SharpLink Gaming announces $425 million funding for ethereum treasury strategy, sending shares flying

The appetite for public companies to adopt cryptocurrencies as a treasury reserve asset continues to grow, with ethereum now getting its own iteration of Michael Saylor’s Strategy. 

On Tuesday, sportsbook marketing firm SharpLink Gaming announced it raised roughly $425 million through a private investment in public equity offering to adopt an ethereum treasury playbook, helping the company’s stock jump over 400%. 

SharpLink shares spiked as high as $52 before closing at $35.80, a bid up since Friday, when they were trading at about $6. The $425 million will be used to acquire ethereum and serve as the firm’s primary treasury reserve asset, according to the firm’s press release.

The price of ethereum has increased 5.6% in the last 24 hours to trade hands at the $2,680 level, outpacing the top 50 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization, data pulled from CoinGecko shows. The market cap of ethereum and SharpLink now stand at roughly $323 billion and $24 million, respectively. 

Ethereum cofounder Joseph Lubin will become the chairman of SharpLink’s board of directors when the offering closes, which is expected to occur on Thursday.

Ethereum software development firm Consensys, founded by Lubin as well, led the investment round. It was joined by other venture capital firms and infrastructure providers like Pantera Capital, Galaxy Digital, and Primitive Ventures.

Maria Shen, the general partner for Electric Capital, which participated in the capital raise, told Sherwood News that there’s “great momentum” in the ethereum ecosystem stemming from the network’s latest Pectra upgrade and new leadership in the Ethereum Foundation, a nonprofit organization supporting the network. “There’s also a growing realization that ethereum is a great home for institutional capital,” Shen said.

SharpLink’s announcement comes after several public companies have adopted rival cryptocurrencies as reserve assets. 

Consumer goods company Upexi holds 597,002 solana tokens worth about $106.5 million, while DeFi Dev Corp has 609,233 Solana coins in its treasury, representing $108.4 million.  

Strategy, which started as a software enterprise business, has turned into a bitcoin vacuum machine, possessing 580,250 bitcoin worth $64 billion at current prices. Strategy’s latest acquisition was announced on Monday, when cofounder Michael Saylor disclosed that the firm scooped up an additional 4,020 bitcoin for about $427 million.