infrastructure at milkroad.combridge. >> Yeah. So, there's some natural alignment there. Uh, which is always good to see in in this ecosystem. Um, yeah, for anybody who missed it, uh, last week I did an interview with Fong Lee, who's the CEO of Micro Strategy, about what they're doing in the Bitcoin DAT ecosystem. So, if anyone missed that, I definitely recommend you check out that uh, episode. Um, Joe, I want to ask some more questions specifically around

Ethereum. Uh obviously ETH the asset is very central to ESPAT strategy but you all have also been very focused on the Ethereum network the Ethereum ecosystem and the development in that space has been really exciting to me from from a perspective of what ESP is doing. Um Ethereum co-founder Joe Luben uh is also involved in ESP and has been very focused on developing the ETH ecosystem his whole career. Um just tell me about how you think about this. How important is the Ethereum network and the ecosystem as distinct from ETH asset and how do you guys think about that at Sharplink?

>> Sure. Let's let's just start. If you have a reserve currency, you better have a reason why you think it's a really good reserve currency. Like if [snorts] you're the treasure of the king and you're collecting gold, you believe gold is a really good asset to hold in the long run for the kingdom. So, Ethereum, I will tell you that having worked in financial services for 20 years, you and I worked at the same firm. I even worked to scale a fintech business that was all around making investing easier for big institutions to do portfolio management, trading, risk management, and operations. And it was an incredible front row seat on frankly how inefficient the current financial rails are. Our economy is strong. People are

investing, but they don't realize the amount of human interaction and capital that's necessary to even just trade stocks, bonds, and funds. In the US, things settle on a trade date plus one day. Meaning, if you trade something on a Friday morning, you don't get your money till Monday. And in Europe, I'm sorry, in Asia, in many countries, it's T plus two. So, you're at risk every single night that your counterparty won't be there or the markets will move. And it takes insurance and ISDS and all sorts of counterparty risk and capital just to buy and sell something between 9:30 and 4 every day. And it's locked to where that venue is. So, for example, if

your stock is listed at NASDAQ, that's where it trades during the day. The promise of Ethereum is this idea that you have a decentralized rail that allows a ledger that can settle trades instantly. And I know that sounds like nothing to someone from the crypto space, but let's be real, crypto is a $3.5 trillion industry. There are $700 trillion of world financial assets. If you could start trading more and more of those digitally 24/7 that settle instantly, Ethereum is going to be that programmable layer that is trusted, neutral, and decentralized that's going to start accumulating more and more. And

it started with stable coins, which is just a version of tokenizing a dollar. There's 300 billion today. Secretary Besson thinks it'll go to three trillion in the next couple of years. Tokenized stocks, bonds, and funds are only 30 billion. You heard Larry Frink from Black Rockck on October 14th say his vision is all assets are going to be tokenized. That's trillions of dollars coming on chain. And Ethereum has the license to win. There may be chains that are slightly cheaper or faster, but Ethereum's been up for 10 years, has never gone down, and Ethereum has the liquidity and the trust that other layer ones don't. That's why we believe we're in a super cycle of institutional

adoption and we're in the early innings. Even though Ethereum has been around for 10 years, it took 10 years to build for this moment. Now is the time to own the asset Ether, which secures uh that network, which we believe is going to be the global settlement layer for finance. And if you believe that, Ether is a great asset to hold as a long-term treasury asset, as permanent capital. So, if you can't tell, I'm very enthusiastic. even though the price volatility is high in the last few weeks. That's okay, >> right? Because the the fundamental strength of the network is one of the biggest value pieces and that's not tied to the daily price fluctuations. Makes a lot of sense. Um I want to talk about some of the specifics of how you guys

are engaging in the ETH ecosystem. There's plans I've seen and you can update me if I have the numbers wrong on this, but there's plans to update or plans to deploy rather uh $200 million of Shark Sharplinks Ethereum on consensus's Lana ecosystem, which is a a ZKVM layer 2. Tell us a little bit about why ESB is excited about Lana and uh how you are planning to leverage your capital in the ETH ecosystem overall because how you leverage the capital makes a difference and so forth. So just tell me a little bit about the the the plans here. Yeah, first of all, this is the most exciting thing about my job.

Like raising capital is fun. Buying Ether is really fun, but making it productive is differentiating. So, let's not forget Bitcoin doesn't have native staking yield. So, if you have an asset where you can get high 2% 3% native staking yield, the first thing you do is you make it productive. And by that what I mean is since day one we've been staking nearly 100% of our ETH like high 90%. Because that's what you do for investors. And that is just the basic staking of your ETH to secure transactions in the ecosystem. In return you get ETH rewards. Hundreds of thousands of dollars a day of ETH rewards are enduring to our company.

