Podcast: Building the $3B Ethereum Treasury Company, with SharpLink CEO Joseph Chalom

Hi Fintech Architects,

In this episode, Lex chats to Joseph Chalom, CEO of SharpLink, a Nasdaq-listed leader in digital asset treasury management focused on Ethereum. Joseph shares his journey from BlackRock and the Aladdin platform to pioneering digital asset strategies, including staking and tokenization. The discussion explores the evolution of fintech, the integration of crypto into institutional finance, and the future of decentralized finance (DeFi) and AI-powered financial agents. Joseph highlights SharpLink approach to making Ether productive for investors and the growing institutional adoption of blockchain technologies.

For those that want to subscribe to the podcast in your app of choice, you can now find us at Apple, Spotify, or on RSS. Or to support this writing and access our full archive of IPO primers, financial analyses, and guides to building in the Fintech & DeFi industries, see subscription options here. Our current price point is only $2/week.

Thanks for your time and attention,
Matt Low 🙌

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Key discussion points:

1. SharpLink’s scale and “productivity” pitch for ETH
   We hear that SharpLink (Nasdaq listed since July 2025) has raised a little over $3B in equity, holds ~$3B of ETH, and claims it stakes nearly 100% of its ether—framing itself as a public equities “one click” way to get both ETH upside and yield.

2. A rare behind the scenes look at BlackRock’s crypto playbook
   We get specifics on how BlackRock approached digital assets through three pillars—Circle/USDC reserves, the Coinbase integration (announced Aug 4, 2022) to make crypto trading “boring” for institutions, and tokenization via BUIDL on Ethereum with Securitize, which he calls the largest tokenized fund.

3. The next wave thesis AI agents + Ethereum rails
   Chalom argues the underestimated unlock is autonomous AI agents using Ethereum for programmable settlement, continuously reallocating capital across staking, lending, liquidity, and DeFi while monitoring smart contract risk—replacing manual “yield farming” with always on optimization.

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Background

Joseph Chalom spent two decades at BlackRock after starting his career as a corporate and technology attorney during the dot-com boom — an experience that taught him to distinguish genuine value from speculative frenzy. Joining BlackRock in 2005 to scale a then-obscure fintech product called Aladdin, he rose to become COO of BlackRock Solutions and ultimately Managing Director and Head of Strategic Ecosystem Partnerships, where he architected the firm's entire crypto strategy: forging the landmark Coinbase partnership, leading the launch of the iShares Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs (the latter now exceeding $10 billion in assets), investing in Circle as their exclusive USDC reserve manager, and overseeing the creation of BUIDL — the world's largest tokenized fund on Ethereum.

He retired in June 2025; six weeks later, after a call with Ethereum co-founder Joseph Lubin, he became co-CEO of SharpLink, trading his seat at the world's largest asset manager for the chance to build what he calls "the institutional exposure vehicle for the long-term Ethereum opportunity."

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👑Related coverage👑

Analysis: Understanding the $100B+ Crypto Treasury company boom

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Analysis: Robots, Crypto, and the Collapse of Old Systems

Topics:

Sharplink, BlackRock, FutureAdvisor, Ethereum, ETH, Buidl, Aladdin, digital assets, treasury management, decentralized finance, tokenization, Bitcoin, AI, AI Agents, Roboadvisors, Autonomous Agents

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Timestamps

• 1’05: SharpLink’s Ethereum Treasury: $3B Raised to Make ETH Productive

• 4’53: BlackRock’s iShares Era and Aladdin Explained: Risk Tech at $14T Scale

• 9’07: From Aladdin to Robo Advisors: Why 320,000 Advisors Couldn’t Scale

• 16’32: The FutureAdvisor Culture Lesson: Balancing Product Builders and Institutional Know How

• 18’31: BlackRock’s Three Pillar Crypto Bet: Circle Coinbase and Tokenization

• 25’21: Why BlackRock Picked Coinbase: Making Crypto Trading “Boring” and Institutional

• 28’44: From Six Week Retirement to ETH Treasury: Why SharpLink Holds “Permanent Capital”

• 34’12: The Treasury Trade After the Hype: Why SharpLink Beats ETH ETFs on Staking

• 38’55: NAV Discounts and Mean Reversion: SharpLink’s Plan to Double ETH per Share

• 43’39: Ethereum’s Next Growth Stack: $300B Stablecoins $14T Tokenization and Institutional DeFi

• 48’23: From Copilots to Autonomous Agents: Ethereum as the Rails for Machine Finance

• 52’21: The channels used to connect with Joseph & learn more about SharpLink

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Illustrated Transcript

Lex Sokolin:
Hi, everybody, and welcome to today's conversation. I'm absolutely delighted to have with us today, Joseph Chalom, who is the CEO of SharpLink. SharpLink is the first and one of the most meaningful digital asset treasury companies, and I'm really excited to learn more about SharpLink. Joseph also has a fantastic background in fintech and crypto across large asset management. And so, we're going to open up those topics today. With that Joseph welcome to the conversation.

Joseph Chalom:
Thanks, Lex. Really excited to be here and to share more.

Lex Sokolin:
Yeah. So maybe just can you tell us what is SharpLink.

