Alright, Charlie, let's kick it. Thank you. Yo, yo, yo, yo, yo, what up, what up?
Good morning, good morning, GM, GM.
Tuesday, January, like 75, 2026.
Look at that, another beautiful day to have a beautiful beautiful day i got my co-host in the house
tyler good morning how you doing today pretty good got a nice uh we got some nice macro news
this morning cpi came in under our coins got a little bit of a pop uh looks like it might be
retracing a bit and then that's a big day we have have a big guest. Had to break out the ETH hat.
on the show. I should have an ETH
I need to get my sweater again back up.
hoodies left, I think, I need to get my sweater again back up. I only have like my artifact hoodies left,
I think from the crypto era,
but nobody gives hoodies away.
Nobody gives hats cheaper.
Where'd you get the heat?
I gotta get my game up here.
I gotta, sorry, I gotta stack up here on that merch.
Anyways, today on the show, like Tyler said, big one.
Markets and news, of course.
Nikita seems to fix the algorithm.
We'll see if you guys see the show.
Help us get back in that algorithm, y'all.
I feel like we're into the abyss here.
On DJs, on myself, on Tyler Spacey, it doesn't matter who.
If you can retweet the ex-broadcast, whether Tyler's or mine's post, it doesn't matter.
Let's just get more eyes on the broadcast
Every retweet helps from y'all.
So we appreciate you guys.
So anyways, we'll talk about that.
We'll talk about a few different things.
And then we'll be joined at the half hour mark.
So pretty soon by Joseph Shalom.
Joseph Shalom, who you may know,
and now the CEO of Sharpling Gaming, Asbet, the first Ethereum dad.
And one of the biggest ones out there, one of the biggest players in Ethereum.
So we're going to have a very interesting conversation today about all things, you know, probably digital asset treasuries, markets.
Very curious about the TradFi crypto conversation, which is very relevant.
And that's kind of where he comes from, BlackRock.
And then, of course, last but not least, SharpieLink
has a lot to share. They have
quite a few news come out in the last few weeks,
so we'll be able to talk about all of that.
And then at the end, we'll give some money away
the show, who is signed up
to Yeet.com using the FOMO Hour
do that. And with that being said,
while we wait for Mando, Tyler,
we shall go straight to you.
Yeah, folks, crypto majors are green here this morning.
Up about 1, 1.5% across the board, but retracing a bit.
We did get some nice macro news this morning.
CPI came in about a tick under expectations.
Bitcoin sent to 92.8 or so on the back.
That news is back at 92.2 here now.
Up 1, and then 1.7% on the day. ETH up 1.5% on the day.
$31.40, so slightly lagging Bitcoin there. Salon up 1%
at $141.55, so it's lagging both of those as well.
There were some big movers. Dash was up 60%.
The story IP token up another 30% two days in a row.
The Story IP token up another 30% two days in a row.
XMR stealing the privacy show up another 15%, hit 680 overnight and a new all-time high.
Basically doubling in what feels like just a month or so.
I think it's up 50% on the week and now the 12th biggest token in crypto.
Gold and silver also hit new all-time highs this morning as well.
So some big moves in metals.
In the crypto headlines here, so the U.S. Senate,
they released the draft Crypto Market Clarity Act,
which does include limits on stable corner rewards.
So we'll talk about that here in a bit.
Senator Elizabeth Warren, she's pressing the SEC over inclusion of crypto in 401ks, arguing they expose retirees to too much risk. Metallic Peter, he warned crypto
needs better decentralized stablecoins, citing governance capture and inflation risk. World
Liberty Phi, they launched a crypto lending platform yesterday built around USD1. I think
they've already got $20 million in assets over there. BitGo filed for a US IPO targeting $2 billion valuation as their assets have suppressed $100 billion.
And then we saw Tennessee regulators order Polymarket Couch and Crypto.com to halt sports prediction markets and refund users,
though it does not seem like they will comply.
And corporate treasuries ETFs.
We talked about this a little bit yesterday, but strategy, $1.25 billion in Bitcoin buys last week.
They're larger since July.
Tom Lee's Bitminer added $76 million in ETH last week as well.
And the Bitcoin ETS flipped green again.
Finally, we had some inflows yesterday, breaking a four-day outflow streak.
In token airdrop and protocol news, let's see here.
The football.fun token, they're going to TGE this Thursday, January 15th.
FOGO announced they're also going to TGE this Thursday.
They're also doing a $7 million ICO at a $350 million valuation via Binance wallet.
And they also shared that Robot Ventures is now an investor.
And they also shared that Robot Ventures is now an investor.
We also had Markets.xyz launch a purpose platform for equities and crypto, starting with the US 500 index.
In memes, it was a busy, busy day, folks.
Eric Adams, former mayor of NYC, he endorsed this NYC token, pitching it as a tool to promote civic values.
Then the token was swiftly run. They pulled liquidity
just a few hours in. It fell from
was kind of a black eye on what
had been a brighter day for memes. The
PSYOP anime coin, from 30X
It's $26 million at peak.
There's a few other on-chain movers as well.
MemeCoin majors were up about 2% on the day.
And the NFTs caught some love as well.
The NFT boarded up about 5% to 7% across the majors.
And then Good Vibes Club,
a 101 sold for 50 ETH and another one sold for 20 ETH.
So some big action over in that collection.
So the trenches heating up a little bit.
Adam Weitzman strikes again.
And they were like fighting one another.
You know those Dubai plates?