It's it's amazing. The second thing is I'm going to explain something that's a little bit unusual. In most investment strategies, the more money you're given as a portfolio manager or an active manager, usually you have capacity constraints. So the more you're trying to manage, that's hard in strategies and very often your returns will be lower. What's interesting is what we've learned is if you own billions of dollars of ETH, you can do things that retail ETH holders cannot do and you can do things that ETH ETFs cannot do. The first thing is you can go out to the ecosystem and think of restaking your ETH. So, for example, we just did an announcement

with our partner Consensus um the largest Ethereum um um the largest Ethereum company. It's been around for 9 years to essentially partner with them and their layer 2 blockchain, Lana, that you just described and then go out into the DeFi ecosystem and find very high quality partners like EtherFi, like I cloud where you can restake your ETH, in this case in a liquid restaking token, where not only do you get a higher rate of return than you do from basic staking, each of those parties is willing to give us economic incentives. And why are they willing to give us economic incentives?

Because very few actors in the world can pledge to put 200 million of capital or ETH with them and lock it up for multiple years. So this idea that in crypto and in protocols you measure yourself by TVL or total value locked. We can put the L in TVL. We can say to them this is permanent capital. We're willing to leave it with you for two years. whether the price of Ether is high or not, we will do that with you so you can get higher risk adjusted returns because they're giving you ETH incentives. And we did one other thing that no one had done before is we kept it in our qualified custodian anchorage.

So we're not sitting in some DeFi smart wallet. We're sitting in a regulated qualified custodian. So you get restaking yield in the low 3%s plus you get incentives from the parties to leave it with them for several years. you get DeFi returns and you can keep it in a qualified custodian to reduce your risk. That's something that retail investors can't do. It's something that the ETH ETF set can't do and it's something you can do when you own billions of dollars of ETH and you have an incredible institutional team who knows how to do it. So again, if I sound excited, we are breaking barriers and raising standards which benefits investors because it flows back into our balance sheet as income and and and revenue. So, it's

super fun. John, that was a long answer to a short question. We're doing things to raise the standards and it goes to the benefit of our shareholders. >> It's a very thorough and exciting answer to the question. The thing that stands out to me about this, and I agree with you, this is the most exciting piece of this. The thing that stands out to me about this is that is the first time where there's been a real opportunity for an institutional-grade security solution that brings the opportunity for institutional capital to get deployed into DeFi. And I I'm curious your thoughts around that because like everybody who's a DeFi native has been talking about the benefits of you know automated market makers and all the different things that DeFi the innovations that have come out of that but institutional capital has not had a

regulatory compliant way to get access. Do you think that that messaging is resonating with institutional investors and are they really excited about this opportunity to get, you know, like you said, professionally managed exposure to DeFi protocols and and things like Ether and I cloud? >> I think it's resonating not only with those institutional investors who understand that ETH is now productive and you can make it even more productive through asset management. I think it's also resonating with the DeFi community who never saw the likes of these pools of ETH and capital who are willing to keep it in their protocols. And what's really interesting is if you're a student of Ethereum, Vitalik in the early days, I'm I'm not sure he was that

positive on DeFi because of the risks and he was worried about investor sentiment and risks. And I don't mean institutional investors, I even mean retail investors. He's written more recently about good DeFi and what we're focused on is DeFi who understand that with the higher return comes higher risk meaning it's there's a yield component but there's a risk component and to date most people participating in DeFi only focused on the yields I can get 15% yields 20% yields and forget that the other side of that is you're taking more risk so what we're doing as institutional stewards is looking at every risk innate or inherent in a protocol or a DeFi uh security layer

from smart contract risk to deping risk to liquidity risk to capacity risk to bridging risk, you know, to oracle risk. And I think the DeFi community is waking up and saying, "Wait, I'd love to be able to meet these standards and get hundreds of millions or even billions of [clears throat] dollars of permanent capital into my um protocol." And that's what I think is exciting, not just for institutional investors, but for the DeFi community as well. And they're actually quite proud to share all the risk mitigants they have across their protocols because we're asking them to demonstrate it.

