Sharplink (Nasdaq: SBET), one of the largest corporate holders of Ether by treasury size, has deployed $200 million of its ETH holdings into staking through the Lido protocol. The company will hold the resulting wrapped staked ETH (wstETH) on its balance sheet, with custody managed by Anchorage Digital, the first federally chartered crypto bank in the United States.
The move follows Anchorage Digital’s integration of wstETH last month, which extended institutional access to Lido’s liquid staking product for firms already using the custodian. Sharplink described the allocation as the next step in making its ETH treasury more productive for shareholders rather than simply holding the asset passively.
The mechanics of the deal
Under the structure, Sharplink’s ETH is staked through the Lido middleware, which pools assets across a distributed set of node operators running Ethereum validators. In return, Sharplink receives wstETH, a rebasing token that accrues staking rewards automatically. Unlike native validator staking, which subjects new entrants to Ethereum’s validator entry queue and a lock-up period, staking through Lido begins accruing rewards immediately. Sharplink can redeem wstETH through Lido’s withdrawal mechanism, sell it on secondary markets, or post it as collateral across DeFi protocols.
Joseph Chalom, chief executive officer of Sharplink, said the allocation leverages wstETH’s composability while maintaining institutional-grade risk standards, and that adding Lido deepens the diversification of the company’s treasury strategy.
Kean Gilbert, head of institutional relations at the Lido Ecosystem Foundation, said treasuries increasingly want their ETH working for them without surrendering liquidity, and described Lido as the standard for liquid staking at scale.
Market context and regulatory read-across
Sharplink’s move is part of a discernible trend among publicly listed companies holding significant digital asset reserves. Bitmine recently reported that roughly 87 per cent of its total ETH holdings are now in staked form. BNY has announced a collaboration with Galaxy to add staking to its institutional digital asset custody platform. Across the Ethereum network, over a third of all circulating ETH is currently staked, according to on-chain data published on Dune Analytics.
The structural appeal is straightforward: ETH held passively earns nothing, while staked ETH generates a native yield denominated in the same asset. For a public company with a large treasury allocation, the incremental yield, without requiring a sale of the underlying position, is a credible argument for the shareholder base.
The regulatory picture for institutional liquid staking remains in formation, particularly in the United States. The SEC has not issued definitive guidance on whether staking-as-a-service or liquid staking tokens constitute securities, and the question carries direct implications for custodians and treasury companies that hold wstETH on a regulated balance sheet. Anchorage Digital’s federal charter provides some structural cover, but the legal characterisation of wstETH is not yet settled. In the EU, the Markets in Crypto-Assets regulation (MiCA) does not directly address liquid staking tokens, leaving a gap that national regulators are expected to address over the medium term.
Lido reported approximately $16.5 billion of ETH staked through its protocol at the time of the announcement, with wstETH integrated as collateral across more than 100 DeFi protocols and around $10 billion in active use. The protocol holds an A+ rating from independent staking-assessment frameworks Staking Rewards and Credora, and has received a Web3SOC certification from security firm Cantina following a review of its governance and financial resilience.
For Sharplink, the next milestones worth watching are whether the wstETH position is actively deployed as collateral in DeFi or held passively, how the company accounts for staking rewards under US GAAP, and whether the regulatory treatment of wstETH on a listed company’s balance sheet attracts further scrutiny from the SEC.
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