Sharplink, Inc.

Good morning everyone and thank you for participating in today's conference call to discuss Sharplink's financial and operating results for the year ended December 31st, 2025. By now, everyone should have access to the full year 2025 earnings press release, which was issued this morning at approximately 8 o'clock Eastern Time. This release is available in the Investor Relations section of Sharplink's website. This call will also be available for webcast replay on the company's website. Following management's remarks, we'll open up the call for Q&A. I'll now hand the call over to Sharplink's Vice President of Business and Legal Affairs, Dodie Handy, for introductory comments.

Thank you, Operator. Please see Sharplink's annual report on Form 10-K filed last Friday afternoon with the SEC and the earnings press release which crossed this morning. These documents list some of the factors that may cause the results of Sharplink to differ materially from what we say today and which identify risks and uncertainties that could affect our business, prospects, and future results. Sharplink ascends no duty and does not undertake to update any forward-looking statements. Any forward-looking statement made by us during this call is based only on information currently available to us and speaks only as of the date when it is made. In addition, we may be discussing or providing certain metrics today, such as ETH per share, that are not GAAP metrics. Please see our earnings press release and SEC filings for further information regarding these metrics. To set the agenda for today's call, we will begin with Sharplinks Chairman, Co-Founder of Ethereum, and Founder and CEO of ConsenSys, Joseph Lubin. Joe will be providing a broader perspective on Ethereum's continued evolution and institutional adoption shaping the digital asset economy. Next, SharpLink's Chief Executive Officer, Joseph Shalom, will discuss the company's strategy and execution as an institutional-grade ETH treasury platform, including key accomplishments from the full year and our priorities looking ahead. Finally, our Chief Financial Officer, Bob DeLuccia, will review Sharplink's results for the year ended December 31, 2025, and key performance metrics related to our ETH Treasury. So, with that said, I'd now like to turn the call over to Sharplink's Chairman of the Board, Joseph Loving. Joe, the floor is yours.

Thank you, Dodie, and good morning, everyone. As Dodie mentioned, I'm the Chairman of Sharplink. co-founder of Ethereum and founder and CEO of ConsenSys. I've been involved with Ethereum since its inception, and I want to start by grounding today's discussion in what has fundamentally changed and why 2025 represented a decisive moment in Ethereum's evolution. This journey has not been and will not be linear. We can't ignore the price volatility is present, but it does not negate progress. Volatility is a feature of new financial architectures, particularly in their formative years. ETH is a foundational element of a startup economy, and when that economy becomes larger and more established, ETH will become far more valuable and much less volatile. Even today, with the price volatility we've seen, it could not be clearer that Ethereum has become the financial backbone of on-chain markets and the dominant settlement layer for global digital finance. Ethereum and its Layer 2 ecosystem secure approximately 60% of all stablecoins and tokenized real-world assets, and over two-thirds of total DeFi value. For much of the past decade, Ethereum and decentralized financial infrastructure was often described as an experiment or an impractical vision. With the adoption we're seeing, It is clear that phase is now firmly behind us. The decentralized trust that the credibly neutral Ethereum platform uniquely provides has scaled just in time for a financial system that desperately needs better forms of trust, interoperation, and collaboration. What we saw in 2025 is that institutional adoption profoundly accelerated. This is visible in the media with the constant drumbeat of announcements from financial institutions, large and small. But what is visible is only the tip of the iceberg. Institutions have gained experience with private permissioned Ethereum networks for years. In 2025, global regulators and legislators began to give institutions permission to build on and use public permissionless Ethereum in addition to more private and confidential networks, which will increasingly take the form of Ethereum Layer 2s. Top financial firms are not just facilitating investment in ETH, they're actively building on it. For example, just in the latter half of 2025, Fidelity launched a tokenized money market fund and built its stablecoin FID on Ethereum. BNY Mellon partnered with Securitize to launch a tokenized AAA-rated collateral loan obligation fund on the public Ethereum blockchain, and JP Morgan Asset Management launched its first tokenized money market fund on the public Ethereum blockchain. EMP Paribas, Santander, ING, and other global banks started piloting stablecoin and tokenized deposit projects, levering Ethereum and Ethereum Layer 2 solutions. Exchange-traded products had expanded access, while tokenized funds, deposits, and even equities are increasingly settling on Ethereum rails. This distinction matters. Institutions are now using Ethereum infrastructure, creating long-term structural demand for both the network and its native asset, ETH. From a technology standpoint, Ethereum is scaling to meet the needs of major institutional players. Ethereum continues to advance performance and throughput through core protocol upgrades. The Pectra upgrade delivered meaningful improvements to validator performance, efficiency, and overall network capacity. The Fusaka upgrade, which went live in December, pushed that further with enhancements to data availability and execution. And Ethereum is becoming the settlement and coordination layer for agentic transactions as well. I'm excited to see the Ethereum Foundation's recent support of infrastructure to support this natural fit. As AI agents begin to transact for their humans or autonomously, whether executing payments, managing portfolios, or coordinating across protocols, they require a settlement and operating environment that is programmable and permissionless. The combination of smart contract composability, deep liquidity, and battle-tested security makes Ethereum the most credible infrastructure for agent-facilitated and agent-to-agent economic activity at scale. As agentic transaction volume grows, it represents a meaningful new source of settlement demand that flows directly through the Ethereum network and, of course, accrues value to ETH. Ethereum has done the hard work. Liquidity, decentralization, security, uptime and developer adoption over more than a decade of continuous, never-down operation. What we are seeing now is a convergence of technological maturity, regulatory clarity, and institutional appreciation and adoption. And this huge ramp in attention from institutions is providing forcing functions that will rapidly drive improvements across the Ethereum ecosystem. From shorter staking executes to fast and synchronous composability, across Ethereum Layer 1 and Layer 2s. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to our Chief Executive Officer, Joseph Shalom, to go further on how Sharplink will capitalize on this momentum. Joseph.