Number plates that are worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.
but for like the latest art blog i left the deaf beef piece or this punk because it has like it was
owned by a celebrity now we have one adam so adam we appreciate you uh and we need you uh we meet uh
we uh we need you uh to bring some of your buddies here you know when you go on those like cars and
coffee runs with the Bugatti owners,
because this guy owns like two Bugattis, right?
Anyway, with that being said, we got to start with former Mayor Adams.
I mean, listen, I'm not one to be a Zora and Mamdani fan,
but maybe he wants a better choice here after seeing what's
Mayor Adams launching a meme coin, NYC token, in order to support the fight against anti-Semitism
What does that have to do with that?
If anything, you're probably making it worse after Rock pulling it under that cause.
So you're not helping here, Mayor Adams. I saw MoonPay
I mean, what the hell, man? Take us
through what happened. Yeah, what a strange
move. So Eric Adams gave a speech in
Times Square yesterday where he
was talking about this NYC token, a
the city. He said it would address
anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism,
that it would teach kids how to embrace blockchain
and that the proceeds would go to these good causes.
He went on to say that he wouldn't take a salary for the first few years.
So very kind to you there, Eric.
They described the token as New York City's first ever commemorative coin.
So this got some big endorsements, a lot of coverage.
Dozens of copycat coins launched and this real one came out.
It shoots straight to $530 million FDV.
And then within 30 minutes, an hour, the team pulled liquidity.
It pulled $3.4 million out of this.
burned Khalif and all the way
It has somehow since rebounded a little bit. It's hanging
right now, which actually still feels kind
As you can see, it's kind of been grinding up
This is just a very messy messy story a messy launch oh man the good news is i feel like a like we matured enough that no one was like heads over heels trying to eat this thing like
i don't know anyone who bought this. I don't even really see anyone
on the timeline talking about how they bought it.
Well, we don't see anyone on the timeline anyways, but
stuff I saw in the timeline, because
you know what? Because it was such a quick rug
anyone tried to trade this
Yeah, I mean, we're looking at the chart.
This is the five-minute view. Yeah, so you had
If you missed it, it was already
at $500 million, and then you're not going to chase it there.
Literally, you did five-minute candles here.
Let's put it in one minute. So basically, you got rugged
Pretty much. Like one, two, three... You had 10 minutes? Pretty much.
you had four minutes here to buy.
So you had about seven to 10 minutes hold time here.
Let's have a look here at the top traders.
usual suspects probably made a lot of money.
And besides that, did you see, do you want to see the funniest thing, Tyler?
Yeah, some insider bought zero dollar.
They bought like the pre-launch and they still lost money.
So there's an insider that bought half a million dollars worth or or whatever worth, and still managed to lose half a million dollars
despite being an insider, because he got the
CA earlier, clearly, before it was announced and was buying.
Both sides agree that this is stupid,
Like, celebrity rocks? Yeah, I mean, this is stupid, but are we so back? Like, celebrity rocks?
Yeah, and this is such a wild situation.
I didn't even report on this live because I wasn't sure if it was real.
I didn't know if it was like an AI video, if his account had been hacked.
You know, I think a year ago, this is maybe a bigger like black eye.
But now, I don't know that it's a black eye.
But also, it's not like the crypto natives were rallying around this thing.
No one was rooting for this.
If anything, we all rejected it.
So I don't think this is in line with the Libra. No one was rooting for this. If anything, we all rejected it.
I don't think this is in line with the Libra.
This is just a very strange actor.
I don't know who told Eric to do this.
Does this mean we're back?
That's not where my head went right away.
I think some of the other action on Chain may say that we are back like Psy-Off anime.
I mean, you guys know, if you follow me, you've seen,
I've been pretty vocal about what's going on in the run.
So therefore the algorithm is only feeding me that.
And this algorithm, I should have played that to my advantage,
fed me these animes on Saturday or Sunday, dude.
It was one of the two, I don't remember,
I remember seeing like really early
and I remember seeing the anime about,
you know, the raining girl lighting her,
you know, the Khamenei photo on fire.
And I was like, dude, this is sick.
And I noticed they did some about Venezuela, et cetera.
I was like, yo, like these animes are really, this one, this is exactly the one.
So it wasn't Gen 10th because that's a retweet from somebody else, but this was it, right?
So I saw this anime and I was, this is super cool, Tyler.
And I couldn't help but see this like, oh, there used to be a wallet.
So there was a wallet on here, right?
In the bio, I was like, wow, there's going to be a token
around this? And they had like
a few thousand, maybe a thousand,
like a very little amount of followers. Like there was not
53k, by the way. And yesterday,
like 1 million followers to
I don't even know how much,
It was in the back of an Elon Musk tweet, it seems, Tyler.
Yeah, Rajko Cole tweeted it, and then Elon Musk followed the account.
And it basically candles from $2 million to $12 million in an hour.
I think one of the largest hourly candles we've seen since 10,
I'd say maybe really since the,
so it was a one day 30 to 40 X anyone bought in before that,
hit all the way to 28 million overnight.
Looks like it's kind of chopped around 16,
$18 million range. Yeah. It's still of chopped around $16, $18 million range.
It's still fairly low compared to where we were, but...
We're starting to see some more action,
which I think is the bigger takeaway.
It's just more in Sims to play the game for these new products.
And then now there's like an anime meta coming on the back.
it's one of those that you actually had
kind of a little bit of time.
What I like about this one
is it seemed to be like quite organic.
Like I saw the person tweet like about it.
And I think it opens the door
to a more interesting conversation.
