Sharplink Gaming plans to raise roughly $200 million to add Ethereum to its corporate treasury, the company said Thursday in a statement.
The ETH treasury firm has entered into an agreement to sell its common stock to four institutional investors, with shares priced at $19.50 each. The offering is expected to close on August 8, if the deal’s closing conditions are met.
This deal brings the online gambling marketing firm closer to its goal of holding 1% of all Ethereum in circulation.
“Sharplink is proud to be joined by globally-recognized institutional investors, augmenting our strong existing investor base and further validating our mission to be the world’s leading ETH treasury,” Sharplink co-CEO Joseph Chalom said Thursday in a statement.
Sharplink Gaming did not immediately respond to Decrypt’s request for additional comment.
The raise comes as a growing number of public companies pivot to corporate strategies focused on accumulating massive amounts of cryptocurrencies, following the lead of Michael Saylor’s software firm Strategy. As part of that trend, several Ethereum treasury firms have emerged over the past year, catapulting Ethereum to its highest price in roughly two years.
Ethereum was recently trading at $3,812, just 22% below its record price of $4,878 that it touched during the bull run of 2021, according to data provider CoinGecko.
Sharplink held 521,939 ETH worth $1.9 billion as of August 3, according to its filings with federal regulators. The company initiated its Ethereum-accumulation strategy in June of this year.
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As the treasury firm nears 1,000 ETH in total holdings, bettors are wagering on whether the company will meet or exceed that benchmark. Fifty-five percent of bettors on Myriad Markets, an events-contract platform, have wagered that Sharplink will not accumulate at least one million ETH before mid-September.
Myriad is owned by Dastan, the parent company of Decrypt.
Whether Sharplink snaps up one million ETH tokens by mid-September, it already boasts of one of the world’s largest Ethereum treasuries. The largest ETH treasury firm is the Peter Thiel-backed BitMine Immersion, which holds roughly $2.9 billion in ETH, according to publicly available data.
