# Ethereum's Institutional Super Cycle: Sharplink, ETH Labs, and Pectra

**Podcast:** The Milk Road Show
**Published:** 2026-07-06

## Transcript

That's going to, 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.
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 do?
Hello and welcome to the Milk Road Show, the podcast that knows that disrupting Wall Street is ethier said than done.
I'm your host John Gillen.
Today is Monday, July 6th, and today we are joined by Joe Lubin and Joe Shalom.
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 Shalom is the CEO of Sharplink, who spent over 20 years at BlackRock, where he led the digital assets team for the Aladdin business.
Joe Shalom 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 2.0 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 shalom how are you guys welcome to the show hey john thanks for having us hey john great to see you 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 Shalom, 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?
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 raised 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 use that money to, as you said, get back to buying Ethereum.
buying Ether, and then doing some stock buybacks as well.
So it's really, really accretive to do those things, especially at this price.
And we're excited that we're back in kinetic again.
Joe Lubin, I wanted to ask you about how it's been weathering a bear market.
From the 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 in crypto?
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 of TradFi organizations, major financial institutions, financial market infrastructure.
And yes, the the price of the Sharplink equity is correlated to the price of Ether and the price of Ether.
has not been surging recently and, you know, it's been correlated with Bitcoin for better or worse for a long, long time.
And I actually think we're probably through it just because there, 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.
The Web is very large and it's going to start to rapidly move onto decentralized rails.
We're going to see that very heavily kick into gear.
over the second half this year and early next year, you'll see some announcements being made.
And so bottom line, we've been building for the future for a long time in the Ethereum ecosystem, and the future is definitely now.
And that'll start to ramify.
Guys, listen, we are at a very crucial point in time right now.
AI stocks have ripped.
They're going to keep ripping.
Our analysts on the AI side are up like literally 100% or more on quite a few calls.
And crypto is about to boom again, or at least it feels that way.
If you want all the insight on what we're buying, what our analysts are doing, what's on their watch list.
All of that is in Milk Road Pro, so join at the link below.
So less of a bear market and more of a builder's market.
Joe Shalom, I want to ask you a question about this.
Sharplink's ticker SBET was recently added to the Russell 2000 and 3000 indices, I believe as of June 29th.
So pretty recent news here.
How significant is this milestone for you all as a public company?
Do you see this as a game changer for Sharplink or is this more of an expected milestone?
How do you view this?
I think it's an expected milestone.
What do I mean by that?
And we don't take it lightly.
It means that...
Many active investors and also passive investors in indices can now think of Sharplink as one of the constituents that they need to buy to include in their portfolios.
And that's really, really positive.
But it's actually just another step in what we've been doing for over a year, which is we started with the thesis that.
Institutions and retail should be owners of ETH and should be owners of a digital asset treasury.
Last summer, during the summer of debts, it was very much initially a retail phenomenon, but we were equally focused on the world's largest financial institutions.
We started with institutional ownership of our stock being about 6%.
Today, it's roughly 48% of our holders.
are some of the largest institutions in the world, and they tend to be more buy and hold long term focused, which is really important.
We're also focused on the retail investor who want that potentially parabolic or high risk, high reward opportunity.
And you're entering at a point right now where ETH from a price to opportunity ratio is actually looking quite favorable.
And Joe was talking about.
what we're seeing behind the scenes, you're hearing institutions almost on a daily basis make announcements that would have shocked the market a year or two ago.
You know, large tokenization exercises, new stablecoin entries, global stablecoin in non-USD, DeFi activity that is surging.
All these things are largely inuring to the benefit of the Ethereum ecosystem.
And I'll say this, if you look at the scoreboard, Ethereum is, largely the net winner of these activities in this momentum.
Over 50% of stablecoins, over 50% of real-world assets and tokenization, and DeFi and Agentic are built on Ethereum.
So all of this, wrapping it up, is really good for long-term investors and being part of the Russell 2000 and 3000s.
means you have a level of support and buying that you wouldn't have as a stock that's not listed in one of these major extended market indices.
So we see it as part of our journey and a recognition of what we've become in the industry, which is an institutional exposure vehicle for the Ethereum opportunity.
So you talked about institutional exposure and you mentioned DeFi.
Another question I wanted to ask you all about was the Galaxy Sharplink on-chain yield fund.
This is a first of its kind, as I understand, $125 million private investment vehicle, and it's designed to deploy capital across DeFi.
Joe Shalom, you've been involved in DeFi here now, coming from Wall Street over here.
Talk to me about this partnership.
What makes this unique?
Why are you excited about this?
And just tell our audience a little bit more about what this actually is.
Sure.
Remember I said we do two things at Sharplink.
We're an ETH exposure vehicle.
So you get beta linear exposure to ETH, but we also make it productive because unlike Bitcoin, it's a natively productive asset.
And we're on that journey.
We started with staking all our ETH, participating in liquid staking tokens.
We launched a really unique groundbreaking partnership with ConsenSys.
It's a layer two linear blockchain, EtherFi.
to start deploying our ETH into a liquid restaking token.
But within a qualified custodian, one of the first times this has ever been done, we're stepping one step further on that efficient frontier.
And two of the largest public companies in crypto, Sharplink and Galaxy, are launching a fund.
We're each putting in capital.
Galaxy will be the general partner and manager of that fund.
And it'll start trying to bootstrap.
new on-chain protocols, giving them their first capital, not from a venture perspective, but over-collateralized lending of our ETH in order to get past that cold start problem with expectation that we will get outsized yields on a risk-adjusted basis.
So we're stepping one at a time as a public company down the efficient frontier in order to generate really good risk-adjusted yield for our for our investors.
