SharpLink, the Nasdaq-listed Ethereum treasury company chaired by Joseph Lubin, has deployed roughly $400 million of its existing ETH reserves across the liquid staking protocol Lido and the restaking platform Ether.fi. The move does not increase the number of ETH on its balance sheet but changes how the treasury earns yield, pushing a larger share into DeFi infrastructure where returns depend on protocol incentives as well as Ethereum's own staking rewards.
Most coverage places $200 million into each protocol. The Lido half dates to August 13, when Lido announced SharpLink would stake $200 million through Lido and receive wstETH, a wrapped token that represents staked ETH, with Anchorage Digital holding custody. The Ether.fi half grew out of an October 2025 plan with EigenCloud and Consensys's Linea network. SharpLink's October statement did not itemize the total, and no wallet addresses have been published to verify the split onchain.
Lido adds liquidity by giving SharpLink a token that can be moved, lent or posted as collateral while the underlying ETH keeps earning. At the time of the August announcement, about $16.5 billion of ETH was staked through Lido and roughly $10 billion of its tokens were used as collateral across more than 100 integrated applications. Ether.fi works differently: its weETH token represents restaked ETH, pledged a second time to secure additional services run by EigenCloud, in exchange for extra rewards. SharpLink bridges that weETH to Linea and collects incentives from Ether.fi, Linea and EigenCloud for keeping liquidity there.
SharpLink's CEO Joseph Chalom said in August that the Lido position would make the company's ETH “even more productive” through wstETH's DeFi integrations. However, the same exposure brings different accounting risks. In its second-quarter results, SharpLink reported 888,938 ETH as of August 3, with liquid staking and restaking tokens making up close to 29% of the total. The quarter closed with a net loss of $394.3 million, driven by a $321 million unrealized loss on ETH and a $76.1 million impairment on LsETH and weETH. Native ETH is marked to market and can recover on paper, while impairments on staking tokens do not get written back up.
At August prices near $1,890, the $200 million Lido tranche equals roughly 106,000 ETH. If wstETH is booked the same way as LsETH and weETH, the share of SharpLink's treasury exposed to non-reversible impairments would rise from about 29% to around 40%. A partnership agreement signed in December 2025 commits SharpLink to bridge at least $200 million of weETH onto Linea over an initial 24-month period in return for monthly incentives from Ether.fi, Linea and EigenCloud. Those payments last only as long as the agreement does.
Separately, Bitwise's latest staking report shows validators now hold 35.9% of all ETH, the most in Ethereum's history, while Ethereum's annualized gross staking yield fell from 2.81% in Q2 to 2.63% in Q3. Solana's gross yield slipped from 6.38% to 5.99%. Ethereum's decline stems from more stake spread across a square-root issuance curve, plus falling fees and MEV. Active validator balances rose 8.8% over the quarter from 40.24 million ETH to 43.80 million ETH, while network fees and MEV averaged 198 ETH a day in Q3, down 40% from 331 ETH in Q2. Bitwise estimates the real gain after dilution is about 1.7% for Ethereum and 2.2% for Solana.
On Solana, issuance accounts for almost 90% of gross staking yield, and its disinflation schedule is cutting inflation. Validators approved SGP-0002 to double the annual disinflation rate to 30%, which would reach the 1.5% floor in about 2.8 years instead of 5.7. On Ethereum, EIP-8363 would burn a rising share of consensus rewards as more ETH is staked, but the Ethereum Foundation's protocol team declined to recommend it for the Hegotá upgrade, saying issuance changes need wider community discussion.
The combination of a large institutional treasury moving deeper into staking and falling yields illustrates both demand for ETH yield and the hidden costs that can accumulate through protocol risk, dilution and illiquidity.