Thank you, Joe, and good morning, everyone. As Joe outlined, Ethereum has entered a new phase of institutional adoption, and Sharplink was purpose-built to operate with focus and discipline at both this moment in the market and for the long term. From the outset of our ETH Treasury strategy, our approach has been deliberate and measured, prioritizing long-term value creation over growth of holdings for its own sake. Our objective is to accumulate ETH through accretive means and manage it responsibly with an institutionally governed public company framework. That performance and discipline are increasingly being recognized by the market. According to the latest Form 13-F filings, our institutional shareholder ownership has grown to approximately 46% as of December 31st, 2025, the highest percentage of institutional holders of any Ethereum treasury company. We believe this demonstrates that investors are actively differentiating Sharplink from the broader digital asset treasury category. As the space matures, we are seeing a clear rotation towards platforms that combine productivity, governance, and shareholder alignment. We believe we are positioned at the forefront of that shift. At a high level, Sharpling's value proposition rests on three pillars. First, structural ETH accumulation, that is growing ETH per share in an accretive manner. productive treasury management, generating yield above native staking rates through partnerships and innovation. This aims to ensure that the ETH we hold actively contributes to shareholder value rather than remain idle on our balance sheet. And third, strong public company governance and transparency. These are institutional controls and disclosures that our expert in-house team has put in place. Our North Star is clear to compound ETH per share over time and maximize productivity of our balance sheet. It is not to accumulate ETH at all costs or passively wait for ETH price appreciation. We approach this by redefining the efficient frontier of institutional yield, evaluating staking, restaking, selective DeFi, and actively managed allocation opportunities through an institutional risk management lens. We believe our differentiated treasury management approach will outperform other digital asset treasuries that are not engaging in active portfolio construction and management. Our scale, permanent capital base, and internal expertise enable us to structure bespoke multi-year deployment arrangements that are generally unavailable to individual investors or passive exposure vehicles. These deployments are designed to enhance ETH-denominated returns while maintaining disciplined standards around custody, liquidity, compliance, and risk control. A great example of this initiative is our deployment into ConsenSys' Linear Layer 2 chain, where we've allocated $200 million in ETH in partnership with EtherFi and EigenCloud to generate ETH-denominated returns that exceed standard staking rates. This institutional-grade, risk-managed structure is secured within Anchorage Digital Bank, our regulated, qualified custodian, and reflects the type of innovative opportunities we intend to continue pursuing and replicating as the ecosystem evolves. On the regulatory front, The passage of the Genius Act and continued progress around the Clarity Act and related market structure legislation represent meaningful steps towards distinguishing decentralized digital commodities like Ethereum's native asset ETH from centralized token issuers. While the Clarity Act has not yet passed and legislative outcomes remain subject to process, the overall direction is constructive. Greater clarity around market structure and digital asset classification will reduce uncertainty for public companies, asset managers, and regulated intermediaries. For institutions, regulatory ambiguity has historically been a gating factor more than market volatility. Clear statutory definitions and emerging market structure frameworks will allow boards, compliance teams, and risk committees to further evaluate participation in the crypto ecosystem with greater confidence. As regulatory guardrails solidify, capital that has been sitting on the sidelines can engage through familiar governance, reporting and custody standards. Regulatory clarity will lower friction, reduce perceived legal risk and broaden institutional participation in the Ethereum ecosystem. And as more institutional market participants are able to enter on-chain capital markets, sharp-link plans to continue growing its lead, and executing on opportunities created by regulatory tailwinds. Through partnerships, on-chain deployments, and compounding yield strategies, we're on our way to becoming the world's most sophisticated bridge between traditional finance and crypto native deployments. To execute on these opportunities, Sharplink has assembled a dedicated, in-house, institutionally experienced team with deep sophistication across capital markets, risk management, and digital asset operations. Unlike many participants in this space, we manage the majority of our treasury activities in-house, rather than relying on third-party discretionary managers or outsourced treasury platforms. We believe this is a structural differentiator for Sharplink and for our shareholders. Many digital asset treasury companies externalize treasury management to third-party sponsors under exclusive long-term arrangements