Crypto
Joseph Lubin, the Founder and CEO of Consensys and Co-Founder of Ethereum
Joseph Lubin, cofounder of ethereum and Consensys, attends the Day 2 of the RISE Conference (3studio/Getty Images)

SharpLink Gaming announces $425 million funding for ethereum treasury strategy, sending shares flying

Joseph Lubin, the cofounder of the blockchain network and Consensys, will act as the chairman of SharpLink’s board of directors.

Sage D. Young

The appetite for public companies to adopt cryptocurrencies as a treasury reserve asset continues to grow, with ethereum now getting its own iteration of Michael Saylor’s Strategy. 

On Tuesday, sportsbook marketing firm SharpLink Gaming announced it raised roughly $425 million through a private investment in public equity offering to adopt an ethereum treasury playbook, helping the company’s stock jump over 400%. 

SharpLink shares spiked as high as $52 before closing at $35.80, a bid up since Friday, when they were trading at about $6. The $425 million will be used to acquire ethereum and serve as the firm’s primary treasury reserve asset, according to the firm’s press release.

The price of ethereum has increased 5.6% in the last 24 hours to trade hands at the $2,680 level, outpacing the top 50 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization, data pulled from CoinGecko shows. The market cap of ethereum and SharpLink now stand at roughly $323 billion and $24 million, respectively. 

Ethereum cofounder Joseph Lubin will become the chairman of SharpLink’s board of directors when the offering closes, which is expected to occur on Thursday.

Ethereum software development firm Consensys, founded by Lubin as well, led the investment round. It was joined by other venture capital firms and infrastructure providers like Pantera Capital, Galaxy Digital, and Primitive Ventures.

Maria Shen, the general partner for Electric Capital, which participated in the capital raise, told Sherwood News that there’s “great momentum” in the ethereum ecosystem stemming from the network’s latest Pectra upgrade and new leadership in the Ethereum Foundation, a nonprofit organization supporting the network. “There’s also a growing realization that ethereum is a great home for institutional capital,” Shen said.

SharpLink’s announcement comes after several public companies have adopted rival cryptocurrencies as reserve assets. 

Consumer goods company Upexi holds 597,002 solana tokens worth about $106.5 million, while DeFi Dev Corp has 609,233 solana coins in its treasury, representing $108.4 million.  

Strategy, which started as a software enterprise business, has turned into a bitcoin vacuum machine, possessing 580,250 bitcoin worth $64 billion at current prices. Strategy’s latest acquisition was announced on Monday, when cofounder Michael Saylor disclosed that the firm scooped up an additional 4,020 bitcoin for about $427 million.

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Hyperliquid reclaims all-time high

HYPE, the native token powering perpetuals exchange Hyperliquid and its underlying blockchain, rebounded to reclaim its all-time high previously set at the start of the month.

Treasury firms Hyperliquid Strategies and Hyperion DeFi have also rallied as the token increased double digits in the last 24 hours to trade as high as $76.70, rising past its record price set nearly two weeks ago, according to CoinGecko. In the interim between all-time highs, HYPE pulled back to around $53.

The token has several tailwinds, the first coming from ETF flows. Since their inception in May, HYPE ETFs have yet to record negative weekly outflows, posting a cumulative total net inflow of $171.8 million, per SoSoValue.

The second comes from Hyperliquid spending basically everything it earns in fees to buy HYPE, a mechanism embedded into the protocol’s codebase.

The venue’s buyback funding mechanism is set to add a new source of yield. Validators of the network activated “AQAv2,” which means stablecoin deployers will share about 90% of reserve yield revenue on their supply within the protocol.

Around $6.1 billion of Circle’s USDC resides in Hyperliquid, per DefiLlama. Accrual begins on August 26 and the first payment is made on October 3, the network announced in its Discord channel last week.

A substantial amount of capital is riding on different positions of HYPE. In total, a move down to under $53 would result in the liquidation nearly 1.8 million HYPE worth of leveraged long positions on the on-chain perps venue, or $131.7 million, data from CoinGlass shows. For the upside, a climb above $100 results in the liquidation of more than 3 million worth of leveraged HYPE short positions, or $221.5 million.

HYPE’s rebound to all-time high comes after Michael Selig, chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, defended his agency’s decision to approve regulated perpetuals, or futures contracts without expiration dates, CNBC reported on Monday.

Last month, the CFTC approved bitcoin perpetual futures trading in the US through regulated prediction markets firm Kalshi and an affiliate of centralized exchange Coinbase.

“Perps are highly likely to become lightly regulated and thus approved in the US,” said David Pakman, head of venture investments at CoinFund.

“We expect to see perps for many different types of assets, from commodities to equities,” Pakman told Sherwood News.

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Crypto market snaps back as sentiment lifts, with altcoins from ethereum to XRP soaring

The market capitalization of the crypto industry has jumped around $83.2 billion in the last 24 hours, with privacy-focused token Zcash and worldcoin, the native cryptocurrency of the network backed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, leading market gains, jumping over 22%.

But the last 24 hours have been good across the board:

Investors have been eager to see some positive signs around the Iranian conflict ending, coupled with hopeful outlooks around the CLARITY act, both breathing some life into assets, Kairos Research cofounder Ian Unsworth told Sherwood News.

Simon Shockey, a crypto strategist at crypto wallet infrastructure firm Privy, said the upswing stems from several things converging. He pointed to how alt markets broadly were very oversold following the bug found in Zcash that shook confidence.

Friday, Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox said Anthropic didn’t find any more serious bugs with the Zcash protocol after Shielded Labs requested the AI firm run a security audit of the network with Mythos.

Shockey added that the pool of willing sellers has dwindled. Even if structurally, AI is a much more compelling and asymmetric bet in the eyes of allocators, many of these crypto assets have simply run out of marginal sellers despite some shorter-term narrative-driven pumps. The only people left to sell at this point are the teams themselves and VCs.

Net-net: oversold conditions plus exhausted seller bases plus a macro backdrop thats stabilized equals a snapback, especially in names that have real usage or community conviction behind them,” Shockey told Sherwood.

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