Joseph Chalom:
Sure. So SharpLink is a Nasdaq listed company starting basically in July of 2025. We launched as the first Ethereum digital asset treasury. And the purpose and mission is essentially to give both retail and institutional investors access and ownership of ether. So ether is the token that secures the Ethereum decentralized network and the yield that you can get on Ethereum because it's natively productive. We do it within the context of a US registered public company. And since last summer, we've raised a little over $3 billion of equity capital, and we've invested it by buying the ether token, and we've been making that ether incredibly productive in a risk adjusted way. So think of us as an exposure vehicle for the long term Ethereum opportunity for appreciation, but also a yield generating vehicle.

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Lex Sokolin:
Fantastic. Okay, we'll dive back into Ethereum and SharpLink in a bit. But I wanted to go to kind of the beginning of your career and what got you into financial services, and what were some of your formative experiences coming into finance?

Joseph Chalom:
I actually went to law school never wanting to be a lawyer, but I practiced corporate and technology law at an incredible moment in time.

You can think of it as the late 90s to about 2004, and the reason why it was so formative. It was the first time in my life, and probably one of the biggest industry collisions with the launch of Web One. We didn't call it web one at the time. It was the.com boom. But the idea of new technologies fundamentally changing how businesses operate, but more importantly, what the experience is in accessing information and sharing information. And that really was business models colliding. At the time we realized it would affect businesses, we didn't understand the social impact and the civilization-based impact, but learning how to do partnerships, learning how to figure out essentially where technology is going to be in 3 or 4 years was very formative on me. But also watching people who did not believe that fundamental valuation models mattered, you know, clicks and eyeballs. And don't worry, we'll make up losses on volume. It taught me to trust my gut and that there are fundamental ways to value businesses. And today you can think of crypto as needing some of the same capabilities because it's just a new business model.

So that was formative. And then after a number of years practicing law, I actually joined Blackrock in 2005 to help scale a fintech business called Aladdin. And at that time Blackrock was a small fixed income asset manager. But as a fiduciary, it realized it needed to be a great and differentiated risk manager. And they did that by building this Aladdin technology within the firm.

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Lex Sokolin:
So this was actually before Blackrock had iShares as a business, right? Because I remember it was in the oh eight crisis that I shares ended up like the index business that Blackrock is so famous for today ended up getting acquired by Blackrock when a bunch of firms failed.

Joseph Chalom:
That's exactly right. The firm grew to build capabilities across fixed income equity alternative through a series of acquisitions. A Merrill Lynch investment manager acquisition in 2006. And to your point, they acquired iShares, the ETF complex, which back then was actually quite small. The date was December 1st, 2009. And it was quite interesting, the idea that at the time there was a view that businesses needed to specialize.

You can only be a fixed income manager or an equity manager, or you can either be active or you can do index where you do public markets or you do alternatives. And it turns out if your customers want all of that, you being able to provide that capability was really important. And I worked at the intersection of those capabilities. But as we deliver risk management and portfolio management and investment technology. So we built a fintech business that that could cover every one of those asset classes and eventually crypto.

Lex Sokolin:
Let's make it a bit more tangible in terms of what did Aladdin do and what does risk management mean from the perspective of somebody like Blackrock offering it to other asset managers? Right. Because I think for a lot of people, they think Blackrock, they think large scale asset allocation plus ETFs. Right. And I think many industry participants don't even know that Aladdin exists. And then when they do they're like what are the words mean. So can you tell us a little bit more about the early customers, the technology and the value proposition?

Joseph Chalom:
First, let me start with the why and then I'll tell you the what in the how. The why is whether you're an asset manager or an insurance company or a pension plan or a corporation or a sovereign wealth fund, you're managing money on behalf of somebody else. In the case of Blackrock, the majority of the money they managed was on behalf of pensions and retirement plans. And it turns out that if you get something wrong, people don't retire in dignity. So the why is if you're going to manage somebody's assets, you really need to understand the risks in their portfolio so you can meet their goals. The what was essentially, as you grow at Blackrock or any other asset manager or asset owner, you end up having lots and lots of portfolios across different asset classes, across different strategies, and those portfolios are made up of individual positions. They could be public equities, they could be bonds, they could be private funds that don't trade on a liquid basis. You need a way to look at your entire enterprise, your strategy across every portfolio and model them bottoms up. So you know your portfolio risk is only a function of the individual securities you own.

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But then you also need to be able to express your opinions. I want to go long Aussie dollar and short this amp. So, you need portfolio management capabilities, and then you need to be able to get best execution and traded. And then you need to be able to settle it and manage your settlement cash. And then you have to have risk management on top of that. So, you can think of it as almost the operating platform for somebody who's managing assets. And it doesn't matter if you're managing $100 million. Or in BlackRock's case today, they announced their earnings, $14 trillion of assets. You need a system to do that, right. And the early customers were Blackrock clients who benefited from Blackrock risk reports. But they wanted to be able to do risk management themselves. So, the firm built a SaaS business on a private cloud. I joined in 2005 to help them scale it as a chief operating officer. And if you fast forward today, it has 1000 plus clients across almost every asset class, including crypto, and it helps people manage and risk manage tens and tens of trillions of dollars of assets. So again, the Y is to make sure you're not making mistakes and messing with people's goals and retirements. The how is just becoming an expert in building your community.