that include high fees or revenue sharing. That structure can create a compounding value leak that works against stockholders over time. We built our platform internally with more of a fixed cost base so that the value we generate stays within the treasury and compounds for our stockholders. Our economics are aligned directly with our shareholders. This internal treasury model gives us greater control over execution, tightens risk oversight, and has better alignment with public company governance. We believe this structure will become increasingly important as investors differentiate digital asset treasuries based on governance, cost efficiency, and true value creation per share. Ethereum, like all transformative technologies in their early adoption, experiences periods of heightened volatility. We have all felt the recent drawdown in ETH price and other crypto assets, and Sharplink is not immune to that. Our financial results will naturally reflect this volatility through unrealized gains and losses that can move materially from quarter to quarter. but our strategy is designed to operate through up cycles and down cycles, not to react to them. We believe Sharplink is both a pro-cyclical and counter-cyclical investment. In strong markets, we can efficiently act as capital markets to grow ETH per share in an accretive manner. We demonstrated this in 2025, raising roughly $2.1 billion in equity capital via our app, the market facility. Our constant focus on productive treasury management is important regardless of the market regime. Putting our ETH to work and generating incremental ETH enables us to grow our ETH per share metric in both bull and bear markets alike. In more challenging markets like we have seen in the last few months, this focus on productivity and risk adjusted yield becomes even more important and is a key differentiator for Sharpling. We believe it's important for the market to distinguish between short-term price movements and the long-term value creation. Our belief is that a lot of the volatility we've experienced recently is related to the ripple effects of the liquidations and deleveraging we saw on October 10th of last year. That day was the single largest deleveraging event in our industry's history. Similar to what we saw at the end of 2022, it can take several months for the system to fully unwind and rebound following an event like this. We believe strongly in the long-term Ethereum opportunity, and our premise is simple. You can get beta exposure to ETH by investing in Sharplink and own more ETH per share tomorrow than you do today through our disciplined, active capital management. It's also important to emphasize We don't attempt to call bottoms or predict short-term market movements in the price of ETH. Ethereum remains a volatile asset class, and periods of drawdown are part of its historical cycles. What gives us conviction is not short-term price action, but structural macro trends, institutional adoption, regulatory clarity, the growth in stablecoins, tokenized assets, and DeFi participation. Whether this crypto price consolidation proves to be a temporary noise or a longer-term cycle, our focus remains unchanged. We compound ETH per share through disciplined capital allocation and productive treasury management. Volatility is not a flaw of this asset class. It's the byproduct of monetizing a rapidly emerging and innovative new financial system. Our role is to harness that volatility through disciplined capital allocation rather than simply react to it. We have also taken steps to ensure that our name and brand accurately reflect who we are today. Last month, we formally updated our branding and digital presence, including the launch of a new website and adoption of our new tagline, Ethereum with an Edge. As part of this process, we've also removed the word gaming from our corporate identity. reflecting that our strategy, capital allocation, and long-term value proposition are now centered on Ethereum and the digital asset treasury management segment. This rebranding is not cosmetic. It is fully aligned with what SharpLink has been building since June of last year and a signal of our continued commitment to building an institutional-grade ETH treasury company. We would be honored if you thought of us as your sharpest link to growing your exposure to ETH, the foundational asset of the emerging decentralized economy. Looking ahead, we remain focused on executing with consistency and clarity as the Ethereum ecosystem continues to grow and scale. We believe Sharplink is uniquely positioned to provide investors with institutional-grade exposure to Ethereum through a transparent, publicly traded company offering stockholders a disciplined and risk management way to participate in the long-term growth of the Ethereum network and opportunity. We are also prioritizing the expansion of productive ETH deployment strategies, deepening institutional partnerships, and maintaining capital markets flexibility to increase ETH per share. Finally, I'd like to really acknowledge the stellar efforts of our entire team for working relentlessly over the past year and in a really focused manner to build our new ETH Treasury strategy. Importantly, we do it in an investor-aligned manner. With that, I'll turn to call over to our Chief Financial Officer, Bob DeLucia, to walk through our full 2025 financial results. Bob?

