SharpLink Emerges as Ethereum’s Answer to MicroStrategy’s Bitcoin Bet
Move over, Michael Saylor—there’s a new institutional crypto play in town. SharpLink just positioned itself as Ethereum’s version of MicroStrategy’s infamous Bitcoin treasury gamble, minus the laser-eyed maximalism.
Why it matters: While Bitcoiners were busy arguing about ordinals, ETH quietly built a DeFi empire. Now SharpLink’s putting real money behind the ’ultrasound money’ narrative.
The fine print: No actual numbers were harmed in the making of this analogy—because unlike your average crypto whitepaper, we don’t make up metrics. Yet somehow this still makes more sense than most SEC filings.
What is SharpLink Gaming?
SharpLink was co-founded in 2019 by now-CEO Rob Phythian and former COO Chris Nicholas, who left the company in 2024. Tori Roberts joined the team in 2021 as vice president, in charge of affiliate marketing with Robert DeLucia following in 2022 as chief financial officer.
According to the official SharpLink site, there are also three independent directors in Leslie Bernhard, Robert Gutkowski, and Obie McKenzie that make up the board of directors, chaired by Phythian himself.
Bernhard has previously served as a director and chairman in multiple Nasdaq-listed companies, Gutkowski helped seal a $486 million cable distribution deal, and McKenzie was a managing director at BlackRock. So, it appears at least, the directors are a capable bunch.
Put simply, SharpLink Gaming uses technology to help match sports betting companies with fans. According to its LinkedIn page, the company now uses an AI tool that collects and analyzes behavioral insights on users, pushes relevant betting content onto those users, and converts them into paying customers.
Trading on the Nasdaq under the ticker SBET, it currently sits at a market cap of $55 million trading at nearly $80 per share, already doubling its price since Tuesday, according to data on Trading View. If you bought SBET stock five years ago, though, you’re still down around 67%.
The company’s revenues declined 26.1% from 2023 to 2024, last year’s financial report showed, with cash on hand decreasing by 42.2% to $1.43 million. That said, it saw a positive net income of $10 million, a notable rise from a net loss of $14.2 million.
In 2024, SharpLink Gaming sold two of its businesses for $22.5 million, used most of these proceeds to write off outstanding debts, and completed a domestic merger that changed the company from an Israeli LLC to a Delaware corporation, according to a company release.
In July 2024, the board of directors started a formal review process to “evaluate strategic alternatives” that would “drive growth and create and maximize value” for stockholders. It appears that in this process, the board of directors started to consider cryptocurrency more seriously.
In February 2025, the company announced that it acquired a 10% equity stake in Armchair Enterprises Limited, a company that owns CryptoCasino.com, as part of a strategy to become the “first Nasdaq-listed company focused on crypto gaming.”
“We carefully evaluated more than two dozen compelling opportunities,” SharpLink CEO Phythian said in a release, referencing the board’s review process. “And [we] determined that the combination of market expansion, cost efficiency, security and player demand makes crypto gaming one of the most promising growth opportunities in the online gaming industry today.”
But this initial crypto pivot wasn’t enough to prevent the price of SBET stock from dropping 60.8%, from $5.75 to $2.26, over the next two and a half months.
During this period, SharpLink announced a reverse stock split to stay above Nasdaq’s stock price minimum requirement of $1. And then a $4.5 million public stock offering in order to regain “compliance with Nasdaq’s minimum requirement for total stockholders’ equity.”
Things were existential for SharpLink. But that was before the Ethereum treasury strategy led its stock price to surge 420% on Tuesday to $35 a share—and now more than doubling that.
Who is the SharpLink CEO?
Rob Phythian co-founded SharpLink and today serves as its CEO and chairman of the board of directors. And now he’s the Ethereum Michael Saylor.
Pythian founded SharpLink after he spent almost nine and a half years as CEO of SportsHub Technologies, a company that created games and apps for sports gaming sites. Prior to that, he’d also co-founded SportsData LLC, a sports experience creator, and served as its CEO and president.
During his time at SportsHub, he was named by a local business publication as one of the top 100 people to know in Minnesota. Phythian was hailed a pioneer and a “sports tech godfather.”
One former business partner told Decrypt that he has great respect for Pythian.
"I worked with Rob maybe 10 or 15 years ago on [an unnamed] skill gaming venture,” Matthew Warneford, CEO of Roblox game creator Dubit, told Decrypt. “Rob’s a great guy, very smart, and good to work with. Have nothing but positive things to say."
By 2023, now CEO of SharpLink, Phythian and his company started to embrace artificial intelligence. In a guest blog post for Sportico, he outlined a future where AI could help personalize the sport fan experience, while also batting away concerns that AI outputs are too generic as he believed that the tide was turning.
A year later, it was clear that the company needed a new direction, and Pythian led the company through its shift to crypto gaming.
And now he’s leading SharpLink into its next phase as the Microstrategy of Ethereum. The question now is: Will it work?
If Phythian follows Saylor’s playbook, then the next step will be to sell shares, or debt against those shares, to buy more Ethereum. Then rise and repeat. That likely bodes well for ETH—and perhaps even SBET shareholders. But what it means for SharpLink as a business is an open question. It’s a gamble, but one that so far appears to be paying off.
