How Ethereum Institutional Intends to Grow Ethereum's Market Share

**Joseph Chalom** (0:00)
It has over a million validators when Solana has less than 800 It has five or six credible, diversified software clients, whereas 92%, I believe is the last time I checked, of Solana is running on one client software system. All the elements that matter, uptime, liquidity, developer community, composability, Ethereum is leading by miles.

**Laura Shin** (0:29)
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Today's guest is Joseph Chalom, CEO of Sharplink. Welcome, Joseph.

**Joseph Chalom** (1:26)
Great to be back, Laura.

**Laura Shin** (1:28)
Excited to have you.
This week, Sharplink, BitMine, and Joe Lubin launched Ethereum Institutional, a new nonprofit intended to help large financial institutions make decisions about the platform for tokenizations, stablecoins, and on-chain market infrastructure. This comes on the heels of the establishment of ETH Labs, which was launched last week and seems to be focused on ensuring that Ethereum is technically able to deliver to institutions building on it. And all of these developments come after this kind of two-year period of turmoil in the Ethereum community and the Ethereum Foundation, which culminated in the Foundation announcing that it would be taking a smaller role in Ethereum's development. So Joe, tell us how this idea for Ethereum Institutional came about and what the organization plans to do.

**Joseph Chalom** (2:19)
Sure. Even taking two steps back, I think we're at a moment that matters in the Ethereum ecosystem. We're obviously in a consolidation period of the price of Bitcoin and ETH, but the sentiment has not been great. Some of that is leverage that was taken out of the system in October. Some of it is the AI narrative. Some of it is risk off. But there definitely was a crisis of confidence and communication relative to what the role of the Ethereum Foundation should be.
So I believe very strongly that the EF has a narrower mandate. That mandate is going to be on censorship resistance, privacy, security. It has the greatest track record. But what we recognized is as the Ethereum Foundation gets smaller, we need other parts of the institutions to step up. And this is the second announcement, ETH Labs, which was announced as a not for profit last week.
Again, it was funded by Joe Lubin personally, Tom Lee at BitMine and Sharplink. It's because we have a view that we are large stakeholders in the ecosystem, and it means we need to be benevolent and stewards of the ecosystem. So that first announcement was an incredibly talented ecosystem team that's going to be building the future of Ethereum and the protocol for what institutions are looking for. And then this week's announcement around Ethereum Institutional was a spinoff of the go-to-market team, the education team, the team that engages with hundreds of financial organizations on a neutral basis.
And the support is meant to signal that there's no crisis in the Ethereum community. There's no funding issues in the Ethereum community. And at a moment when Ethereum is winning and has the license to win, we just need to inject more confidence that it is winning and has the support. So you can think of these as back-to-back launches that build on one another and complement the Ethereum Foundation rather than compete with it.

**Laura Shin** (4:26)
And so what will Ethereum Institutional be focused on?

**Joseph Chalom** (4:30)
So Ethereum Institutional was actually a group of people who were working within the Ethereum Foundation.
Almost as a BD type group, an educational group, their role is to help the largest institutions in the world who are currently making like once in a decade decisions about the future of their financial infrastructure. They're making these foundational decisions. We needed a front door and a sense of one place you can go to.
If you want to learn more about the Ethereum options, it could be Mainnet, it could be one of the layer twos. It's meant to be neutral. And the beautiful thing about Ethereum is it doesn't force a rigid configuration. It lets institutions think of their requirements, what approach they need. And then the second thing that this institutional group will do, will actually lead engagement in the community. It'll lead educational conferences, and it'll help coordinate between lots of different stakeholders. So you can think of it as being the front door, while ETH Labs, you can think of it being the technical platform that's going to be delivering what institutions need. And this is a one-two punch, and it's not competitive with, it's complementing the core work of the smaller Ethereum Foundation.