Odaily Exclusive Interview with SharpLink: Ethereum's "Productive Capitalist"

Original | Odaily Planet Daily ( @OdailyChina )

Author | Hao Fangzhou

_On-site Interview | _Cody

“E Guards,” are you still there?

In a time when public sentiment is low, I’ve heard a saying—“If you don’t participate in ETH staking, there’s no productivity”—hold on for a moment, and let’s learn about the person who said it:

Matt Sheffield (X@sheffieldreport), CIO (Chief Investment Officer) of SharpLink.

Recently, SharpLink—positioning itself as “the next-generation digital asset treasury”—boldly announced that it would place $200 million worth of ETH directly on-chain via the qualified custody institution Anchorage Digital, in partnership for two years to enhance yield with Linea, ether.fi, and EigenCloud. This move is not only aimed at earning ETH returns that exceed native staking yields, but also at establishing a standardized playbook for institution-level DeFi operations. The core logic is very clear: while the company firmly believes that Ethereum is severely undervalued, it is maximizing the number of ETH per share at a pace that suits it.

Why does this publicly listed company dare to put almost its entire balance sheet into ETH? Are the bullish views purely driven by its own positioning, or is it like someone standing on a mountain who can see a different horizon? How do large institutions and regulators trust the on-chain ability to generate returns beyond expectations? When facing accounting paper losses amounting to billions of dollars, how do they persuade traditional investors?

In New York, Odaily Planet Daily was fortunate to meet Matt and held an in-depth conversation, asking the questions above.

He clearly laid out SharpLink’s “ETH-first” philosophy, its steady strategy centered on “maximizing the number of ETH per share” as the core KPI, and how it is trying to become “the best way to hold Ethereum”—and carve out a safe path for the entire industry, from compliant custody to DeFi yield—through native staking, on-chain partnerships, and pioneering compliance practices.

The following is the fully edited transcript of the interview—enjoy~

Odaily Planet Daily:Hello, Matt. I’m Cody from Odaily Planet Daily. I’m honored to be visiting the SharpLink team in Midtown Manhattan today. Matt, could you briefly introduce yourself first?

Matt: I’m the Chief Investment Officer at SharpLink. SharpLink is a digital asset treasury publicly listed on Nasdaq, with roughly $3 billion in equity capital. Our goal is to allocate this capital on the balance sheet in the most efficient way to hold Ethereum, and to show the world the理念 of “safety first.”

Odaily Planet Daily:Before joining SharpLink, what experience and resource advantages can be reused?

Matt: I come from a traditional finance background. I started out at Bridgewater, trading interest rates and credit products, and then in 2022 I went out on my own and, together with several former colleagues, founded a crypto hedge fund.

More recently, I was at FalconX, managing the spot trading team—one of the largest digital asset prime brokers and traders globally. I became interested in the digital asset treasury domain at FalconX and contacted the SharpLink team. My career has always focused on native yield and the “productivity” of assets.

Odaily Planet Daily:After coming to SharpLink, what is the core KPI as CIO?

Matt: Maximize the number of ETH per share. My job in this role is to build what we believe is an efficient frontier investment portfolio denominated in ETH that can produce higher risk-adjusted ETH returns for SharpLink.

For example: from the very beginning, we native-staked all our ETH. To demonstrate to the market, Ethereum is inherently a different kind of asset. It has “productivity,” and in the right hands it can become more productive. An ETF that doesn’t participate in staking has no productivity—it isn’t fully capturing all the value that Ethereum can create.

Odaily Planet Daily:So does the company prioritize maximizing dollar profits, or maximizing the number of ETH per share (ETH-per-share)?

Matt: Actually, we believe these two are essentially the same. Because our core belief is: Ethereum is an undervalued opportunity with huge upside potential, driven by the growth curves we see across multiple areas such as tokenization and smart payments. Therefore, SharpLink made a strategic decision starting in June last year—to allocate nearly all of our treasury to Ethereum. This is also what we believe is the best decision we can make for our shareholders.

If Ethereum is undervalued, we also want to accumulate as many ETH per share as possible, and use that as the driving force for shareholder growth—ultimately equivalent to creating the highest dollar value as time goes on.

Odaily Planet Daily:This question also ties into SharpLink’s positioning. Among these descriptions—public company, Digital Asset Treasury Company, and an active fund focused on the Ethereum ecosystem—which one is more accurate?

