SharpLink Gaming has revealed its intention to allocate $200 million in Ether (ETH) from its corporate treasury to Consensys’ Linea network.
The firm stated that this multi-year initiative will leverage Linea’s zkEVM layer-2 infrastructure to cultivate onchain yield and enhance the efficiency of its ETH holdings. Per a press release issued on Tuesday, the strategy seeks to capture “highly competitive, differentiated, risk-adjusted ETH-denominated returns.”
SharpLink plans to generate yields through staking, restaking rewards obtained by securing EigenCloud’s decentralized verification services (AVSs), and incentives from Linea and ether.fi — a decentralized liquid staking and restaking protocol.
Staking involves locking cryptocurrencies to bolster a blockchain network in return for rewards. Restaking takes this concept further by permitting users to reuse or “restake” their staked assets to support additional decentralized services and reap supplementary rewards.
The $200 million deployment will be overseen with institutional safeguards provided by Anchorage Digital Bank, SharpLink’s approved custodian.
Presently, SharpLink is the second-largest corporate holder of ETH, possessing 859,853 ETH valued at approximately $3.57 billion, or 0.71% of the total supply, as per CoinGecko data. The forthcoming deployment constitutes about 5.6% of its treasury.
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DeFi yield strategies
SharpLink is not the only entity utilizing decentralized finance to boost onchain returns.
On Sept. 2, ETHZilla (ETHZ) announced its plan to invest $100 million of ETH in ether.fi to enhance yield on its treasury holdings. ETHZilla currently ranks as the fifth-largest Ethereum digital asset treasury (DAT), holding 102,326 ETH as of this writing.
In February, the Ethereum Foundation, which supports Ethereum’s core development and ecosystem, deployed 45,000 ETH into various DeFi protocols, including Spark and Compound. The foundation’s treasury policy disclosed in June plans to transition beyond passive holdings by staking and deploying ETH across DeFi protocols.
Centralized exchanges have also started integrating DeFi yield strategies. In September, Coinbase allied with DeFi lending protocol Morpho to allow users to lend USDC (USDC) stablecoins and earn yields as high as 10.8%.
Less than a month later, Crypto.com revealed plans to incorporate Morpho into its Cronos blockchain, enabling users to deposit wrapped ETH and other assets to generate stablecoin yields via new lending vaults, anticipated later this year.
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