Joining me here at the New York Stock Exchange to break all of this down is, CEO of Sharply just great to have you here.
Thank you so much.
Well, first and foremost, tell me about this fund and what specific types of projects that you're looking to find.
So first of all, we are the 2nd largest public holder of ether in the world, and when you own that you have an obligation to make it productive.
And when we started, we started by essentially staking all our ether to own to return a risk-free reward from staking.
Over time we've tried to make our ether treasury more productive.
We started participating in DI protocols.
This fund is about making 6 to 10 yield bearing investments with a partnership with Galaxy, meaning through their pipeline and risk.
Management and our long term capital, we can deploy capital to early stage DI protocols and earn a higher yield while being fully collateralized and over collateralized in our lending.
So think of us having benevolent capital that we can lend to protocols and in return our investors can get higher risk managed returns.
It's a first of its kind between two public crypto companies.
And just since the last time you were on the show, a lot has changed both in the market environment as well as over at sharply.
So for our viewers who may not be as familiar, can you break down what's going on?
Sure.
So first of all, last summer, most digital asset treasuries were either able to raise.
Significant capital or they weren't.
We're one of the two Ethereum Treasury companies that were able to raise billions of dollars of capital on behalf of investors, and our client base, our investor base, has become the most institutional in this space.
47% of our stockholders are institutional holders.
At the same time, we've actually seen a significant consolidation in the price of cryptocurrencies, mostly because of the macro environment.
Crypto is very sensitive to inflation.
Liquidity and most recently the expectations that rates are going to rise potentially as opposed to fall has had a short term impact.
But what's quite interesting is the market signals around institutional adoption have never been stronger.
Every day you're hearing a new announcement, including we're here at the New York Stock Exchange.
Announcing they're going to support 24/7 trading of public equity, so across the stablecoin, tokenization, defi, and soon to be agentic finance space, the long term signals have never been more positive.
So we're at a moment of divergence which sometimes is a good entry point from a risk reward perspective.
And speaking of which, 2026 has been quite the volatile year across all asset classes whether we're talking about equities or commodities or crypto.
So can you tell us what long term fundamental signals that you're tracking when it comes to I think ether is the leader.
The Ethereum ecosystem is the leader owning over 50% of all stablecoin circulation.
DeFi high quality DeFI transactions and the early innings of tokenization of most financial assets.
So what we're looking for is to go from announcements to pretty significant capital deployment by the largest institutions in the world, the likes of BlackRock, Franklin Templeton, and again you've seen announcements from NASDAQ, DTCC, New York Stock Exchange that. is going to be the future rails, so we're set up to give investors an opportunity to express that view and get an exposure.
It's a much smarter way of getting exposure than owning spot yourself or even investing in an ETF.
The signals are really loud and we just need to come out of this crypto consolidation period.
And the ones who do it responsibly and institutionally will be the.
Winners in the long run.
Yes, and Joseph, before I let you go, we are heading into a holiday weekend, and that just means that the second half of 2026 is right around the corner, which is hard to believe and all eyes are on the nation's capital when it comes to clarity and that legislative process is still ongoing.
So what are your expectations as we head into the second half?
Our expectations are that the Senate Banking Committee will merge its bill with the Senate Ag Committee.
Get to a Senate vote and then the most important thing is for the Senate and House to reconcile the bill and hopefully put it on the President's desk by July 4th or shortly thereafter.
It's a very short period.
That would be a massively bullish signal for the high quality crypto assets and for the high quality protocols and exchanges.
I do.
I think we're going to get to a period where you're going to see a flight to quality, and those who don't take security and institutional standards seriously, I don't think they'll benefit from this.
That said, even if the Clarity Act does not pass, you now have an SEC and a CFTC who can handle most of it through rulemaking, and they're on the same page for the first time in what feels like 8 years.
Well, Joseph, a lot to keep our eyes on as we head into the second half here.
So I appreciate your time and thank you so much for joining me today here at the New York.
Thank you, Rey.
Enjoy your holiday weekend.
Thank you.
You as well.
Thank you.