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Lex Sokolin:
If we think about other standalone public companies or companies in that space, is it like a broad ridge or an investment?

Joseph Chalom:
Investment does it for the wealth industry. You can almost think of it as competing with some of the Bloomberg capabilities, some of the capabilities that State Street has having a platform called Alpha. But at the end of the day, if you're going to be offering clients every asset class, every strategy, everywhere in the globe, you need to be able to manage that risk. And in the case of Blackrock, they built a platform to externalize that IP so others can manage risk in their entire workflow. The interesting thing is it gave me a front row seat on how market structures worked, both fixed income equity crypto across different countries, and it actually exposes some of the real deficiencies and frictions as people move securities, as people move money.

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And in some ways, it was helping extract that complexity by wrapping it in a really great platform. But one of the reasons I ended up joining the crypto industry and focused on market structure and Ethereum is I had a front row seat on how traditional markets had a lack of trust, a lack of straight through processing, and frankly, the level of frictions and rents that were being taken even though the markets work. We got used to something that's highly inefficient, and I had a front row seat to that.

Lex Sokolin:
Yeah, nothing will inspire confidence in public blockchains, like knowing what it takes to download overnight a CSV file of, you know, investment positions from five different custodians and then trying to reconcile them. I hear you. So before digital assets, we had digital wealth and that was the robo advisor boom in the late 2000, sort of through 2015 or so, where Web2 technologies, you mentioned web one, but where Web2 technologies started getting applied to the distribution of financial products, and we moved sort of a lot of relationships and interactions from in person to the web or to phones.

And companies like Betterment and Wealthfront started to make it dense. Blackrock famously, at least for the 15 of us who are still from that era, famously acquired a company called Future Advisor, which was one of the early robo advisors out of California. And based on some of our prior conversations, you touched that business and you kind of saw what was going on. Can you tell us the context for how Blackrock thought about the space, the acquisition and then what happened?

Joseph Chalom:
Sure. I think there was a thesis, two theses. One was the traditional way that the wealth management industry distributed funds was highly manual. It was the idea that most companies had sales forces that would go and push their products and get in cars and have suitcases full of printed materials, and go from a financial advisor to a financial advisor explaining why your fund is better than, you know, somebody else's fund. And it was really, really limited in the number of advisors you can engage with. I think there's roughly 320,000 US financial advisors, and you could probably, in that manual way, touch very, very few.

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The second thesis was that these advisors were constrained in the number of clients they could take on. Maybe they can have 100 clients because every portfolio was different. Being used to being brokers. Now they're being told they need to be fiduciary advisors. If every portfolio looked different, they were spending more time preparing for meetings than they were giving advice. So, the idea was, if you can build digital portfolios, probably based on models of ETFs that are, you know, here's an aggressive portfolio, here's a moderate portfolio, here's a conservative portfolio, and you can align them with a risk tolerance of that customer. You could do two things better. You could have more uniform portfolios so you can serve more customers. You can give them advice on a digital basis. And most importantly, you can actually do it in a very compliant manner. So, you don't have portfolios for 80-year-olds that are full of Tesla, and you don't have portfolios for 30-year-olds that are just sitting in cash. It turns out that and I ended up running Future Advisor for a period of time out of San Francisco.

Turned out that there were two impediments to that. One is most people with significant money still wanted to trust an advisor who understood their family, their birthdays, weddings, divorce goals, colleges and they were very reluctant to put large portfolios into robo advisors. So, what you ended up getting and it happened across the industry is the no thank you portfolios where they're willing to put, you know, very small portfolios for the youngest customers in into this place. And there are only a few companies that ended up doing it. Well, it was Vanguard and Charles Schwab, but it actually taught us a lot of lessons. And the rebalanced capabilities and the portfolio advice capabilities ended up getting integrated into our Aladdin platform, and it ended up being a really good set of IP. What's interesting is I think we're going to leapfrog that, and I don't think there's going to be robo advisor too. I do think in the asset management and crypto space and the digital asset space. There's going to be a genetic, trusted and trustless agents that are going to do a better job delivering what you would have thought were robo capabilities in every aspect of our lives.

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So, this just may be an example where we're going to leapfrog two generations of technology to get the same capabilities. At some point in this podcast, I'd love to share, you know, some ideas of what could be coming and how Ethereum could be the essentially the decentralized, trusted agent machine economy for a big part of our lives. But I think it's interesting. We were too early and there wasn't a great product market. I think it's going to happen in the background through authentic capabilities. Just almost 15 years later.

Lex Sokolin:
I think what at the time felt like features or maybe polish or a change in a part of a business model these days is just getting swept up in a complete sea change of what the economy is made from, and we'll definitely touch on this in more detail on the future advisor side. I'm really curious about the cultural integration of what at the time was like a pretty tech forward startup team and, you know, a large incumbent financial institution with a very different operating cadence. You know, and I think the acquisition happened a few years before.

I would say there was a whole cottage industry of consultants talking about how to do digital transformation, you know, and how to have innovation labs and how to transition from small to large and give people ownership and so on. You were pretty early in trying to incorporate a startup into some core operations of the business. Were there any lessons on that culture combination?

