SharpLink Co-CEO Joseph Chalom Sees Ethereum as Long-Term Reserve Asset, Not Speculative Play

Ethereum shifts from casino chips to cornerstone asset as SharpLink's leadership bets big on ETH's store-of-value future.

Strategic Pivot

Joseph Chalom's vision reframes Ethereum beyond trading volatility—positioning it alongside gold and treasury bonds in corporate treasury strategies. The move signals institutional maturity as crypto sheds its speculative skin.

Market Realignment

Traditional finance veterans scoff—but then again, they also dismissed Bitcoin at $100. While Wall Street debates yield curves, crypto-native executives build actual digital fortresses. Guess which group still uses fax machines?

Execution Over Theory

SharpLink joins growing ranks of companies allocating to crypto reserves—proving real-world utility beats theoretical objections every time. The market's voting with its wallet while traditional finance debates paperwork.

Crypto treasury holdings are not comparable to FTX collapse

On Myriad Markets, traders assign better than a 94% chance that Strategy won’t sell BTC this year. Saylor has also said that Strategy might eventually control as much as 7% of the Bitcoin supply.

Against that backdrop, Chalom dismissed the notion that balance sheets loaded with crypto are the “black swan” of this cycle, a term used for rare events with severe fallout, such as the FTX collapse.

“Absolutely not, unless you mean the black swan event to drive mind share and adoption,” he said. “The reason why I say it’s just not even in the same league as [FTX] is this is the most transparent approach you can have.”

Chalom, formerly BlackRock’s head of digital assets strategy, pointed to the obligations that come with being public.

SharpLink is under SEC oversight and must comply with Nasdaq requirements. He said the company releases weekly updates detailing its ETH balance, entry prices, and staking rewards. On the other hand, he argued, FTX failed because of a lack of transparency. The downfall, as reported by Cryptopolitan previously, led to a 25-year sentence for founder Sam Bankman-Fried

Pitching ETH is tougher than Bitcoin

Chalom said SharpLink’s outreach is designed to build Ethereum awareness among major institutions.

He expects that stablecoins, tokenized assets, and programmable money will push big names onto the network, and views the company’s disclosures and education as an on-ramp. “There’s a giant amount of education here,” he said. “And I think it doesn’t take convincing, it takes explaining.”

He also noted that pitching Ethereum to traditional investors is harder than pitching Bitcoin, which many frame as “digital gold.” That simple pitch, plus the surge into bitcoin ETFs, helped BTC while ETH trailed. He said the gap could shrink as investors understand Ethereum’s “network effect growth story,” similar to the early internet.

“That just took a look a little bit longer to explain, and the adoption will take longer,” he added. “It just may have an impact that’s 10, 20x on what Bitcoin has had on the financial ecosystem.”

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