Glad to finally announce our partnership with @LidoFinance. Composability makes an asset more valuable and drives growth in the DeFi ecosystem. Shoutout to @Anchorage for adopting support to mint and redeem within the QC. Institutional DeFi (onchain finance) continues to make strides!

Great conversation with David and Casey today on Vibestream. We kicked off discussing what is a DAT (clip below) and made our way through deployments, EIPs, and somehow ended on why bringing back Blockbuster might make sense. Thanks for having me on the show!

The Galaxy @Sharplink Onchain Yield Fund has launched — $125M in committed capital to deploy into onchain yield strategies. The first institutional-grade, scaled onchain strategy on Galaxy's asset management platform.

Emerging crypto protocols and projects often face a cold-start problem, while there are billions of dollars waiting to be deployed by venture funds to buy tokens or company equity. But importantly, most of this venture capital is not used to kickstart activity within the actual protocols. That initial momentum is necessary for projects to reach escape velocity. We believe this Fund can fill that gap for innovative projects building in the ecosystem and may help generate risk-managed returns for investors. If you are building one of these innovative projects seeking capital deployment, please reach out and I can make an intro to the team managing the Fund to explore partnership.

This is a pretty good summary Years ago we could make changes pretty willy nilly as the ecosystem was so small But the bigger the ecosystem becomes, the slower the changes need to be and the more consideration there needs to be for each set of participants We don’t want to ‘scare away the institutions’, otherwise there will simply be no demand Ethereum demand is about to increase exponentially, and so stability is very important The last thing needed is contentious decisions that have the community divided Let the growth happen, continue to monitor the impact, gather more data We can still be proactive at a later date TL;DR right idea, wrong time

EIP-8363 is bad for DeFi, bad for Ethereum and mistimed. Grow DeFi, increase network volumes, burn more ETH as a result. That is how we achieve the trillions of onchain growth we expect, while making ETH more and more disinflationary over time. But we are still in the lets win phase. This EIP is more so suited for a future where the world is already all settling on Ethereum, prices (and economic security) are higher, and we can tighten our belts (maybe, I still have monetary theory questions). Positive nominal yields, managed but positive inflation (we are sub 1% already, basically on par with BTC) and positive real yields are how you create sound money. Reliable, slow moving monetary policy is how you create an asset worthy of reserve status, while incentivizing a network security model that institutions can look at today, to underwrite for the next decade. Now is not the time to scare away the institutions we have successfully courted over a long journey. Let them arrive, make our onchain economy thrive through classic monetary theories such as the reduced cost of borrow versus positive real yield assets, and then burn more ETH via the existing mechanisms on rising transaction volumes. We need a lot more ETH denominated high quality risk assets onchain, otherwise the flight of capital will not be from staking elsewhere onchain. It will leave the ecosystem, or take bad risks in pursuit of the yield offset, and regress us as an industry. It's one thing for more staking to be dilutive to issuance. If we think 50% of the network being staked is the point where value has diminished, then let the network share in rewards that stop rising at this point. I'm not specifically supporting that threshold, but the concept of an issuance curve that flattens as marginal value declines does works. We already have that on the ramp up of our issuance curve especially. But burning, and bringing these yields down 50% at current stake levels, and putting a risk of 0 yield in front of the world creates an uncertain, and unreliable future. Also, as an aside, the mint then burn mechanism will cause a lot of taxation questions. As a public company, we have resources to dedicate to taxation. Individuals might feel the pain of this approach. Back to monetary policy. Being sound money, and creating a strong economy on the back of it is a well tested problem. Negative real yields don't work. We learned that in the 70s in the US, Turkey learned that earlier this decade, and the Argentine Peso did as well. You flee the currency with negative real policy rates since purchasing power erodes. Running validators isn't free, add in liquidity risk/slashing and that needs to be factored into calculating a real-yield where you don't just buy bonds to get the yield, you are paid for the risk and the work of securing the network with your money. I love that our community has these conversations in the open. That anyone can submit EIPs, and think everyone involved had good intentions in their submission. I just think we're missing the forest for the trees here.

Ethereum's blockspace is one of its most valuable commodities. Sharplink supports innovation in this area as the institutional supercycle unlocks step-function growth for the ecosystem. That's why we're investing in @BlockSpace_ETH and their all-star team.

Sharplink's Q2 earnings call is coming up on Monday, 8/10 at 8:30 am ET Our executive team, including @joechalom and @ethereumjoseph, will present the quarter’s results and answer questions during a live Q&A. Tune in ⤵️

1/ We’re excited to announce the close of @ethereuminsti's initial ecosystem funding round and supporter coalition, with broad participation and support from individuals and entities focused on driving institutional adoption of @ethereum. Our ecosystem funding round is anchored by @BitMNR, @Sharplink, Ethereum co‑founders @ethereumJoseph , and @MihaiAlisie, alongside a larger group of individuals and crypto‑native institutions.

