SharpLink Slides as Corporations Crank Up Crypto Risk

Following a parabolic rise towards the end of May, Ethereum treasury company SharpLink’s SBET stock was decimated last week, falling by 76% in after-hours trading on June 12.

Despite the concerning price action, other corporations are ramping up their crypto risk profiles and acquiring altcoins such as FET, HYPE, and XRP to gain a foothold in the crypto market.

SBET tanked after hours on Thursday, falling from $32.52 to as low as $9, after Steven Zheng, a researcher at The Block, posted on X that “basically every participant in SBET’s private placement filed to dump all their shares less than a month after they announced the ETH Treasury Strategy move.”

However, the company’s chairman and the founder of Consensys, Joseph Lubin, was quick to publicly address the situation.

“Some are misinterpreting SBET’s S-3 filing: It registers shares for potential resale by prior investors…This is standard post-PIPE procedure in tradfi, not an indication of actual sales. To clarify, neither Consensys nor I have sold any shares,” Lubin said.

Consensys’ lawyer Matt Corva posted, “ It’s a basic registration statement. Of course, all the shares get registered.”

Despite the clarification, SBET failed to recover from the bloodbath and closed at $9.2 on Friday. While this is still 145% higher than it was when SharpLink announced its plans to aggressively acquire ETH, the stock is down 89% from its peak of $82 on May 29.

Small Companies Ape Altcoins

Despite SBET’s volatility, other crypto companies are pushing forward with their crypto treasury plans, and getting far riskier with their asset selection than entities such as Strategy or SharpLink.

On June 12, Tony Guoga, the chairman of SolStrategies and Chairman of Tony G Co-Investments Holdings, announced that his company has purchased 10,387 HYPE for a total of $438,000. While that is a miniscule amount compared to the crypto holdings of entities such as SharpLink, GameStop, and Strategy, the announcement sent the TONY stock flying from $0.56 per share to $5 per share in a single day.

This news came just one day after Fetch AI revealed that fitness equipment company Interactive Strength – ticker TRNR – raised $500 million to buy FET, which trades at just a $1.7 billion market capitalization and is down 58% over the last year.

TRNR’s stock did not fare as well as TONY, and is down 26% since its announcement on June 11.

While HYPE and FET may be on the more speculative side, another company is moving forward with its XRP strategic treasury, after VivoPower and Webus International announced plans to buy an aggregated $400 million of XRP in May.

This time it’s Trident Digital Holdings, a Singapore-based e-commerce company that is buying up to $500 million worth of XRP for its treasury, pushing the potential XRP inflows up to almost $1 billion by the second half of 2025.