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It has over a million validators. When Solana has less than 800, it has five or six credible diversified software clients. Whereas 92% I believe is the last time I checked of Solana is running on one client software system. All the elements that matter Uptime, liquidity developer community composability Ethereum is is is leading by Miles hi everyone.
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Welcome to Unchained, your no hype resource Fil Things Crypto I'm your host, Laura Shin. Thanks for joining this live stream. Before we dive into today's discussion, we'll hear a word from the sponsors that make this show possible.
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This episode is brought to you by Kape America's Privacy first mobile carrier Same premium service you'd expect from any other carrier, but designed so your number, your location and your data actually stay yours. Get 33% off six months at Cape Co Unchained Fidelity has been investing in blockchain since 2014. They're not wondering if digital assets will shape the future. They're hiring the talent to help ensure they do. Explore opportunities today@crypto.fidelitycareers.com Fidelity is an equal opportunity employer.
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Today's guest is Joseph Shalom, CEO of Sharplink. Welcome Joseph.
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Great to be back. Laura.
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Excited to have you. This week Sharplink, Bitmine and Joe Lubin launched Ethereum Institutional, a new nonprofit intended to help large financial institutions make decisions about the platform for tokenization, stablecoins and on chain market infrastructure. This comes on the heels of the establishment of ETH Labs, which was launched last week and seems to be focused on ensuring that Ethereum is technically able to deliver to institutions building on it. And all of these developments come after this kind of two year period of turmoil in the Ethereum community and the Ethereum foundation, which culminated in the foundation announcing that it would be taking a smaller role in Ethereum's development. So Joe, tell us how this idea for Ethereum Institutional came about and what the organization plans to do.
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Sure. Even taking two steps back, I think we're at a moment that matters in the Ethereum ecosystem. We're obviously in a consolidation period of the price of Bitcoin and eth, but the sentiment has not been great and some of that is leverage that was taken out of the system in October. Some of it is the AI narrative, some of it is risk off, but there definitely was a crisis of confidence and communication relative to what the role of the Ethereum foundation should be. So I believe very strongly that the EF has a narrower mandate. That mandate is going to be on censorship, resistance, privacy, security it has the greatest track record. But what we recognized is as the Ethereum foundation gets smaller, we need other parts of the institutions to step up. And this is the second announcement. ETH Labs, which was announced as a not for profit last week, again was funded by Joe Lubin personally, Tom Lee at Bitmine and sharplink. It's because we have a view that we are large stakeholders in the ecosystem and it means we need to be benevolent and stewards of the ecosystem. So that first announcement was an incredibly talented ecosystem team that's going to be building the future of Ethereum and the protocol for what institutions are looking for. And then this week's announcement around Ethereum Institutional was a spinoff of the Go to Market team, the education team, the team that engages with hundreds of financial organizations on a neutral basis. And the support is meant to signal that there is no crisis in the Ethereum community. There's no funding issues in the Ethereum community. And at a moment when Ethereum is winning and has the license to win, we just need to inject more confidence that it is winning and has the support. So you can think of these as back to back launches that build on one another and complement the Ethereum foundation rather than compete with it.
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And so what will Ethereum Institutional be focused on?
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So Ethereum Institutional was actually a group of people who were working within the Ethereum foundation almost as a BD type group, an educational group. Their role is to help the largest institutions in the world who are currently making like once in a decade decisions about the future of their financial infrastructure. They're making these foundational decisions. We needed a front door and a sense of one place you can go to if you want to learn more about the Ethereum options. It could be mainnet, it could be one of the layer twos. It's meant to be neutral. And the beautiful thing about Ethereum is it doesn't force a rigid configuration. It lets institutions think of their requirements, what approach they need. And then the second thing that this institutional group will do will actually lead engagement in the community. It'll lead educational conferences and it'll help coordinate between lots of different stakeholders. So you can think of it as being the front door, while ETH Labs, you can think of it being the technical platform that's going to be delivering what institutions need. And this is a one, two punch and it's not competitive with, it's complementing the core work of the smaller Ethereum Foundation.