You said I've been involved in DeFi for a long time.
It's only been a few years.
Joe, maybe you have a thought on what this means for DeFi for institutions coming.
I think you pretty much nailed it.
The institutions are coming.
I got a little bit of...
positive insider info regarding clarity at the Goldman Sachs Digital Asset Conference last week in London.
It's a bit of surprising positive news.
And fingers crossed, we'll land that.
If that doesn't land, Project Crypto will land it from the SEC and CFTC's perspective.
DeFi is going to be a major unlock.
If it gets normalized for traditional financial institutions and then enterprises, then the rest of the world will get more comfortable in terms of more normie retail users.
Potentially, we're going to have to make sure the user interfaces are.
easy to understand and the protocols are getting safer and safer.
I think we're going to get a major assist from machine intelligence because it is asymmetric in how the builders will benefit from machine intelligence in terms of eradicating bugs over the attackers who are sort of operating on some of the humans and between the protocols and the cracks between protocols.
DeFi is going to become, I believe, quite safe in the not too distant future.
And the floodgates are going to open once organizations and retail realizes that they can earn significant yield in appreciating currency rather than a debasing currency with lower yields.
I wanted to ask a question about this.
You all in the statement about this Galaxy partnership said that this was one initiative in a broader program of work.
Could you elaborate on that?
Does this mean a broader program of work with Galaxy, with other partners, or just what does that really involve here as you guys continue to expand what you're doing in the ecosystem?
Yeah, the one interesting thing about running an Ethereum digital asset treasury, which is different than running a crypto fund, different than running an ETF, is We have what we think of as long-term, almost permanent capital.
The idea that we accumulate ETH, we continue making it productive, but we're not under selling pressure the way an ETF is, where you essentially have to provide daily liquidity to your investors, which means our investors in Sharplink have a bit of a competitive advantage.
The idea that we can deploy our ETH on a multi-year basis, not just stake it.
not just participate in DeFi, but actually make two, three-year commitments.
And in return, we do something that crypto and DeFi doesn't really have, which is this idea of having actual locked value or actual duration associated with their protocols.
And we can commit to that because we're in no rush to undeploy our ETH.
And in return, we actually get favorable economics.
Very often, we're receiving additional economic incentives in the form of ETH for keeping our ETH in a sizable amount with a protocol.
And what we're suggesting is there are many different ways to do this.
It could be through staking, restaking, participating in DeFi, lending our ETH.
But there are other use cases who need ETH.
People need ETH to finance.
prediction markets people need eith to finance crypto insurance markets so there's almost an unlimited ability to take that eith on a permanent basis put it into the ecosystem and get good returns we're just taking our time and we're doing the opposite of what crypto does we're deploying slowly and being prepared to extract our capital quickly that's literally the opposite of how crypto works and that's what we do for our investors so We're seeing steps along the efficient frontier, but I think there will be limits on the level of risk we're willing to take.
But we're building a portfolio of ETH.
I want to ask Joe Lubin some questions about ETH Labs and ETH Institutional, but I also want to follow up on something you just mentioned here, Joseph, which is this idea of being a fiduciary to shareholders.
I've heard you say this before about having responsibility to be a good steward of the capital and the staking rewards.
Talk to me a little bit about that and what that actually means in terms of how you all manage your capital at Sharplink.
Sure.
I think that we have North Stars and we don't deviate by the state of the crypto cycle.
Our North Star is one to accumulate ETH in a way that concentrates more and more of it per share.
That's our North Star.
And to do that, you could do it in many ways.
We do it in a way that's accretive to investors.
And we don't raise capital to dilute investors just for the sake of accumulation.
That's what a fiduciary does.
You take a long-term view.
you give them a thesis, you know, for a long period of time, we didn't raise capital because it would have been diluted for investors.
And then we find these ways to raise capitals and capital in a way that's a creative and as you mentioned, some of it will go to buy ETH.
Some of it will go potentially at times to buy shares because again, it's really good for investors and ETH concentration.
So that's the way I would think about it.
But we also have a stewardship role as being one of the most concentrated owners of ETH in a public company.
Joe, Tom, Lee at Bitmine and ourselves feel like we have an obligation to the community.
And this might be a great pivot on why Sharpling, Joe and Tom Lee started participating in funding those really important ecosystem participants.
It's part of our fiduciary obligation.
It's actually part of our mission and it's highly aligned with what our investors expect with us.
Yeah.
In simplest terms, if you believe in the power of decentralized trust and that the global economy will grow increasingly decentralized, we're seeing real appreciation for this from traditional financial organizations and real necessity from the world of machine intelligence, where people are starting to really believe that certain elements of what they're building need to be decentralized.
Otherwise, they could come under a regulatory threat potentially.
And so if you believe that we're moving down that path, there are two rigorously decentralized protocols in the world.
One of them is smart contract platform.
The other one.
is bitcoin if you want exposure to decentralization in bitcoin you can buy bitcoin or you can buy levered bitcoin in the form of mstr or you can be you can buy damped bitcoin in the form of strc and and get reliable returns for a long time again that's based on this thesis uh sharplink and ethereum have an unfair advantage in that Ether is productive.
And so to the extent that we won't get out over our skis in terms of leverage, and we won't because we have a steady hand at the helm, I don't want to call it a slam dunker guaranteed, but it is long-term permanent capital and decentralization will cause it to grow in value.
And our shareholders will, I think, appreciate that over time.
Well, thank you both for the thoughts on that.
That was a great pivot.
That is where I wanted to go with this conversation is towards ETH Labs and how you all are being stewards of the Ethereum network and ecosystem.
