Why Ethereum’s Supercycle Has Finally Started, Says Sharplink CEO

Ethereum has spent most of the year losing the price-action battle. AI has sucked oxygen out of the broader risk trade and even Bitcoin has outperformed it despite fears around Strategy finally selling its monumental stash.

But according to Sharplink CEO Joseph Chalom, that is exactly why investors may be missing the bigger story.

In Chalom’s view, Ethereum is not waiting for its next era to begin. It has already started. The only thing that has not caught up yet is the price.

“I would go as far as to say that I think we're in a new era of Ethereum,” Chalom told Coinage, pointing to the network’s 11th anniversary since its first block in July 2015. “We're at the beginning of an institutional supercycle.”

It's a bold claim at a moment when ETH is still lagging Bitcoin and investor sentiment around digital asset treasury companies has sharply cooled. But Chalom argues the market is looking at the wrong scoreboard. Instead of judging Ethereum solely by daily candles, he says investors should be watching the institutional infrastructure forming around it, the use cases already moving onchain, and the growing realization that the Ethereum Foundation is no longer the only steward of the ecosystem.

“For almost a decade, Ethereum's core work was done, and it lived almost entirely within the Ethereum Foundation,” Chalom said. “That era is slowly beginning to end, not because the foundation failed… But actually, because it succeeded and the network has essentially outgrown a single steward.”

Last month, Sharplink joined fellow Ethereum digital asset treasury company Bitmine in backing a new R&D entity called Ethlabs. It joins a swath of external groups like Etherealize and the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, which all seek to help grow institutional adoption of Ethereum. On top of that, Sharplink also backed Ethereum Institutional, a non-profit group seeking to codify Ethereum as the base layer for institutional finance.

“One is advancing the protocol, one is bringing it to institutions,” Chalom said. “And we and others hold that productive asset, while at the same time, the Ethereum Foundation is here to protect the principles and the core. These are complementary. They're not competing. And together, they're the new architecture of the new era of Ethereum.”

In tandem, Chalom believes these entities can help continue to drive a lead Ethereum has stacked on the rest of crypto in key areas, like stablecoins, tokenized real-world assets, DeFi credit markets, and agentic payments. His argument is that Ethereum already owns the most important use cases in crypto — even if the market is not rewarding ETH for it yet.

Perhaps the clearest example of this is Ethereum's leading market share of the overall stablecoin market, with roughly 55% of stablecoins being settled in the Ethereum ecosystem. Tokenization, he argued, is still only in “the top of the second inning,” but is now moving from isolated experiments into a race among major institutions to bring entire asset classes onchain.

The same goes for DeFi. After a series of security and configuration failures hurt confidence in the sector, Chalom said the more mature players are beginning to prove themselves as the credit layer for tokenized real-world assets. He specifically pointed to Aave and Morpho as examples of DeFi protocols that are starting to look less like speculative crypto apps and more like infrastructure for collateral, lending, and execution.

Then there is the emerging AI angle. Chalom stopped short of saying SharpLink itself would become an agentic AI company, but he argued the market is underestimating the transaction volume that could come from AI agents paying other AI agents.

“We saw in Q1 about 160 million micro payment transactions through agent-to-agent using X402,” Chalom said, referring to an open-source micropayments capability. “Most of that is happening in the Ethereum ecosystem.”

Those transactions are still small, but Chalom believes they could become larger and more frequent as autonomous agents begin executing more tasks and payments onchain. If that happens, he said, the activity could “drive significant volume into the Ethereum ecosystem and suck up some block space,” which would ultimately be positive for ETH.

That is the use-case side of how Chalom sees Ethereum treasury companies evolving. Unlike what Michael Saylor may have pioneered with Strategy leveraging Bitcoin, Chalom says Sharplink most stands to benefit by what's built on top of Ethereum.

Sharplink’s pitch is not simply that it owns ETH. It is that ETH can be staked, deployed into liquid staking protocols, and used in DeFi strategies without the company needing to lever up its balance sheet. Chalom contrasted that with Bitcoin treasury companies, where productivity generally requires financial engineering.