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So Ethereum has other organizations that are also focused on institutions, namely Etherealize, which launched A year and a half ago and the Enterprise Ethereum alliance which is quite a bit older, maybe about a decade older and you know, as we just mentioned, also ETH Labs. So how does Ethereum Institutional differ from these other organizations?
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I think they have the depth of experience, having sat in the ef, they have the technical capabilities, they have a couple of years of track record of having met 500 financial institutions, having the contacts, having run 40 plus seminars. And I think what you're going to see them do is really be the source of education as these institutions are making these foundational decisions. I'm not suggesting they're the only place in the world you can learn about Ethereum. There are many of us who are, who are talking about this long term opportunity but you can think of them having technical expertise and understanding the requirements of these institutions. So we are moving to a world where it was more under one tent, the Ethereum foundation, to a world where it is more distributed and may require a layer of coordination but not control by any one party. I think Ethereum strength is that it's truly credibly neutral and you can't say that about the competitive chains who have concentrated ownership of the tokens, concentrated ownership in the software clients and concentrated ownership in the validators. And frankly a BD group that's completely aligned with all those parties, incredibly neutral matters to institutions and that's what Ethereum is defined by. But it is going to be a set of distributed organizations and we will have to find a way to coordinate them without controlling them.
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And so are you like talking with Etherealise and the Enterprise Ethereum alliance about sort of like creating your own swim lanes or will there be overlap or are the groups competitive or how does that all work?
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So I think you have to distinguish between the announcement last week which was ETH Labs, ETH Labs is going to be run as a completely independent group of people. It's a not for profit. It will have independent board members. The largest backers which are sharplink, Tom Lee at Bitmine and Joe Lubin will not be board members. We will have information but it's meant to be completely neutral from a governance perspective. I think what you're going to see is Eth Ethereum Institutional will have a leader from the organization on the board. But I think we announced that Tom Lee and I will also serve on the board, not to control the outcomes, But Tom has 35 plus years of experience and in macro and finance and a Rolodex like you've never seen before. I had 20 years of experience selling financial technology when I was at blackrock to Aladdin. Also deeply understand what institutions require. So you can think of us not controlling them, but helping them make intros and when necessary, giving them guidance. But the Ethereum, Ethereum Institutional is also a not for profit. It's credible. It's not going to push one solution over another, but it's going to have the backing of the largest stewards of ETH in the world, Tom, Joe and myself. And we're going to be a benevolent force. We're not deciding outcomes, we're helping institutions make those decisions. So that's the way I would think about it. Ethereal plays a really important role. The Enterprise Ethereum alliance plays a role. I think over time you'll see more coordination between these organizations, but no single party controlling them, which is what the beauty and strength of Ethereum is.
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Okay, okay. So basically, ETH Labs and Ethereum sorry, Ethereum Institutional have the same backers, but the way that they operate will be separate and then Etherealized, obviously. And Etherealized and Enterprise Ethereum Lies are. Are obviously completely separate. They were formed at different times. Um, so one other thing I want to ask about was, I believe recently on the show, I could not find this episode. So hopefully I'm not misquoting, but I swear somebody who was from Ethereum said to me or. Or to somebody on one of our shows that in institutional pitch meetings, they've never fielded a question about Solana, but they have fielded questions multiple times about Canton. And it was. You know, I remember being very surprised when they said that, which is why I feel like somebody said, I'm just.
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Unfortunately, it was Danny Ryan.
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Oh, okay.
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From Etherealize. And he and I were on a podcast together with you, which was wonderful. That was his quote, if I'm not mistaken. Laura. Does that ring a bell?
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Okay.
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It's so funny because I told somebody on the team to look at the Danny Ryan episode. I thought that it was him, but anyway. Okay, so thank you for remembering that and clarifying for the record. Know, but so spinning off from that, I was wondering, like, who do you see as kind of the main competitors to Ethereum right now in the institutional space? And how do you feel Ethereum is
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best equipped to compete with them?