Because the percentage of creator
fees was changed which was Alon's big comeback
to the timeline a few days ago and
if you're on yesterday we discussed all this with Mike Dudas
who's an early investor to them so
maybe you want to talk about this because it's actually impressive how much
the creator fees are kind of changing
the incentives to launch and maintain
So you continue to earn as the token churns through volume.
So creators like the one behind SaoPanime, they're incentivized to continue creating this content.
And it looks like they're going to continue doing it.
And they've got a pretty big following now.
So this is going to be an interesting one to watch. I don't know that it's Todd's.
I'm not buying here on the 25 X, but it is one to continue
Similar but Nick Shirley is expected to release another video tomorrow.
His token got a little bit up yesterday as well.
This is what I found interesting, right?
Like a lot of people in the comments of the anime thing were like, oh, check your Zora
You made a lot of fees there. But nobody actually cares about the token on Zora.
Like the speculators don't.
So the token on Solana, on Pump Fun went to like 20 million.
It's still sitting at 17 million at the time of the show right now.
And the Zora one, I don't think had cracked like 600K at the time.
And remember like on the show I said about the Nick Shirley stuff,
I said, I wonder if he was streaming live on PumpFun
or if he had a PumpFun creator token
and he was doing these videos live on there,
how much fees he would make and how big that token would be.
And I think that proves the point.
Like I feel like the base ecosystem is much less for trading.
Of course, you have like some cool stuff.
I think some, I saw something about the DRB thing
that's been going on for a long time. There's still some narratives and some coins
that are doing well. Zor itself was quite a trade last year, one of the better ones.
But people don't really speculate over there.
case. AB. There's a Zor coin, there's a pump coin. We see
which one runs. So it's pretty clear that
tokens. How much money has he made
data in front of me. That's probably six figures, right? Yeah, I don't have the data in front of me.
It's probably six figures, right?
Yeah, I think it's in six figures.
There's this other one, right? I think it was
man. Gave us this token at $2
million. Went to $20 million
on the back of a Claude shout-out.
You know, the tomato one.
And the Southpump Fun tweet about this,
started this project using Claude
and now has racked up over $120,000
So all of this is like looking kind of good.
Like I put a tweet about this yesterday
like you have a lot of $5, $10 million runners,
you have a lot of $20, $30 million runners after you have a lot of $20, $30 million runners after that,
and you have the white whales,
which will come up and down,
and then it starts, right?
I think we're on the precipice of a good market.
We'll talk about this with Joseph
in a little bit more length regarding the market,
but we're looking good, Tyler.
Definitely signs of life.
there's a big problem problem we're getting away from
just like the hyper rotation a bit yeah well for now you know you know you know what's gonna happen
anyways i i see joseph is studio already but we'll go to you in a little bit uh let's um let's let's
run through some more um summer news that you had. And what up, Mando?
And then maybe we can wrap there.
I think the biggest news was the crypto market structure bill.
The U.S. Senate released their draft yesterday.
And I think the big takeaway is that big banks have been voicing their concerns over stable coins
and how they would be regulated.
And it does look like the,
the bill writers kind of gave into them a bit.
They have new provisions that are going to block interest payments or the
ability to earn yield just by passively holding stable coins.
So that is a new provision that got into the bill.
But there are some carve outs, which I think is pretty interesting and perhaps the compromise in this.
So I dug into this a bit and there's a nice write up over on Decrypt.
It looks like while passive holding stable coins, you won't be able to earn yield.
There are several other ways you can, like by transacting, by executing on governance, validation, staking, activities, payments transfer.
So basically, if you do anything with the tokens actively you can earn yield um
which i don't know i think it's kind of a win i'd be curious to hear more from some of the
the crypto d5 players who have been kind of fighting for this bill and different provisions
i'm curious to hear more of their thoughts um but just me, it sounds like you have to click one extra button
and then you can turn the yield back on.
So it feels like a doable win, I would say.
Maybe not just like the slam dunk,
but still perhaps a layup using the basketball analogy.
So I was not discouraged seeing that.
And then this is going to go up for, I think,
the discussion on Thursday. So it's moving along. Thursday will be the big day to see
how much, how real this bill is and its chances of passing in current state.
Yeah. No, a hundred percent. Mando, CPI looked good this morning. Market's looking ripe over
here. How you feeling? Your XMR trade is looking good too. Went Mark is looking ripe over here. How are you feeling?
Your XMR trade is looking good too.
Well, I call on the show every day.
And then they call on the next day.
Do you know what I did about XMR?
Which is the stupidest reason?
Google is integrating its technology into Apple.
They won the big contract yesterday.
And XMR seems to be leading crypto.
I don't see a lot else out there, like breaking out all-time highs right now,
Obviously, crypto is trading well,
but still slightly underperforming.
Still feels a bit shaky, doesn't it?
You just know that any one time,
they'll just rub Bitcoin.
But, you know, decent day.
I feel like the trenches heated up a little bit
Obviously, there was that NYC scam,
but generally, it's felt like risk-taking appetite has come back a little bit.
People don't just want to sit around and do nothing.
What a trade, that XMR, eh?
Brought to you on this show.
Brought to you on the show.
I was trying to buy it last weekend.
And then I saw open interest only in like the three to four million.
And I didn't think much of it.
I was like, oh, I'm not doing it right.
I didn't really understand the whole USDH thing.
I do need to educate myself maybe a little more on that.
But for those of you who got the trade, congratulations.
And wishing us many more breakouts like that.
One of which perhaps will be Ethereum.
And speaking of which, we may as well bring our special guest of the day,
CEO of Sharpling Gaming, Joseph Shalom. Joseph, good morning. How are you doing? Thanks for coming.
