SharpLink Gaming has revealed its intention to allocate $200 million in Ether (ETH) from its corporate treasury onto Consensys’ Linea network.
The company stated that this multi-year project will utilize Linea’s zkEVM layer-2 framework to produce onchain yield and enhance the efficacy of its ETH assets. As detailed in Tuesday’s press release, the strategy seeks to achieve “highly competitive, differentiated, risk-adjusted ETH-denominated returns.”
SharpLink aims to generate profits through staking, restaking rewards from supporting 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 help secure a blockchain network in return for rewards. Restaking expands this concept by enabling users to reuse or “restake” their locked assets to back additional decentralized services, garnering extra rewards.
The $200 million initiative will be managed under institutional safeguards via Anchorage Digital Bank, SharpLink’s accredited custodian.
Currently, SharpLink stands as the second-largest corporate holder of ETH, possessing 859,853 ETH valued at about $3.57 billion, representing 0.71% of total supply, according to CoinGecko data. The planned deployment constitutes roughly 5.6% of its treasury.
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DeFi yield strategies
SharpLink is not alone in exploring decentralized finance to enhance onchain returns.
On Sept. 2, ETHZilla (ETHZ) announced its plan to allocate $100 million of ETH to ether.fi to boost yield on its treasury. At the time of writing, ETHZilla is the fifth-largest Ethereum digital asset treasury (DAT), holding 102,326 ETH.
In February, the Ethereum Foundation, the nonprofit supporting Ethereum’s core development, deployed 45,000 ETH into DeFi protocols, including Spark and Compound. The foundation’s treasury policy from June outlined plans to move beyond passive holdings by staking and allocating ETH across DeFi protocols.
Centralized exchanges have also started to adopt DeFi yield strategies. In September, Coinbase partnered with DeFi lending protocol Morpho to enable users to lend USDC (USDC) stablecoins and earn yields of up to 10.8%.
Less than a month later, Crypto.com revealed plans to integrate Morpho into its Cronos blockchain, allowing users to deposit wrapped ETH and other assets to earn stablecoin yields through new lending vaults, expected later this year.
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