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Yeah. I'm going to give you a controversial answer, but one I genuinely believe. You ready for this?
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Yeah.
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The number one impediment to Ethereum winning is inertia at the largest institutions and the fear of changing their rails. That is the number one impediment it's not Solana, it's not Canton, and I'm just being very direct. It is institutions have been running on Rails that are predictable. And by predictable they know how they perform, they know when they're up, they know when they're down. They know it takes T plus 1 in the US to settle a trade, they know it takes T plus 2 and 3 in in Asia to settle a trade. So it's the predictability and the millions of proprietary databases and vendor lock in which are actually the number one impediment of the progress that we know is coming on stablecoins on tokenization and on Defi. And my mental model is that stablecoins are the money layer. They're actually the first proof point of tokenization. Highly successful tokenization of real world assets are very early, but that's the asset and exposure layer. And both Defi and other Rails will end up being the transaction layer of the future. But I think right now the biggest impediment is not Solana or Canton or a particular L1 or L2. It is fundamentally people getting ready for change and these organizations are slow to move. That said, I think Solana plays a really important role and will have a swim lane. But if you're thinking about the capital markets use case and I just want to start with facts. I'm, you know me, I'm the most optimistic, positive person in this industry. I will not fud other people but I'll share facts. Look at the scoreboard. Ethereum has more than the Ethereum community has more than 50% of all stablecoin settlement and activity on it relative to any other chain. I think 10x Solana tokenization, it's over 55% and my guess is it will grow. And then in the defi land, Defi was built on Ethereum largely in the early days and if you talk about high quality defi borrowing, lending in swaps, it's dominated on Ethereum by the aves and the morphos of the world. So I think each one of these chains is going to offer something that's unique. I just happen to think that in capital markets where you want a decentralized player that's never gone down, where you're not having vendor lock in and you actually have liquidity and I mean real transactions, not transactions happening off chain that you then represent on chain, Ethereum is the clear winner. We need to get our narrative right. And I think this past 10 days with these two announcements are turning the corner on the idea that Ethereum is winning and has the license to win. We just need to tell the story and make it easier for institutions to choose the Ethereum ecosystem, but it has all the characteristics that are winning. That's my honest, straightforward opinion. It's inertia and storytelling.
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All right, so in a moment we'll talk a little bit more about Ethereum's road to adoption, but first we'll take a quick word from the sponsors who make this show possible.
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Back to my conversation with Joseph so there's been a lot of conversation about the fragmentation and alignment issues due to Ethereum's modular structure, and one could argue that the likes of Coinbase, even now, maybe Robinhood, have benefited from Ethereum without giving much back. So I wondered how institutions usually react to Ethereum having this structure with the split between the L1 and L2s, and what questions or concerns they have about it, particularly around things like, you know, fragmentation of liquidity, et cetera.
