Why Ethereum’s New Era Is More Bullish Than Ever

**Joe Lubin** (0:00)
That's gonna, at some point soon, start to eat up a lot of block space. There will be lots of Ether staked in many, many different situations. And so people laugh at the notion of ultrasound money. There is no more high-powered money in the world than Ether. It will all be very clear.

**John Gillum** (0:18)
Ethereum strikes back. The last two weeks have seen two new high-powered organizations launch with one simple goal, make Ethereum win. But what does that mean? How will they do it? And what do investors need to know about all of this? Hello and welcome to The Milk Road Show, the podcast that knows that disrupting Wall Street is ether said than done.
I'm your host, John Gillum. Today is Monday, July 6th. And today we are joined by Joe Lubin and Joe Chalom. Joe Lubin is the co-founder of Ethereum, who serves as the CEO and founder of ConsenSys, one of the most important companies in all of Web3, and also the chairman of SharpLink. Joe Chalom is the CEO of SharpLink, who spent over 20 years at BlackRock, where he led the digital assets team of the Aladdin business. Joe Chalom and I used to sit on the same floor at BlackRock, and now we are sitting on this podcast with all of you. So if you are excited for some Ethereum Alpha today, make sure you like and subscribe, share this episode with somebody who's going to enjoy it. Today's episode is brought to you by Bitget Stocks 2 with real liquidity and real dividends, and Securitize, the regulated rails for tokenization. And without further ado, welcome to The Milk Road Show. Joe Lubin, Joe Chalom, how are you guys? Welcome to the show.

**Joe Lubin** (1:24)
Hey, John, thanks for having us.

**Joseph Chalom** (1:26)
Hey, John, great to see you.

**John Gillum** (1:28)
I'm very excited for this conversation today. I think a lot of people are seeing the headlines about strategy selling Bitcoin. But after eight months with no purchases, last week, SharpLink started buying Ethereum. Again, you all purchased 10,000 ETH and $10 million worth of SharpLink shares with your buyback program. Joe Chalom, I wanted to start with you on this question. Why did you all decide to start deploying capital again? And what's the reason for making this move now?

**Joseph Chalom** (1:53)
Sure. So SharpLink, for your viewers, is the second largest corporate holder of ETH. We're an Ethereum Digital Asset Treasury, and our goal is to give investors directional access to the price of ETH. Think of it as beta to ETH. And then on top of that, we make that ETH incredibly productive through staking and other DeFi activities.
The last year since we started, we've actually been on a bit of a journey.
There were periods of time when ETH, the price was ripping, Digital Asset Treasuries were on a roar, and then we went through a consolidation period in crypto. But through that period, we kept to our principles and our North Star, which is we raise capital and we deployed in ways that are accretive to investors. A few weeks back, we raised $75 million of equity and warrants, and we used that money to, as you said, get back to buying Ethereum, buying Ether, and then doing some stock buybacks as well. It's really, really accretive to do those things, especially at this price, and we're excited that we're back in Kinetic again.

**John Gillum** (3:05)
Joe Lubin, I wanted to ask you about how it's been weathering a bear market. From this perspective of a Digital Asset Treasury Company, there's been a lot of attention on Digital Asset Treasury Companies for the stress that they've been under during this bear market. What's that experience been like for you as somebody who is no stranger to the bear markets and crypto?

**Joe Lubin** (3:23)
So I guess I and we have been weathering the bear market from a couple of different perspectives. One perspective is the amazing progress that the Ethereum protocol and technology has been making. Another has been the behind-the-scenes adoption and excitement of TradFi organizations, major financial institutions, financial market infrastructure.
Yes, the price of the SharpLink equity is correlated to the price of Ether, and the price of Ether has not been surging recently, and it's been correlated with Bitcoin for better or worse. It's been on the rise for a long, long time, and I actually think we're probably through it, just because if you see what we are seeing from the inside, you would be wildly bullish. And yes, there is a little bit too much Ether currently for the amount of block space that the Ethereum ecosystem has built and made available, but the Internet is very large, and it's going to start to rapidly move on to decentralized rails. We're going to see that very heavily kick into gear over the second half this year and in early next year. You'll see some announcements being made.