June 22nd saw the announcement of ETH Labs, and the three names at the top of the list were Bitmine, Sharplink, and Joe Lubin.
And Joe, I wanted to get your perspective on this new nonprofit.
What role you see this playing and what your involvement is going to be, because this seems like a new initiative broken out from the Ethereum Foundation.
I'd really like to hear your perspective on this.
So maybe it'll be best to back up a little bit.
We talked about price action in the Ethereum ecosystem, price drive sentiment, and there's been...
some malaise at points in time over the last couple of years in the Ethereum ecosystem.
All while that has been happening, the protocol has been doing great things.
The builders have been heads down just building, but the world has been changing pretty dramatically.
I think geopolitical shifts, the end of a...
economic monetary super cycle is impacting the world and machine intelligence is transforming everything.
It's transforming how people understand themselves and how companies understand themselves.
And so we find that there have been lots of pivots either underway or to happen.
And the Ethereum Foundation actually, I think over the last year or so if you if you look at uh vitalik's utterances and and writings i think he went into war mode to to use a term um which you may appreciate um uh so uh a the ethereum foundation uh needed to shrink up its budget uh b i believe uh this is my speculation uh that vitalik decided that uh hey minimalism has been helpful.
The thesis of getting stronger by subtraction at the Ethereum Foundation level has been helpful in decentralizing or spreading responsibility for activity across the ecosystem.
And it's a very broad and very deep ecosystem at this point.
But...
In an increasingly complicated multipolar world, it is important, I think, to have one institution.
And there's only one institution in the history of the world that I think has been configured to do this.
And that's the Ethereum Foundation.
The Ethereum Foundation is focused on protecting the cypherpunk principles.
So they're doing that in the form of the crops mandate, censorship, resistance, open source, privacy, security.
And Bastion took on the difficult role and he's a truly great executive director in the current context.
He took on the difficult role of reshaping the Ethereum Foundation so it can be more focused and its mission could be CRISPR, essentially to be the North Star, the sanctuary technology that we can all rely on to to sort of stave off the possibility of living in a prison planet with surveillance everywhere and controlled by top-down overlords.
So I may be exaggerating a little bit, maybe not.
And so what emerged from that is that given that the...
core researchers and developers were going to focus on these components mostly, but they'll focus on other things as well.
There were a group of top core developers that wanted to focus more in the near term on some things that would essentially foster adoption for the Ethereum technology from traditional finance, from machine intelligence.
Essentially, they wanted to concentrate on the platform holistically they wanted to to do things that would facilitate growth in defy in trad fi and they wanted to be really explicit about the tight linkage between strong ether and strong ethereum strong ethereum protocol and so eth labs formed were instantly, they instantly captured the excitement of all the people that they spoke with.
And they have secured a bunch of funding, some in the form of grants, and we're trying to work out a longer term, more sustainable forms of funding.
Joseph and I have been participating a bit behind the scenes and our colleagues at Sharplink have been doing some really great work, mostly just sending out messages, getting on calls, potential contributors to that.
And so the ETH Labs people did a lot of that work, but we helped on that front.
ETH Labs needs to be credibly neutral, nonprofit, and...
That's what it is.
We will be delighted to provide any sort of advice, but we're not in control in any way.
They're in control and they have also captured the imagination and excitement of a whole bunch of other people, not necessarily from within the Ethereum Foundation.
I think they're looking to try to leave the Ethereum Foundation primary and very strong.
in terms of its talent base, but also looks like they're a magnet to attract a bunch of 10x talent.
to their ecosystem and to itself.
Gotcha.
Okay.
So that's helpful to frame sort of the context of this.
I want to hear this answer from both of you on what are some of the short-term, like near-term priorities that you'd like to see out of ETH Labs?
Are there some easy wins you'd like to see them focus on?
And what do you see as like the immediate next steps for this organization?
I'd like to hear from both of you on this, but Joe Lubin, if you want to start with that.
I don't think that Joseph or I should be suggesting what their near-term priorities are.
I think if you go to the website, they've been pretty clear.
They've got a significant list and it gets more and more fleshed out every time I see new iterations of it.
But the high-level take is that they want to grow Ethereum and they want to be open and accessible.
all the things in and around the Ethereum Foundation that the Ethereum Foundation isn't currently configured to address.
Yeah, and I would just add, John, in your intro, you used words that I've been saying for a while that we're in a new era of Ethereum.
I would argue it's a new complementary era of Ethereum.
And if you look back at what the Ethereum Foundation has accomplished for over a decade at this point, It has been where most of the core work lived and that era is ending.
It doesn't mean it's competitive.
It's actually complementary and it's not because the foundation has failed.
It's actually because the foundation has succeeded and the network and the requirements have outgrown a single steward.
So as Joe said, the foundation is going to focus on what it does best.
And that refocus created both an obligation and an opportunity for new institutions and credible stewards to step up.
And we are in the business of readying Ethereum for the demand that's coming from institutions, the scale of transactions that are going to come from agentic and machine intelligence.
So if you took a step back.
You can make an argument that the Ethereum Foundation is going to continue to be the sacred core, the protocols, principles, neutral, and conduct a lot of the important core research, the crops mandate.
ETH Labs is going to be a 10x protocol accelerator.
It's going to be independent, as Joe mentioned.
It is going to have some of the highest density of Ethereum and technology talent.
These teams and individuals came from the EF.
There is good blood, not bad blood.
And one of their goals is going to be to make Ethereum faster and more interoperable so it can absorb that demand.
In parallel to that, you mentioned two organizations.
Ethereum Institutional is the team from the EF that for the last year, essentially under a mandate from Tomash initially, has been the go-to-market.
organization, the institutional front door.
