This week, Bankless co-founder David Hoffman’s candid confession about liquidating his ETH holdings garnered 1.8 million views on X, sending ripples through the Ethereum community. Amid the uproar, Sharplink (Nasdaq: SBET)—the second-largest publicly listed ETH treasury company with approximately 868,000 ETH worth nearly $1.8 billion—stepped forward. On May 30, CEO Joseph Chalom published a lengthy piece titled “Ethereum Going Back on Offense,” aimed at restoring confidence among ETH holders.
Before leading Sharplink, Chalom spent two decades as a senior executive at BlackRock, overseeing fintech and digital asset strategy. This background gives him a firsthand understanding of what institutions require before allocating capital to new infrastructure. He wastes no time cutting through the noise: the debates swirling around the Ethereum Foundation (EF) and ETH’s price volatility obscure a much larger picture. In his view, Ethereum has already won on the attributes that matter most for institutional adoption—trust, security, and liquidity—and the results delivered over the past decade are what will ultimately define the financial infrastructure of the next ten years.
Ethereum’s Fundamentals Are Deeply Undervalued
Chalom lets the data speak. Ethereum settles the majority of global stablecoin value; it hosts more tokenized real-world asset projects than any other blockchain by a wide margin; and it remains the default venue for high-value DeFi transactions. These advantages are no accident—they are the fruit of rigorous protocol development by the EF. Ethereum is the only blockchain to have successfully delivered major upgrades at the base layer for ten consecutive years: The Merge, EIP-1559, Dencun, Pectra, Fusaka, and the forthcoming Glamsterdam upgrade, which promises step-change scalability while the EF leads the industry toward a post-quantum era. This is the most ambitious technical roadmap in crypto.
To critics who frame Ethereum’s decentralization as a weakness, Chalom counters that this argument inverts institutional logic. No foundation should control a blockchain entirely, and institutions will not lock themselves into a proprietary system merely to migrate from another one. They need confidence that the fundamental properties they rely on won’t be altered at will by a centralized owner. Ethereum’s credible neutrality is precisely what makes it a viable settlement layer for global finance—these are not flaws.
He draws an explicit parallel to Amazon during the dot-com bust: foundational innovation was overlooked as flashier newcomers stole the limelight, but the true value eventually prevailed. Standard Chartered has made a similar comparison, highlighting the severe divergence between ETH’s fundamentals and its price.
The Discipline of Contra-Cyclical Investing
Chalom elaborates on the virtue of contra-cyclical positioning. In almost every market cycle, the moment when retail capitulation peaks and sentiment hits rock bottom is precisely when disciplined capital should deploy. Warren Buffett built Berkshire by purchasing quality assets at times of maximum pessimism—GEICO in the 1970s, Bank of America and Goldman Sachs during the 2008 crisis. For much of the past year, the Fear & Greed Index has registered extreme fear, and the smartest investors buy quality assets when the crowd is terrified.
He recalls the crypto winter following FTX’s collapse, when most institutions scaled back BTC and ETH exposure or shelved product launches. At BlackRock, his team did the opposite: they doubled down, invested in infrastructure, forged ecosystem partnerships, and built products bridging traditional finance with crypto. The lesson is clear.
The Ecosystem Needs New Voices to Drive Institutional Adoption
In the latter part of his essay, Chalom acknowledges that the EF is fulfilling its core mandate. Going forward, it will focus more sharply on the CROPS framework—prioritizing censorship resistance, openness, privacy, and security to make Ethereum a “haven technology.” The real gap, he argues, lies in go-to-market leadership, even as institutions broadly want to embrace Ethereum.
He calls on ecosystem stakeholders and participants to take a more active role in shaping Ethereum’s narrative. Since last summer, a coalition of digital asset treasury companies and core guardians—Sharplink, BitMine’s Tom Lee, Consensys’s Joe Lubin, Etherealize, Nethermind, Aave, Morpho, EEA, and others—has stepped up institutional education, working closely with small teams inside the EF dedicated to institutional onboarding.
Sharplink itself is a case in point. It became the first company to stake billions of dollars in ETH capital and has deployed hundreds of millions into high-quality DeFi protocols. Its recently announced $125 million DeFi yield fund with Galaxy Digital will channel capital into both established and emerging protocols. Chalom pledges that Sharplink will do even more, actively advocating for Ethereum and proactively supporting the approaching institutional adoption supercycle.
It’s worth noting that while David Hoffman’s confession resonated deeply, his piece also acknowledged that Ethereum has done many things right—the issue, in his view, is that the “ETH as money” thesis has no future. Chalom’s response, from an institutional lens, offers the opposite conviction: ETH’s intrinsic value is tightly coupled with network expansion, and as torrents of stablecoins, tokenized RWAs, DeFi, and agentic finance flow across Ethereum, it will become the ultimate trust infrastructure, with its monetary premium crystallizing accordingly. Juxtaposed against Hoffman’s thesis, Chalom’s argument forces every ETH holder to re-examine their position from a wider institutional perspective.