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You know, what's quite interesting is it's, it's kind of weird to get a question about fragmentation of liquidity when ethereum is over 50% of liquidity of stablecoins, defi and, and tokenized real world assets. So like the first thing is you have that problem when you're the deepest pool. And I think you're right. You know, these L2s came into being because Ethereum at the foundation made an intentional decision that until such time that it had the throughput and the block space, they would seed scaling and, and custom configuration to the L2s. On the, on the one hand it's been wildly successful because again they're over 50% market share in the things that matter 10x the next chain. So like that's a good problem to have. I think the decision around the price of ETH and how fees are charged and how fees accrue is something that will at some point be revisited. You know, the technical decision was to seed, roll up control to a lot of the layer twos, I think in order to get scale, but also to get market share. And the fees accrue to mainnet, the fees accrue to ETH largely when you had congestion issues. That was a technical decision. But there weren't stewards of Ethereum who wanted to take a step back and say, wait, maybe in the future there's tremendous value being provided to the L2s on mainnet for the security that it has to, to really focus on what matters. And I think over time Ethereum Institute, the ETH Labs, the largest Stewart will continue to make that decision of do we grow market share or do we have more token value accrue to ether itself. But I'll tell you, I'd much rather be in a situation where you're winning market share, you're winning on trust, liquidity and security. And then you figure out the economics. I'd rather be in that situation then focus on tokenomics before what the clients require. So I think you'll see the industry become much more intentional. And I have an analogy, maybe a good one, maybe a bad one. But like Uber when it started was expressly subsidizing its drivers, it was expressly subsidizing its riders. And look at the market share it created. I think they have over 47% of the rideshare market share in the US and over time more and more value started accruing. Once they built that followership, once they essentially built a new business model, in this case, in that case rideshare, in this Case, you know, global settlement on a neutral platform, which is what Ethereum is, they ended up figuring out the economics for the investors and they ended up becoming in a much better position than if they focused on economics first and market share second. So I'm trying to be very, very direct that I think over time, as Ethereum becomes that global settlement layer that's dominant but neutral and decentralized, the stakeholders will figure out how to make sure that more of the value inures to Ether. But you mentioned Robinhood. Robinhood just went live on Arbitrum L2, you know, but in the Ethereum ecosystem, you know, that could be one of the largest case studies on the use of Ethereum globally in financial markets. And they still use Ethereum and Ether to secure transactions and to get economic security. So that is a net positive for the Ethereum ecosystem, not a negative because it didn't happen on mainnet or the L2. And I think most other chains would die to have a relationship like this with Robinhood. So I think we're going to be much more intentional around economics. But it's never been a bad strategy to get the trust and the market share first.
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So, you know, you already kind of naturally led into this question around ETH the asset. And I had Onskar Dietrich of ETH Labs on the show the other day. I saw there was like a little controversial controversy on Twitter about a post that I made about something he said. But I asked him about the value of ETH and how the Ethereum. It has been perceived that the Ethereum foundation was not very focused on that. But I wondered if the value of ETH is something that Ethereum Institutional intends to focus on and if so, how do you plan to positively influence the value of eth?
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So let me state a thesis first before I talk about, you know, who controls the value of eth. And just to be clear, none of us stewards have an ability to independently control the value of eth. However, let me just give you two mental models. The first is this idea that Ethereum and Ether cannot exist without one another. And for a long period in Ethereum's history there has been a correlation between the value of the assets secured on Ethereum and the price of Ether. That correlation held for a while. It seems to be challenged at the moment, and I'm not. It's not clear if that's because of sentiment or because the speculation left the market. So that's number one. The first thesis is there is going to be a correlation between the price of Ether and The assets secured on the network, even if it's not linear. The second is at some point the transaction volumes that are coming on Ethereum are going to be many, many multiples of what we see today. Right now there's a lot of block space. We're not triggering the burn. But when you start seeing stablecoin growth like we expect, you start seeing tokenization. There's only $31 billion of tokenized real world assets. The estimates, whether it's BCG or Citigroup or B. Riley or others, is that it's going to be measured in the trillions and then DEFI has had a bit of a hiccup from a security perspective. But wait till RWA joined Bitcoin and ETH in borrowing and lending markets. You're going to see massive transaction volume and that's even before you get to agentic. And when you start seeing that volume and again this stuff is compounding. If stablecoins, tokenized real world assets and DEFI are largely happening on Ethereum, this is going to be a righteous circle and more and more share of transactions are going to happen on Ethereum and at some point we'll start triggering the burn. And then the final thing is people in the industry who hold eth, whether you're an ETF provider, a dat, a high net worth individual, another steward, now have a focus on being intentional about the economics and the relationship between Ethereum and eth. I would expect over the next several years as we see usage grow, you might see proposals to have more of that benefit ether the token. But again, I'd rather start with a position of winning massive market share. Jeff Bezos did that in book selling and then in, in, in E commerce and Uber did it in rideshare and over time it benefited the investors. So that is the thesis. I'm not suggesting at all that it's rudderless. There are these correlations, but just wait till you see the bullish level of activity that's coming. I think we're vastly underestimating it and the stewards have an interest of making sure that not only Ethereum is productive and winning, but Ether the token accrues value.