And that too will be neutral.
And it has a job.
Its job is to work alongside stewards like ourselves, alongside ETH Labs, in parallel to the Ethereum Foundation as the go-to-market organization that's credibly neutral.
It's not going to be pushing L1 over any L2 or L2 over one another.
But at the end of the day, they're going to provide education.
They're going to walk hundreds of institutions from the stage of evaluation to testing to production.
And all these things are going to be complementary to one another.
We're just moving in a world where it's going to be multinodal and not sitting in a single foundation.
And in the long run, that's extremely bullish and healthy for Ethereum.
And the demand is there.
We just have to supply these ingredients to help accelerate this institutional super cycle.
not one that's coming, one that's happening.
Yeah, after what I just said, I did come into the situation having two personal priorities or agenda items, and they were shared across Sharplink and across BMNR and across the two spinouts.
We needed both organizations to be nonprofit and credibly neutral, and we needed to Unlike other blockchain ecosystems, we needed a decentralized group of stewards across the ecosystem.
And I think of Sharplink and ConsenSys and VMNR, obviously the Ethereum Foundation, and these two new organizations, among some others in the ecosystem, as part of the group of decentralized stewards.
We needed a situation.
where there wouldn't be conflicts of interest between those who were trying to educate and inform governments and financial institutions and other enterprises regarding the benefits of Ethereum.
And so we couldn't have in the most proper configuration, we couldn't have the Ethereum institutional group be fully credibly neutral with no conflicts of interest inside the Ethereum Foundation anymore.
And so I think that was a very healthy outcome.
I was going to joke before, this is so weird.
It's almost like you guys actually believe in decentralization.
It's very strange.
And yeah, you know, Joe Shulam, you said, you know, complimentary Ethereum.
Joe Lubin, I've seen you using the term Ethereum summer on Twitter or the summer of Ethereum love and my phrase wartime Ethereum, whatever you want to call it.
I think it's an exciting time and there's a lot happening.
Just to bring our listeners up to speed, Ethereum Institutional has been referred to a couple of times.
This was another organization that was launched about a week after ETH Labs.
So if you have not been following us the last couple of minutes of this conversation.
as this has organically come up.
That's what we're talking about here.
And I want to ask you guys a question around this.
Etherealize is an organization that has already been doing some of this work around this institutional adoption and trying to bring ETH to institutions.
And Joe Shalom, I've heard you use the term front door for institutions to come to Ethereum.
And I'd like to hear about your thoughts on how Etherealize and Ethereum Institutional are going to cooperate or what they're going to cover that's different from one another and just like some of the distinguishing things about these two organizations there as we get more and more nodes into.
the governance apparatus of Ethereum here.
Joe Shalom, would you like to speculate on that?
Or Joe Lubin, any thoughts on that from either of you?
Sure.
I mean, I think Danny Ryan and Vivek are exceptional people.
They have been very focused on this idea of talking to institutions about the Ethereum opportunity.
I think they're also going in the direction of building product and building infrastructure to help institutions.
So I think it's just another positive node.
in the ecosystem no different than you have the enterprise ethereum alliance who has a mission and members whose job is it is to educate so this is the opposite of solana where you have a concentrate concentrated ownership concentrated governance concentrated bd this is something where ethereum strength is its decentralization even if at certain moments it feels like it's not organized I think you now have more stewards whose interests are aligned.
And I think these things, again, are complementary of one another and not competitive.
That's my take, Joe.
I don't know if you have a different take.
Yep, fully agreed.
And I guess I love the front door analogy.
I've actually been thinking of them as a sort of neutral help desk for an entire ecosystem where they can answer your questions, they can point you to materials, they'll produce some materials themselves and put them on the desk that you can.
come along and take and they know everybody inside the EF and inside ETH Labs.
And I think they have a contact book of 500 organizations that they've been talking to over the last year or so.
So they can route your questions, satisfy your interests, and point you to probably a short list of the right people to talk to across the ecosystem.
And I will say that Tom Lee, myself, Joe will be actively involved with Ethereum Institutional.
Why wouldn't you try to take advantage of our, I don't know what it is, a thousand years of TradFi, DeFi, macro experience?
I'm exaggerating, but collectively we probably have a hundred years of experience and contacts and good stewardship and reputation.
So we are going to be involved in helping the Ethereum Institutional team.
do their jobs and do their jobs well, but again, in a credibly neutral way.
Yeah.
And what we would like to see is to multiply that to a thousand years and 10,000 years of experience in various different aspects of running human society.
And so, yes, we're the founding grantors of two.
the two projects, but we've been very actively trying to bring many others, both in TradFi and across the ecosystem, in to be significant contributors of capital and opinion and assistance.
Okay, so this conversation has been helpful, I think, in framing a little bit of Sharplink, the way you guys are trying to engage with Ethereum here and these two new organizations.
I want to get your thoughts on some criticisms I've heard about this, which I'm sure you guys have heard a lot.
But I've heard critics saying that this is a little bit like reshuffling some decks on the Titanic, that a lot of the membership of ETH Institutional and ETH Labs used to and already were working on Ethereum in the Ethereum Foundation and that breaking this out like this.
doesn't really solve the problems or really break the dam on some of the barriers that Ethereum has run up against.
And I'm curious how you respond to this and how you think these new org structures and this new structure for the leadership and governance of Ethereum and these new organizations are going to help move the needle on some things that maybe hadn't been able to have been broken through before.
And just what are your thoughts on that?
Joe, let's start with you.
There are some premises in your question that I just don't think are accurate.
I think.
the technology has been evolving beautifully.
