How do you save an ailing publicly traded company in 2025? One answer, and an increasingly popular one at that, is: pivot to crypto—or more specifically, become a crypto treasury company.
The previously unknown online gambling marketer SharpLink Gaming did just that earlier this week, when it announced it had raised $425 million in investment to establish an Ethereum treasury. It was a notable departure from the more common route of building a Bitcoin treasury, with Ethereum being the second largest and most liquid crypto asset on the market next to Bitcoin. As part of the raise, Consensys CEO and Ethereum co-founder Joseph Lubin joined SharpLink’s board of directors. (Disclosure: Consensys is one of 22 investors in an editorially independent Decrypt.)
Before going all in on Ethereum, SharpLink had a market capitalization of around $2 million, trading for just over $2 per share and was just weeks ago dangerously close to being delisted from the Nasdaq for falling below the $1 per share minimum. On Tuesday, everything changed: The company’s stock jumped 420% to $35 per share, with a market cap above $23 million.
It’s a strategy reminiscent of, well, Strategy. Michael Saylor’s company, formerly known as MicroStrategy, laid down the blueprint for how this works: you buy up a bunch of Bitcoin (or, in Sharplink’s case, Ethereum), and your stock functions as a proxy bet on the crypto asset. Shares in a crypto treasury company will often trade at a premium to the digital assets because, for the average investor, it’s much easier to buy stock than fiddle around with crypto directly.
Before being worth $101.76 billion and amassing a Bitcoin treasure chest worth over $60 billion, MicroStrategy was floundering at a double-digit share price as a fairly average business intelligence software solutions company. MicroStrategy then bought $425 million in Bitcoin in the fall of 2020. The same amount in Ethereum that SharpLink plans to buy. Back in 2020, MicroStrategy came out of nowhere. Just like SharpLink did Tuesday.
So what is SharpLink, and where did it come from?
What is SharpLink Gaming?
SharpLink was co-founded in 2019 by now-CEO Rob Phythian and former COO Chris Nicholas, who left the company in 2024. Tori Roberts joined the team in 2021 as vice president, in charge of affiliate marketing with Robert DeLucia following in 2022 as chief financial officer.
According to the official SharpLink site, there are also three independent directors in Leslie Bernhard, Robert Gutkowski, and Obie McKenzie that make up the board of directors, chaired by Phythian himself.
Bernhard has previously served as a director and chairman in multiple Nasdaq-listed companies, Gutkowski helped seal a $486 million cable distribution deal, and McKenzie was a managing director at BlackRock. So, it appears at least, the directors are a capable bunch.
Put simply, SharpLink Gaming uses technology to help match sports betting companies with fans. According to its LinkedIn page, the company now uses an AI tool that collects and analyzes behavioral insights on users, pushes relevant betting content onto those users, and converts them into paying customers.
Trading on the Nasdaq under the ticker SBET, it currently sits at a market cap of $55 million trading at nearly $80 per share, already doubling its price since Tuesday, according to data on Trading View. If you bought SBET stock five years ago, though, you’re still down around 67%.
The company’s revenues declined 26.1% from 2023 to 2024, last year’s financial report showed, with cash on hand decreasing by 42.2% to $1.43 million. That said, it saw a positive net income of $10 million, a notable rise from a net loss of $14.2 million.
In 2024, SharpLink Gaming sold two of its businesses for $22.5 million, used most of these proceeds to write off outstanding debts, and completed a domestic merger that changed the company from an Israeli LLC to a Delaware corporation, according to a company release.
In July 2024, the board of directors started a formal review process to “evaluate strategic alternatives” that would “drive growth and create and maximize value” for stockholders. It appears that in this process, the board of directors started to consider cryptocurrency more seriously.
In February 2025, the company announced that it acquired a 10% equity stake in Armchair Enterprises Limited, a company that owns CryptoCasino.com, as part of a strategy to become the “first Nasdaq-listed company focused on crypto gaming.”
“We carefully evaluated more than two dozen compelling opportunities,” SharpLink CEO Phythian said in a release, referencing the board’s review process. “And [we] determined that the combination of market expansion, cost efficiency, security and player demand makes crypto gaming one of the most promising growth opportunities in the online gaming industry today.”
But this initial crypto pivot wasn’t enough to prevent the price of SBET stock from dropping 60.8%, from $5.75 to $2.26, over the next two and a half months.
During this period, SharpLink announced a reverse stock split to stay above Nasdaq’s stock price minimum requirement of $1. And then a $4.5 million public stock offering in order to regain “compliance with Nasdaq’s minimum requirement for total stockholders’ equity.”
Things were existential for SharpLink. But that was before the Ethereum treasury strategy led its stock price to surge 420% on Tuesday to $35 a share—and now more than doubling that.
Who is the SharpLink CEO?
Rob Phythian co-founded SharpLink and today serves as its CEO and chairman of the board of directors. And now he’s the Ethereum Michael Saylor.
Pythian founded SharpLink after he spent almost nine and a half years as CEO of SportsHub Technologies, a company that created games and apps for sports gaming sites. Prior to that, he’d also co-founded SportsData LLC, a sports experience creator, and served as its CEO and president.
During his time at SportsHub, he was named by a local business publication as one of the top 100 people to know in Minnesota. Phythian was hailed a pioneer and a “sports tech godfather.”
One former business partner told Decrypt that he has great respect for Pythian.
“I worked with Rob maybe 10 or 15 years ago on [an unnamed] skill gaming venture,” Matthew Warneford, CEO of Roblox game creator Dubit, told Decrypt. “Rob’s a great guy, very smart, and good to work with. Have nothing but positive things to say.”
By 2023, now CEO of SharpLink, Phythian and his company started to embrace artificial intelligence. In a guest blog post for Sportico, he outlined a future where AI could help personalize the sport fan experience, while also batting away concerns that AI outputs are too generic as he believed that the tide was turning.
A year later, it was clear that the company needed a new direction, and Pythian led the company through its shift to crypto gaming.
And now he’s leading SharpLink into its next phase as the Microstrategy of Ethereum. The question now is: Will it work?
If Phythian follows Saylor’s playbook, then the next step will be to sell shares, or debt against those shares, to buy more Ethereum. Then rise and repeat. That likely bodes well for ETH—and perhaps even SBET shareholders. But what it means for SharpLink as a business is an open question. It’s a gamble, but one that so far appears to be paying off.