Joseph Chalom:
So, it's been a decade, and sometimes I remember how I did things and who I did it with and what I did, but I think the main lesson was very, very simple. When you're building, when you're acquiring a team of really talented product and engineering people who come from one background, and that was essentially a very retail focused robo advisor, and you're trying to pivot your business model to something that's more institutional. In the case of Future Advisor, we were trying to be a B2B2C company. So build capabilities that you could white label for other institutions, build a platform for institutions so they can interact with their consumers.

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I think the number one lesson is to learn that you probably need a better balance of people who have both great product expertise, but also know the customer, because the retail experience and workflow is fundamentally different than what institutional users and home offices care about. So, my number one lesson is like you can't go too far to either extreme, have incredible product and engineering people who don't have context or have people with deep, deep institutional experience but may not know how to innovate in the same way. So that that would be the one lesson I learned. And I still hold it too hard in terms of how I hire today.

Lex Sokolin:
After digital Wealth came digital assets, and that's a very different trend. The way that financial instruments are manufactured are very different on chain. You know, I think there's a profound transformation in the industry and that's obvious and loud in 2026. But you were fairly early in Blackrock to start looking at digital assets and, you know, launch Ethereum focused products. Can you talk a bit about how that came about and then what in particular you liked about the protocols that you focused on?

Joseph Chalom:
Sure. I mean, the career transformation was essentially leading partnerships in a number of ecosystems. Some of them, at the time this was 2018 seemed pretty boring. You know, owning the data, relationships and ecosystem, owning custody or owning index relationships or AI before it was a genetic. But one of the ecosystems I was responsible for was blockchain, and I inherited a one-person team, this really, really talented gentleman named Robby Mitchnick, who taught me everything I needed to know back then about blockchain and then crypto. And I shared something that is very hard to attain because it turns out it takes experience to have experience. But it was a great partnership. We ended up hiring a five-person team with a handful of engineers, and we spent a few years trying to understand what the role of technology could play in Blackrock back office or business processes, and eventually realized it needs to be an open architecture, an open ledger, and we spent a lot of time in 2019 and 2020 meeting the entire crypto ecosystem. And a lot of the same lessons I learned during web one held true.

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Here you met innovators; you saw business models completely colliding. You saw people who didn't understand one another's business models. You saw fraud. People who told you that fundamental things like collateral don't matter or counterparty risk don't matter or credit risk doesn't matter. And smart contracts are going to abstract all risk. But we eventually settled on a really interesting strategy, and we went to our leadership and we said we wanted to do three things. And this was 2021. We wanted to play a role in the stablecoin ecosystem, the crypto ecosystem, and in tokenization. So, three pillars. And in the first we invested in Circle. We became their exclusive reserve manager of the Treasury portfolio that backs USDC. And we learned a lot about the future of money movement, and we built a great partnership with Jeremy Allaire and his team, and that was quite successful. And the second was this idea of if someone in the institutional space is going to own Bitcoin, or if they're not going to do it in some smart Web3 wallet, they're going to do it where they own their fixed income, equity, FX, cash and commodities.

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So, we knew it had to be part of a portfolio allocation. And so, we built the capabilities in our Aladdin platform. But importantly, we partnered with Coinbase to integrate their prime capabilities, their custody capabilities and liquidity so that it was fully integrated in every Aladdin workflow. But with the benefit of getting the incredible capabilities that Coinbase offered. We announced that partnership on August 4th, 2022. It broke their stock because it felt like institutional was finally arriving. Blackrock was giving their imprint tours that, you know, does a good housekeeping seal of approval on bitcoin and ETH. And then FTX happened and most of our client base kind of ran away from all their crypto and digital asset products, whether they were going to invest in it in their portfolios or launch funds. But it turns out there was one client called Blackrock who doubled down because we knew there were clients who wanted exposure to Bitcoin and ETH, and to date, they couldn't own the spot. They had no custodial relationship. There were no funds you could really buy that were liquid.

So they had been allocating billions of capital to crypto venture created a giant bubble. And you saw 2022 as the peak of crypto venture. I don't think it's ever recovered. And those funds did well. But they completely underperformed the underlying Bitcoin in ETH. And then eventually we were able to get SEC approval along with 11 other issuers to launch a Bitcoin ETF in early 2024 and an ETF when I was at Blackrock, and they had great product market fit, and they raised tens and tens of billions of dollars and have been great investments for the customer base. And then the third was tokenization. And we knew tokenization was going to change finance. We didn't know how. But again, we didn't build. We partnered with a great company called securitize. We let around and we tokenized a yield bearing fund called BUIDL, which had a few innovations. It was launched on mainnet layer one Ethereum, and it was interchangeable for a stablecoin. And there was a cohort of crypto holders of stablecoins who needed to stay on chain 24 over seven to have that transactional liquidity.

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But when they didn't, they wanted to earn yield. And so, they can instantly go from owning the stablecoin to BUIDL and earn that yield. And that became the largest tokenized fund in the world. And I think that was something that is going to get rinse and repeated across every type of fund and stock and bond in the space. And then I retired after 20 years at Blackrock. So, it was a great journey. I did it with a great team and to be honest, we were the tip of the spear. The spear was Blackrock and its distribution and trust and reach, so we were very lucky to do it from the best platform in the world.

