Sharplink dusts off the ETH buying glove after eight months of bench-warming 🧤

Sharplink, the second-largest public corporate holder of Ether, snapped up 5,000 ETH worth about $7.85 million from crypto prime brokerage FalconX on Thursday, its first Ether purchase since Oct. 26, 2025, when it acquired 19,270 ETH for $78.3 million. On-chain data from Arkham shows the transfer arrived as ETH slid to $1,537, its lowest price in 2026, and as the broader market sold off: ETH fell roughly 5% over 24 hours, slipping below $1,560, while bitcoin dropped under $59,000. During the rout, Tether's USDT briefly overtook Ether by market capitalization at about $186 billion to $185 billion.

The Minneapolis-area company now holds 876,285 ETH and ETH equivalents, including 22,102 staked tokens, according to company disclosures. Onchain analyst EmberCN put Sharplink's average purchase price at about $3,609 per coin, implying an unrealized loss of roughly $1.79 billion with Ether trading near $1,555. Sharplink rebranded from SharpLink Gaming in February and has expanded beyond basic staking into additional onchain yield strategies, reporting $12.1 million in first-quarter revenue versus $742,000 a year earlier. Sharplink has not publicly confirmed the transfer; CoinDesk said it had reached out for comment.

Sharplink remains behind Bitmine Immersion Technologies (BMNR), chaired by Tom Lee, which held about 5.67 million ETH in mid-June after acquiring another 52,203 ETH last week. "We continue to maintain a steady pace of accumulation throughout 2026. We believe we are in the early stages of crypto spring," Lee said. Sharplink, Bitmine and Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin, who chairs Sharplink, recently backed Ethlabs, a nonprofit founded by former Ethereum Foundation researchers. The company was founded in 2019 as a sports-betting affiliate marketing firm, pivoted to an Ethereum treasury strategy in June 2025, and lost the title of largest public corporate ETH holder to Bitmine in August.

Sharplink CEO Joseph Chalom told Cointelegraph in May he identified three potential Ether catalysts: passage of the CLARITY Act, a return of market risk appetite tied to easing geopolitical tensions and a cooling of the artificial intelligence investment thesis, and continued growth of real-world asset tokenization. The House Financial Services Committee has scheduled a hearing on the CLARITY Act for July 17, the Senate has yet to vote on its version, and tokenized real-world assets have reached a distributed asset value of $31.55 billion, near a yearly high. "I'm seeing genuine corporate accumulation conviction holding strong amid subdued price action," Andri Fauzan Adziima, research lead at the Bitrue Research Institute, told Cointelegraph.

Sharplink's Nasdaq-listed shares (SBET) closed down 3.5% at $4.56 on Thursday and are down roughly 27% over the past month and 50% over six months. The purchase comes just before Sharplink is expected to join the Russell 2000 and Russell 3000 indexes on Monday, a step Chalom said would broaden the shareholder base and strengthen access to capital markets. Separately, a newly created wallet accumulated 18,361 ETH worth $28.9 million and 152,986 HYPE worth $9.73 million through FalconX over the past nine days, while BlackRock moved 2,700 BTC and 41,996 ETH to Coinbase, totaling about $226 million. Spot Ether ETFs recorded a $12.85 million net outflow on June 26, per SoSoValue, leaving cumulative net inflows at $10.90 billion and ETF issuer holdings at over $8.38 billion, or 4.42% of Ether's market value.