“If you want to actually be productive with Bitcoin, you have to lever up and financialize your balance sheet,” Chalom said. “Ethereum doesn't need to do that. You can make your ETH productive without taking on leverage.”

That distinction has become more important as Strategy’s own capital structure has come under pressure. Chalom said there are two major overhangs on crypto right now. The first is the AI trade, which has pulled liquidity away from other risk assets. The second is the market’s growing concern around Strategy’s daily announcements, preferred stock structure, convertible debt management, and the possibility that balance sheet assets may need to be sold to fund obligations.

“I do think there's an overhang right now in this ecosystem,” Chalom said, pointing to “these daily announcements you're seeing out of Strategy” and the need to raise enough cash to buy back convertible bonds or pay dividends on preferred stock. By contrast, Chalom said SharpLink has kept its balance sheet simpler. For now, the company has stuck with common stock rather than preferred shares or other more complex instruments.

“We at Sharplink have kept a cleaner balance sheet,” he said. “We've decided to this point, not to say we won't, to keep our balance sheet just common stock.”

What Ethereum Catalysts Come Next?

Chalom’s optimism also extends to Ethereum’s technical roadmap. He singled out three areas he believes are being underappreciated: throughput improvements, privacy, and synchronous composability.

The last one may be the least understood and the most important. Today, a complex transaction involving Ethereum mainnet, an Ethereum layer two, and another chain like Solana may require separate transactions across separate environments. Those transactions can settle at different times and fail independently. Chalom said advances in synchronous composability could allow those actions to be read once, executed together, and written into a single block.

“For me, the number one thing that excites me is synchronous composability of transactions,” Chalom said. “It'll be the number one UX step up.”

In plain English, that would make Ethereum feel less fragmented. Users would not have to think as much about which chain or layer they are touching. Institutions could execute more complex collateral, trading, and settlement flows without the same operational friction. Chalom also pointed to privacy improvements and quantum-resistant work as reasons he believes Ethereum is preparing for institutional demands that were dismissed as impossible only a few years ago.

That technical progress matters because Chalom expects the second half of the year to bring a step-function increase in tokenization.

He said the current market for tokenized assets sits around $31 billion, with a large share concentrated in Treasuries, yield products, and money market-style funds. But he sees the next stage moving beyond crypto-native experiments into existing multi-billion-dollar funds and broader equity markets.

When Chalom was at BlackRock, he helped launch BUIDL as a tokenized U.S. dollar yield fund from zero. Now, he sees major asset managers looking to tokenize existing funds rather than only creating new onchain products. He also pointed to Franklin Templeton and Ondo-style tokenized ETF strategies as signs that traditional finance is moving more aggressively.

The bigger unlock, in his view, is tokenized equities. Chalom said the market may have overemphasized the idea a few years ago when the focus was on tokenizing one stock at a time. Now, he sees a path toward entire categories of public equities moving onchain.

He cited Bullish’s acquisition of Equiniti as an example of that shift. Rather than tokenizing a single asset, the bet is that infrastructure could eventually support tokenization across thousands of U.S.-listed equities and allow them to trade in a 24/7 environment.

“What I'm looking forward to are step function increases,” Chalom said, “going from launching small funds or tokenizing individual funds or equities to seeing large swaths of asset classes become tokenized.”

Put together, that is why Chalom believes Ethereum’s supercycle has already started. The market may still be trading ETH like a lagging risk asset. But the infrastructure around Ethereum is changing, the institutional use cases are accelerating, and the ecosystem is no longer relying on a single foundation to push everything forward.

Chalom is not offering a short-term price target. But he did make clear that he thinks the risk-reward has shifted.

“I'm not in the business of giving short term price predictions,” he said. “But I actually think in the Ethereum space, the risk reward of buying ether today at this price around $1700 may never have been better given the tailwinds that we're seeing in the ecosystem.”

Whether that changes in August, October, or later, Chalom said, is not the point. The point is that the pieces are already moving.

“The trend is here,” he said, “and the supercycle has started.”

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