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Lex Sokolin:
I'm interested in a small detail that you had mentioned, which was partnering with you had mentioned partnering with circle and with Coinbase earlier in your career. You've worked with, you know, all the other custodians and institutional providers. You know, one thing I've always found a bit odd is in the traditional finance sector, you have very clean kind of roles and responsibilities, right? Like you've got these entities, the exchange, this entity is the custodian.

This is the broker dealer. And then this is the advisor. And each one of them has different roles. On the one hand, that's very clean. On the other hand, you have all these kinds of Scotch tape reconciliation data issues with crypto exchanges. The whole thing is vertically integrated. So, you are the exchange and you are the broker and you are the advisor. You play all the different roles, and you're also the technology integrator of all the stuff underneath for the blockchains. And then you're also, you know, now offering prime brokerage and institutional custody and so on. How did that affect BlackRock's ability to work with the company? Like, was it novel and strange to see somebody who has that sort of vertically integrated shape? Did it make it much easier to partner with a company like that or, you know. Was it unusual? Like, was it technology as a result of that? Better or worse? Can you reflect a bit on this topic?

Joseph Chalom:
I want to start with a couple of principles. The first principle is, you know, Bitcoin and ether are really volatile and risky assets. And so, if you're going to give someone exposure to that, you want to do it in a way that is most familiar and works within the same risk management framework and system and workflows as they would do to buy FX or stocks or bonds. So, like it's already a risky asset, maybe the riskiest in their portfolio. So, you need to make sure you're doing it the right way. And so, one of the principles was if you're going to give someone a crypto exposure, we wanted to do it in the most institutional way. And let me give you a couple examples of that. One is most crypto is traded on a pre funded basis. Meaning you have to know you're going to buy Bitcoin or ETH. You have to move money into that account and it settles instantly. Most portfolio managers in traditional finance deal with the T plus one settlement. They just need to know they have the cash. The next day when they're ready to invest, they just invest and they make sure they get settled overnight.

And one of the reasons we chose Coinbase is not only can you integrate them as a custodian, but they were willing to finance these trades overnight. So, our customers were our funds did not have to pre fund an account, keep it in a hot wallet which is actually somewhat risky. And then you know, trade and it settles instantly. They're not used to that. So having somebody who can both be the custodian who can keep your assets, whether you're buying or selling in cold storage and only move it to settle, it was actually a great innovation. And in addition, they could aggregate liquidity. It wasn't only trading with Coinbase. They had access to a lot of liquidity. So, it actually was the safest way to enter this space for customers who were doing it for the first time, including Blackrock and more importantly, for what's a very risky asset. So, I remember the first time we demoed the integration to the firm's management team and their response was, it is so boring, and we knew it was mission accomplished.

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I think if we had tried to do something flashy away from Aladdin doing things that broke standard operating models, we would have gotten no adoption. So, it was actually quite an easy decision to choose Coinbase, and at the time they were the only public crypto custodian, to be very honest. The negotiations took a while because they needed to understand our clients and we needed to understand their risk management. And I do think we raise standards in the industry and those standards became standards. We're quite proud of what we did, and that partnership has been incredible for both firms in some ways. As long as it as long as we understood one another, we were able to help both institutional and crypto start speaking the first language, the same language for the first time. So, I viewed that that entire journey as a bridge. It wasn't one side meeting the other. We met in the middle.

Lex Sokolin:
You retired from Blackrock. Now you're leading a digital asset treasury company. Can you tell us what is a digital asset treasury company? Why are they around and how did you get involved?

Joseph Chalom:
Sure. So, I genuinely retired from Blackrock and I stayed retired for six weeks. A year ago, to the week I had met Joe Lubin at an amazing conference in Saint Moritz called CFC. Ironically, it's taking place today. He's there here in New York. We met to talk about what Blackrock was doing. I wanted to learn what consensus was. Consensys is a, you know, the league. You had worked there. It's a leading Ethereum go to market company with great assets like MetaMask and infra and the Linea zk, EVM blockchain. But we had never met before. We really got to know each other. I admire his view on how Ethereum, as a decentralized, trusted platform is going to change financial services, and in some ways, it's going to change civilization. And I think he admired, you know, the tenacity and the execution that Blackrock had shown. We stayed in touch. And when I retired, you know, he and his team reached out and suggested they were going to build a digital asset treasury.

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I didn't really know what a debt was. I knew what Michael Saylor had done for a Bitcoin, but I thought it was singular and that it was only a Bitcoin phenomenon. And the more time I spent not just before joining SharpLink, but after joining, the more I realized that it is a really smart exposure vehicle to get asset to your treasury asset. In this case, it's the ether tokens that secure that secure the Ethereum blockchain. More importantly is unlike Bitcoin, which is a great store of value. Think of it as digital gold. Ethereum is the same, but it's programmable. And more importantly, it's a productive asset in that you could natively stake your ether tokens and create yield for your investors. So, if you have an asset that you believe has a thesis, a long term Ethereum transformational opportunity, and you believe you should own it for capital appreciation, and you have it in your treasury as permanent capital, and you could stake it and do really productive things with it. You're now providing yield on top of a capital appreciation story.