It has been intentional that we did not cut corners and shoot for extremely high throughput because credible neutrality, building a global sovereign decentralized digital asset settlement network is incredibly important.
And so We're in a position now in the Ethereum ecosystem where we can very significantly grow transaction throughput year after year.
We're on our 3x roughly annual track.
That's going really well.
And that's going to be, I think, accelerated by machine intelligence and our friends at ETH Labs joining in from their own perspective with the EF.
who is also very interested in scaling the technology.
So anybody who thinks that Ethereum is the Titanic rather than the dominant blockchain ecosystem on the planet, winning by virtually all measures, has an agenda.
Yeah, and look, Joe mentioned there's been some malaise.
Joe mentioned that we have had some communication and narrative issues.
That's true.
I think that's now a thing of the past.
But imagine despite having those challenges, if you look at the scoreboard, we're probably in the second inning of an institutional super cycle.
And look at the four things that matter most.
Stablecoins, the first proof point of tokenization, highly successful, over 50% happening on Ethereum.
The next, Solana, I think, has less than one-tenth of that TVL and transaction volume.
Tokenized assets, largely defined on Ethereum.
When I was at BlackRock, we launched on Ethereum.
When Robinhood is launching, they're launching on Ethereum.
JP Morgan's tokenizing assets and deposits on Ethereum.
Governments in Europe and around the world, they're choosing Ethereum.
So this idea of a government sovereign...
Capital markets use case of tokenization, which I would say is in the bottom of the first inning and about to go parabolic.
It's happening largely on Ethereum.
And by a mile, DeFi was built on Ethereum.
Look at the likes of Aave and Morpho and high-quality DeFi, borrowing, lending, collateral pools.
Ethereum defined it and has the vast market share.
And in the machine...
autonomous agentic economy, this machine intelligence economy, X402, the micropayment standard that Coinbase built and open sourced and ERC8004 are going to be the two mechanisms in which this tidal wave of transaction volume is going to come.
I believe it's largely going to happen in the Ethereum ecosystem.
And I think it'll be really, really good at sucking up block space.
And so by each of these measures, tokenized assets, stable coins, DeFi, and the coming agentic economy, Ethereum is in pole position.
And there's a big gap between them and anyone else, despite some of the malaise and narrative.
Now we're going on offense and we're going to have an Ethereum summer.
We're going to do a better job communicating, engaging institutions to make this easy decision of choosing Ethereum even easier.
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Well, wartime Ethereum forever.
Joe, I want to kind of build on this question here a little bit.
I've heard a comment from you that I thought was really insightful.
You said that Ethereum's true competitor is not a Solana or a Canton or another one of these blockchain ecosystems, but it's really the legacy systems that institutions have billions of dollars of sunk cost on and years of inertia built up on.
How do you view going about breaking this stronghold and sort of getting these institutions to begin to make the move to Ethereum as opposed to sticking to these?
legacy systems they've got so much inertia on.
I made that comment on a podcast on Thursday, but Joe, you take the answer.
I was thinking, Joseph, I said, Joe, this is going to happen a lot.
I knew this was going to happen.
I was about to say that I don't remember making that comment.
I wouldn't frame it that way.
The way I would frame it is that one of Ethereum's biggest near-term opportunities is the legacy financial system, given the mind-blowing redundancy in place in not just across, let's say, banks, but within a single bank.
If you think about how many banks an organization like JP Morgan or Citi or Boney have rolled up over the years, I'm sure they tried to streamline things, but they do have parallel infrastructure inside those organizations.
I've heard it said that Banks are reconciliation companies that also offer financial services to people and organizations.
And so you don't really need to reconcile a single source of truth.
You just need to make use of it in much more efficient ways.
And so there are lots of.
crypto people inside of financial institutions.
They were the weird kids and then became less marginalized.
Joseph led that pretty early inside BlackRock.
And now they have a lot of influence inside major organizations.
And some of them have convinced their CEOs, very loud, prominent CEOs, to also lead the charge.
Yep.
And John, what's interesting is I think if you took all these large financial institutions and you generalized about them, they're pretty predictable.
They don't like change.
When they're moving from one rail to another, they don't want to go from one vendor lock-in and one proprietary database or a million to another.
They care deeply about three or four things.
And this is a generalization, but I think it applies to every one of these institutions that is making a decision.
They want to go where their new form of assets are going to be most secure with uptime, predictability, where the rules of the road are not going to change, especially when you go from T plus one settlement to same day, where you can't pick up the phone and call a counterparty and say, hey, we've been trading together for 40 years.
Do me a favor and reverse that trade.
In blockchain space, it's immutable, which means you need that sense of security and trust.
And then they're also very, very clear that when they trade, they want to be where they can get the best execution for their clients, which is where there is a depth of liquidity.
And Ethereum is leading that by a mile, if not more.
And so I think these institutions are consistent.
They like security.
They like trust.
They like predictability.
They like decentralization because it represents trust and security.
Oh, and by the way, if this is.
the chain with the most assets and the depth of liquidity, that's where they want to be.
Now, there is some fragmentation.
And at some point, to me, one of the most exciting things happening in crypto, which will actually be very beneficial for both retail and crypto and institutions, is this idea of synchronous composability.
That even though you have mainnet, a number of L2s, even Solana, the ability to compose a transaction with multiple legs where you do not need to worry about what chain they're on or whether one leg fails and the other one doesn't.
These are really exciting things.
So institutions care about not only what I described, but the usability.
And Ethereum is going to have incredible capabilities around composability in a more synchronous way.
And I think that is going to be a huge lift for how actual institutions trade.
for the ability of them to have a better user experience than what they have today in crypto.
So I'm beyond excited.
You don't have to convince institutions.
