In brief
- SharpLink Gaming just added more than $30 million worth of Ethereum to its treasury.
- The firm now holds $461 million of the second-largest cryptocurrency by market cap.
- All of the firm’s ETH is deployed into Ethereum staking platforms, generating 120 ETH in rewards so far.
SharpLink Gaming, the Minneapolis-based gambling marketing firm turned Ethereum treasury company, added more than $30 million in ETH to its treasury, the firm announced on Tuesday.
The publicly traded firm acquired 12,207 ETH at an average price of $2,513 during the four-day span of June 16-20, bumping its treasury holdings to 188,478 ETH—or about $461 million worth, based on the current price of Ethereum.
“This move reflects our confidence in Ethereum’s utility and our commitment to exploring transformative technologies that can unlock new value for our business and stockholders, alike,” said SharpLink Chairman of the Board, Ethereum co-founder, and Consensys CEO Joe Lubin in a statement. (Disclosure: Consensys is one of 22 investors in an editorially independent Decrypt.)
Shares in the company have jumped over 11% today to a current price of $10.02, but remain down 72% in the last month, led by a major selloff that occurred after a recent S-3 filing that Lubin deemed was being “misinterpreted” by the market.
Some investors appeared to read the filing as showing backers dumping their shares, which Lubin said was not the case. Publicly traded Solana treasury company Upexi appeared to suffer the same fate on Monday, with its shares falling 60% following a similar SEC filing.
Prior to that selloff, SharpLink’s SBET shares had risen to a price higher than $90 as recently as May 29, according to data from Yahoo Finance.
SharpLink first announced its plans to establish an Ethereum treasury in May, raising $425 million via a private investment in public equity (PIPE) arrangement to acquire and hold the second-largest crypto asset by market cap.
Unlike popular crypto treasury vehicles like Michael Saylor’s Strategy, which typically just accumulate the underlying asset of their choosing, SharpLink is putting its ETH to work, participating in staking and decentralized finance (or DeFi) to generate yield.
As of June 20, the firm says it has placed 100% of its ETH holdings into staking platforms, resulting in 120 ETH in rewards and an ETH-per-share growth rate of 18.97%.
ETH is up 6% in the last 24 hours amid a ceasefire agreement from Iran and Israel. It is now trading at $2,444, below the average purchase price for each of SharpLink’s treasury acquisitions.
Edited by Andrew Hayward
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