SharpLink Gaming recently acquired $462 million worth of Ethereum, becoming the asset’s largest holder among public firms, according to a company blog post published on Friday.
The Nasdaq-listed online gambling marketer, which adopted an Ethereum treasury strategy in May, said that it had purchased roughly 176,000 ETH for an average price of $2,600 per coin. The price of Ethereum was recently changing hands around $2,500, an 8.8% decrease over the past 24 hours, according to crypto data provider CoinGecko.
The company’s announcement follows a Securities and Exchange Commission filing that sparked confusion on Crypto Twitter. As the public tried to parse the significance of an S-3 shelf prospectus, shares tumbled more than 70% in after-hours trading on Thursday.
Although observers speculated that the filing indicated SharpLink investors had sold shares, Ethereum co-founder, Consensys CEO, and SharpLink board chair Joe Lubin said the filing was “standard.” (Disclosure: Consensys is one of 22 investors in an editorially independent Decrypt.)
SharpLink shares opened at $10.26 on Friday, a 67% dip compared to the stock’s closing price of $32.53 a day before, according to Yahoo Finance. Shares soared as high as $124.12 in late May after the company announced a $450 million private placement. They were recently changing hands around $11.21.
“There’s a period of time between [the] announcement to when everything is ready to go, where the float is tiny and everyone buys it, and it basically turns into a meme stonk,” Taproot Wizards co-founder Udi Wertheimer, said on X, formerly Twitter. “That’s resolved once all the filings [are] done. […] It doesn’t mean anyone ‘rugged.’”
SharpLink said that, as of Friday, over 95% of the company’s Ethereum holdings had been deployed in “staking and liquid staking solutions, contributing to Ethereum’s network security while generating yield.”
Among liquid staking protocols, Lido is the most popular, containing $23 billion in assets, according to crypto data provider DefiLlama. The protocol allows investors to lock up Ethereum to earn staking rewards, while also having access to a token pegged to the price of Ethereum.
Bitcoin treasury firms, which have soared in popularity this year, are not able to earn yield on their holdings by leveraging Bitcoin’s network. The difference, in terms of staking, can be attributed to the networks’ different consensus models.
In addition to SharpLink’s initial PIPE transaction, the Minneapolis-based firm said that it had raised $79 million through at-the-market (ATM) offering of common shares. Under its ATM equity program, the company is able to issue $1 billion in equity to buy more Ethereum.
A PIPE, or Private Investment in Public Equity, allows a firm to quickly raise capital by selling shares privately to institutional or accredited investors, as opposed to a public offering.
SharpLink said in its blog post that, on a broader scale, that its Ethereum holdings were second only to the Ethereum Foundation. As of Friday, the Ethereum Foundation held $540 million worth of Ethereum, Arkham Intelligence data showed.
Edited by James Rubin