You just have to give them a front door and you give them a path to the scale that they need.
Yeah.
So we've been talking about TradFi quite a bit on this call.
I remain a decentralization maximalist and a pragmatist.
I think a lot of people in the Ethereum ecosystem, even from the start.
I felt that unless we made proper decentralization available to as much of the global economy as possible, we won't really have succeeded.
And so what Joseph was speaking about, synchronous composability and near synchronous composability across private permission networks and layer two networks and layer one is essentially the holy grail that.
comes close to completing the Ethereum roll-up centric roadmap vision where we can have scalability and modularity where things can be in their right place and still they can benefit from the full security guarantees and the rigorous decentralization of the Ethereum protocol, even if they're sitting on a private permission network.
And so you can...
coming to a wallet or a browser near you six, nine, 12 months from now.
Joe, let's build on that idea.
You've spoken about this a little bit, but you said you're a decentralization maximalist.
Vitalik recently said he wants the Ethereum Foundation to just be a node among nodes in the governance of Ethereum.
Now that we have these new organizations, do you think that we have all the nodes that we need?
Are there new nodes that you'd like to see built out?
Or how do you just see the evolution of Ethereum's governance going forward from here?
Evolving.
I guess I'm not of the belief that I or anybody can top down design it or control it.
And so all these complexities keep popping up in human society and humans are really good at solving them.
And we're going to get so much more capable as machine intelligence supercharges all of us.
Joseph Shalom.
See, when I worked at BlackRock, Joe Shalom was just what I called him.
It was always two words together.
John, we did this to confuse you.
We did this to confuse you.
This was a grand scheme going back 60 years ago.
Well, it's worked out beautifully.
Joe, Shalom, you've spoken a lot about the coopetition between Bitmine and Sharplink.
I'd love to hear about the relationship with Bitmine here.
You touched on this a little bit, but at the top of the letterheads for Ethereum Institutional and ETH Labs, Bitmine's name is right next to Sharplink's.
What's that relationship like?
And then I'd like to hear from you also about this coopetition, right?
Like these are not all these foundations, ETH Labs, ETH Institutional, Ethereum Foundation.
They're not all the same entity.
There, you know, theoretically could be some tension between them in terms of strategic vision or activity.
What would you like to see there?
What does a healthy coopetition look like in this ecosystem?
Well, I think in the Ethereum digital asset treasury ecosystem, I use that word going back to, I think, late July.
The idea that there were six or seven Ethereum digital asset treasuries who had launched last summer and fall.
who were competing for capital, they were competing for talent, they were competing to accumulate ETH.
But at the same time, they had a very common mission, the idea that they all collectively believed with conviction that there's a massive Ethereum opportunity out there, a multi-decade opportunity.
And we were all set up with the idea of giving people access to that opportunity.
I think as you've seen the ecosystem evolve, there are two or three of us left.
who've been able to get scale, build trust with investors.
Several DATs have fallen away, have essentially changed their strategy to do other things.
Our relationship with BitMine is actually very positive and very strong on both the institutional level.
We were able to collaborate to, along with Joe Lubin, fund these two organizations, announce it, agree on the governance frameworks.
They're going to be not for profit.
They're going to be controlled and independent.
They're going to be neutral.
But at the same time, to realize that we actually have more in common than we have apart.
We speak on a relatively frequent basis.
We appear on panels together.
And I would say it's as positive as it can be.
among people who have the same mission, who are competing for the same investors.
So I think it's at this point become more cooperation than competition.
But at the same time, we each have our shareholders and we have different swim lanes.
We have chosen to be at Sharplink, the more institutionally focused at, and we have a super clean balance sheet and we're doing the right things for our shareholders.
And despite the downturn and consolidation in price, We haven't done anything to deviate from our core principles.
But yes, it's coopetition, but I think the cooperation is more positive than people could even imagine.
Joe, I'd love your take because many times it's three of us on these calls.
Yeah.
If you look at all the things that Sharpling cares about and that BitMine cares about, I would say 90% of them are aligned.
It's all about growing the Ethereum ecosystem, growing the value of the Ether token, and that ramifies very positively for our shareholders and theirs.
Joe Lubin, I wanted to ask you a question.
As you said, this conversation has been very focused on institutions, but Ethereum is still very much a grassroots project.
And we recently crossed a milestone of 1 million developers.
contributions to the code in the Ethereum ecosystem.
And I wanted to get your thought about this.
You tweeted about this, I believe, but what's the significance of this milestone to you personally as one of Ethereum's earliest developers?
And what does this mean for Ethereum overall?
Well, it's a tremendous milestone.
Our friends at Electric Capital.
source that fact and pointed it out.
And so we've been leaning into talking about that a little bit a few years ago at the Osaka DevCon.
One of the things I said in my keynote was that we should make it a goal to have a million Ethereum developers.
We looked at the world at that point and there were 30 something million developers in different languages and in different disciplines around the world.
And so we thought that was a nice round number to put the call out.
We were already the dominant developer ecosystem in the blockchain space.
And years later, we continue to be.
I think we will remain and grow our dominance.
Yeah.
Okay, great.
That's very helpful.
I want to ask both of you this question because I think both will have different answers to this, and I'd really be curious to hear this.
The Glampsterdam upgrade is coming to Ethereum sometime in Q3 of 2026.
I don't believe that there's a firm date set yet, and we don't have to go into a deep dive on Glampsterdam right now, but I'd really like to hear your thoughts about what you're most excited about from this upgrade.
What is this going to unlock?
The biggest upgrade since the merge, a lot of people are calling us that.
It decentralizes block building.