Doing great. Hey, gentlemen. I'm here from frigid New York, but super optimistic and
really excited to be here. Yeah, it is cold out there now. Listen,
I did about 20 some winters in the East Coast. I'm done. I paid my dues. I've done it and I don't need to do it anymore. Anyways, Joseph, thank you so much for coming here. I know we've been
chatting a little bit in the back end. It's really awesome to have you on here today. We've had the
other Joseph in your operation on before a few times, Joseph Lubin, co-founder of Ethereum.
But I think it's really relevant to have you on the show today as Sharplink and Esbet, you guys have a lot going on, a lot of announcements that we want to go through.
Also, Ethereum is kind of looking good, so definitely want to talk about Ethereum.
That's, and again, TradFi.
TradFi is leading the way.
He's buying stocks, et cetera, et cetera.
And you have quite the background over at BlackRock.
So a lot of things that we can chat about with you today, Joseph.
But first, just for the audience, if you can give yourself a little introduction, and then we'll start from there.
Joseph Shalom. I'm the CEO of Sharplink.
Sharplink is the second largest ETH digital asset treasury.
We really founded the strategy only last June, so it's been only about seven months.
We hold, at any given time, between $2 billion and $3 billion of ETH.
And you can think of it as permanent capital.
And from day one, we've been deploying nearly 100% of our ETH to make it productive.
And to kick off, I'm with you guys on Google and gold.
I would add Ethereum to that long-term investment list.
And I'd love to share the reasons why I'm really excited.
So previous to that, spent 20 years at BlackRock,
The last five or six leading teams focused on partnerships,
including all the work we did in the digital asset space
around stable coins with the ETFs
and launched some of the largest tokenized funds
in the world. So super excited.
Full disclaimer, I'm not nearly as good as Tyler on the daily charts. I'm definitely more of a
long-term macro guy. So bear with me. I'm not going to pull up any charts today.
It's good. Don't worry about it. We're not here to talk charts and price action that much
Don't worry about it. We're not here to talk charts and price action that much either.
First question for you, and then I'll let my colleague Tyler go.
You obviously already gave yourself an introduction and some of your background, but what drew you to Sharpling?
Because when you came on from BlackRock, it was a pretty big news within the industry, which we actually covered.
And so what drew you to Sharpling Gaming? And in the same
wind, I guess, what drew you to crypto, right? So Sharpling Crypto overall.
Yeah, to be honest with you, I fell into crypto. I inherited a one person blockchain team in 2018,
not realizing the depth of how this is going to fundamentally change our lives.
The team taught me everything I needed to know about crypto.
I went down the Ethereum rabbit hole after we launched not only a Bitcoin ETF,
but an ETH ETF in July of 24.
It became the largest ETH fund.
But I didn't really understand how productive ETH could be
because those funds couldn't stake. After 20 years, I retired and Joe Lubin pulled me out
of retirement six weeks later because we share this idea that ETH is not only going to change
civilization, it will at some point become the world ledger and will fundamentally shake up how value is transferred.
And I'd love to be able to spend some time on how an AI machine economy is going to change every one of our lives.
And I think it's going to happen on Ethereum.
So I'm in this for financial system and civilization change.
And I know that sounds very macro away from the daily charts,
but a deep, deep believer that this is going to change all our lives.
Well, Joseph, why don't we just dig right into it? So I think two parts there, you said World
Ledger and then the AI machine economy. Let's tackle World Ledger first. What does that mean
to you? If ETH is successful as the World Ledger, what does that look like?
Sure. I spent 20 years literally with a front row seat on the traditional economy and market structure and saw how fundamentally broken the movement of value was.
Things didn't settle for T1.
Sometimes in Asia, things settle in two or three days.
We didn't have your security and
money. Basically, the entire premise of the financial system relied on human trust or
contracts or capital. The idea that there's another way to do it, a different set of rails
that are built on decentralized trust is what's exciting. The idea that you can use Ethereum,
and by Ethereum, I mean the L1 and the L2 ecosystem, to literally settle trades atomically in an instant, to program those trades, to be able to trade 24-7.
All the frictions that we see in traditional finance will end up going away when there's a single trusted decentralized ledger. And Ether is not just another L2 token. Ether is going to be
the trust commodity that's going to replace human trusts. So this idea of humans, machines, Ether
will end up being where most value and trust is exchanged in the world. And it's going to be more
than just traditional financial systems. We see it in stablecoins. We see it in RWA.
Wait till you see agentic workflows
fundamentally change how we live our lives.
All of this will be done on Ethereum.
And I'd love to take up the Solana debate
whenever you're ready later today.
And I want to talk about the agentic stuff first
in a second as well but I'm curious
did you have a light bulb moment
you were talking to these teams you were learning about
the years was there any events
or any specific things that just really clicked
one and that was when I told you
at BlackRock we did three things
Circle. We became the manager of their stablecoin reserve, a $70 billion portfolio. That was
interesting, but very much in our wheelhouse. Managing treasuries is not a very hard thing.
The second thing was launching ETFs, and that was exciting. The tokenization piece is where it went down the Ethereum rabbit
hole. We launched a product called Biddle. It's an on-chain yield-bearing token that is one-for-one
exchangeable 24-7 with stable coins. So this idea, when you want to be productive on-chain,
great, you stay in a stable coin. When you want to earn yield, stay here. We had to decide where
to launch this. And we looked at every chain out there. We did our diligence and we realized that
mainnet, Ethereum, is where the security lives. It's never gone down. It's trusted. And overall,
that's where the liquidity is flowing. So 60-something percent of stable coins on Ethereum.
