Inspired by Michael Saylor’s Bitcoin playbook, Joseph Lubin says Ethereum treasury companies can provide outsized returns on yield and investment opportunities to their Bitcoin counterparts.
Speaking exclusively to Cointelegraph at Token2049 in Singapore, the Ethereum co-founder unpacked his thesis for why Ether (ETH) digital asset treasuries (DATs) present superior opportunities to the Bitcoin (BTC) treasury movement popularized by Saylor’s Strategy Bitcoin play.
“I’d much rather have something that potentially has more impact. It certainly is as solid as Bitcoin, and I would argue more solid because of the functionality and the organic demand for it to pay for transactions and storage,” Lubin said.
The Ethereum co-founder was actively championing ETH DATs after he was appointed chairman of the ETH-based treasury company SharpLink Gaming.
The Nasdaq-listed iGaming company has bought more than $2 billion worth of Ether since adopting a treasury strategy in August.
Inspired by Michael Saylor
Lubin admitted that his impetus to head up an ETH treasury company was inspired by Saylor and his financial engineering constructs, which are based on Bitcoin as a reserve asset.
“I was fortunate enough to sit down and have dinner with him in December and heard his rationale for doing all that. It was basically about finding better treasury capital assets for his company,” Lubin said.
“I talked to my colleagues who immediately thought, it’s obvious that Ether would be a better treasury asset because it’s a productive yield-bearing asset.”
Lubin presented an optimistic outlook for Ethereum’s medium-term future. He described the ecosystem hitting its “broadband moment” in 2025, with the protocol more horizontally and vertically scalable and crying out for cheaper, abundant block space to be used.
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He added that Ethereum had scaled too quickly in the past 18 months, which left a “glut of block space” that simply didn’t have enough builders, applications and transactions to fill the void.
“I really thought that there were doldrums in our ecosystem. That was all about price because there was too much Ether and too much cheap block space,” Lubin said.
The solution? Start a movement of ETH DATs that aggressively acquire the underlying token of the protocol and actively stake and invest Ether.
“We thought maybe we could light a fire under the Ethereum ecosystem. And that’s worked out really nicely. We’ve got a few companies and we’re differentiating ourselves in exciting ways,” he said.
Supply-demand dynamics to boost Ether
The Ethereum DAT landscape is quickly growing, but it is dominated by two significant players: Lubin’s SharpLink and Tom Lee’s BitMine.
The latter is the proverbial whale. Driven by Lee’s fervent bull case for Ether, the company had acquired 2.65 million ETH as of Wednesday. Its holdings are worth $11 billion, far greater than SharpLink’s 839,636 ETH stack worth $3.69 billion.
Related: SharpLink Ether holdings near $1B in unrealized gains as ETH surges
Lubin told Cointelegraph that he had initially anticipated a sprint to accumulate ETH, but this has changed since Lee publicly set a target of acquiring 5% of Ether’s total monetary base.
“We weren’t thinking of a limit but we did think that we can’t accumulate too much ETH, otherwise there’d be pushback from the ecosystem.”
The long-term goal for Lubin is to grow the concentration of Ether per fully diluted share while protecting the price of the equity. Following that, SharpLink will aim to continue earning yield on its staked Ether.
Lubin envisions a future where SharpLink borrows against its ETH, invests in Ethereum-centric companies, and stakes in supporting protocols.
“The real opportunity is to be the Berkshire Hathaway of the next global economy, the more decentralized global economy.”
Weighing up the risks
The DAT movement will go down as one of the meta-narratives of 2025. However, skeptics remain concerned about the systemic risks that treasury companies are taking on by incurring significant debt to purchase protocol tokens.
Lubin played down any talk of a cataclysmic collapse caused by DATs, while cautioning against companies being over-leveraged.
“The biggest risk is not doing this kind of thing because it’s a profound new construct.”
Lubin anticipates the price of ETH increasing as supply-demand dynamics tighten, driven by ETH DAT buying.
“The financial industry is rushing into our ecosystem,” he said. “Other enterprises are rushing into our ecosystem. It’s our broadband moment. Everybody’s paying serious attention to what we’re doing. We’re not going to get out over our skis.”
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