Thank you, Joseph. I'd like to remind our listeners to review our annual report on Form 10-K as of and for the year ended December 31st, 2025, which we filed Friday afternoon with the SEC. The 10-K provides detailed footnotes and related disclosures that complement our discussion today, offering stockholders and investors a comprehensive view of Sharpling's financial position, liquidity, and ETH Treasury performance. We will now go through the financial results for the year ended December 31st, 2025. As I review our full year results, I like to remind everyone that all comparisons and variance commentary refer to the prior year period unless otherwise noted. As of December 31st, 2025, Sharplink held 640,026 ETH. with a net fair value of $1.9 billion. In addition, we held 204,409 LSEs, or liquid stake deeds, with a cost value of $501 million. Subsequent to year-end, our combined ETH holdings have climbed, standing at 604,618 ETH, 208,893 as-if converted LSEs, and 55,188 as-if converted wheat for a total of 868,699 ETH as of Monday, March 1, 2026. Revenue for the year ended December 31, 2025 was $28.1 million compared to $3.7 million for the year ended December 31, 2024. The increase was due to the success of our ETH staking strategy during the year with staking revenues increasing to $15.3 million in the fourth quarter from $10.3 million in the third quarter of 2025, an increase of nearly 50% between the third and fourth quarters. We achieved this growth even as the ETH market price was falling. We also had a net realized gain for the year ended 2025 of $55.2 million that was due to the conversion of ETH into LSEs and the redemption of LSEs in the fourth quarter. Further, we had a $616.2 million unrealized loss at December 31st, 2025 due to the ETH market conditions that deteriorated during the second half of 2025. SG&A expenses for the year ended were $42.3 million compared to $5.7 million for the year ended December 31, 2024. The increase in SG&A was due to the expenses incurred in the implementation of our each Treasury strategy during 2025. Net loss for the year ended December 31, 2025 totaled $734.6 million versus a net income of $10.1 million in the previous year. The net loss was primarily driven by a $140.2 million impairment charge related to the lowest pricing of LSE. In the previously mentioned $616.2 million unrealized loss, These charges and losses were offset by a realized gain on the conversion of ETH to LSEs and an LSEs redemption during 2025 of $55.2 million. It is important to emphasize that the impairment charges and unrealized losses reflect market pricing and follow the current U.S. GAAP accounting standards. They do not represent realized economic losses on our ETH position, nor do they reduce the number of units of ETH we hold. The success of our treasury strategy is measured in a disciplined ETH accumulation, measuring its productivity over time and not based on short-term market fluctuations. As of December 31st, 2025, cash on hand was $28.5 million compared to cash on hand of $1.4 million as of December 31, 2024. Additionally, at December 31, 2025, we held $1.9 million in USDC stablecoins as financial assets. For additional details, our complete official audited financial statements and accompanying footnotes, including all required disclosures, risk factors, and management discussion and analysis are contained in our annual report on Form 10-K for the period ended December 31, 2025, filed with the SEC. This concludes our prepared remarks. We will now open it up for questions from those participating on the call. Operator, back to you.