RWAs at this point are 70 to 80 percent on Ethereum.
And I had that aha moment that we traditional finance, when they tokenize their products,
are going to want to go where security is. And Solana is an amazing product. It's fast.
It is not, doesn't provide the economic security that traditional finance wanted,
which is why we chose Ethereum. That was a bit of the aha, I wouldn't say a moment, an aha diligence and a
learning that we came to. And I think BlackRock is a bit of a harbinger of what traditional
financial firms want. They want finality, they want trust, they want uptime. And that's why I
got into this idea that Ethereum will become the world ledger because it has those characteristics.
And I think that was in line with what a lot of the ETH bulls, the ETH maxis thought this is how it would play out.
The tokenization for the very reasons that you mentioned.
And it looks like that is indeed coming to fruition.
Of course, BlackRock's stamp of approval was a big one as institutions.
They're an easy act to follow to a degree.
So is that the reason why the agentic economy and machine economy will be on ETH as well?
Or what makes ETH specifically the interest for that?
Can I just take a step back and give you my macro view of what we're seeing?
a step back and give you my macro view of what we're seeing. On the one hand, you see Bitcoin
and ETH trading in the short run like a NASDAQ MAG7. It's very, very sensitive to risk on,
risk off. And there's a lot of conversation about the AI bubble. I think the AI bubble
conversation is really the question of, are we overbuilding? Are companies overspending to build AI data centers?
I think we are underestimating how AI is going to shift and change our lives.
And I'll get to Ethereum in a minute.
But if you take a step back, 25 was the year of AI assistants and copilots.
They were generalized capabilities. I think you're going to see Ethereum, this idea of machine ecosystem moving value.
And I'd love to give you four or five examples of what I mean by that, because I think people
are fundamentally underestimating this. You're going to start seeing autonomous market participants.
So people who use AI agents, digital twins who are out there using these capabilities to trade,
rebalance portfolios, provide liquidity, continuously execute whatever strategies they have.
Tyler, whatever you're doing on screen on a daily basis, there's going to be something,
a digital twin of your wallet, automating this capability.
I think it's also going to blend into this idea of you're going to have your own AI asset manager.
You know, you give them constraints,
risk tolerance, targets, goals,
and it will optimize it for you.
But I think what's most exciting for the crypto community
is this idea that there might be in DeFi
Like today, if you want to do yield harvesting,
you're out there working the books, trying to do it yourself as a human. These DeFi agents on your
behalf will basically move capital across protocols. They will optimize your staking,
your lending, your liquidity. They will monitor smart contract risk,
and they will do this all autonomously. And the reason why I'm excited about this is if you
want to geek out, look at ERC 8004. It is literally a protocol for trustless agents.
And I think over time, and I don't mean measured in days or weeks, but I don't also mean many years, most of our financial lives will be living in an agentic state.
And if the trading and the liquidity and the DeFi is on Ethereum, this is where an agentic economy will be built.
And that will be very bullish for transactions.
It'll be very bullish for TVL.
And if you believe that, and I believe it deeply,
you should be owning ETH right now as that trust commodity that's going to move this value and secure it. So I know that was a mouthful. I'm a futurist. We are fundamentally underestimating
how Agentec is going to go from tasks to ecosystems. I think that's spot on. I think
that the developments with CLAW just in 2026 and how it just built this new workflow tool itself
in the last week and a half, I think more and more folks are starting to see it.
This was more of an idea, a concept,
I think more for the futurists, even in late 2025.
Now I feel like more even folks who don't
classify themselves as futurists're starting to see it. Right.
And feed at which it progresses.
And I think the next line of thought is how do you invest in that?
Like what are the ways to place trades on that concept?
So I think a part of your thesis is that it'll play out on Ethereum and
another bull case for Ethereum.
I'm curious, you are a macro thinker investor on a multi-year time frame.
How do you think about valuing Ethereum or Ether the asset?
I think there's been a lot of discussion over the past few years about the fees it generates, how to generate, you know, accurate pricing
I'm curious kind of what all goes into your value model.
And I will say off the bat, I will leave it to other people to put out specific price
not who I am. In most cases, those people are wrong 80% of the time. Let me give you a simple
In most cases, those people are wrong 80% of the time.
asset-based valuation model as we think about Ether. So Ether is both a store of value,
at times it's deflationary. And while it's not hard-coded like Bitcoin to have a specific number,
over time, what we're going to end up seeing is, think of it as an asset-based valuation model.
time, what we're going to end up seeing is, think of it as an asset-based valuation model.
As more TVL, as more transactions are happening on the Ethereum ecosystem, the value of Ether
has been climbing. There was a consensus report put out last June that talks about Ether as
trustware. And they did a backtest for the last five years that as transaction values on
Ethereum increase for every $2 of transaction secured on the Ethereum ecosystem, you get about
a dollar of Ether market cap appreciation. I don't think as this J curves, as stable coins triple,
I don't think it'll be as linear as that,
but I definitely believe if you have a thesis
that more and more of the economy is going to transition
to an Ethereum ecosystem,
Ether will appreciate as an asset.
I also think that L1 versus L2 is going to start to break down.
There was a reason L2s came to become the fast, cheap
providers on the back of the security of mainnet. But Vitalik is talking about 10xing the throughput
of mainnet in the next couple of years. And it's actually happening faster than you would think.