It introduces parallel processing.
curious what are you most excited about from the glamson upgrade what does that unlock for ethereum and for sharplink uh joe lubin you want to start with this one uh sure um so first uh we continue on our drumbeat uh to grow scalability uh so so moving uh again another 3x uh down the road on an annual basis uh is huge But I think the parallelism, you know, the two big headliner EIPs, block-linked access list, does enable a lot of efficiencies in the protocol, and it will enable very significant additional scalability.
And so you hinted at it when you know where all the potential conflicts are in terms of accessing data that could be overwritten in a single block.
What you can do is make sure that even if you start to do a lot of things in parallel, they can be architected and sequenced so that there are no collisions and you don't have to redo that work.
So we've been solving a lot of other problems in the protocol.
And there have been lots of calls to parallelize things.
We've actually done a little parallelization at consensus in our Basu execution client.
But it's time.
We can now get increasingly parallelized.
And there are so many different dimensions that we're going to be able to scale the protocol on.
And enshrined proposal builder separation is really great for taking a bunch of things that were off chain and not in the protocol and required trust assumptions and bringing them under the tent and into the protocol and doing things right.
And so whenever it's going to happen.
again and again because the theorem needs to keep evolving to stay relevant and to get more and more capable and scalable.
So whenever we identify things that emerge because an itch needs to be scratched or a problem needs to be solved, we're going to go ahead and do that, solve the problem.
And then if that introduces things that are concerning at all, then we can Take a careful look at that and bring it into a decentralized configuration inside the protocol.
Joe Shlom, anything you want to add to that?
I just think, so Joe was referring to EPBS or enshrined proposer builder separation.
The fact that it moves coordination from the protocol and directly into the protocol instead of relying on these third party.
relays it actually really helps avoid validator concentration and centralization it also allows block propagation periods to be longer and if you contrast ethereum with some of the other chains ethereum has over a million validators whilst and is becoming essentially more diversified and less reliant on them as a centralized player That's very different than what you see on Solana.
It's certainly very different than what you see on Canton.
So this is really, really important.
Ethereum is already leading in this way.
And you don't want to be running on a blockchain that has validator centralization.
And this is going to be really, really helpful to avoid that when you already have the highest level of diversification.
of validators out there.
So when you speak to institutions, I need to do a better job translating this into English because what you're basically saying is don't go from vendor lock-in to validator lock-in or validator centralization.
This is the economic security engine and the benefit that Ethereum brings.
The Ethereum Foundation wrote an amazing piece last week.
It was 70 plus pages written in almost plain English.
for institutions and governments.
And when they call out, it would take a central single party over $50 billion of ETH ownership to threaten the Ethereum security model.
No other blockchain is as close.
So Glamsterdam is going to be huge and it's going to be reinforcing the advantages that Ethereum already has over its competitors and certainly over the current financial rails.
Really helpful context on that, Joshalim.
I read that piece over the 4th of July weekend.
I thought that was fantastic.
So if anybody hasn't read that piece, it's 71 pages of just riveting information about why Ethereum is going to win.
I want to end this with a conversation around ETH, the asset, because I think that this, you know, both of you have allured to this, and I think it's well known.
The frustration in price action has been a big source of just people rage quitting or just in general losing patience and getting frustrated.
Vitalik said something recently I thought was really insightful.
in reference to Ethereum's crops, the values, the principles of Ethereum.
He said the principles don't matter until people benefit from them.
And I'd love to hear both of you comment on how these organizations and these efforts that we're seeing in the ETH ecosystem are going to make all these properties that Ethereum has beneficial to people and then tie that back to how this is going to drive value to ETH the asset.
I know you're both tired of this question, but I think it's the most important one right now.
And I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.
Joe Lubin, would you like to begin with this one?
Sure.
The principles do matter.
They matter at all times because you don't know exactly when you're going to need the system to behave in a way, in a principled way, essentially.
And so I understand what Vitalik was trying to say there.
He was trying to say that you all just watch.
We're going to need this stuff very soon.
And so in terms of price action, if you think about the fact that it was 20 cents a little over 10 years ago, and if you think about the fact that it is a profound transformation in the way trust operates on the planet.
So we're going from living in a society that operated top down command and control for millennia.
And we are proposing to replace that with a bottom-up decentralized trust infrastructure.
And we're proposing to do that at scale where not just all the web, but all of the traditional economy can benefit from this technology.
We've had to overbuild.
And it's not that we have nearly enough.
block space because we're going to need so much more.
But we do now have elastic mechanisms that will enable us to add more and more block space over time.
And so the Ethereum Developers, core developers essentially ceded pricing power to the roll-up-centric roadmap and to the roll-ups, and that was good.
It enabled the technology to establish itself in some different forms.
The ZK form is incredibly powerful, and that's going to be the way forward for both Layer 2s, for private permission networks that can now actually participate along with Layer 2s and Layer 1 in orchestrated transaction sets, and it's going to essentially saturate the layer one protocol.
And so when we get to the point where there are a lot more transactions and they're coming from the TradFi direction and they're coming from the machine intelligence direction.
And the sort of native organic DGEN direction will continue to build and will continue to innovate.
And so we need recognition from outside of our ecosystem and utilization from outside of our ecosystem in order to make our system much more valuable and relevant.
And that's going to, at some point soon, start to eat up a lot of block space.
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.
Well, it will all be very clear at some point within the next.
Two years, maybe, maybe a little longer.
Joe Shalom, would you like to build on that?
Ether is the best money in the world.
Anything to add to that?
The highest power of money.
Well, I agree with Joe.
That's the economic thesis that there's no Ethereum without Ether.
There's no Ether without Ethereum.