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So, imagine you can invest in the early days of the internet and get an exposure, but also create a productive asset that is a mission of SharpLink to accumulate and make ether productive on behalf of our Customers were the second largest digital asset. Treasury we have. Just shy of 3 billion of ether on our balance sheet. And I use the word permanent capital because most capital in crypto, whether it's an ETF, whether it's a private fund, is not permanent. At some point it could be tomorrow. You need to give it back to investors. If you're a treasury, you can hold the tokens for decades. And that is the intent of giving that exposure. So, you can buy it in one click through a public equities listed on Nasdaq as that is the ticker. You get exposure to the long-term capital appreciation, even though it's volatile, and you rely on someone like us who can institutionally create productivity and yield. That is the value proposition of a digital asset treasury, specifically on Ethereum. But it's not based on conjecture. It's based on a thesis that Ethereum is going to play a transformational role in the future economy.

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Lex Sokolin:
So, a lot of this actually just happened last year, right? The Saylor strategy for Bitcoin was seen as kind of an outlier. And he was perceived, I mean, extremely impactful, but a very high risk person, you know, selling pretty arcane financial instruments to volatility traders with various convertible notes and so on in order to get more assets and then reinvest that back into Bitcoin, which coincided with a bitcoin price increase, because in part, if you're buying it at the scale of 100 billion, then the price is going to go up. And so, this was seen as kind of an outlier. But I would say with the launch of SharpLink, it really set off a race of lots of companies coming into the space and pursuing the digital asset Treasury strategy, which is to, you know, issue equity, use the proceeds to buy an underlying currency. And in the early days, you know, the multiples at which the debts were trading were very high.

So, you could have a dollar worth of Bitcoin but have $5 worth of enterprise value. And there are maybe 30 ish dad companies out today. And between May and December of last year, that sort of arbitrage went away. So, the multiples are now down from 5 or 10 times to write about one, kind of similar to a business development company, you know, or a closed end fund. Can you talk about sort of the structure itself, like why should an investor want to hold an equity that is wrapping itself around a token without the ability to redeem versus holding, let's say, the same Blackrock ETF that you had built for ETH or any other structure.

Joseph Chalom:
There's two ways to answer this question because there's not one homogenous audience, you know. There are institutional investors who want a longer-term exposure. There are retail investors who may be more momentum or sentiment based. But I think the way to think about it is let's just take institutional investors. You have really three choices on how to get exposure to either Bitcoin or Ether or Solana.

One is to try to own the spot itself. And actually, with Bitcoin it's not easy because you need a custodial relationship. And you could just go out and actually buy the ETF, which is why Blackrock and Fidelity and others had a lot of success in doing that. When it comes to Ethereum and the ether token, it's actually much harder to get the full productivity. It's again, it's very hard for institutions to buy ether because a they don't have the custodial relationships or it's not within their investment guidelines to who to hold spot. But two, they don't know how to stake it and risk manage it. The alternative is to buy an ETF, and there are a series of Ether or Ethereum ETFs that have been launched, including what I did with my team at Blackrock. I think there are two challenges to that is first. Until very recently. So, for almost a year and a half, the ETFs who owned ether were not allowed to stake it in the US. So, you have a natively productive asset that should be earning a yield in the high 2%, 3% range.

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And you can't stake it. So, if you own it through an Ethereum debt, you could buy it. You know, public equity, there's no management fee. And you know that you can get the full staking yield and more. And since we've launched, we've staked nearly 100% of our ether earning yield. The second challenge of an ETF is even if you can stake it now, you're seeing the likes of grayscale and others. Launch stake ETF products. You likely cannot stake 100% of your ETH because you need to provide daily liquidity to those ETF investors. If you want to be a fiduciary and let someone buy in and get out. The challenge with ether staking is that it has an entry queue and an execute. Until very recently, the exec was as long as 40 days. So you can't as a fiduciary stake all your ETH. If you have people who want their money back, and it takes you 40 days to get out of your staked position. And I think the third thing is additional asset treasury, like SharpLink, has an ability not only to stake 100%, but to do really interesting things in how we deploy our balance sheet in the ETH to beat the returns of the Ethereum staking rate, including on a risk adjusted basis. And I'd love, as we continue to speak, to share that. But again, if you're a big institution you really can't own spot. Eve wouldn't know how to make it productive in staking. You could own an ETF, pay a management fee, but you're not going to get the full productivity of ETH because of the daily liquidity. In the case of SharpLink. You can buy it at 9:00 in the morning if you want to exit, you just sell your shares. So, it's a very liquid Nasdaq based stock.

Lex Sokolin:
How do you think about the Nav discount and premium? There are many types of people in the world, but there are investors and traders and around crypto. Most people are traders. And so there's been some difficult market conditions since, let's say, August of last year, where a lot of the hedge funds and Pipe participants in the debt launches and so on are very oriented towards a trading type approach, you know, so you're going to see hundreds of millions in volume on names like SharpLink, Corbett, Mine or MicroStrategy that if you were looking at a visa or a Goldman Sachs, you know it's ten times as much volume in these stocks than otherwise.

And a lot of the things that this audience wants is it wants financial engineering around stock price. You know, it wants to buy back your stock or issue dividends or, you know, why is there this Nav discount? Where did the premium go? And I feel like it's a very different energy compared to the type of firm that you're trying to build. So how do you think about that participating in a marketplace like that, and what are the tools that the company has?

