Joseph Chalom, Co-CEO of SharpLink Gaming (SBET) and former head of digital assets at BlackRock, said in a recent interview with The Block that companies building Ethereum treasuries should not be compared to Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy) and its Bitcoin-holding model. Chalom argued that ETH treasury firms are better understood as stakes in programmable financial infrastructure, not as leveraged bets on a single asset's price.

SharpLink disclosed in its Q1 2026 earnings release on May 11 that it holds 872,984 ETH in treasury, worth approximately $3 billion at current prices. The company reported $12.1 million in total revenue for the quarter, with $11.5 million of that coming directly from staking. That compares to just $0.7 million in total revenue during Q1 2025, before SharpLink pivoted its business model to focus on Ethereum.

The company posted a net loss of $685.6 million for the quarter. That figure includes $506.7 million in unrealized mark-to-market losses on its crypto holdings and a $191.7 million impairment charge on liquid staking tokens; neither reflects losses from its core operations. ETH is currently trading around $2,283, down roughly 54 percent from its all-time high of $4,946 reached in August 2025. Realized gains came in at $12 million, broadly matching total operating revenue.

"We deployed our ETH capital with discipline, internalized the majority of our asset management platform, and have moved beyond foundational staking into a broader set of onchain opportunities," Chalom said in the earnings release. On price volatility, he told Decrypt: "When ETH goes up, our stock price benefits. When ETH goes down, we have no reason to sell...it's a buying opportunity."

Why the ETH Model Differs From the Bitcoin Playbook

The core distinction Chalom is drawing involves what Ethereum can do that Bitcoin cannot. Strategy holds roughly 818,869 BTC and generates no native yield from that position. Its returns depend entirely on Bitcoin price appreciation. Ethereum, by contrast, is a proof-of-stake network, meaning holders who lock up ETH to validate transactions earn protocol rewards, currently running at roughly 3 to 4 percent annually.

SharpLink has accumulated 18,800 ETH in cumulative staking rewards since the company launched its Ethereum strategy in June 2025, and more than doubled its ETH per share from 2.0 to 4.02 over the same period. Chalom joined SharpLink as Co-CEO in July 2025, one month after the strategy's inception. On May 9, the company and Galaxy Digital announced a roughly $125 million Onchain Yield Fund designed to deploy Ethereum capital into staking, restaking, and other yield-generating strategies.

Analysts have also noted that ETH's higher implied volatility relative to Bitcoin makes its convertible debt instruments more attractive to arbitrage-focused investors, enabling cheaper capital raises. And Ethereum's native yield provides more credible backing for preferred stock dividends than a pure price-appreciation model can offer.

Joseph Lubin, Ethereum co-founder and SharpLink's chairman, framed the broader thesis this way in the company's earnings materials: Ethereum is "programmable financial infrastructure, powering a new class of global markets" across stablecoins, tokenized assets, and decentralized finance.

Tokenization Data Underpins the Thesis

That framing has data behind it. Ethereum currently hosts $16.7 billion in tokenized real-world assets, representing 53.14 percent of the total distributed RWA market across all blockchains, which stands at $31.42 billion as of May 2026. Tokenized U.S. Treasuries on Ethereum alone account for roughly $8 billion. BlackRock's BUIDL fund, the largest institutional tokenized fund, holds over $2.3 billion in assets, with 56 percent deployed on Ethereum. Spot ETH ETFs recorded $356 million in net inflows during April 2026, reversing five consecutive months of outflows, with BlackRock and Fidelity accounting for more than 90 percent of flows.

What This Means Outside the United States

Ethereum's role as a settlement layer for tokenized assets carries different implications depending on where you are. In India, ETH is classified as a Virtual Digital Asset and subject to a 30 percent capital gains tax as well as a 1 percent tax deducted at source on crypto transactions, but no finalized framework yet exists for tokenized securities. SEBI is also expected to become the primary supervisor for crypto exchanges in the near term, a development that bears directly on any institutional assessment of the regulatory outlook for ETH activity in India. The Asset Tokenization (Regulation) Bill, 2026, introduced in the Rajya Sabha, would establish a formal framework for tokenized assets, and GIFT City in Gujarat has become the main regulatory sandbox for institutional tokenization pilots. Staking income remains in a grey zone until DeFi rules expected later in 2026 are published.

In sub-Saharan Africa, where on-chain transaction volumes exceeded $205 billion between mid-2024 and mid-2025 (a 52 percent year-over-year increase), the practical applications Chalom is referencing, including instant settlement, programmable payments, and yield-bearing instruments, align closely with existing infrastructure gaps. Several use cases are taking shape across African markets. Onafriq has deployed USDC-based stablecoin payment corridors across 40 African markets. Namibia has piloted a land registry system using MetaMask and the Ethereum network. Nigeria's Zone network is building blockchain-based payment infrastructure. These deployments are at varying stages of maturity, and regulatory fragmentation across the continent limits how quickly institutional treasury strategies of the kind SharpLink is building can be replicated locally.

What Comes Next

Chalom has indicated that 2026 needs to be the year ETH treasury companies shift from accumulation to productivity, meaning deploying holdings into active yield strategies rather than simply holding and waiting. SharpLink's Linea deployment (a $170 million ETH stake on Consensys' Ethereum Layer 2 network) and the Galaxy Digital fund partnership both reflect that direction. Whether the market assigns those productive cash flows a valuation premium comparable to what Strategy commands for its Bitcoin holdings remains the open question. The combined market cap of SBET and peer firm Bitmine Immersion (BMNR), which holds approximately 4.5 million ETH and is the larger holder by a factor of roughly five, sits at roughly $8 billion today, against Strategy's approximately $120 billion.