And as transaction volumes come, there'll be more demand for Ether and it will be that trust commodity that institutions need to have.
And even if you look at Robinhood selecting Arbitrum as their L2 to power their crypto platform, they derive security from mainnet Ethereum and the transaction gas is paid with ETH.
So these things are really good for the ecosystem.
I think the roll-up seeded intentionally a lot of the economic value to drive more transactions and throughput.
The good news is the market share is there.
Like any other chain would trade hands with Ethereum in an instant to get that level of market share.
And if you believe in these three things that are three or four things that are coming, more stablecoin activity, the money layer, more tokenized assets going from tens of billions to tens of trillions, the asset exposure layer and DeFi being.
the layer at which transactions happen for both humans institutions and autonomous machine intelligence and agentic agents the demand is going to be there the level of transaction volumes that we anticipate again i don't know if it's next quarter or a year from now are going to be much more significant and that's going to drive demand for ether which today is at a depressed price but it's quite ironic having the short-term consolidation in price when the long-term outlook for demand is so high.
Last week, I did an interview with Roger Basin, who's the head of digital assets for Franklin Templeton, and he's been at that firm for nearly 40 years.
And he said something that resonated a lot with what you just said, Joe.
He said that all of our business is based on trust.
And I said in my debate with David Hoffman about why he sold his Ethereum that all the finance is downstream of trust and faith.
And I think that this is one of the reasons why, like Vitalik says, crops are so important, people will benefit from them.
That brings capital, pristine assets, users, and it creates an economy.
So I think we'll see how that continues to play out.
But that's, I think, how we got here and how we go forward.
I want to ask about how you all are thinking about measuring success.
Because, you know, Joe Shalom, I've heard you make reference to the scoreboard.
Joe Lubin, I think you have other ways of measuring success for this network and for this asset.
Is it the price of the Ether token?
Is it the adoption, the developers?
Is it the price of SBET?
Is it all of these things?
How do you go about measuring success here?
What does that look like in your mind?
We started with Joe Lubin a few times.
Joe Shalom, let's start with you on this one.
Sure.
So you can't disconnect Sharplink from the Ethereum ecosystem and the Ethereum opportunity.
So for me, it's three things in the Ethereum ecosystem.
It's growing the pie.
It's not just having 50% of each of these food groups and maintaining that market share.
It's maintaining or growing that market share in a pie that's about to get much, much larger.
And if you take a step back and you look at the crypto ecosystem, probably has about a $2.5 trillion market cap.
That is not the TAM.
The target market is...
measured in tens, if not hundreds of trillions just for capital markets.
So it's Ethereum growing its market share in a rapidly growing market.
Again, I use the analogy of Jeff Bezos.
He wasn't here trying to dominate bookselling.
He was building a new market structure for all of commerce.
And people who thought he was losing money selling books missed the big picture and missed out on 1000x.
So from an Ethereum perspective, It's that.
I also think that builders and talent are critical to the long-term success of a business, of an ecosystem, especially for the trust that we expect.
And one of the reasons why ETH Labs and Ethereum Institutional were set up were, on the one hand, not to lose the density of talent that Ethereum has, but they'll end up being magnets.
So the second measure is that these institutions are actually wildly successful in attracting the best talent, paying for performance, and then shipping out new capabilities and then implementing those capabilities.
And the final thing from a Sharpling perspective, we have a North Star, which is not accumulation of ETH at all costs.
We own about a billion and a half dollars, a little over a billion and a half dollars of ETH today, the second largest public holder.
Our goal is to put more and more ETH in every share of Sharpling.
And we do that through raising capital accretively.
And we do that by making our ETH productive and putting it back in the treasury.
In the future, we'll build operating businesses that will be ETH aligned, generate revenue or ETH that we can use to accumulate as well.
So I think we need to avoid the short-termism.
I think we need to avoid funding other people and protocols and network.
The amount of prosperity and economic activity that this...
ecosystem is going to help support, is going to blow people away.
So you've got to be positive, even though sometimes in the short run, it looks like we're in a very consolidated cycle.
Joe Lubin, how do you measure success?
The internet was invented decades ago as a military and academic technology.
Tim Berners-Lee in 1989 introduced the web technologies to the world that they evolved over the next.
decade or so there were these companies called interactive companies or internet companies, Razorfish, etc.
that started building websites for traditional companies and they brought some traditional companies onto the web, e-commerce, mobile, social, etc.
of all things and essentially There were internet companies and now every company is an internet company.
And so digital asset treasury companies are figuring out how to hold digital assets on balance sheet and do interesting and powerful things with digital assets from the perspective of their treasury.
But increasingly, everybody is going to become a digital asset.
company or every company will and so uh when it becomes clear uh that uh all roads flow to and through the Ethereum network and Ethereum technology, then I think we will have succeeded.
Joe Lubin, CEO of ConsenSys.
Joe Shalom, CEO of Sharplink.
Thank you both so much for being on the Milk Road Show.
I'm going to have to end us here because otherwise I'm going to get fired for going way over time.
But I would love to welcome both of you back anytime to continue this conversation as this starts to play out and we see some of the impact that these organizations are making.
But in the meantime, where can we send people to find more of you and your work online?
Joe Lubin, where can we?
send people to find you twitter ethereum joseph and joe shalom how about you uh sharplink.com and twitter at joe shalom thank you both so much for being on the milk road show i look forward to continuing the conversation next time thanks john thanks john And thank you all for joining us.
I hope you all learned something today.
We covered a lot of ground, so I certainly hope you did.
But until next time, stay safe, stay educated, stay bullish, and I will see you all in the next episode of The Milk Road Show.
Thanks for being here, everyone.
Bye.
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