Joseph Chalom:
I think if you take a step back, we are at this point 6 or 7 months in to Ethereum debt. You see, basically at some point there was exuberance in the bitcoin debt space, you know, being able to have a multiple of 2 to 3 times of what your underlying Treasury Nav is was probably exuberant. And I think we're in a phase where there's been consolidation and compression and whatever the antonym of exuberance is, maybe its consolidation is also not where we're going to end up. And I think this stuff will mean revert.

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The thesis is that if we can make our ETH productive, and the yield on our ETH is actually revenue in almost every public company context, you have an underlying valuation of the assets you own. In the case of us, it's our ETH. And if you can generate revenue from your product in a public company context, that typically comes with a forward multiple. So that is the general thesis on why there should be a multiple to Nav, even though right now we're in a discounted phase. I think the more interesting thing is if we think we're in the second inning and in US parlance, it's early in a match of this space and you're not measuring outcomes in weeks or seasons. You're really measuring outcomes as a public company in the long term. The more important thing I think is, is three principles. First is that you make your underlying asset productive. And as I said earlier, we've been staking nearly 100% since day one. And that should be the starting point. And not all dads have been doing that.

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The second is to build an institutional leadership team that knows how to run a public company, but also knows how to manage the reserve. Because this is a reserve asset through good cycles and bad, and we've seen massive volatility in the last seven months in the price of Bitcoin and ETH, let alone the long tail of crypto tokens. So, if you're building for the short run and you can't survive a downturn, you shouldn't be in this industry like we're embracing an asset that has volatility. You need to be able to embrace it on the way up and manage it on the way down. And we've done a few things right. A we haven't encumbered our ETH a lot of the other dads have either issued debt or they've issued preferred, and I think they regret it and they're going out and try to buy it back. And if you don't make those kind of adolescent mistakes or rookie mistakes, you can manage your ETH in upturn and downturns. And while your stock could go up or go down, it doesn't change how you manage your reserve because you're always going to do it with the North Star.

And the North Star is to increase increased ETH concentration per share. And we've more than doubled ETH concentration since we began. So, I think if you're building it for the long run, you're not trying to be as attractive of investors. You'll end up having a really, really good experience, even though at times there may be exuberance or compression or consolidation. And we're building that leadership team that knows how to do it, that has traditional finance experience, that has crypto experience and has very, very high integrity. And that's what we've been doing. And at this point we own a little over 680,000. We're the second largest corporate owner of ETH, and we believe we're the stewards of that. And so, you need to be very careful not to make short term mistakes and build for the long term. I mean, if you're a steward, your goal is not to take outsized risks with your treasure.

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Lex Sokolin:
As we move forward into the future. You know, I think staking returns are between 2 and 4% per year with DeFi and maybe some re staking, you can add 1 or 2 additional points to that.

It's important. Or at least there's an expectation of higher ROE on it. And so, there's some expectation around built in capital gain for the underlying asset and so on. We're also at this inflection point where blockchains are no longer like this. How do we make finance more efficient thing, but much closer towards a financial system that is ready for a machine scale economy. And there's a lot of buzz in crypto about crypto, AI and robot money and so on. But I think Ethereum is now starting to get some of that exposure through various initiatives around, you know, agent to agent payments and so on. Can you talk about what you see today in crypto that is exciting to you for kind of weaving into the AI theme? And are you seeing any green shoots that are tangible?

Joseph Chalom:
I think there's four things that excite me. Three are above the waterline and are really visible. And the fourth I think people are underestimating. The first three are just the idea of, you know, the growth on Ethereum, the growth of digital assets on chain to essentially fulfil the promise of having decentralization, Programmability, Composability. 24 over seven trading. Instant settlement. Those promises are being fulfilled right now in three ways. The first is just the growth of stablecoins. And stablecoins are just you can think of it as the Internet of Money. You know, in most cases its dollar denominated. It's a bit of an oligopoly at this point, but you have over $300 billion of stablecoins projected to grow to several trillion over the next few years as finance starts using stablecoins as a means of payment as it gets into the hands of consumers as credit cards, you know, leverage stablecoins for payments and the like. And most of that is happening on Ethereum. I think it's around 60%. The second is tokenizing real world assets. And by that, I mean initially it was funds. Now it's stocks. It's going to be bonds. It's going to be real estate. It's going to be, you know, all sorts of assets are going to be tokenized. Most of that is happening also on Ethereum, and that is actually ready for a J curve.

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I think there's about $32 billion of tokenized funds and equities in the world today. BCG is predicting it could be $14 trillion before we know it. And when you hear Larry Fink and others say that all assets will be tokenized, what he means is they're going to be trading with instant liquidity settlement programmability 24 over seven on chain. That is a very, very bullish signal that is being broadcast. And the third is DeFi. And for a long time, DeFi was a space where you kind of had to jump over a chasm. You left your qualified custodian, you're staying in some Web3 wallet, and you're kind of putting your hands over your eyes and you realize there's risks associated with DeFi, like yields. There are smart contract risks, there's protocol risks. There's pegging risks. There's capacity, risk. There are all sorts of correlation in this space, but you're willing to chase yield and maybe go beyond the efficient frontier from a risk perspective because you were really chasing yield. A lot of that DeFi is now going to be accessible by institutions.