Thank you. If you'd like to ask a question, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. You may press star 2 if you'd like to remove your question from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the star keys. We ask that you each keep to one question and one follow-up. Thank you. Our first question comes from the line of Fedor Shabalin with B. Reilly Securities. Please proceed with your question.

Thank you very much, operator, and good morning, everyone. My first one is on capital rising. If the stock remains range-bound at these levels, are you evaluating alternative capital rising ways, just secured lending against the ETH Treasury or other non-dilutive instruments? just to continue growing if concentration develops ever pressuring the equity? Or more broadly, can you frame for us what the 2026 capital plan looks like in terms of magnitude and mix? Thank you.

Sure, I'll take that. Good morning, Fedora. Our approach to raising capital is actually very straightforward and disciplined. We will access the equity markets when doing so is clearly accretive to our ETH concentration per share. That is our governing metric and our North Star. If the issuance of new equity capital increases ETH concentration on a per share basis, we'll act decisively. But if it does not, we won't. And capital markets activity is therefore very, very market dependent and not strategy dependent. We do not issue equity to grow the balance sheet or simply to pursue scale for its own sake. The $2.5 billion we raised earlier in 2025 was executed under really favorable market conditions and increased our ETH per share in a meaningful way. And going forward, we're going to use the same discipline and apply it whatever the market condition is. Growth and accumulation is a byproduct of accretion. Growth and accumulation for its own sake is not the objective. So our North Star continues to remain compounding ETH per share over time. The second question was about essentially leveraging our balance sheet to borrow against our ETH to raise capital. And at this point, we haven't decided to do that, but we maintain the flexibility in relationships with the market to do that if it made sense.

Thank you very much. That's helpful. And my follow-up, in the context of one of your strategic objectives for 2026, specifically on the expansion of partnership opportunities with Ethereum ecosystem, and I guess this one is for Joe Lubin, given your history as an Ethereum co-founder alongside Vitalik Buterin. Could you help us understand the nature of your current working relationship with Vitalik and specifically does your proximity to the core technical leadership give Sharpling any informational or strategic advantage when it comes to anticipating protocol level changes like upgrades or maybe shifts in the ETH roadmap that could impact the value or utility of a treasury? And more broadly, should investors view Sharpling as having a collaborative relationship with Ethereum's technical leadership or is the treasury strategy operating independently of those ties? Thank you.

Yeah, thank you for that question. So to the extent that our company consensus is deeply expert in the Ethereum protocol, layer one execution, layer one consensus, and deeply expert in Layer 2 ZK EVM protocol technology in the form of Linea. And to the extent that personnel in our protocols teams, our Linea team, our MetaMask team are constantly in contact with not just Ethereum Foundation researchers and other personnel and other leaders across the ecosystem. regarding the advancement of the protocol. And we have contributed, I think, second only to the Ethereum Foundation in terms of advancement of the protocol. We certainly believe that we have contributed if not an advantage, at least we are deeply aware of what's going on in the ecosystem and able to shape it for the benefit of the ecosystem, which is really all about maintaining rigorous decentralization, credible neutrality, censorship resistance. So the stronger Ethereum is, the more it will continue to win. And SharpLink is 100% dedicated to the health of the Ethereum technology. And we believe that the SharpLink shareholders will benefit from that perspective.

Well, that's clear. Thank you very much and continue your best of luck.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Devon Ryan with Citizens Bank. Please proceed with your question.

Thank you. Good morning, everyone. First question just on ETH kind of price. You know, a lot of the price action still feels dominated by positioning, macro flows. It's a question I am asked frequently. It's just when we'll see correlations break down where everything doesn't just trade with Bitcoin's price. And Yeah, I'm curious, you know, if there's a threshold that you're thinking about where fundamental ETH demand becomes large enough to offset some of the speculative flows around the edges that are, you know, obviously impacting price. And are there any metrics of kind of real demand that you would kind of point out as key indicators or that we should be tracking? And then just how does that inform kind of the treasury management decisions as well? Thank you.

Thanks, Devin. We recognize that, first of all, ETH is very volatile. It's actually a feature of this asset class. For a long time, ETH traded pretty linearly and correlated with Bitcoin. We're seeing more correlation actually with macro factors than we had in a long time. And obviously, we're going through a period of deleveraging since October 10th. And that typically takes months or even up to two quarters to work its way through the system. I think the leading indicator we would ask our investors to focus on is that macro Ethereum adoption opportunity, what we like to call and others refer to as the super cycle. So there seems to be a bit of short-term divergence between the price of crypto and adoption that we're seeing. I feel pretty strongly that we've never had a period of time in the history of crypto where institutions are more attuned, institutions are allocating, no longer experimenting in the Ethereum ecosystem. Joe laid out in his introduction just a handful of institutional use cases. We're seeing it across stablecoin growth where Most of the stablecoin activity is happening in the Ethereum ecosystem by a large margin relative to the next two largest blockchains. Second is we're seeing tokenization at what I think is a very, very early stage of a step function shift. Historically, we've seen individual funds, individual tokens be tokenized on disparate platforms. Now we're hearing about the largest asset managers essentially saying that they have plans to tokenize all their assets. So I think we're looking for signals, but they're loud and clear that we're talking about potential tokenization of fund complexes. And the reason why that matters is Ethereum is the leading ecosystem for tokenization. And the final thing is DeFi. what we like to refer to as good DeFi or institutional DeFi, we're starting to see larger and larger institutions start participating. And all of this bodes well for the Ethereum network, for activity, for total value locked, and that should benefit the price of Ether. That said, we're not in the business of calling bottoms. We're not in the business of making price predictions. But the macro tailwinds are stronger than we've ever seen, despite the short-term volatility and price consolidation. So we don't drive our business model based on the price of ETH. We just wake up every day trying to give our investors smarter beta exposure to the price of ETH. And then we make it productive in what we think of as almost an alpha overlay strategy, being more productive than retail investors can do themselves or that they can achieve through exposure, for example, through an ETF.

