If You Don’t Want, You’ll Just Be Bought: Affiliate Platform SharpLink Becomes Ethereum Treasury

SharpLink Becomes the First Publicly Traded Company to Raise Capital Specifically for Buying Ether—But the “Ether Strategy” Was Also Pushed by a Famous Ethereum Co-Founder. SharpLink’s Stock Price Says It All.

MicroStrategy set the example for Bitcoin, and now SharpLink is following suit for Ethereum: The company has raised capital from investors to purchase $425 million worth of Ether (ETH).

SharpLink plans to become “the largest publicly traded ETH treasury.” To this end, the company intends to raise an additional $1 billion through a further stock offering, which will likewise be fully invested in Ether.

Much like MicroStrategy, SharpLink has no direct connection to cryptocurrencies. The company operates an affiliate network for online casinos and sports betting. However, its pivot to Ethereum was not accidental or due to deep conviction from the company’s board, but rather has a personal background.

The $425 million investment SharpLink recently secured came largely from ConsenSys, arguably the largest company within the Ethereum ecosystem. No less than Joe Lubin, founder of ConsenSys, as a result of the deal, will become chairman of the board at SharpLink.

If companies aren’t starting to accumulate Ether in their treasuries on their own, you just have to buy the company yourself. Or, as Lubin puts it: “The partnership with SharpLink represents more than just a financial milestone. It demonstrates the growing recognition among capital markets that a programmable asset like ETH plays an important role in shaping how value, trust, and financial systems are structured worldwide.”

So, following this circular logic: If I buy a company to make it do what I want, then that proves that what I want resonates with companies. Neat!

And just as with MicroStrategy and other Bitcoin treasuries, SharpLink’s Ether strategy first materializes in its stock price. At the end of May, the stock virtually exploded—from less than three dollars to nearly eighty at its peak. While it has since pulled back, it is still trading at over fifty dollars, which means it remains in a substantial profit zone, up almost 2,000 percent.

From a long-term perspective, SharpLink’s stock price follows a pattern that aficionados of shitcoins and “crypto treasuries” will find all too familiar: After its first spectacular peaks, the price keeps falling lower and lower, and even what seem like massive recoveries up close, are, when you zoom out, merely weak pauses on the path to nothingness.

To be honest, I haven’t seen such a depressing chart as SharpLink’s in almost a month. If you need a reason to feel joy today, just remind yourself that you never owned a SharpLink share.

A climb from three to eight dollars sounds impressive—until you realize the stock was trading for $700 in June 2021. Even that price seems notable only if you ignore that back in January 2013, the share cost $3,200. And even that fades when you look at the more than $10,000 that investors were paying in March 2000.

The $50 the stock recently reached is still only 0.5 percent of its all-time high. Rarely do you see a stock chart that so beautifully illustrates the image of a dead cat endlessly bouncing down a staircase. The roughly $2.70 you would have paid for the stock in May was, so to speak, the very last step.

The company was dead. Revenue had shrunk to three million, the losses were consistently higher, and the P/E ratio—economically the most important metric for a stock—had soared to infinity, which is infinitely bad.

Market capitalization currently stands at about $35 million. At the time when Joe Lubin poured in nearly half a billion dollars, SharpLink wasn’t even worth $3 million. For the Ethereum billionaire, this de facto acquisition must have been a bargain—he bought a dead company for peanuts, with its top value being its status as a publicly traded firm.

The real question is: Why didn’t ConsenSys simply become a treasury itself—or, if the plan was to link shares with Ether, become a joint-stock company? Is it for regulatory reasons? Or perhaps for the optical bonus that a company ostensibly unrelated to crypto is now accumulating Ethereum?

In any case, SharpLink’s core business—which was already on its last legs—will play a mere supporting role from now on. Instead, the value of SharpLink’s shares will depend primarily on the price of the Ether that the company represents.

What’s truly astonishing here is that a public company about to invest $425 million in Ether is valued at just $35 million. What are we missing? And what does this say about the market’s expectations for the future price of Ether?