Why This SharpLink Whale Holds Millions in SBET—But Not Ethereum

A pseudonymous man known as “SharpLink Whale” currently holds approximately $3 million worth of stock in Ethereum treasury company SharpLink Gaming. While the former traditional finance worker is bullish on the firm, he doesn’t hold any Ethereum—and isn’t buying into other treasury companies.

SharpLink Whale told Decrypt that he started purchasing SharpLink stock, which trades as SBET, at around $14, as the initial hype around its Ethereum treasury plans started to die out. The European trader purchased just shy of $1 million worth of the stock to start with, and following a number of subsequent sales and purchases, he now holds $3 million worth, as verified during a call with Decrypt.

He believes that Ethereum “will have its moment now” and set new all-time highs, and that the ETH-to-BTC ratio could double this year. Despite this, he doesn’t own any Ethereum outside of his SBET fortunes.

SharpLink Whale explained that, firstly, he simply doesn’t want to be responsible for safely storing such a large amount of Ethereum, jokingly citing concerns that his “motherboard will burn because I’m downloading too much porn or whatever.”

“Besides that, I also want to have some yield on that ETH, and I don’t want to be researching what each protocol is offering,” the whale told Decrypt. “I want somebody else to do it for me. Obviously, I have to pay a premium for that… I’m happy to pay a premium for having my ETH custodied by the best in the business and having it deployed by the best in the business.”

Why SharpLink?

SharpLink Gaming was previously a little-known online gambling marketer, but rebranded to become an Ethereum treasury company in May. In making this move, the firm raised $425 million to purchase ETH, and Consensys CEO and Ethereum co-founder Joseph Lubin joined its board of directors. The company now holds 438,190 ETH, or $1.647 billion worth of the asset.

(Disclosure: Consensys is one of 22 investors in an editorially independent Decrypt.)

The SharpLink Whale believes that SBET is best positioned to manage how it acquires yield, and warns against other firms jumping on the treasury company trend.

“I’m pretty sure it’s already turning into a grift,” he told Decrypt. “A lot of times in crypto, what happens is: There’s something that has a big success, you have a lot of copycats, and people think they missed out on the main one—so they try to get the copycat, and they get fucked over.”

Lubin’s involvement is core to the SharpLink Whale’s thesis on the company. He believes that Lubin is the second-best person—only behind Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin—to help the company safely custody the ETH while also outlining a sound strategy to produce yield.

Yield refers to the process of earning a return from an asset. In this case, rather than simply holding or staking Ethereum, a user may choose to provide liquidity for a protocol, for example, in exchange for a percentage yield on the ETH they are providing.

As such, SharpLink Whale believes most people should avoid crypto treasury copycats and only pay attention to SharpLink, as well as Michael Saylor’s Bitcoin-centric Strategy. That said, he also sees potential in BitMine Immersion Technologies because of Tom Lee’s involvement and his connection with Wall Street.

Outside of that, the whale mostly thinks it’s best to ignore emerging treasury firms, as he’s not convinced they’re going to outperform the aforementioned companies at acquiring yield on the assets. He also has concerns about safe custody, laughing and suggesting that an inexperienced company could click a dodgy link and lose everything.

Who is SharpLink Whale?

SharpLink Whale told Decrypt that he is a European man in his early 30s, currently working as a full-time trader and stay-at-home dad. He started his career in traditional finance before pivoting to crypto approximately four years ago, working a “relatively boring” job at a DeFi company.

He said that he made his initial $1 million SBET buy from the proceeds two major bets on Coinbase and Nvidia stocks that brought a 9x boost to his net worth.

The SharpLink millionaire’s story mirrors that of the Dogecoin Millionaire, an American man who profited millions of dollars by purchasing DOGE. However, Glauber “ProTheDoge” Contessoto famously did not sell any Dogecoin at its peak, which soon fell so hard that he lost his Dogecoin Millionaire title—though he regained it more than a year later.

The pseudonymous SharpLink millionaire refuses to fall to the same fate, and has already sold parts of his position—despite his growing social media following centering on his SBET holdings.

At one point, SharpLink Whale told Decrypt, he sold his entire SBET portfolio at around $40 and bought back in once it dipped to $20. In total, the trader has realized more than $2.5 million in profit on SBET despite his current holdings being down $126,000 from when he bought back in—albeit still sizably up from the initial buy.

“You feel kind of inclined not to sell. When I sell, I could just not tell people, but I want to be straight up. But obviously, it panics a lot of people,” he told Decrypt. “People also need to learn that you always need to make your own decisions. If I’m long SharpLink and it goes down 20%, it hurts. But it was my decision, it’s fine. But if I long it purely based on some anonymous Twitter account or even friends, and then it goes down, it feels different.”

Days before taking a call with Decrypt, the SharpLink millionaire started to get cold feet as he claimed he was looking to exit his position. He said that the swings in price were too much to stomach, claiming that his portfolio shifted more than $500,000 in one day.

Now, he’s looking to diversify his portfolio into more stable assets so he can get a better night’s sleep—which he claims has been greatly disturbed since he first bought SBET. What stable assets, you may ask? Bitcoin, of course… one of the most notoriously volatile assets of all time, though the chaos has been calming lately.