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So let's also now talk about culture because Ethereum has been a leader for quite a long time. You know, it's, it's had the place of the second blockchain for, I don't, I don't even know. I think it was maybe close to a decade we'll say. But part of the community inks the past couple years has been this perception that Ethereum and in particular the Ethereum foundation is non competitive. And it almost felt like the community sort of seemed to realize before the foundation did that we're in this new era where it's all about adoption and you have to go out and get users and not just wait for them to come to you, whether it's everyday people, businesses, institutions. So you know, do you think of Ethereum Institutional as having that kind of infinite garden culture that the Ethereum foundation has or do you plan to try to foster a different type of culture?
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No, I think whether it's ETH Labs or ETH Institutional or Sharplink or Joe Lubin, like all of us have a view that there are principles around decentralization, neutrality, trust, privacy, that the Ethereum foundation is building the most foundational layer that's required for us to be credibly neutral. And then we're going to be focused at Sharplink, at Bitmine, at ETH Labs, at Ethereum Institutional on the adoption and the use case of capital markets. Again, Ethereum has the license to win. And you know what's interesting is I would politely and respectfully challenge the culture issue, which is I wrote about this recently. You know, there's this view that Ethereum has something around the narrative that's missing. Just look at the scoreboard again. It passed a million contributors to the code and the ecosystem. No blockchain is even close. I'm not sure there's any open source blockchain project that that's even close. It has over a million validators. When Solana has less than 800, it has five or six credible diversified software clients, whereas 92% I believe is the last time I checked of Solana is running on one client software system. Like, like all the elements that matter. Uptime, liquidity, developer community, composability. Ethereum is, is, is leading by miles. And I think sometimes the angst is more self inflicted because if you take a step back and just look at the facts, not fud, it is really, really doing well. And yes, the Ethereum foundation went down a different ideological route and you know, it didn't communicate well. But I would still rather have a foundation that's credibly neutral, where the system has never gone down, where the software clients are actually diverse, where you have real economic security. The last estimate I saw from the EF is it would take over $50 billion of concentrated ownership to try to attack Ethereum security. That is massively important. So I'm going to fight back politely on there's a Cultural issue. The cultural issue is there's principles here and we're not creating another vendor lock in. So we're going to stick to the principles, but we are going to focus on the use case and adoption of capital markets. And that's why you're seeing this one two punch of announcements. And it wasn't just Joe Lubin and Tom Lee and Sharplink supporting this. In each case you had over 50 influential supporters who put their money where their mouth is to contribute to create this long term endowment, so to speak to and the Runway. So no one would think there's a funding challenge, but I'd much rather have this than a concentrated treasury or a foundation who can change the rules of the game. The Ethereum foundation owns less than half percent of all eth, so it's credibly neutral and it's not going to change the rules of the game like another foundation could. So I would take this nine times out of ten despite the fact that there's been some noise. So I'm bullish, I'm positive and I'm not just shilling because we're one of the largest owners of eth. These are the facts if you just look at them.
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So Ethereum and in particular, I guess the foundation has somewhat famously been dismissive of the financial aspects of crypto with DEFI founders complaining that the foundation doesn't support DeFi, didn't use it for a long time and you know, here we are where now there are these two new organizations that are essentially being funded by to Ethereum dats, which you know, obviously have their own shareholders who have their own rights, they have legal protection, they have, you could say a different alignment even than from direct holders of eth. And I wondered, you know, if there's any issues there around either incentives or. Yeah, just I'm just curious, like what of what rights or what influence does their needs and wants have on the funding for these organizations?
