As Bankless co-founder David Hoffman's confessional article about dumping his entire ETH stack racked up 1.8 million views and stirred intense debate across the Ethereum community, Sharplink (Nasdaq: SBET), the second-largest publicly traded ETH treasury holder, decided to speak out. Sharplink holds approximately 868,000 ETH, valued at nearly $1.8 billion at the time, second only to BitMine. On May 30, CEO Joseph Chalom published a long-form article titled "Ethereum Going Back on Offense," aiming to restore confidence among ETH holders. Chalom opened by stating that the current controversies surrounding the Ethereum Foundation (EF) and the noise from price fluctuations are masking the bigger picture: Ethereum is the frontrunner to become the financial infrastructure of the next decade.
EF Focuses on the Core, Laying the Groundwork for Institutional Trust
Drawing on his two decades as a senior executive at BlackRock overseeing fintech and digital asset strategy, Chalom noted that he understands precisely what institutions require before deploying capital into new infrastructure. In the attributes that matter most—trust, security, and liquidity—Ethereum is already far ahead. The data supports this: Ethereum settles the majority of global stablecoin value; it hosts more tokenized real-world asset projects than any other blockchain; and it is the default venue for high-value DeFi transactions. These advantages are not accidental but the result of years of disciplined protocol development by the EF. Ethereum is the only blockchain to have successfully rolled out major upgrades at the base layer for a decade in a row—The Merge, EIP-1559, Dencun, Pectra, Fusaka—and the upcoming Glamsterdam upgrade promises another leap in scalability. Meanwhile, the EF is spearheading the industry's move toward quantum resistance, a roadmap Chalom calls the most ambitious in the space.
Decentralization Is a Feature, Not a Bug
To those critics who paint Ethereum's decentralization as a weakness, Chalom offered a sharp rebuttal. He argued that this view completely inverts institutional logic. Institutions do not lock themselves into a proprietary system just to migrate from one monopoly to another. They need assurance that the fundamental properties of the infrastructure cannot be arbitrarily altered by a centralized owner. Ethereum's ecosystem boasts more developers than any other blockchain, and the vast majority of them are not affiliated with the EF. This credible neutrality and decentralization is exactly why Ethereum is destined to become the global financial settlement layer. Chalom asserted that a foundation focused on security, privacy, quantum resistance, and core protocol is, every time, preferable to one optimized for short-term marketing.
An Amazon-Like Undervaluation with a TAM of the Entire Global Financial System
Chalom introduced a compelling analogy: Ethereum today is like Amazon when the dot-com bubble burst—a foundational innovation overlooked by many critics while trendier upstarts attracted the hype, only for the pessimists to be proven decisively wrong. He stressed that ETH's total addressable market is not crypto trading but the entire global financial system. As Standard Chartered has similarly noted, ETH's fundamentals and price performance are seriously disconnected. Ethereum's intrinsic value is tightly correlated with network expansion, and the network is approaching an inflection point of exponential transaction volume growth driven by stablecoins, tokenized real-world assets, DeFi, and the emerging wave of agentic finance. To secure such immense settlement volume, Ethereum will transform into a highly sought-after incentive layer and the ultimate trust infrastructure, and its monetary premium will rise accordingly.
Market Fear Is the Time to Buy
Chalom pointed out that for much of the past year, the Fear and Greed Index has signaled extreme fear. Historically, in almost every market cycle, the moments of peak retail capitulation and rock-bottom sentiment are precisely when disciplined capital positions itself for the next upturn. Warren Buffett built Berkshire Hathaway by buying quality assets during times of extreme pessimism—from GEICO in the 1970s to Bank of America and Goldman Sachs during the 2008 financial crisis. Chalom practiced this philosophy himself while leading BlackRock's digital asset strategy. After the FTX collapse, when most institutions were fleeing crypto exposure or delaying product launches, Chalom's team went the other way. They doubled down on infrastructure investment, deepened ecosystem partnerships, and launched products bridging traditional finance and crypto.
That experience taught him that the smartest investors buy quality assets when the market is most fearful, investing counter-cyclically rather than pro-cyclically.
The Ethereum Ecosystem Needs New Voices
While affirming that the EF is fulfilling its core mission, Chalom addressed the gaps openly. The EF will increasingly concentrate on an internal framework called CROPS (Censorship Resistance, Openness, Privacy, and Security), positioning Ethereum as "haven technology" rather than chasing raw scaling speed. The real issue, however, is a leadership vacuum in go-to-market, while institutions are broadly ready to embrace Ethereum. Chalom thus urged ecosystem stakeholders and participants to take a much larger role in shaping the narrative and driving institutional adoption.
Sharplink is already putting its weight behind the effort. The company is the first publicly traded firm to stake billions of dollars in ETH capital and has deployed hundreds of millions of dollars into high-quality DeFi protocols. It recently announced a $125 million DeFi yield fund together with Galaxy Digital to provide capital to existing and emerging protocols. Alongside fellow treasury and ecosystem guardians—BitMine's Tom Lee, Consensys's Joe Lubin, Etherealize, Nethermind, Aave, Morpho—Sharplink is working closely with the small EF team focused on institutional education and adoption. Chalom made clear that Sharplink and its allies will step up their advocacy and actively support the coming institutional adoption supercycle.