>> Yeah. And so as Trad comes to take advantage of DeFi, DeFi evolves to become more compliant, more robust, and to to get to the standards that institutions demand. I think this is, you know, benefiting both spaces in a lot of ways. I'm interested in how you're thinking about the moat around what ESP is doing. In other words, how you've got these like kind of like sophisticated and and sort of unique strategies and methodologies for getting this highquality security and yields for investors. Um, but obviously there's going to be a lot of competition around this. Do you think about that at all in terms of protecting the moat on the business or is this not something you're concerned with or what what's the thought process there?

>> So, I would I let me give you two answers. One is we're trying to do it in a different way. Most of the other digital asset treasuries have a handful of employees. They essentially outsource the accumulation of ETH, the staking of ETH, even running the public company, they outsource to third party asset managers and consultants. Um, from my experience um around risk management and 20 years at the largest asset manager in the world, I decided to go in a different direction. So, we are hiring the capabilities to do this on team for two reasons. One is if you're trying to own billions of dollars of an asset, you better have a team who knows how to look at the risk management is number one.

And two is as you go out into the staking world. You need to understand that you're a steward of these assets. It's a treasure. You're not here like a hedge fund trying to take crazy risks. So having that team and we've hired an incredible chief investment officer from Falcon X and from uh Bridgewater. We've hired um chief development officer who's got experience not only at consensus but at JP Morgan and investment banking. We're hiring a team who could do it onchain and on team so that we keep as much of the fees low to go to our investors. I think the second thing that's uh really really important in differentiating is telling the story around um how you're uh deploying that

in an actively managed strategy and tell your investors that this is no different than any other efficient frontier of a portfolio. Whether you're building a retirement portfolio, a pension portfolio, a sovereign wealth portfolio, we have a portfolio of billions of dollars of ETH and you have to look at it as part of it you're going to be really conservative in. And in other parts you're willing to go up the risk curve and get higher returns. You just need to be able to describe it in a way that investors understand because you're starting to see people report publicly that they're trying to get 7 10% rates of return and you know they're taking risks and doing it outside of a regulated custodial framework. So we're building on team. We're trying to keep

the fees as low as possible to give it back to investors and we're communicating what this portfolio looks like uh over time. So yes, we're trying to do it the right way and differentiate ourselves. >> Yeah. And I think that that building of the team internally is a big differentiator just right there. Um I do want to bring uh up the the certain things we've touched on a couple times, but the the market dynamics of late. Um and just kind of get your thoughts on where we are with this. Um obviously Bitcoin down below 90K, Ethereum dipped below 3K. Uh is the bull run over? Are you panicking? Are we cooked? um or are you buying the dip or what are your thoughts on the current market sentiment right now?

>> Sure. Um so first of all um the beautiful thing about not being a fund we are in ETH treasury is that we believe we hold permanent capital meaning whether we own 2 billion 3 billion 4 billion it will go up and down at some point we had another half a billion of ETH as the price has come down we own less value of ETH even though we own the same number of ETH. I think the important thing is to take a step back. The shortterm feeling is of fear. Like, let's just be clear, a lot of that is coming not from the crypto community. It's coming from the macro markets. Um, there's been a pullback not only in the NASDAQ and the S&P. There's a feeling that we went too far on the AI

uh sentiment up the risk curve and there's fear in the market um is number one. And that's we should just acknowledge that. And I would tell you that Bitcoin and ETH um which are sometimes viewed as risk on assets are caught up in that fear and sentiment. So there's been a pullback. Um second is I think it's fair to say that beyond the AI question um and the risk on we don't have economic data. The government was closed for 42 rough days. We don't know what unemployment was and we don't know what inflation was for the month of October. We'll start seeing those numbers. Um the beautiful thing is the market has now discounted the likelihood of a rate cut probably down to 40% in

December whereas I think earlier in previous uh months they had assumed almost 100%. So just think about it the market's already priced out a rate cut so there's upside in the market. So I think there's a lot of fear. October 10th was a massive deleveraging day and I think it was a day where people realized that not all assets are the same in the crypto space and you've seen Bitcoin and ETH retain their value much much better than the next 80 alt tokens which some people say at this point are not only super risky but maybe even uninvestable. So, I think in general across markets, you're going to see a flight to quality. And when you see a

flight to quality, Bitcoin and ETH will hold up much better. Um, I think that is a short-term view and it's short-term sentiment. We saw pullbacks of roughly the same size in the spring of 204. We saw a pullback earlier this year in the spring of in around March about a 30% pullback in the price of ETH. Um, that is normal behavior of a very volatile asset. But what we've seen is significant recoveries afterwards. So I think Bitcoin, for example, has made most of its money 25 days a year. We're sticking to our guns. We're owning our ETH. The more encouraging thing beyond the macro and the short-term price and fear in the markets is that the actual

adoption macro trends are massively positive for Ethereum. We talked about it. stable coin adoption 60% on Ethereum and growing real world asset tokenization 80% on Ethereum and the high quality DeFi is happening in the Ethereum ecosystem. Those macro trends are just strengthening. So I think we can need to get through this dip of fear. I don't think we're at the end of a four-year cycle. I think uh the world is changing and I'm actually very bullish in the long run, even though I won't give you price certainty, but I think now is a great time to buy at a 3,000 entry point for ETH, especially if you're an investor for more than a year.

