SharpLink Gaming Stock Soars as Ethereum Treasury Firm Boosts Stash to $527 Million

Ethereum treasury company SharpLink Gaming’s stock was up Tuesday after the company announced another ETH buy, bringing its total holdings of the second-biggest cryptocurrency to 205,634 coins—or over $527 million worth.

The gambling marketing firm’s stock (NASDAQ: SBET) was recently trading at nearly $16 a share, up nearly 26% over the past day. 

SharpLink said Tuesday that it bought 7,689 ETH during the week spanning June 28 to July 4, at a weighted average price of $2,501 per coin. 

SharpLink Chairman of the Board, Ethereum co-founder, and Consensys CEO Joe Lubin said in a statement: “By continuously refining our treasury strategy and adopting innovative transparency metrics like ETH Concentration, we’re not only maximizing long-term value for shareholders but also setting a new benchmark for responsible digital asset stewardship in today’s public markets.” (Disclosure: Consensys is one of 22 investors in an editorially independent Decrypt.)

The company said that “ETH Concentration” is a new metric that gives investors an idea of how much their shares are exposed to the cryptocurrency. SharpLink said that it calculates the metric by dividing the total ETH held by 1,000 assumed diluted shares outstanding—or the total number of all assets in a company were converted into shares. 

SharpLink started buying ETH in May and is the one of the newer companies to put crypto on its balance sheet—along with many other Nasdaq-listed firms. 

Such companies are following the approach of Strategy (formerly known as MicroStrategy), a software firm that in 2020 started buying Bitcoin as a way to get a better return for shareholders. It now holds 597,325 BTC, worth $65 billion, and has inspired a growing stack of followers.

Strategy now works to securitize Bitcoin—or allow investors to buy its stock in order to get safe, regulated exposure to the cryptocurrency. The firm’s co-founder and chairman Michael Saylor has said that buying Bitcoin can make a company “live forever.”

Other Nasdaq-listed companies have followed suit—albeit mostly smaller, lesser-known entities—by buying assets like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, and XRP. Typically, these companies have achieved at least short-term stock price gains, sometimes with massive spikes.

ETH was recently trading for $2,565 per coin, up 1% over a 24-hour period, according to crypto data provider CoinGecko. Ethereum has risen nearly 6% over the past month, but remains about 48% below its 2021 all-time high of $4,878.