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Ethereum Hasn't Convinced Markets

Camila Russo & Olivia Capozzalo
June 16, 2025

Happy Monday, Defiers!

Today’s big story:

  • Ethereum has a new narrative, but the market isn’t convinced (yet)

Plus:

Read more below! But first, please give our sponsors some love; they make this newsletter possible.

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The Market Isn’t Buying the New Ethereum Narrative Yet

SharpLink stock cratered more than 70% last Thursday after a regulatory filing was misread by traders as a mass selloff signal. Despite attempts to clarify the filing, including public reassurances from Joe Lubin and other Consensys insiders, the market hasn’t recovered much. The damage is sticking. Did investors miss the memo? Or do they see through it?

I’ve been covering crypto long enough to know that the efficient market hypothesis doesn’t always apply, but it’s rarely this off.

To recap on the SBET plunge — unlike an initial report said, SharpLink investors weren’t dumping shares or cashing out. It was a routine registration of previously issued stock. Lubin and others tried to right the ship, explaining that the stock wasn’t being sold, just registered.

But you wouldn’t know that from the price chart. The stock dropped from nearly $33 to as low as $9 in one brutal day. That’s a 76% haircut for a company that just weeks ago was being hyped for its ETH-denominated buyback program and backing from one of Ethereum’s co-founders. Before SharpLink’s pivot in late May, its stock had been trading between $4-$5 for the past year, and skyrocketed to near $100 a few days after the announcement.

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SBET stock 5-day price chart

The stock sold off last week because it misrepresented a filing. After the issue was clarified, SBET should have rebounded quickly — unless investors see something else is amiss. Or maybe the initial excitement that drove the stock up in the first place just isn’t there anymore.

The selloff comes at a delicate moment for Ethereum’s broader narrative. Under community pressure, the Ethereum Foundation has been pushed to clarify its role, reconfigure its leadership, and reinvigorate its strategy.

A dedicated marketing collective called Etherealize was spun up. The new Ethereum strategy emphasizes scaling the L1, bringing L2s to the masses, improving UX/UI, and an EF that props up Ethereum use cases and builders — and even bull posts ETH. There’s also a new focus on DeFi, including by actually deploying EF funds in DeFi protocols.

At the same time, the Ethereum community has gone into war mode, becoming a lot more active in making a bullish case for ETH, the asset. The Lubin and SharpLink deal has been the clearest example, positioning the stock as a way for public equity investors to gain exposure to ETH’s upside. After years of letting “number go up” Bitcoiners dominate the meme wars, Ethereum is stepping into its narrative era.

Another example of this was a recent report co-authored by the CEO of Etherealize and other prominent ecosystem players, which laid out a bold thesis: ETH is not just a utility token — it’s “digital oil,” a scarce and productive asset that deserves to be valued like a global commodity reserve.

The report proposes a long-term ETH price target of $80,000, based on comparisons to oil, bonds, gold, and money supply. More provocatively, the fully modeled cap scenario lands ETH at a staggering $700,000 per token if it captures even a fraction of those traditional stores of value.

It’s a compelling story. It’s ambitious. It’s also, so far, just a story.

Because, while the vibe shift is real, the on-chain data hasn’t caught up. Since the EF leadership change on March 1, most Ethereum metrics — TVL, active addresses, staking growth, gas fees, and even ETH price — have been flat or only modestly higher, relative to the broader market. Zoom in to the period since the SharpLink buyback announcement on May 27, and the numbers look even less convincing. TVL is stagnant. Staking is rising slowly. Daily users are down slightly. The price of ETH? Drifting sideways.

At least compared to the previous ~4 months, ETH did reverse its underperformance — but there’s no breakout. There’s no frenzy. There’s no traction. Yet.

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None of this means the strategy is failing. Ethereum’s structural changes at the EF, across the L2 ecosystem, and in how the community presents itself, are meaningful. Rewriting the investment narrative for a $400 billion protocol doesn’t happen overnight. Institutional adoption moves at a glacial pace, and regulatory clarity is still a work in progress. The Ethereum leadership can’t promise an overnight bull run. But it can build the foundation for one.

For now, SharpLink’s stock shows that the clear Ethereum narrative shift has yet to land with investors. If it had, we’d be seeing it reflected in the public proxy stock designed to ride it — just like Strategy’s MSTR trades at a premium. We’d be seeing it in ETH itself. Instead, we’re seeing hesitation. And that tells us something important.

The market isn’t dumb. It’s just not fully convinced yet.

With love,

Cami, founder of The Defiant

📈 Markets in the last 24 hrs:

TICKERVALUE24H
BitcoinBitcoin$107,947
2.28 %
EthereumEthereum$2,638.56
3.61 %
XRPXRP$2.31
6.89 %
BNBBNB$656.06
1.27 %
SolanaSolana$157.39
3.71 %

This is the news that mattered in the past 24 hrs

  1. Tron plans to go public in a reverse merger with SRM Entertainment, a publicly traded company on the Nasdaq, FT reported this morning; the move comes months after Tron and the U.S. SEC jointly filed a motion to pause an investigation into the crypto firms’s founder, Justin Sun, to “consider a potential resolution.”
  2. Last week, spot Ethereum ETFs recorded inflows five times above average, with over $500 million in inflows, despite seeing about $2 million in outflows on Friday; Spot Bitcoin ETFs have showed slower momentum in June, though they finished last week with a solid $1.39 billion in net inflows.
  3. Reports earlier this month that memecoin launchpad pumpfun was planning a token sale at a $4 billion fully diluted valuation were met with widespread criticism; But, a recent Messari Research report says that the (yet to be launched) PUMP token could trade at a much higher valuation of $7 billion, or more.

🎬WATCH

In the latest episode of The Defiant Podcast, Cami spoke with Sandy Kaul, Head of Innovation at Franklin Templeton, about the future of tokenized money market funds, DeFi-powered supply chains, how evolving crypto infrastructure is reshaping TradFi, and a lot more.

That’s it for today — if you enjoyed this newsletter, tell your friends! https://thedefiant.io/subscribe