We at SharpLink, I'll diverge for a minute. We had SharpLink just announce a few weeks ago that we deployed $170 million of our ETH into a composable liquid staking token in a partnership with Consensys Linea, which is their ZK EVM. It's a layer two ether, Phi and Eigen cloud. And we did it by deploying that money in a liquid restaking token that earns the re staking yield. The benchmark is a little over 3%, but also because we're willing to lock our permitting capital on a multiyear basis. These protocols were willing to give us incentives, economic incentives in ETH. So, you're getting the almost risk-free rate. Plus, you're getting incentives on top. And so, you're starting to participate in DeFi. But we did something that was actually pioneering. We worked with Anchorage Digital, our custodian, to keep that liquid restocking token within their qualified custodian. And in the past, you had to really make a choice between getting DeFi yield and taking risk and leaving the qualified custodian or earning just basic yield in the QC.

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We're able to merge both, and that's what I mean by pioneering productivity. So those are the three things that excite me, that are real, that you can see this idea of growth in stablecoins, growth in tokenized real-world assets. And now at this point, good safe DeFi. And a lot of that again is happening. The predominance of that is happening on Ethereum. The fourth is agenda AI. I'll take a breath. See if you have any follow ups to that. Otherwise, I'd love to share what I think is a futuristic vision of how a genetic and trustless agents can play a role in the real economy.

Lex Sokolin:
I agree with all your points around stablecoins, tokenization, and define and you know, shows that in a large way, blockchains are for finance and every which way that finance expresses itself. This is the next platform for us.

Joseph Chalom:
So it's funny, if you take a step back and you think of how AI is working away from digital assets and away from crypto, and you take a multiyear view, you know, 2025 was really the year that a lot of enterprise software essentially embedded generalized AI assistants, co-pilots, you know, the GPT capabilities into almost every application that we use today.

Everything is discoverable. Everything is assistant based. I think when you look at 2026, these applications are going to evolve to really include task specific AI agents. So instead of general assistance, apps, including in crypto are going to be designed to handle particular functions or workflows. And over the next year, you're going to start seeing these agents start collaborating. And they're collaborate initially distinctly of one another in different applications. But over time, they'll collaborate in the same data environment, and it'll create an AI agent, ecosystems that will span applications. And this will be the new normal, not just in enterprise applications but in our lives. So like, why the heck does this matter for crypto and digital assets is I actually think AI agents are going to become an active participant in these ecosystems, not just analytical tools. And what do I mean is we're going to go from tools that humans operate. And to be honest with you, in crypto the UX is pretty scary. It's not really easy for people who are not crypto native to use, and we're going to go from tools that humans operate to systems that operate themselves with human setting objectives and oversight, and crypto will provide the rails.

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Ethereum could provide the decentralized rails of programmable programmability, incentives and settlement, and AI agents will then lend their autonomy and coordination and intelligence. And, you know, in the crypto world, you're going to see autonomous market participants just like off chain. You have humans who trade and rebalance portfolios and provide liquidity and can execute strategies slowly. You're going to see agents be able to do that in reason from signals. You're going to see them be able to manage your assets within constraints. And the most exciting thing to me is DeFi, as you mentioned, is a new frontier, but it's really hard to navigate. I think we're going to see AI agents on Ethereum basically select and move capital across protocols optimized for staking, lending, liquidity and frankly, monitor smart contract risk and be able to react in real time. So, you're not the sucker holding the bag when there's a problem. And so, I think, you know, yield farming today, which is a very manual activity. I think this will effectively replace it with continuous autonomous optimization.

And I think it will essentially change how we use our wallets, how we use our asset managers. And I'm very, very bullish that we may be overestimating how this will change our lives and our and our financial lives in the next year. I think we are vastly underestimating how this is going to change finance and the consumer experience over the next couple of years, and I know that was a really long answer, but I believe deeply that it's going to have to sit on decentralized rails, and it is part of that Ethereum supercycle that's coming stablecoins, RWA, DeFi and these autonomous financial agents.

Lex Sokolin:
As a venture investor in the in the machine economy, I probably over index on agreeing with you. If our audience wants to learn more about SharpLink or about you, where should they go?

Joseph Chalom:
SharpLink.com, which is our basic investor website, and you can even see a real time dashboard of transparency of every metric that matters in real time of our strategy and our ether reserve. Or you can go to at Joe Chalom - that's j o e c h a l o m on x. I really enjoy these opportunities to share my views. A lot of them are strongly held, some are weakly held, and I think it'll be really interesting to look back at the end of the year to see if some of these things have actualized and whether it goes faster or slower than we think. Again, I don't get caught up in the daily charts. If you're a long-term investor, you should have Bitcoin and ETH in your portfolio. And ETH has that long term tailwind. And I think it's a great time to be an owner of ETH and to hold it and to do it through a digital asset treasury that can make it more productive than you can yourself.

Lex Sokolin:
Fantastic. Joseph, thank you so much for joining me today.

Joseph Chalom:
Thanks, Lex. Really, really enjoy the opportunity.

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