Matt: We’re a digital asset treasury—this is a commonly used industry term—but I want to say we’re a completely different kind of treasury, because we care more about Ethereum’s native productivity rather than financialized yield.

Odaily Planet Daily:Please expand on the parts that are different from other treasuries and focus on native productivity.

Matt: People’s understanding of a digital asset treasury originally comes only from Michael Saylor’s Strategy. Buying digital gold (BTC) is, in essence, choosing a different type of asset—a structural type of financialized yield. It’s like levering up in common stock, introducing variable Gamma (the acceleration of option price changes)—using financialization techniques to produce equity-like returns from yield that doesn’t exist in a BTC-denominated trade.

But what we are catering to is a completely different set of participants—those interested in linear accumulation of yield. Right now, we earn about $1 million per day purely from staking, and we currently have no debt at all.

Odaily Planet Daily:That means it would be hard for the treasury to face the externally worried situation—“in times of high volatility or price declines, the treasury needs to sell assets to relieve cash-flow pressure”—to happen at SharpLink, right? More specifically: at what price point of ETH would you trigger your “liquidation”?

Matt: We don’t have liquidation prices like treasuries that hold convertible bonds or preferred stock. Those instruments get worn down continuously, or if they take on some form of overcollateralized borrowing, liquidation can occur.

This goes back to the reason we believe that “keeping Ethereum on the balance sheet can be so powerful”: you have recurring income from staking, which helps protect the network, and you can also generate excess income through more productive on-chain activities.

Odaily Planet Daily:Besides staking, what on-chain activities generate excess yield?

Matt: SharpLink will roll out deployments with DeFi partners over multi-year periods to earn additional ETH on top of native staking rates. The ETH we earn today is already above the native staking rate. We’ve taken slightly more risk, and pushed the business boundaries outward a bit.

Our goal is: if native Ethereum staking rate is viewed as a risk-free interest rate in the crypto space, then it should be our benchmark—we should strive to beat it on a risk-adjusted basis. That is the focus of my work.

Not only building partnerships on-chain, SharpLink is also looking for external partners and exploring ways to achieve this goal on both the on-chain and off-chain sides. In the end, holding a large amount of Ethereum provides the parallel dual benefits—creating excess value for shareholders, and benefiting the Ethereum ecosystem.

Odaily Planet Daily:Besides continuing to accumulate ETH, does SharpLink have more proactive plans this year in areas like RWA and the Ethereum ecosystem, or will it stick to a relatively passive treasury-management role?

Matt: I don’t think it’s passive. We’re actively managing the Ethereum treasury. It’s just that currently, we have no interest in diluting our value proposition.

While we’re very interested in helping in areas such as RWA liquidity, yield-generating strategies, and smart payments—for example, providing liquidity to protocols to generate more ETH per share—those aren’t the core business. SharpLink’s goal is very focused.

Odaily Planet Daily:In January this year, SharpLink announced that it had deployed $170 million worth of ETH on Linea, aiming to enhance staking yields. How do you assess liquidity risk versus on-chain risk? How receptive are institutional investors to this?

Matt: The news you mentioned is not only interesting to us, but to the entire industry. Because historically, institutions don’t go on-chain. I think this time they’ve compromised on what are absolutely critical risk-value beliefs, achieving a broader trade-off. Part of it is about market structure, part of it is about incentives. In the past, DeFi-participating institutions didn’t have enough scale to invest the time and resources needed to reduce trading risk.

For that reason, we partnered with Linea, ether.fi, and EigenCloud for a two-year deployment. Quick update on the numbers: it’s now $200 million. After our initial announcement, we added another $30 million.

We’re not only earning on-chain liquidity and interest; the partners also provide the kind of long-term orientation that basically doesn’t exist in the crypto space today, along with Ethereum-denominated incentives.

We want to build institutional-level partnerships and maintain institutional-level duration—that’s important.

Another partner, Anchorage Digital, is an OCC-chartered compliant custody institution. We want to complete financial operations without ever leaving a qualified custody institution. We don’t want to use hot wallets, so we mint assets from within the custody institution and then bridge across chains via LayerZero. I don’t think any publicly listed company has done this before.

This is setting an example of “safety first”—both raising standards and paving the way, making it easier for later entrants to get involved and trust DeFi.

Odaily Planet Daily:As a Nasdaq-listed company, the SEC is very strict about accounting treatment for crypto assets (such as fair value measurement). How do you ensure that complex DeFi yield strategies (like LSTs and LRTs) meet the compliance requirements for a listed company?