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So sure, we're a public company and I can't speak for Joe Lubin or Tom Lee, but I'll share my view. I've never seen a more aligned set of interests. Just think about it. Our thesis as a public company of Sharplink is to give people access to the Ethereum opportunity and you get linear exposure to the price of ETH and then we do something quite unique. We make our ETH really productive in the ecosystem. So just think of that, we're giving someone directional access to ETH and we're making it productive. How is there not a better alignment of interest for our end shareholders than to support the ecosystem, Support the people who are going to be shipping and delivering the code from ETH Labs. And it's starting with five people, but we expect it to be much larger and then people who are helping the first use cases, which are capital markets. So I think our interests are beyond aligned. Our investors should be really, really happy that we're helping support the ecosystem. At the same time, as I said, ETH Labs is. Has an independent board, sharplink, Joe Lubin and Thomley do not sit on that board. We let ETH Labs come up with their roadmap, let them build. It's all auditable, it's all public. Ethereum foundation we do have influence on. And Tom and I are going to sit on the board because they need our help with introductions to the world's largest financial institutions.
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Wait, I'm sorry, Tom Lee are going to sit on the Ethereum foundation board?
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Not on Ethereum foundation, on Ethereum Institutional's board. I'm sorry if I misspoke on Ethereum Institutional along with David, the executive director, because why wouldn't you take advantage of, you know, 60 to 70 years of capital markets and institutional experience and introductions. But again, this is intended to help guide the Ethereum community, but there's no one controlling this. There are a series of nodes, as you mentioned. You have the Ethereum foundation, you have ETH Labs, you have Ethereum Institutional, you have great parties like the Enterprise Ethereum alliance, who have, who have a spokesperson role and an education role. You have Etherealized with Danny, Ryan and Vivek, who are wonderful doing their job. I mean, that's okay. We're not a centralized organization like others.
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Okay, last quick question. I'm sure you have been watching this MSTR drama with strc and obviously you yourselves are also a dad. And I was just wondering, you know, what you are thinking as you are watching this kind of situation that strategy has been navigating amidst also this sort of drawdown that we've seen across the board with dads.
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Yeah. So I would say first of all, we tip our hat to Michael Saylor for coming up with this idea that there's another exposure vehicle for owning a crypto asset. You could own spot, you could own an ETF. And when I was at BlackRock, we launched the largest crypto ETFs in history. But for many investors, you'd rather own a public equity. So he coined that model, he built that model. I think the difference between Bitcoin and ETH and Solana is that Bitcoin is not natively productive. It doesn't have a yield. So if you're running a bitcoin debt and you want to drive outsized returns beyond just holding Bitcoin, you need to financialize your stock. And that could take the form of convertible bonds, it could take the form of preferred stock, it could take both. With Ethereum, you don't natively need to do that because it has a 2 and a half to 3% native yield. And at Sharp Link, we've been around for, at this point, one year, and we've largely stuck to issuing common stock and only when it's accretive to shareholders. We've not raised common stock and diluted our shareholders. So we have not yet chosen to take on debt. We have not yet chosen to offer preferred. We've kept a very clean balance sheet. And I'll tell you one thing, I definitely feel like Michael Saylor is in a pickle. We have a lot of respect for him. The thing I think that's overhanging the market is the lack of clarity and kind of daily announcements as to the direction he's taking. But we have a lot of admiration for, for coining and building a new business model. It's just harder with Bitcoin than it is with eth. And so it's funny, when I started, I used to get the question last July, August and September, how is a debt going to survive a crypto downturn? And it's very rare when you start a new business and three months later you're in a downturn, you're in a winter, you're in a consolidation period. And we actually survived perfectly fine. Why? We prioritized our investors. We didn't dilute them. We didn't take complicated structure. We made our ETH productive like we've promised. And yes, the stock will go up and the stock will go down, but we've survived a downturn because we did the right thing at every step and we did it with a institutional client base. That said, those DATs that took out really weird structure or started selling their ETH, or started, you know, investing in housing and. Or started tokenizing aircraft engines, they didn't survive. And it feels like in the Ethereum space, there's Bit Mine and sharplink that have survived and the other ones either didn't get off the ground or at this point have pivoted from becoming D. So I'm actually quite proud of what we've accomplished. Like, very few businesses hit a wall on the price of their product in the first few months and are able to come out perfectly fine. So we're quite proud of it. We've just tried to season first before taking on capital structure, which I think has been the right thing for investors. And we've over communicated it every step of the way.