So I think more of the value will eventually accrue to mainnet than the L2s. So I would be an owner of Ether rather than a lot of the layer two tokens at
this point. That is the rationale. That makes sense. You brought Vitalik and that was actually
on my list. So I'm curious, A, do you, Joe Lubin, do you have conversations with Vitalik? And I
guess part two of that, how do you feel about his leadership of the broader ecosystem into 2026?
I would say when I tell you that our mission is to first accumulate Ether and make it productive,
our second mission is actually to be a really prominent advocate for the ecosystem.
a prominent advocate for the ecosystem.
And by that, it's less conversations with Vitalik.
It's more a really constructive engagement with the Ethereum Foundation, which I think
if we're honest with ourselves for about four or five years, it lost the mindshare.
It lost the mindshare to Bitcoin.
It lost the mindshare to Solana.
Alana was fast, it was cheap, spent a lot on BD and marketing.
Spent a lot on BD and marketing.
I think as you see the dats rise, half the value of the digital asset treasuries, whether
it's Tom Lee or myself or others, is creating that demand for Ether, which has been really
positive on the price action and sucking up block space.
Part of it is just telling the story of what's coming.
And when you see the news announcements from JP Morgan,
from Morgan Stanley, from Korea, from Japan, from PayPal,
like there are so many signals telling you that it's coming to Ethereum.
When we engage with Ethereum ecosystem,
we try to provide them context on what institutions are looking for.
They're looking for throughput and they're looking for privacy.
The security is already there.
The ability to deliver big upgrades to a year
has been unparalleled on Ethereum.
What we need is throughput and privacy.
And we also need to be telling the story better.
In lots of investment theses,
you have to go look for breadcrumbs, pull it together, figure out if it's a signal.
There is screaming broadcast that this is coming on Ethereum, stablecoins, RWA, traditional finance.
You just almost just need to focus on that long term signal and not focus on the daily charts in this, in this thesis of ours.
But we're engaging less with Vitalik and more with the foundation.
We believe in this leadership and what they're doing.
I think you mentioned like the dad says the spokesman to a degree,
and that's one of the core responsibilities. I think it was needed.
I think that's actually been one of the bigger benefits of some of the larger DATs and their ability to share the message with a broader retail base that perhaps traditional crypto native leadership just didn't have the ability to, didn't have the reach, or just perhaps weren't as good at crafting the message.
So I do think that's been important.
Maybe we go down the DAT operational rabbit hole a little bit.
I don't know if you're one.
So you all just deployed $170 million in ETH on Linnea.
What goes into that operation?
I'd love to hear a little bit more about that.
I think the first thing I would say is let's just start.
People should know that Bitcoin is an amazing store of value. I'm not a maxi on any coin or
topic other than progress and tokenization, but Bitcoin is not a productive asset. Ethereum is.
So the first rule is if you own a productive asset, you better deploy it and make it productive. And we've
been nearly 100% staked since day one. Some of our competitors weren't staking until early this year.
So you have a yield bearing asset, you better start making that productive. And we've been
doing that. What's interesting is most of our portfolio is sitting in just native staking, earned the Ethereum staking rate,
pretty risk-free. But what we found is we want to be pioneers. And I know that sounds a little
bit crazy or not humble, but what do I mean by pioneering ETH productivity? It turns out that
in crypto, there are very, very few people who have long-term capital. If you're an ETF,
you need to provide daily liquidity. If you're a venture fund, you have a horizon. We own at this
point nearly $3 billion of what I call permanent capital. And we had an ability to do something
that no one had done before. Two things. One is to deploy that permanent capital
on a multi-year duration basis, meaning we could go to protocols. We went to Consensus,
we went to Linea, we went to Etherfy, we went to Eigencloud and said, would you like us to deploy
a large amount of capital and lock it? The secret is that TVL in crypto has no L, right?
But if you can go to a protocol and say, I'll lock my capital up for a couple of years,
you will not only get a restaking rate, you will also get incentives from these parties
because they want that locked capital.
So we were able to essentially compose a partnership, ConsenSys, the Linea, EVM, ZK blockchain they have,
EtherFi, Eigen, to get a restaking rate plus incentives from any of the parties.
And those incentives are in ETH, and those incentives don't add risk. So what we've just
essentially done is composed a restaking token that gives you excess returns without taking excess risk.
That would be good enough, but we did something more.
We went to our friends at Anchorage, one of our two custodians, and said, can you support this in the qualified custodian?
And they were able to innovate and say, yes. So if you can get outsized returns and reduce
operational risk, so DeFi in a qualified custodian, that had never been done before.
And I think this is really, really good for investors. DeFi level yields with less risk
in a qualified custodian. This is what I mean about pioneering. And people use the word
institutional and DeFi together, but they didn't really go together.
So if I sound excited, if I sound a little bit like I'm quite excited about this, what
went into this was a tremendous amount of diligence.
We saw the news and I think it's great.
At some point, the dads need to do something, right? There's so much money locked up. And like you said, there's no L in this industry. It's fast money and it moves up and down a lot. It's very volatile, especially as of recently. So you guys have a lot of ETH, right? Are you up to a million ETH yet?
I think, or are you close, right?
We're in the high 800,000 earning every day.
Yeah, so you're in the high 800,000 earning every day. So you have good yield on that Ethereum.
So what can you do with this ETH, right?
Or what are you planning to do with it in the future in a way?
Are you just going to park it and let it multiply?
Or do you have any plans for that?
So I think we just need to take a step back.
I would say 2025 was the year that DATS did their initial accumulation.
2026 needs to be the year of productivity.