Matt: Interestingly, we’re always “eating the crabs first.” When SharpLink began native staking, we saw this coming—native staking flows into revenue. Meanwhile, liquid staking tokens are currently treated as intangible assets and subject to impairment. The market has to understand our financial statements.

Whenever we do something, we communicate with huge internal and external teams to ensure compliance. We created compliance precedents; then others can follow the same path, so that Wall Street and investors feel at ease, and the industry can develop accordingly. It’s a very time-consuming process, which is why we do things in an orderly and methodical way.

We’ve been using digital asset strategies for less than a year, and our asset-management scale is about $30 billion. That accumulation speed might not sound that astonishing, but it’s already an appropriate balance point.

Odaily Planet Daily:What frustrates ETH holders is that, compared with other mainstream coins like BTC, ETH’s current performance has been weak. What’s your take?

Matt: People are only just starting to notice the big bullish catalysts for ETH. I think the most important one is RWA. When you look at market size and charts, you should ask: “How much of the digital assets world has been tokenized, relative to the size of the entire financial world.” For example, BlackRock plans to tokenize everything. Just their one ETF product series is $4.5 trillion—that’s multiple times more than the current total market cap of RWA.

So we’re still in the super-early stages of the huge transformation of putting assets on-chain. Ethereum will be at the center of this transformation. That is the opportunity we see in Ethereum: substantial network growth with upside potential in price appreciation.

Over the past month or so, market fundamentals have become more stable and healthier—especially in the U.S. trading session, where trading behavior has become more rational. With regulatory clarity in the U.S. and tailwinds from things like ETFs, the wind is blowing in the right direction.

We try to avoid predicting prices, because in the end, everyone needs to assess whether the opportunity in Ethereum is right for them. But we absolutely hope that SharpLink is the best way to hold Ethereum.

Odaily Planet Daily:ETH’s price weakness has also brought SharpLink huge unrealized net losses on paper. How do you explain this financial performance of “high growth accompanied by large losses” to traditional shareholders?

Matt: It’s a great question. We’ve done a lot of investor communications and education—trying to accurately explain to the market what SharpLink’s strategy is. That way, you know exactly what you’re investing in, rather than just putting money into a black box.

The result of investor education is this: when we filed our 13F last June, our institutional holding ratio was 5–6%, with the rest being retail. The most recently released 13F shows that our current institutional holding ratio is 46%. Many of the institutions listed have previously basically not been investing much in the digital asset space.

That’s also why I’ve been attending meetings, doing interviews, explaining the strategy, and conveying our理念—because if you’re interested in going long Ethereum, we want to be the best way to achieve that objective through a public, regulated vehicle. If you’re not interested in going long Ethereum, I also hope people understand that SharpLink isn’t the right stock for them.

Odaily Planet Daily:Have you had collaborations with the Asian market before?

Matt: Yes. I’ve personally done trading in the Asian market and also lived there. Asia has tremendous room for growth—especially for digital assets. When I attended the Consensus conference in Hong Kong in February, I was surprised by the level of attention that was focused on the breakout rally.

We also went to South Korea and Japan, and more recently to the Gulf region, meeting large institutions and sovereign funds to discuss the opportunity in Ethereum, SharpLink’s opportunity, and what kind of ecosystem they’re trying to build locally.

In Hong Kong and the Gulf region, I’ve seen tremendous attention to RWA. Regulators have an incredible spirit of cooperation and vision—they’re trying to figure out how we can do this safely, how we can move forward, so that they can be viewed as an innovation hub; local builders also see it as home.

We want to be situated where early-stage protocols are, becoming a bridge between traditional finance and crypto.

Odaily Planet Daily:Besides Ethereum, where does SharpLink’s interest lie?

Matt: In the entire on-chain ecosystem around it. RWA, smart payments… all fall within the scope we’re willing to participate in. It’s just that venture capital and liquidity funds look for high-risk, high-reward investment opportunities. ETFs are buy-and-hold products; they don’t necessarily make assets productive. And SharpLink’s goal is to own capital that’s nearly permanent and denominated in Ethereum.

We want to go out and partner with those pushing the Ethereum ecosystem in every way. We can deploy capital to help boost their plans—so that we can earn additional ETH per share, thereby enhancing the value of the Ethereum ecosystem and kicking off a flywheel effect. Fortunately, on the EVM, there’s never a shortage of people doing genuinely novel things.