Sharplink CEO: The future of Ethereum is unfolding

Author: Joseph Chalom; Compiled by Jiahui, ChainCatcher

The current farce around the Ethereum Foundation (EF) and the arguments about ETH prices have failed to reveal the real big picture. I fully understand this debate, but it doesn’t determine who will lead the financial infrastructure of the next decade.

This is merely one stakeholder’s viewpoint. Before leading Sharplink, I spent 20 years as an executive at BlackRock, responsible for fintech and digital asset strategy.

These experiences taught me what institutions truly value before directing capital toward a new infrastructure.

I want to step back, away from the noise, and offer a different judgment on Ethereum’s current state and where it’s headed.

The Ethereum Foundation is doing its job well

Step back and look at the results delivered over the past decade. On the three attributes that institutions value most—trust, security, and liquidity—Ethereum has already earned the credentials to win. It is winning, and the advantage is enormous.

Look at the track record. Most of the world’s stablecoin settlement value happens on Ethereum. Its tokenization of real-world assets (RWA) is far larger than any other blockchain, and it’s the default venue for high-value DeFi transactions.

On these dimensions, no competing chain can match it.

This is not an accident, but the result of years of rigorous protocol development by the Ethereum Foundation. Ethereum is the only blockchain with a ten-year record of major upgrade releases at the protocol layer.

The Merge, EIP-1559, Dencun, Pectra, Fusaka—one milestone after another. The upcoming Glamsterdam upgrade will bring step-change scalability, and the foundation is still leading the way toward quantum resistance. This is the most ambitious technical roadmap in the industry.

Decentralization is a strength, not a weakness

Some of the harshest criticisms of the foundation treat decentralization as a weakness. That is precisely reversing the logic of institutions. The Ethereum ecosystem has more developers than any other chain, and the vast majority of them do not work within the foundation.

No foundation should control a chain. Institutions won’t give up the existing system just to lock themselves into another proprietary ecosystem.

They need to be confident that the underlying properties they rely on won’t be changed arbitrarily by a small number of controllers. In fact, no chain should depend on any single participant.

Ethereum’s reliable neutrality and decentralization are exactly why it can become the future financial settlement layer. These are absolutely not weaknesses.

If I had to choose between two foundations—one focused on security, privacy, quantum resistance, and core protocols, and the other serving only short-term marketing—I would choose the former every time.

Using Amazon as an analogy for ETH’s value

History is full of examples: foundational innovation gets dismissed by detractors, momentum is taken by flashier new players, and in the end the detractors are all proven wrong. Amazon is the clearest case.

In the early days, market consensus about Amazon was that it was a money-losing online bookseller propped up by an internet bubble. The skeptics focused on the profit-and-loss statement, but failed to see Bezos’s long-term ambition.

What he wanted to build was an entirely new online business market structure. Its potential market wasn’t selling books, but the entire retail economy—and later it expanded into cloud computing and media. Analysts who only watched short-term prices missed the larger opportunity.

Today’s Ethereum and ETH are in the same position. Its potential market isn’t crypto trading, but the entire global financial system. ETH’s intrinsic value is tightly tied to the network’s expansion.

And this network stands at a critical point on the threshold of step-change growth in transaction volume, covering stablecoins, tokenized real-world assets, DeFi, and the emerging wave of agentic finance.

To provide security for such massive transaction volume, ETH will become a highly demanded incentive layer and the ultimate carrier of trust, and its monetary premium will rise accordingly.

Without ETH, there is no Ethereum. Assets and the network are inseparable.

Others are afraid; I am greedy

In nearly every market cycle, the moments when retail investors cut their losses and sentiment hits rock bottom are opportunities for disciplined capital to step in.

That’s how Buffett built Berkshire Hathaway—by buying quality assets when the market is at its worst: from GEICO in the 1970s to Bank of America and Goldman Sachs during the 2008 financial crisis.

Over most of the past year, the Fear and Greed Index has shown extreme fear. The smartest investors buy quality assets when everyone else is panicking. They move against the cycle, rather than follow the crowd.

In the crypto winter after FTX, most institutions chose to avoid exposure to Bitcoin and ETH or postponed product launches. But when I was at BlackRock, we did the opposite.

We doubled down—investing more in infrastructure, building ecosystem partnerships, and launching products connecting traditional finance with crypto. We should learn from Buffett and BlackRock’s experience.

Giving Ethereum a new voice

The Ethereum Foundation is doing its job well. Going forward, it will become more focused on CROPS—censorship resistance, anti-capture, open source, privacy, and security—these core attributes.

For most people, the issue is already clear: when institutions are urgently eager to embrace Ethereum, there is a leadership gap in the market-education and promotion stage.

I have a strong sense that stakeholders and participants in the ecosystem need to play a more important role in Ethereum’s narrative and in institutional adoption.

Since last summer, digital asset custody firms and core Ethereum managers have already played an important role in this effort.

These include Sharplink, Tom Lee of BitMine, Joe Lubin of Consensys, Etherealize, Nethermind, Aave, Morpho, EEA, and other ecosystem participants. We also work closely with the foundation’s internal small team focused on institutional education and adoption.

Sharplink itself is also investing in this ecosystem. We were among the earliest companies to stake billions of ETH, and we’ve put hundreds of millions into high-quality DeFi protocols. Recently, we also co-established a $125 million DeFi yield fund with Galaxy Digital to support existing and emerging protocols.

Even so, we can do more—and we will do more: to become outspoken advocates for Ethereum and actively support the upcoming supercycle of institutional adoption.

Ethereum’s future is unfolding right now.