Odaily Interview with SharpLink: Ethereum’s “Productive Capitalist”

Author｜Fangzhou Hao

On-site Interview｜Cody

“ETH Guards,” are you still there?

Amid the current widespread pessimism, I heard a statement—”ETH that is not staked has no productivity”—hold on, let’s first understand the person who said this:

Matt Sheffield (X@sheffieldreport), CIO (Chief Investment Officer) of SharpLink.

Recently, SharpLink, which positions itself as a “next-generation digital asset treasury,” high-profile announced that it would deploy $200 million worth of ETH on-chain through the qualified custodian Anchorage Digital, entering into a two-year yield enhancement collaboration with Linea, ether.fi, and EigenCloud. This move not only aims to earn ETH yields exceeding native staking but also intends to establish a compliant model for institutional-grade DeFi operations. Its core logic is very clear: firmly believing Ethereum is severely undervalued at present, the company is maximizing the ETH-per-share at its own pace.

Why does this publicly listed company dare to bet almost its entire balance sheet on ETH? Is the bullish rhetoric entirely due to its own position, or does it see a different vista from the mountaintop? How do large institutions and regulators trust on-chain excess returns? Facing paper losses potentially amounting to billions of dollars, how do they convince traditional investors?

In New York, Odaily had the privilege of meeting Matt for an in-depth conversation, seeking answers to the above questions.

He clearly articulated SharpLink’s “ETH Standard” philosophy, its robust strategy centered on the core KPI of “maximizing ETH-per-share,” and how they aim to become the “best way to hold Ethereum” through native staking, on-chain collaborations, and pioneering compliance practices, thereby paving a secure path for the entire industry from compliant custody to DeFi yields.

The following is the edited full interview transcript, enjoy~

歐日報： Hello, Matt. I’m Cody from Odaily. It’s a great honor to visit the SharpLink team in Midtown Manhattan today. Could you briefly introduce yourself, Matt?

Matt: I am the Chief Investment Officer of SharpLink, which is a Nasdaq-listed digital asset treasury with approximately $3 billion in equity capital. Our goal is to allocate this capital on our balance sheet in the most efficient way to hold Ethereum and demonstrate a “safety-first” philosophy to the world.

歐日報： What previous experiences and resource advantages from before joining SharpLink can be leveraged?

Matt: I come from a traditional finance background, initially working at Bridgewater Associates trading rates and credit products. Then, in 2022, I went independent and co-founded a 加密貨幣 hedge fund with several former colleagues.

More recently, I led the spot trading team at FalconX, one of the world’s largest digital asset prime brokers and dealers. It was at FalconX that I developed an interest in the digital asset treasury space and connected with the SharpLink team. My career has consistently focused on native yield and the “productivity” of assets.

歐日報： After joining SharpLink, what is the core KPI for you as CIO?

Matt: It’s to maximize ETH-per-share. My work in this role is to build what we consider to be the efficient frontier portfolio for SharpLink, denominated in ETH, aiming to generate higher risk-adjusted ETH returns.

For example: We started by natively staking all our ETH to demonstrate to the market that Ethereum is a fundamentally different asset. It is “productive,” and in the right hands, it can become even more productive. An ETF that does not stake has no productivity and fails to utilize the full value Ethereum can create.

歐日報： So, does the company prioritize maximizing USD profits or maximizing ETH-per-share?

Matt: Actually, we believe these two are essentially the same thing. Because our core belief is: Ethereum is an undervalued opportunity with tremendous upside potential, stemming from the growth curves we see in areas like tokenization, smart payments, and more. Therefore, SharpLink made a strategic decision starting last June—to allocate almost our entire treasury to Ethereum. We believe this is the best decision we can make for our shareholders.

Given that Ethereum is undervalued and we want to accumulate as much ETH-per-share as possible as a driver of shareholder growth, that ultimately equates to creating the highest USD value over time.

歐日報： This question also touches on SharpLink’s positioning. Publicly listed company, Digital Asset Treasury Company, active fund in the Ethereum ecosystem—which description is more accurate?

