Why Ethereum Is Done Being 'Bitcoin’s Little Brother,' Says $1.3B Sharplink CEO

For years, Ethereum has lived in Bitcoin’s shadow — treated as the experimental sibling to the all-important "digital gold."

But if there were ever a time when that narrative might be ripe for reversal, it's now, according to one CEO who spent two decades at BlackRock, including the last few years leading the strategy for digital assets.

On the main stage at ETHDenver, Joseph Chalom explained why the tokenization trend that's already underway should catapult the Ethereum ecosystem forward this year.

“It's an infuriating narrative that we're only a portion of what Bitcoin is,” Chalom said during the fireside chat with Coinage. “We need to stop being the little brother of Bitcoin.”

By managing about $1.3 billion in Ethereum at Sharplink, one of the largest treasury companies in the world, Chalom noted an acceleration in Wall Street understanding the power of removing intermediaries across the financial stack. (Indeed, that is very much part of the reason why Chalom jumped ship from BlackRock to take the role at Sharplink.) And from his vantage point, the next phase of crypto isn’t about speculation — it’s about proving Ethereum’s intrinsic value as the rails for a new financial and digital economy.

“Last year was about reinventing the idea of a digital asset treasury, not for Bitcoin, but for a productive asset like ETH,” he said. Unlike Bitcoin, Ethereum generates yield through staking and DeFi, opening the door to treasury models that are less about hoarding and more about deploying capital into the ecosystem. Chalom argues that simply accumulating ETH isn’t the point. The real metric is how effectively that capital compounds.

"I think there's right now a significant lack of liquidity in the entire ecosystem," he explained, noting that Sharplink is looking to lead the way in deploying its ETH to add value to various ecosystem projects. "We need to do it in a benevolent way — not like a hedge fund, not like a short-term investor — but someone who actually has a vested interest in ETH going up and the Ethereum ecosystem growing up."

Sharplink has been experimenting with longer-duration deployments of ETH into DeFi. One example Chalom pointed to was working with Linea, EtherFi and others to create an enhanced yield tied to locking up ETH for longer, noting that Sharplink did things "differently because we're trying to raise standards."

"We committed this capital for multiple years — so the idea of putting the 'L' in 'TVL,' which is good for the protocols," he said.

Even so, the disconnect between Ethereum’s growing adoption and its price performance continues to frustrate investors. Chalom’s response was blunt: Stop benchmarking ETH against Bitcoin altogether. As a blockchain built to better capture the trend of more offchain assets being brought onchain, Ethereum shouldn't just be valued by discounting a percentage against Bitcoin's total market cap.

“I think a better way to think about ETH is that it has genuinely intrinsic value,” he said, pointing to sites like ETHval.com that track metrics like gas fees, and onchain revenue as more meaningful valuation anchors.

While tipping his cap to Michael Saylor and Strategy for pioneering the digital asset treasury company framework, Chalom argued that the playbook for Ethereum is entirely different for Sharplink.

“[ETH] is natively productive. You could just stake it, secure the ecosystem.” That permanence, he argues, creates an opportunity to deploy ETH in ways that strengthen the ecosystem rather than extract value from it. As Wall Street wakes up and tokenizes their operations, Chalom is confident that likely spills over into other sectors.

"I had a front row seat for 20 years on a broken ecosystem — the exact opposite ecosystem of Ethereum. It wasn't programmable. It wasn't decentralized. It settled in 1 to 3 days," he said. "I'm going to share something controversial, which is I do think we need to prove it in finance, and if you can prove it in finance, you can prove it in almost any other governance setting."

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