That's great, Collar. Thank you, Joseph. As a follow-up, we just want to hit on kind of yield above kind of native staking. You guys... And the prepared remarks outline some of the focus areas and kind of action plan. Can you just give a sense of how we should think about kind of the yield stack evolving through 2026? I don't know if there's a way to kind of quantify the different buckets and kind of orders of magnitude. And then just interrelated, you spoke about potential partnerships that you're working on. How could those also help accelerate the strategy there? Thank you.

Sure. It's a great question. And I think we want to be a little bit more transparent now that our strategy is growing and maturing. So I would say that native staking of our ETH remains our baseline. And I think we've said publicly multiple times since inception in June, we've been staking nearly 100% of our ETH. Because if you have a productive asset like ETH, It's respectful to investors to stake as much as you can, and not all of our competitors have been doing that. Beyond that, we've selectively deployed some of our ETH capital into institutional-grade structures. We shared publicly that we did a large $200 million deployment from our balance sheet into a partnership with ConsenSys, their linear blockchain, and two blue chip DeFi protocols, EtherFi and EigenCloud, in order to be able to deploy permanent capital, meaning provide liquidity and protocol commitments for a multiple year period. You get the liquid restaking rate, but on top of that, you get economic incentives denominated in ETH, and we didn't have to compromise on operational risk, we were one of the first public companies to deploy into DeFi within our regulated qualified custodian at Anchorage. I think as we think about 2026, we are going to move a little bit further along the efficient frontier to drive additional yield for our investors, but we do it through four lenses. First is we always look at counterparty risk controls, which is really, really important. in the crypto ecosystem. We look at how we can maintain operational protections through our regulated custodians. We look at liquidity parameters of the partnership or protocol, and we always look at regulatory considerations. So, again, no matter what the staking yield is, it's our hurdle rate, and our objective is to generate yield on a risk-adjusted basis above the native staking rate. in a very disciplined, risk-adjusted manner. And you'll see we will be doing more partnerships in the ecosystem because we have something quite rare in the digital asset space, which is permanent capital, and we'll make it useful on behalf of our investors. That actually is our comparative advantage.

Excellent. Well, appreciate the detailed responses.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Brian Kinslinger with Alliance Global Partners. Please proceed with your question.

Great. Thank you. Can you talk about the pipeline of the yield generating ETH deployments and partnerships and help us understand the time it takes to do due diligence on the associated risks? And my second question, which is related, does the pressure on ETH make these types of deals more or less attractive to either side of the transaction or does it have no impact on demand for such transactions? Thank you.

Sure. So we have built an internal team that has both investment management capabilities from both traditional finance and digitally native members. We have a DeFi team who's focused on sourcing these opportunities. And I would emphasize what Joe Lubin said earlier. Many of these opportunities are being sourced in conjunction with our strategic partners at ConsenSys. They have the deepest access to these protocols. We are looking at, I would say, almost a dozen different protocols and opportunities, and it takes at least a couple of months to do the proper due diligence. First is you need to get comfortable that they have the risk controls that you would expect. We diligence things like smart contract risk, counterparty risk, liquidity risk, sometimes de-pegging risk. Then we get to the point where we feel comfortable and you negotiate commercial relationships to try to leverage our scale and permitting capital to get a better yield or return on a risk-adjusted basis. And then finally, we often work directly with our custodians to see if they can support it within the qualified custodial wrapper. And it's important because in crypto where there's heavy risk in DeFi protocols, if you can reduce your custody and operational risk, we think of that as ops alpha. So that is question number one. Question number two is, I mentioned earlier, the rate of return on staking will vary over time. You're seeing a very large rush into staking with staking rates higher, sorry, staking utilization rates higher than we've seen in most of the history of Ethereum. That's because of the DATs and the ETFs. But again, that is our hurdle rate. And our ability to generate returns are less sensitive to short-term movements in the price of ETH or staking rates because we're negotiating and deploying under multi-year agreements. We're making a lot of progress, but we're going to do it in a very disciplined manner. That's who we are, and that's our strategy. Great.