Matt: We are a digital asset treasury—that’s the common industry term—but I’d say we are a completely different kind of treasury because we focus more on Ethereum’s native productivity rather than financialized yield.

歐日報： Please elaborate on the part about focusing on native productivity, which is different from other treasuries?

Matt: People’s understanding of digital asset treasuries originally came only from Michael Saylor’s Strategy. Buying digital gold (BTC) is a fundamentally different asset choice, belonging to the structural type of financialized yield—adding leverage to common stock, introducing variable Gamma (the acceleration of option price changes)—using financialization methods to generate equity returns that don’t exist in Bitcoin-standard trading.

But we are trying to cater to a completely different set of participants interested in linearly accumulating yield. We currently earn about $1 million per day just from staking， 和 we currently have no debt.

歐日報： Does this mean the external concern that “during high volatility or price declines, the treasury needs to sell assets to alleviate cash flow pressure” is unlikely to happen at SharpLink? More specifically, at what ETH price point would trigger a “liquidation” for you?

Matt: We indeed don’t have a liquidation price like those treasuries with convertible bonds, preferred shares, etc., which constantly face erosion, or if they engage in some form of over-collateralized lending, might face liquidation.

This also goes back to why we think “Ethereum can be so powerful on the balance sheet“: you have recurring income from staking, which helps protect the network, and you can generate excess income through more productive activities on-chain.

歐日報： Besides staking, which on-chain operations generate excess income?

Matt: SharpLink will deploy with DeFi partners over several years to earn additional ETH beyond the native staking rate. Right now, we are already earning ETH exceeding the native staking rate. We’ve taken on slightly more risk and pushed the business boundary outward a bit.

Our goal is, if the Ethereum native staking rate is considered the risk-free rate in 加密貨幣, then it should be our benchmark, and we should strive to outperform it on a risk-adjusted basis. That’s my focus.

Not only establishing partnerships on-chain, SharpLink is also looking for external partners, exploring ways to achieve this goal both on-chain and off-chain. Ultimately, holding a large amount of Ethereum will have parallel dual benefits—creating excess value for shareholders and being beneficial to the Ethereum ecosystem.

歐日報： Apart from continuing to accumulate ETH, does SharpLink have plans for more active participation in areas like RWA and the Ethereum ecosystem this year? Or will it maintain a relatively passive treasury management role?

Matt: I don’t consider this passive; we are actively managing the Ethereum treasury. It’s just that currently, we have no interest in diluting the value proposition.

While we are very interested in helping with RWA liquidity, yield-generating strategies, smart payments, etc., such as providing liquidity to protocols to generate more ETH-per-share. These are not core businesses; SharpLink’s goal is very focused.

歐日報： In January this year, SharpLink announced it had deployed $170 million worth of ETH on Linea to enhance staking yields. How do you assess liquidity risk and on-chain risk? What is the acceptance level among institutional investors?

Matt: The news you mentioned is a very interesting transaction not just for us, but for the entire industry. Because historically, institutions don’t go on-chain. I think this time they are compromising on crucial risk values to achieve a greater trade-off. Behind this is partly a market structure issue and partly an incentive issue. Previously, institutions participating in DeFi weren’t large enough to invest the time and resources to reduce transaction risks.

For this, we collaborated with Linea, ether.fi, and EigenCloud on a two-year deployment. By the way, an update on the numbers: it’s now $200 million; we added another $30 million after the initial announcement.

We not only earn on-chain liquidity and interest rates, but our partners also provide a long-term duration that is basically non-existent in crypto currently, and give us incentives denominated in Ethereum.

We want to establish institutional-grade partnerships and maintain institutional-grade durations, which is important.

Another partner, Anchorage Digital, is an OCC-chartered compliant custodian. We wanted to achieve for the first time a financial operation without leaving a qualified custodian. Not wanting to use hot wallets, we minted assets from within the custodian and then bridged across chains via LayerZero. Probably no other publicly listed company has done this before.

這是 setting a “safety-first” example, both raising the standard and paving the way, making it easier and more trustworthy for others to access DeFi later.

