SharpLink Gaming, one of the largest publicly traded holders of Ethereum, announced Tuesday that it plans to deploy $200 million in ETH from its treasury onto the Linea layer-2 network.
The deployment will occur over multiple years using risk-managed strategies, the firm said in a statement, and will take place in collaboration with Linea creator Consensys. (Disclaimer: Consensys is one of 22 investors in an editorially independent Decrypt.)
The initiative enables SharpLink to generate enhanced yields on its ETH holdings through multiple sources: Native Ethereum staking rewards, restaking rewards from securing EigenCloud Autonomous Verifiable Services, and incentives from Linea and partner Ether.fi.
SharpLink said that all operations will maintain institutional-grade security through its ETH custodian, Anchorage Digital Bank.
“As one of the largest public holders of ETH, we manage our treasury with institutional rigor and discipline,” said SharpLink Co-CEO Joseph Chalom, in a statement. “This deployment enables us to access the best of Ethereum’s staking, restaking and DeFi yield, while maintaining the institutional safeguards our stockholders expect.”
“This is a foundational step in our broader strategy to responsibly generate enhanced staking yield and optimize treasury performance in a way that maximizes stockholder value,” he added, “and marks the beginning of a much larger effort.”
Beyond immediate yields, the partnership aims to pioneer institutional capital markets infrastructure on Ethereum, including on-chain capital raises, programmable liquidity tools, and tokenized equity strategies.
Chalom previously told Decrypt that the firm was weighing how best to tap into Linea for yield ahead of last month’s launch of the LINEA token. SharpLink is a member of the Linea Consortium, a collective of firms and projects helping to distribute token rewards and drive adoption of the layer-2 scaling network.
“When you hold billions of dollars of ETH and you’re looking at a portfolio of staking, there is going to be an ability to deploy that through staking opportunities on Linea,” Chalom told Decrypt in early September.
SharpLink is currently the second-largest publicly traded holder of Ethereum with nearly 860,000 ETH, or about $3.56 billion worth. The firm’s share price is slightly up on the day, with SBET recently trading hands at $14.34.
Ethereum is on the rebound, rising 8% over the last seven days to a recent price of $4,169 after diving below the $3,700 mark earlier this month. Users on Myriad—a prediction market created by Decrypt’s parent company, Dastan—remain bullish on ETH’s next step, giving a nearly 79% chance of ETH rising to a price of $4,500 sooner than it can plunge to $3,100.