If you're a short-term investor, you're thinking day by day, it's a little bit scary right now, but if you believe in the long-term thesis, now is a great accumulation period. If you liked ETH at 4,400, you really like it at 3,000. >> Why do people invest in real estate? because it spits off cash flow. But I'm not here to manage rental properties. That's why I'm looking at Figure Markets. Their new democratized prime product backs your money with real cash flowing assets and returns up to 9% APY. It's the first real world asset borrow lend pool built for everyone, not just institutions. Ready to lend like a bank and get more than the 5% A is offering you? Download the Figure Markets app today and get 9% on your idol funds. Go

to milkroad.com/figurearkets. >> There are obviously seasons of bearish or bullish sentiment in other asset markets, but they don't quite n like uh fluctuate with the same amount of volatility as the digital asset space. I'm curious about how you're thinking about asset management under these cont in this context. I'll give you an example. Um Micro Strategy recently bought or strategy rather recently bought almost a billion dollars of Bitcoin at an average price of about 102,000. Less than a week later, we're now trading below we or Bitcoin traded below 90K. Um, do you do you factor in things like this in your deployment of capital? Is this something you have strategies around or is it something you ignore the noise? How do you think about

that? >> Sure. I think it's worth noting that um again the number one metric of a ETH treasury is one you want to accumulate as much ETH as possible, but more importantly over time you want to do the right thing for investors and try to increase the ETH concentration for sure. As I said, since June, we've doubled it. But there are going to be times like today where um let me say it differently. When your ETH treasury is trading at a premium, so your multiple NAV is more than one, you're out there raising equity and you're buying ETH. But at moments where there's a consolidation like we are in the debt space today, where your multiple to NAV is less than one, you can still do incredible things. You can buy back

shares and we need to be careful. I'm a public company. I don't want to be signaling how, when, and why. But you can buy back shares, which actually increases your ETH concentration. And throughout that period of time, you can still continue to stake. So, I don't believe we're in the business of timing markets. There are people who are smarter than me. You know, there are people who are saying ETH is going to go to 7,000, so they were buying at 4500. When we raise capital, we're largely going to be in the business of quickly buying ETH. We are not smart enough to know when to time the market. And if you're in the long-term view that ETH is going to go up, you want to buy it as soon as possible. So, we do ignore the short-term noise. Uh we do realize there is a consolidation phase happening

today. That's why we're excited as permanent holders of capital because we're not forced to sell like others who are either tax loss harvesting or trying to cap capture gains or losses. So, we're in a different place given our rapper is a public company as a long-term holder of capital. So, uh we we are much more flexible in this format than you are in other formats. >> So, you can change your strategy based on the market context, but you're still moving in the same direction. That that really is helpful and makes a lot of sense. Um I want to talk about the long view and a word that's come up a lot of times has been super cycle. Um, you said recently that Sharplink is in pole position as Ethereum's in as Ethereum's institutional super cycle accelerates.

Tom Lee has also used the word super cycle, but I think this is a little bit of a non-specific term, and I wanted to get your thoughts on what that means and uh how you're thinking about that. What are the effects of this super cycle playing out in the market? So the super cycle we're talking about is about adoption of Ethereum by institutions to do really good real world things. And what I mean by that is we talked a little bit earlier about how inefficient our current market structure is for buying, selling assets, for borrowing and lending assets, um for relending and staking assets. It's a very inefficient system and I think we're in the bottom of the first inning of all assets being tokenized. And it's not just my idea.