We discuss liquidity and size as competitive advantages of Sharplink to grow ETH per share over time. We believe we can do bigger, better deals with our ETH that are sized beyond reach of most players in our ecosystem and therefore command better economics as we grow ETH holdings. The more ETH we have all else equal, the more deals available to us. Liquid ETH that doesn't need to go through an unstaking queue useful for deployments too at times. As we increase our deployments, the goal is to increase the ETH rate of return on marginal deployments over time (as we push further out our view of the efficient yield / ETH denominated return frontier). Having the size to negotiate and deploy is one of the things we view as a major advantage. Our Linea, Etherfi, Eigen deal for $200m from earlier this year is an example. Same deal isn't very interesting to them in small size. Our Galaxy fund MOU announcement follows similar principals. The sizes are attractive so deals can be made. Additionally, when we do capital markets deals like the one we did to raise the $75m or the ATM historically (when we were above mNAV 1), the pricing, and scale factor in our trading volumes. It's less likely someone could offer the same economics to us all else equal if we had 50% of the volumes. There's a long list of treasuries that launched late last year with anemic trading volumes today. I personally have not seen many similarly sized, competitively priced capital markets transactions come from them. With almost 50% of the stock owned by institutions, we believe each marginal $1 of shares repurchased reduces volumes by more than $1 (part of why I believe we went from hundreds of millions a day last year to a still strong ~$50m now is that we went from ~5-6% institutionally owned to 47% in under a year). Great for adoption, it was our goal to be the trusted player. But there are tradeoffs. A lot of those institutions are longer term strategies. We believe more of the shares we repurchase come from the active trader bucket than from those institutions, so volumes can get reduced with repurchases. So to remain kinetic, get stronger terms raising and have the ability to raise at a good pace off the ATM in the future, we consider ongoing liquidity. We have some large institutional holders who likely have position limits as a % of the stock, and dynamic risk parameters that consider their position size as a function of trading volumes (slippage to exit position in X time). So repurchases increase their ownership %, and could reduce the liquidity which may mean on the margins they get pushed out of some of their position (forced seller). Finally, ability to do the trade at opportunistic times. ~$50m of Sharplink trades daily. $10B of ETH traded in the last 24H. We were able to repurchase $10m of shares at $4.69 and 10,000 ETH at $1670 when the market gave us the chance. I don't think we could have bought back $26m of SBET at $4.69 in the same time period. So we were able to get our ETH per share exposure at those prices via a hybrid approach. Obviously the lower the mNAV the more that changes the calculus of ETH per share growth, versus liquidity, target price slippage, versus the ETH purchase and deployments in the pipeline and their upside, etc. It's all a tradeoff, we think repurchases were accretive when we did them, and we thought ETH was a great buy too for our goals. We'll continue to dynamically assess on a number of criteria, and try to be consistent in our frameworks so we can be trusted by institutions and individual investors alike to execute on our mission through a long term, holistic, expected value lens. We will also continue to seek input from stockholders when we do transactions to ensure our strategy and vision are aligned, our frameworks are stress tested and evolve them as it makes sense.

The EF wrote this for the people whose job it is to be skeptical, not those of us who already believe. It reads like an internal due diligence memo a central bank would build before picking a settlement layer. It's objective, and unapologetic in comparing Ethereum to other chains. It explains the importance of different evaluation criteria to set the table before laying out the facts on Ethereum's dominance: Page 5: Quantifies security cost. Finalizing a fraudulent transaction on Ethereum costs about $50.7B to pull off, against $76B staked. Your stake gets slashed on the way out. That's more than Solana, BNB Chain and TRON hold combined. Page 28: Want to know who really controls a chain Look at genesis distribution. ETH: ~17% to insiders. Other chains were 50-90% to insiders. Check the charts. Page 37: Zero outages since 2015. None of the other players compared can say that. Page 38: Ethereum runs 5+ independent clients. Other L1s compared run 1-2. They explain the importance of client diversity too. Page 47: "Public blockchains aggregate global liquidity. Stablecoins, tokenized securities, and financial primitives on Ethereum are immediately usable across a broad market of participants. Permissioned ledgers remain liquidity-constrained by design. Even when technically functional, they often fail to achieve economic relevance beyond the initiating consortium." It goes on from there. This is a great information source that I hope becomes one of the first resources governments and institutions reference when considering their settlement network.

Backwards framing in my opinion. Stablecoin growth, RWA growth, agentic payment growth are all part of the ETH opportunity… when I see more stablecoins minted, or Blackrock announces new tokenized funds, that is a sign to me that the thesis is playing out. More money onchain, bigger market, more economic security needed, more transaction volume potential. If Stablecoin number was shrinking that would be a different story but when a leading indicator rises I’d say that’s good news.