B
All right. Well, Joseph, it was such a pleasure talking with you. Thank you so much for coming on Unchained.
A
Great to have. Thank you for having me. I look forward to being back soon. Thank you, Laura.
B
Yes. And thanks everyone for joining us on this live stream. We will catch you next week. Bye now. Nothing you hear on Unchained is investment advice. This show is for informational and entertainment purposes only, and my guests and I may hold assets discussed on the show. For more disclosures, visit Unchained. Crypto.com.
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Sam.
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Sa.
Host: Laura Shin
Guest: Joseph Shalom, CEO of Sharplink
Date: July 3, 2026
This episode explores the recent launch of Ethereum Institutional, a new nonprofit initiative designed to help financial institutions adopt Ethereum’s technology and infrastructure. Host Laura Shin interviews Joseph Shalom, Sharplink CEO and one of the backers of the initiative, about the evolving landscape of institutional engagement in Ethereum, competition with other blockchains, and the shifting roles within the Ethereum ecosystem. The conversation covers Ethereum’s strategy to increase adoption, the importance of credible neutrality, challenges around fragmentation and alignment, and reflections on both technical and cultural aspects shaping Ethereum’s future.
“As the Ethereum foundation gets smaller, we need other parts of the institutions to step up… These launches build on one another and complement the Ethereum foundation rather than compete with it.” – Joseph Shalom (03:32)
"Ethereum's strength is that it's truly credibly neutral... we will have to find a way to coordinate them without controlling them." – Joseph Shalom (07:25)
“The number one impediment to Ethereum winning is inertia at the largest institutions and the fear of changing their rails… it’s not Solana, it’s not Canton.” – Joseph Shalom (11:25)
“We need to get our narrative right. It’s inertia and storytelling.” (14:21)
"I'd much rather be in a situation where you're winning market share, you're winning on trust, liquidity and security. And then you figure out the economics." – Joseph Shalom (19:09)
“Just wait until you see the bullish level of activity that’s coming… the stewards have an interest of making sure that not only Ethereum is productive and winning, but Ether the token accrues value.” – Joseph Shalom (24:10)
“The last estimate I saw from the EF is it would take over $50 billion of concentrated ownership to try to attack Ethereum security. That is massively important.” – Joseph Shalom (27:32)
"There are a series of nodes... we're not a centralized organization like others." – Joseph Shalom (32:10)
“Those DATs that took out really weird structure or started selling their ETH... they didn't survive. In the Ethereum space, there's Bitmine and Sharplink that have survived... I'm actually quite proud of what we've accomplished.” – Joseph Shalom (35:04)
On Ethereum’s Institutional Edge:
“Ethereum has more than 50% of all stablecoin settlement and activity on it relative to any other chain. I think 10x Solana.” (13:33)
On Narrative and Market Share:
"We just need to tell the story and make it easier for institutions to choose the Ethereum ecosystem, but it has all the characteristics that are winning." (14:23)
On Decentralization:
“Ethereum's strength is that it's truly credibly neutral and you can't say that about the competitive chains.” (07:16)
This episode provides a comprehensive look at Ethereum’s institutional strategy, the philosophy of credible neutrality, and how the ecosystem’s new governance nodes are positioning Ethereum to extend its dominance amid evolving competition and institutional hesitancy. Joseph Shalom’s perspective is optimistic, pragmatic, and focused on both technical stewardship and practical market share growth, offering listeners a clear sense of Ethereum’s strategic trajectory and the ongoing transformation of its organizational landscape.