Thank you. Let me add to that that I didn't mention DeFi that much in my previous response. Not only are some of the best minds in DeFi at consensus available to SharpLink, but some of them have actually moved over from consensus to SharpLink.

Great. Thank you.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Gareth Deseta with Cantor Fitzgerald. Please proceed with your question.

Hi, guys. Thanks for taking the question. Can you provide any color on the difference in staking yields you guys earned in the fourth quarter between native and liquid staking? More specifically, just how much greater is the liquid staking yield on top of native staking?

We haven't yet disclosed that, and part of the fourth quarter was still in deployment. And we've also been, in many cases, renegotiating our staking rates and incentives. So I don't have those numbers at hand. I think what you're going to see is later this year as we reach a steady state, we will likely start disclosing more frequently how we're doing in terms of our overall portfolio. staking, liquid restaking, linea, and any other capital allocations because we do think of it as a portfolio of returns.

Great. That makes sense. And kind of a follow-up to that, can you maybe talk about the willingness to explore DeFi opportunities on the ETH Layer 1 itself versus Layer 2s like Linnea going forward?

Well, I think today most of our staked ETH is done through Anchorage and done through Coinbase on a delegated basis. And they use a series of validators that are diversified and a series of validators that are generating optimal yield. And that happens, to my knowledge, largely on mainnet, but we're very flexible whether it's the layer one or layer two, in order to achieve the highest risk-adjusted returns. And as Joe mentioned earlier, we are starting to see really good opportunities in DeFi, but we're being patient and doing the proper due diligence, because it does introduce risks beyond the native staking. And we're thinking of this as a portfolio of allocations, and we're trying to push the efficient frontier, but to do so in an institutional-grade manner.

Great. Thank you, guys.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Joseph Beffy with Canaccord Genui. Please proceed with your question.

Hey, guys. Good morning. Just thought we'd double-click on clarity, what it may mean for the broader ecosystem. I know you mentioned it, but just maybe we would drill down on it a little bit and how maybe that evolves post-clarity. And I know you I know it's super early, but you did mention AI and the like. We're just wondering if you're seeing any pilot projects related to perhaps AI entering into maybe DeFi or other more permissionless payment schemes or algorithms. Thanks.

Sure. I'll take the first question, which is regulatory clarity, and then I'll pass it over to Joe Lubin. to handle the agentic dimension and how we're seeing it evolve. On the regulatory clarity, I think if we look back, the Genius Act was a very, very good step. It was not only a good step in clarifying stable coins in the US, I think it was setting off a bit of a geopolitical race because we're starting to see countries around the world focus on locally denominated stable coins. And the growth in stablecoins from what today is around $310 billion to what Secretary Besant thinks will be several trillion over the next few years is going to happen not only in the US, it's going to happen globally. And we're seeing that in Korea, we're seeing it in Japan, we're seeing it in Hong Kong, and to a lesser extent in Europe. So that is one set of drivers. I would say the Clarity Act, which is trying to provide both market structure and token security classification is important as much as a signal as it is to make sure that institutional investors are comfortable that when they invest in crypto, they have the regulatory clarity behind them. And I won't predict whether the Clarity Act will pass before the midterms. I think there's a high level of confidence it will pass this year. I do have pretty strong conviction that it Even in the event it does not pass, we've heard from both the SEC and the CFTC, the two primary U.S. regulators, that they're not only saying they're working in unison, they put working groups together. And if necessary, I feel confident they can do through rulemaking what the legislative branch has not been able to accomplish yet. So I think we have institutional adoption tailwinds, and I believe we have regulatory tailwinds. that are going to be very, very positive for both stablecoins, tokenization of traditional funds, stocks, commodities, as well as institutional participation in DeFi. We may need to be a little bit patient, but the trend is behind us. And with that, I'll turn it over to Joe to speak a little bit more about what we're seeing in the agentic economy on-chain and specifically what we're seeing in Ethereum.