It's what you're hearing from um really really smart people who've spent 30, 40, 50 years in Wall Street. And it's coming in three flavors. It's the tokenization of money and dollars in stable coins. You've seen a massive growth not just in Tether and in Circle USDC. You're seeing app chains and other L1s launch stable coins and I think it's just going to become how money is moved in the future. You've seen tokenization of funds in their early stages. You know, it's taken years, almost seven or eight years to get $30 billion of funds tokenized. Wait till you see a whole ETF complex with trillions of dollars tokenized and be put on Ethereum. So, the super cycle is

not referring to the price. It's referring to the adoption curve. And that said, the more assets that are secured on a network, the token that secures it, ETH, is going to go up in value. And you would see Consensus wrote a report in June. It's worth reading for your viewers called the Trustwware Report where they basically explain that over the last 5 years there's been a high correlation between the value of assets secured on Ethereum, stable coins, tokenized funds, and highquality DeFi and the price of Ether. So almost for every $2 secured on the network, the price of Ether, the market cap goes up by $1. Whether that holds in the future, it doesn't matter. It's a very simple

assetbased valuation approach. So yes, we're in a super cycle of institutional adoption which should benefit the price of Ether which is why we're bullish on it. >> I want to ask, we've talked about institutions, we've talked about the short-term, the long-term, we've talked about ETH and everything that you guys are doing and all the innovation that's happening, why that's bringing institutional interest and demand. However, what I've seen as a pattern is that as soon as institutions start to seriously come to a digital asset, retail tends to to move on. For example, a lot of retail investors don't own any Bitcoin anymore. Ethereum is now the the focus of attention and energy on Wall Street and institutions, and retail is getting very bearish and moving on. I'm curious your thoughts on this because

obviously retail investors, we don't want to see them left behind by this big innovation in technology. Um, and yet they they keep getting uh exhausted, futed out. What do you think is a message you would say to retailers to sort of re retail investors to reignite their interest and their enthusiasm in some of these things that is going on in Ethereum? >> Yeah, I I think it's very simple. Retail investors are attracted to crypto because it has asymmetric upside. You know, many retail investors don't feel that parking their money in an S&P 500 fund will earn them what they need to be able to save for their goals or, you know, buy a house, pay off their loans, etc. So, I I actually get and I respect that retail sentiment that I'm looking

for something with asymmetric risk. I think what's important to distinguish is think of these as high growth assets with high upside potential. Bitcoin and ETH still have that. We're in the early stages of that even though they've been around for 17 years or for 10 years in the case of Ethereum. Altcoins obviously have less utility, but they have more speculative value. I think there's going to be a movement to high quality growth assets that are going to be part of this super cycle but have more utility. It's been a really rough year and I actually sympathize with owners of altcoins. So if you look at certain benchmarks like

the Coindesk 80 versus the Coindesk 5, the Coindesk 5 largest assets have held up much much better. Um they're basically flat to down a few% for the year. The Coinbase 80, which are the next 80 assets, um have really really struggled. And while you want to swing for the fences and try to get that asymmetric risk, I think you need to do it in a more balanced way. So telling the story that you're still early with Bitcoin and ETH, especially the ETH institutional adoption super cycle, should resonate with retail investors because I think if you want asymmetric risk, let's do it in a way where you're investing in tokens that actually have

value, that are investable, that have utility and real world use cases. And I I would encourage that type of thinking recognizing that there's always going to be speculation in this market. I I do sympathize with retail. I understand the point of their investments, but you can get that high growth with quality. >> Right. Yeah. And I think that the first step to that is education, which is one of the reasons I'm so glad to have you on the show today and one of the reasons I'm so glad that you moved from BlackRock into the digital asset space because you've often been one of the the best communicators that I've ever seen in in this area and in translating complex and in some cases intimidating concepts into things that people can understand and making them more

accessible um and exciting. Um so thanks for being here, Joe. I really appreciate the work you're doing. Where can we send people to find more of you and your work online? Sure. It's it's uh on X it's Joe Shalom, not to be confused with Joe Luben at Ethereum Joseph. Um and our company's website is sharplink.com. You'll see a lot of information and metrics about how we're accumulating what our metrics are. Um but at the end of the day, I just want to say thank you. Like you guys are doing a great job educating both institutions and retail investors. And it's at moments like this when there's fear that we actually need to take a deep breath. stay calm and think about what those mega trends are beyond thinking about the fourth quarter

and and I love the opportunities to explain. So, John, great to see you again. >> Great to have you, Joe. I'm sure it won't be our last conversation, but I'm glad we got to have one on the record here. Um, so yeah, I hope we can have you back again, and thanks for being on the Milkro Show. >> Thank you, John. >> Thank you all for joining us. We hope you'll learn something today. So, until next time, stay safe, stay educated, stay bullish, and we will see you all on the next episode of the Milkro Show. Thanks for being here everyone. Bye. >> If y'all are making swaps or trades right now, highly recommend you check out Milkroad Swap. This is a DEX that we built in partnership with Cow Protocol.

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