Sharplink goes shopping while ETH has its annual clearance sale 🛒

Sharplink, the second-largest corporate Ether treasury, purchased a combined $62.4 million worth of Ether over three days last week, reviving an accumulation strategy it had paused for eight months as the token slid to its lowest price of 2026. Onchain data from Arkham shows a wallet linked to Sharplink received 5,000 ETH worth $7.85 million from FalconX on Thursday, another 5,000 ETH worth $7.9 million on Friday, and 29,196 ETH worth $46.7 million across three over-the-counter transactions on Saturday, according to Lookonchain. Ether fell to $1,537 on Thursday, down roughly 45% year-to-date and about 22.8% month-on-month, briefly dropping below bitcoin at $59,000 during a broad crypto sell-off. Tether's USDT also briefly overtook ETH by market capitalization, at roughly $186 billion to ETH's $185 billion.

The buying spree brought Sharplink's holdings to 876,285 ETH and ETH equivalents, including 22,102 staked tokens. Onchain analyst EmberCN put the company's average purchase price at about $3,609 per coin, implying an unrealized loss of around $1.79 billion with ETH trading near $1,555. Sharplink's Nasdaq-listed shares closed at $4.56 on Thursday, down 3.5% on the day and roughly 27% lower over the past month, before rising to $4.81 on Friday, up 5.48%. The company has not publicly confirmed the transfers.

Sharplink's main rival, Bitmine Immersion Technologies, held about 5.67 million ETH in mid-June after acquiring 52,203 ETH for $92 million on June 22. "We continue to maintain a steady pace of accumulation throughout 2026. We believe we are in the early stages of crypto spring," Bitmine chairman Tom Lee said. Sharplink CEO Joseph Chalom told Cointelegraph in May that he saw three potential Ether catalysts: passage of the CLARITY Act, a return of market risk appetite tied to easing geopolitical tension and cooling of the AI investment thesis, and continued growth of real-world asset tokenization, which has reached a distributed asset value of $31.55 billion. The Senate has yet to vote on its version of the CLARITY Act, and the House Financial Services Committee has scheduled a hearing on the bill for July 17.

Both companies backed Ethlabs, a nonprofit formed by former Ethereum Foundation researchers to prepare the network for institutional adoption. Ethereum co-founder and Sharplink chairman Joe Lubin joined Bitmine and other Ethereum contributors in supporting the initiative. "As stablecoins, tokenized real-world assets, funds and autonomous AI commerce move on-chain, they are converging on Ethereum as the neutral, credibly permissionless settlement layer for the global economy," Sharplink said. The purchases came days before Sharplink's expected addition to the Russell 2000 and Russell 3000 indexes on Monday, a move Chalom said would broaden the company's shareholder base and strengthen access to capital markets.

US spot Ether ETFs recorded their seventh consecutive week of outflows, posting $12.9 million in net withdrawals last week, driven mainly by redemptions from BlackRock's iShares Ethereum Trust (ETHA). Spot ETF data from SosoValue showed a $12.85 million net outflow on June 26, with ETF issuers still holding more than $8.38 billion, or 4.42% of Ethereum's market value. Sharplink, founded in 2019 as an affiliate marketing service for the sports betting and gambling industries, rebranded from SharpLink Gaming in February and now generates revenue from Ether staking and onchain yield strategies, reporting $12.1 million in first-quarter revenue versus $742,000 a year earlier.