歐日報： As a Nasdaq-listed company, the SEC has very strict accounting treatment for crypto assets (like fair value measurement). How do you ensure complex DeFi yield strategies (like LST, LRT) comply with the compliance requirements of a listed company?

Matt: Interestingly, we are always “eating the crab.” When SharpLink started native staking, we saw this—native staking flows into revenue, while liquid staking tokens are currently treated as intangible assets and subject to impairment—the market has to understand our financial statements.

Whenever we do something, we communicate extensively with large internal and external teams to ensure compliance. We pioneer compliant precedents so others can follow, giving Wall Street and investors confidence, and the entire industry can develop accordingly. This is a very time-consuming process, which is why we proceed methodically.

We’ve been employing digital asset strategies for less than a year, with assets under management around $30 billion. The accumulation speed of this number might not sound astonishing, but it’s already an appropriate balance point.

歐日報： What frustrates ETH holders is that compared to BTC and other mainstream coins, ETH’s current performance is lackluster. What’s your take on this?

Matt: The major bullish factors for ETH are only just beginning to be noticed. I think the most important one is RWA. When looking at market size and data charts, you need to look at “how much of digital assets are tokenized, compared to the size of the entire financial world.” For example, BlackRock intends to tokenize everything. Just one of their ETF series has $4.5 trillion. That’s several times the total current market cap of all RWAs.

所以 we are still in the super early stages of a massive transformation of assets moving on-chain. Ethereum will be at the center of this transformation. This is the opportunity we see for Ethereum—significant network growth, harboring price appreciation potential.

Over the past month or so, the market foundation has become more solid and healthy, especially during US trading hours, with trading behavior becoming more rational. Tailwinds like US regulatory clarity, ETFs, etc., are blowing.

We try to avoid price predictions because, ultimately, everyone must evaluate for themselves whether the Ethereum opportunity is right for them. But we absolutely hope SharpLink is the best way to hold Ethereum.

歐日報： ETH’s price weakness has also brought SharpLink massive paper net losses. How do you explain this financial performance of “high growth accompanied by large losses” to traditional shareholders?

Matt: That’s a great question. We do a lot of investor communication and education, trying to accurately explain to the market what SharpLink’s strategy is. So you know exactly what you’re investing in, not putting money into a black box.

The result of market education is: when we filed the 13F last June, our institutional ownership was 5-6%, with the rest being retail; the recently released 13F shows our institutional ownership has now reached 46%, with many institutions on the list that previously had little to no exposure to digital assets.

This is also why I keep attending meetings, giving interviews, explaining the strategy, conveying the idea—if you are interested in going long on Ethereum, we want to be the best way to achieve that in a public, regulated vehicle. If you are not interested in going long on Ethereum, I also hope people understand SharpLink is not the right stock for them.

歐日報： Have you had any cooperation with Asian markets before?

Matt: Yes, I have traded in and spent time in Asian markets myself. The growth space in Asia is huge, especially for digital assets. When I attended the Consensus conference in Hong Kong in February, I was pleasantly surprised by the surge in attention. We also went to South Korea, Japan, and recently to the Gulf region, meeting with large institutions and sovereign funds, discussing the opportunities for Ethereum, SharpLink’s opportunities, and what kind of ecosystem they are trying to build locally.

I saw tremendous interest in RWA in Hong Kong and the Gulf region. Regulators are incredibly cooperative and visionary, trying to figure out how we can do this safely, how to advance so they can be seen as innovation hubs; local builders also see it as home.

We want to be where early protocols are, acting as a bridge between traditional finance and cryptocurrency.

歐日報： Apart from Ethereum, where does SharpLink’s interest lie?

Matt: In the entire on-chain ecosystem surrounding it. RWA, smart payments… are all within the scope we are willing to participate in. However, venture capital and liquidity funds seek high-risk, high-return investment opportunities; ETFs are buy-and-hold, not necessarily making assets productive; while SharpLink’s goal is to have this nearly permanent, Ethereum-denominated capital.

本文源自網路： Odaily Interview with SharpLink: Ethereum’s “Productive Capitalist”

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