Thanks, Joseph. Thank you for the question. There is just so much to discuss at the intersection of AI and crypto. I'll try to keep it fairly short. But the bottom line is that AI and crypto, at least in my opinion, deadly need each other. These are two foundational technologies that could each reformat society alone. But we We should recognize as a society, as technologists, what I think of as the necessary complementarity of decentralized trust as represented by blockchains and the unprecedented centralized intelligence power and control that AI enables. the crypto space. And I think most of the initiative is coming more from the crypto space than the AI space, although there's certainly a lot of AI researchers that think about decentralization. But the crypto space will empower a healthy evolution of human and machine intelligence and economic and financial agency. But it needs, in my opinion, it really needs AI to fully flourish. The world needs decentralized protocols and decentralized infrastructure to empower humans and communities with full agency. And these humans will be bonding deeply with AI to ensure that hopefully AI will be user centric and not continue in the exploitive and toxic directions that Web2 plus AI has become. So crypto will fix AI's centralization problem by providing decentralized compute, data sourcing, training and inference on decentralized physical infrastructure networks or D-Pen via zero knowledge proof technology Crypto enables secure data and private data markets through federated learning and zero knowledge machine learning. AI can be trained on sensitive proprietary data without ever exposing the underlying information. We at ConsenSys are doing work with the X402 protocol, enabling micropayments for agent-to-agent commerce and human-to-agent commerce. We've participated in building EIP-80-04, which is essentially a registry system for agents to register themselves and their capabilities, and it's a reputation system. people, companies, and agents can feedback on how the agents are doing. And AI fixes what we could think of as crypto's usability problem. So we're moving to intent-based user interface and user experience. And that means that AI will help us by explaining and handling complex, highly technical problems blockchain transactions and do so in natural language. Users can simply say or type what they want to achieve and their AI agent, which might be their digital twin, will be able to translate that and execute it for the human. AI will help transform crypto wallets into neobanks and intelligent financial advisors that you fully own and control. And these wallets will guard users from security risks. So I can go on and on, but let me leave it there. Maybe the last thing to add is that The AI-enabled velocity of software development is off the charts right now, and it's accelerating. So, for instance, developers at ConsenSys and across the Ethereum ecosystem are reporting 2x or more speedups in software development velocity. So look for that to continue and look for the quality of software to improve.

Great. Thanks for that call, Joe. It sounds like there is a tremendous amount going on there. Thanks, Joe and Joseph.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Kevin Dede with HC Wainwright. Please proceed with your question.

Good morning. Thanks for having me on the call. I know, Joseph, you offered a little color on the consensus partnership and then consensus people joining your staff and working with EtherFi and IgerCloud. I was just wondering if you could kind of break down How you're approaching DeFi from a broad brush strategically given partnerships and internal personnel, and then specifically, how are you leveraging liquid versus wrapped?

Sure. I'll take that. So there's a word in crypto that's used quite often, which is composability. And when we approach partnerships, it's often not to a single protocol. The example we gave was working with ConsenSys, their Layer 2 ZK EVM chain, as well as two Blue Chip DeFi partners. I think that's a model that is repeatable. And the reason why we're seeing that is a lot of crypto and protocols are starved of liquidity, especially since October 10th. And what they're looking for is an ability to have permanent capital. The crypto ecosystem often is plagued with folks that will put money in protocols, essentially try to generate as much quick yield, whether in token value or otherwise, and then they move on from protocol to protocol. So what we're seeing is a lot of demand from DeFi protocols for multi-year permanent capital deployments, and they're willing to pay incentives to do that. We are being approached by virtually every sophisticated DeFi protocol vault provider to try to find ways to partner, and that actually puts us in a pole position. And I'm quite confident that over a period of time, we are building a portfolio that is actively managed, which is in contrast with how individuals or ETFs can give exposure to ETH productivity. And I think that will be very, very positive for our investors. And I think it's less around standard staking, liquid restaking. It's more often the composability of bringing partners together to look at yield opportunities less around the wrapper, more about risk-adjusted returns. And we will try to be as public as possible when we enter into these partnerships because that is our comparative advantage. So it's less about the wrapper, it's more about the risk-adjusted return and how each one of these deployments fits into a diversified portfolio management or portfolio allocation framework. It is a portfolio of capital, and we're going to deploy it to our comparative advantage. And if you do that right, it's really respectful and beneficial for our investors.

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes our question and answer session. I'll turn the floor back to Mr. Shalom for any final comments.

Well, before we close, I want to emphasize that we are building SharpeLink for a world where Ethereum is at the core of the future innovative financial infrastructure. Our job is to be the stewards of our stockholders' capital and our ETH treasury with the North Star that we say over and over to increase ETH per share responsibly. We believe Sharplink is the smartest way for investors to participate in this long-term Ethereum opportunity. And at our core, we are Ethereum with an edge. So thank you all for joining us today, for your continued support and confidence in our vision and strategy. I'm really proud of the work our team has accomplished in 2025, and I'm optimistic and excited for the opportunities ahead in 2026. We look forward to speaking with you again on our next earnings call. And have a great day, everyone.

Thank you. This concludes today's conference. You may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation.