Last week, Bankless co-founder David Hoffman publicly explained his decision to clear his entire ETH position, a post that racked up 1.8 million views on X and ignited intense debate within the Ethereum community. But not everyone shares the bearish sentiment. On May 30, Joseph Chalom, CEO of Sharplink (Nasdaq: SBET)—the second-largest publicly listed ETH treasury company, holding approximately 868,000 ETH worth nearly $1.8 billion—released a detailed article titled “Ethereum Going Back on Offense,” directly pushing back against the prevailing FUD.
Chalom argues that the noise around the Ethereum Foundation (EF) and ETH price volatility obscures the bigger picture. Drawing on his two decades as an executive at BlackRock, where he oversaw fintech and digital asset strategy, he knows what institutions prioritize before deploying capital: trust, security, and liquidity. On all three fronts, Ethereum leads by a wide margin.
The numbers back this up. Ethereum processes most of the world’s stablecoin value settlement; it hosts far more tokenized real-world asset projects than any other blockchain; and it serves as the default venue for high-value DeFi transactions. Chalom stresses this is no accident—it is the result of years of rigorous protocol development by the Ethereum Foundation. Ethereum is the only blockchain to deliver a decade-long series of major base-layer upgrades: The Merge, EIP-1559, Dencun, Pectra, Fusaka, and the upcoming Glamsterdam upgrade, which promises a quantum leap in scalability while steering the industry toward quantum resistance.
Addressing critics who view decentralization as a weakness, Chalom dismisses this as a fundamental misreading of institutional logic. Institutions don’t flee one proprietary system only to lock themselves into another. They need assurance that the underlying properties—immutability, credible neutrality—cannot be arbitrarily altered by a centralized owner. Ethereum’s decentralized and neutral architecture is precisely why it is the logical financial settlement layer of the future. Moreover, the majority of Ethereum’s developers are not employed by the EF, underscoring its distributed nature.
The Amazon Moment: An Undervalued Global Settlement Layer
Chalom draws a powerful parallel: Ethereum today resembles Amazon during the dot-com crash, when its stock plunged from $113 to under $6 and was written off by most market observers. Over the following two decades, Amazon leveraged its technological and infrastructure foundations to rebuild global retail and cloud computing. Similarly, Ethereum’s total addressable market (TAM) is not the multi-trillion-dollar crypto trading market, but the entire global financial system—payments, clearing, custody, and smart contract execution. Standard Chartered has previously made a similar argument, noting the stark disconnect between ETH’s fundamentals and its price. (Odaily note: Standard Chartered highlighted that on-chain activity and ETH price had rarely diverged so drastically.)
As stablecoins, tokenized real-world assets, DeFi, and the emerging wave of agentic finance continue to scale, Ethereum’s network transaction volume is poised for exponential growth. In that scenario, Ethereum becomes the incentive layer and ultimate trust infrastructure for all financial flows, and ETH’s monetary premium will expand accordingly. The current market’s undervaluation, Chalom contends, presents a rare window for long-term positioning.
Buy When There’s Blood in the Streets
Chalom invokes Warren Buffett’s contrarian wisdom: buying quality assets when sentiment is at its worst. He points to Buffett’s purchases of GEICO in the 1970s and heavy bets on Bank of America and Goldman Sachs during the 2008 financial crisis. Over the past year, the Fear & Greed Index has hovered in extreme fear territory, signaling retail capitulation—historically the best time for disciplined capital to enter. During the crypto winter following FTX’s collapse, when most institutions retreated from crypto exposure or delayed product launches, Chalom recalls how BlackRock did the opposite, doubling down on infrastructure investment and building bridges between traditional finance and the digital asset world.
The Ethereum Foundation, Chalom notes, is now sharpening its focus on the CROPS framework—prioritizing censorship resistance, openness, privacy, and security—transforming Ethereum into a “safe haven technology.” But marketing and institutional adoption cannot rest on the Foundation alone. Chalom calls on the broader ecosystem to step up, naming Sharplink, BitMine, Consensys, Etherealize, Nethermind, Aave, Morpho, and others that are already taking action. Sharplink itself has staked billions of dollars in ETH and, together with Galaxy Digital, launched a $125 million DeFi yield fund to fuel ecosystem development.
“We can and will do more—to serve as a vocal advocate for Ethereum and actively support the coming institutional adoption supercycle,” Chalom concludes. For investors rattled by short-term ETH swings, this institutional view grounded in fundamentals provides the clarity they need.
Related reading: “Bankless Co-Founder Clears ETH Holdings: Ethereum Did the Right Thing, but ‘ETH as Money’ Has No Future”