If you have a productive asset, stake all of it.
But I would tell you some of it is going to stay native staking some of it is going to be in restate
some of it is going to be in liquid restaking tokens but i think we're going to keep a portion
of our portfolio to be opportunistic we are going to be a lender potentially we have an ability at this point to help people who need unstaked ETH.
I think we are thinking through what could be operating models where if you have permanent capital and you provide financing or liquidity to other protocols who need it.
So I don't want to get into specifics.
I'm a public company CEO, but I think you're going
to see us push the efficient frontier of what you can do if you have permanent capital, which
doesn't exist in this industry. So this idea of term structure doesn't really go out beyond a few
months. But if you can lock your ETH or lend your ETH or be a lender of last resort, you can actually
drive really good returns for your
investors. And I think that traditional structure needs to come to the crypto community. And we can
be one of those providers. Yeah, that's awesome. That makes sense. I'm curious, this is kind of
tied to another question I had is how do you all prepare or plan for market volatility? And I know we don't want to talk about day-to-day price, but ETH went to 5K, went all the way back to 2,500, now back a little over 3,000.
Are there specific strategies that you would hold in the back pocket and think about deploying based on certain prices?
I'm curious how you all think and manage for that.
Sure. I mean, the good news is we're built for both cycles. And I think we need to be honest
with ourselves. And people don't really think this way often in the crypto community is we
chose a volatile industry. I've chosen a very volatile asset. ETH has like a 90 vol. You can't
be excited on the way up and bemoan the volatility on the way down.
So the beautiful thing is you can either build a leverage model, like we saw people do,
and unfortunately, they really heard on October 10th, this idea that they're only playing for
the upside and not protecting the downside. We're not built that way. So we have a clean balance
sheet. We don't have any debt. We have not encumbered our ETH at all. You see some of the debts being forced to sell their ETH to pay off preferred equity or to pay off debt or frankly just to do buybacks.
When ETH goes down, we have no reason to sell.
And when it goes down, it's a buying opportunity.
So I think we're built for both cycles.
But I think we just need to be honest with ourselves.
It's a super volatile asset.
And you can't like it on the way up and not like it when it's coming down.
When it comes down, it's a buying opportunity.
And I think we all need to embrace that ball.
And it's a really positive aspect of the crypto asset class.
That said, I do think since October 10th, we've seen a flight to quality.
If you've seen like Bitcoin and Ether trading in a pretty tight range for the last several months.
But I think you're seeing other than some of the speculative elements, a lot more of the institutions just want to own Bitcoin and ETH.
And they're afraid to go down the risk.
They're afraid to go down that risk ladder to some of the other assets.
I know you guys have been focused on some of the breakout daily trading.
That's just not what the big institutions are thinking about right now.
Now I want to maybe pull us,
but thanks for going down the operational rabbit hole,
And you kind of pull them back out to,
you went there a little bit,
your crypto macro outlook for 2026,
like what is your old view for,
for how this year is going to go?
And it's already off to a pretty volatile start.
So I know it's hard to talk about.
So I would say three or four things.
One is I do think 2026 is going to be the year of tokenization.
Like you hear the Larry Finks, the JP Morgans,
basically saying they're going to tokenize all their assets.
And if that's the case, you're going to go from having 30, 35 billion of RWA tokenized
to potentially hundreds of billions over the next period.
We just need to see some of the big firms tokenize, not individual funds,
but fundamentally tokenize like an ETF complex or a mutual fund complex or a type of asset class.
I think you're also seeing the DTCC signal that they want all settlement to happen
potentially on chain. That is going to be a boon for tokenization. So that I think is one of the
macro thesis. I think in the past, crypto has traded more on crypto news. I think this year, it's going to be highly dependent on whether we get the Clarity Act signed in Q1. I'm optimistic we will. I'm not sure what the final bill will include. And I think it's going to be even more sensitive to the US FOMC, you know, this asset class really trades with liquidity. And if you see rates just
go down 50 basis points this year, I think it's going to be a very, very disappointing year
for crypto. If you see rates go down and be eased by 100 basis points, I think it's going to be a
breakout year. My most important comment is if you believe you
have the tailwinds of loosening, if you have the tailwinds of regulatory clarity and you have the
tailwinds of tokenization, I think we can break the four-year cycle. And if that happens, all bets
are off. I happen to think that it will be a flight to quality and it's going to be more bitcoin and eth than the long tail
um but i could be wrong i'm not going to give a specific price prediction i just know it's
really tied to regulatory loosening and whether it'll be a flight to quality or if leverage comes
back in the system again do you just just quickly on that and and of course you don't have to answer
because i know you don't talk prices and stuff but like what would it take for you to firmly believe
we've broken that four year cycles because
Tyler and Mando talk about this a lot
I think they both agree in the four cycle been broken
obviously you mentioned Tom
when I interview him it's the same thing
you're going there right now like
what how do we confirm that
what would be the confirmation you need for your cycle trend to be broken?
I think you're just going to look in March or April, and either Bitcoin is going to be trading at 120, or Bitcoin is going to be trading at 65.
And that will tell you everything you need to know whether the cycle is broken or not. I'm optimistic that with some of this regulatory clarity with, you know, you saw the CPI numbers and the inflation numbers come in lower than expected.
You saw growth in the U.S. hit over 4%.
You know, there's people predicting it could be between 4% and 5% this year.
If that's the case, you're going to see pretty significant loosening.
And I think you're going to see a breakout again in Bitcoin prices.
And then ETH and others will follow.
Someone pounded the table on that.
I guess, well, Joseph, this has been fantastic.
Maybe a final question here for you.
So if someone checks back in on Sharplink, on SBET, five years,
what do you hope it's known for?
What do you hope it will have accomplished?
I think in five years, we'd like to own 5% of ETH.
I think it's going to happen much sooner.
Tom Lee is going to get there probably mid-year this year and stop.
So we'd like to own 5% of ETH.
We would like to be the most productive debt,
meaning we have institutional capabilities.
We have people who understand DeFi deeply.
We have a strategic relationship with consensus.
I'd like us to be beating other debts on a risk-free basis,
on a risk-adjusted basis on productivity.
I think we'd love to be identifying
new protocols that could 5x, 10x, 20x, 50x. Because of our relationship with consensus,
we see every new protocol launching. And I'm not suggesting we're going to be a venture capital
firm, but if you can start putting that permanent capital to work and help bootstrap protocols, you can participate in the upside. with billions and billions of dollars of ETH and Ethereum economy, because people are going to need
that permanent capital to provide the liquidity and to grease the wheels for what I'm describing
as a new Ethereum economy. The agentic stuff is highly, highly underestimated. And I think how
it's going to change our daily lives, we're going to go back and look back like we did in mid-90s when the internet came
out and how it fundamentally changed how we communicated, how we learned, how we exchanged
information. This is going to be the same on how we exchange value. And I think we're just
fundamentally underestimating the impact of this. And I think it's going to be a boon for,
you'll finally have web three. You'll finally have web three instead of 2.5.
Well, Joseph, this has been incredible.
Really appreciate your time
and all the insights you provided.
We'll be following along closely.
Wishing you all the best success.
And thanks for having me, guys.
but I love hearing about the daily charts.
Sometimes I just need to abstract myself and think in weeks, months, years.
Well, listen, we got you.
For your daily dose of alpha, just tune into FOMO Hour,
and we got you covered on all topics.
Joseph Shalom, CEO of Sharpley Gaming.
Thank you for coming today.
Really appreciate you. Thanks, guys. Joseph Shalom, CEO of Sharpley Gaming. Thank you for coming today. Really appreciate you.
No, we're good. That's it.
Look, if I was to pick any asset in
crypto, I would say that ETH is...
Did we just pump ETH, boys?
I'm feeling underexposed.
It's not a bad looking chart, lads.
You know, it's not a bad looking...
I know Joseph really doesn't like to talk about that stuff.
It's interesting to see a complete difference between Tom Lee's approach and style
and Joseph's approach and style with SBET, right?
Similar to Joe Lubin as well.
It's much more on the technical future of the world, the centralized ledger.
And then you have Tom Lee who has a different way about him.
Both are great, by the way.
But I think it's always interesting.
So that's pretty crazy that two entities
will own 10% of all year at some point.
Yeah, if they get there, you have to assume.
I mean, Tom's going to get there.
He's like 4% already, right?
I know the Sharpling lads are taking a different approach.
I'm mostly interested in seeing how these dads will spend their money
So it'll be interesting to see.
Anyways, should I give some money away?
And while we pull that up, Bitcoin too, 93.5.
Wait, wait, we're at that mark.
I did not touch the lines. I'm not touching the lines. I left last year's line, M, we're at that mark. We're at the mark. I don't, I did not touch the lines.
I'm not touching the lines.
Cause we keep getting slapped down from it.
I don't have my glasses on.
I have mine on and it looks good,
I was on a Wiz's or Soho stream yesterday.
Calling for about 98 potential breakout to 102 before retest of 95.
Bernie calling for breakout.
A lot of my quants are, you know.
We need Bernie power lines to start the show tomorrow.
I already see the requests from DJ and Ty in the comments.
So Bernie, you've got about 23 hours.
a little shout out to the Red guys
who sold out the Worldstar
Cherry Cola, congratulations.
Mari yesterday was like, oh, it's taking a little bit longer.
I was surprised it took a little longer. I mean, it's good that
it sold out, but I was a little surprised about the time.
Ari, man, Myriad Markets.
This guy made $4,000 betting to know that it won't sell out in another three minutes.
But he committed to buy rec with it.
Yeah, Ari, you better do it.
We're going to be watching the chain.
All right, let's bring up the board, Charlie,
and let's pick a lucky winner every day.
Every day someone comes on here and makes money.
She's at Omaha today just for the sake of time.
In light of the recent event,
Alexander the Great is pretty fitting.
I've never seen him either.
Yesterday, we cooked yesterday with Wiz on the stream.
We played a lot of Yeet, Mando.
Yeah, that's awesome, man.
Wiz plays like hard and throws like $500 hands on hard and still makes it to the tracks.
Like what the hell, dude?
He lost it all after betting on the Steelers, but all right, we'll do,
We'll do this, this, and here, there you go.
Let me go full screen for you.
All right. Let's hope that you win. so far. It's been pretty good with Omaha
Let's go three of a kind with Jax as well. That's beatable. Let's beat up
That's Jackson. Oh wait. Oh
Oh wait so far. It's even so we could beat him on the high
We play, yeah, it's a tie.
So we'll play two more, right?
Dude, I've never seen this.
Should we just play two more?
It's kind of common in our minds.
You get two more runs, dude.
I've never personally seen that.
And you won the two hands.
Oh, brutal. That's rebat. Oh, brutal.
That's going to be tough to beat.
Alexander the Crypto Heart.
Well, that was a great show.
That was a great show. It was a-4 we're good that was a great show
we'll see you tomorrow morning
for the episode of FOMO Hour