Ethereum treasury firm SharpLink Gaming said Thursday that it will tokenize its SEC-registered common stock directly on the Ethereum blockchain, appointing financial technology firm Superstate as its digital transfer agent.

The Nasdaq-listed company will use Superstate’s Opening Bell platform to enable SBET shareholders to hold shares natively on Ethereum while maintaining regulatory compliance, according to a press release shared with Decrypt.

The tokenized shares remain legally equivalent to traditional book-entry equity but can be held in self-custodied wallets and integrated with digital financial products, SharpLink Gaming said.

The company claimed it would be the first publicly traded company to tokenize its shares on Ethereum, though fellow publicly traded Ethereum treasury firm BTSC announced a similar move back in 2023.

SharpLink said that its latest move aligns with the SEC’s Project Crypto initiative, unveiled in July to lower regulatory burdens for the crypto industry. 

On Tuesday, SEC Chair Paul Atkins said he seeks to institute an “innovation exemption” for certain digital assets by year’s end.

“Tokenizing SharpLink’s equity directly on Ethereum is far more than a technological achievement—it is a statement about where we believe the future of the global capital markets is headed,” SharpLink Co-CEO Joseph Chalom said.

Superstate previously teamed with firms like Galaxy Digital and Solana treasury firms Forward Industries and Upexi to tokenize shares via the Solana blockchain.

The partnership follows SharpLink’s pivot from gambling marketing to a crypto treasury earlier this year, with Ethereum co-founder Joseph Lubin joining as chairman in May during a $425 million funding round led by Consensys.

(Disclaimer: Consensys is one of 22 investors in an editorially independent Decrypt.)

“We’re very pleased to be partnering with SharpLink as they build the ecosystem for tokenized equity on Ethereum and beyond,” Superstate CEO Robert Leshner said in the press release.

SharpLink and Superstate plan to explore how tokenized equities could trade on automated market makers and other DeFi protocols while remaining compliant with securities regulations.

SharpLink holds over 838,000 ETH worth approximately $3.3 billion, making it the second-largest publicly traded Ethereum holder behind BitMine Immersion Technologies, per StrategicETHReserve.xyz.

Meanwhile, users on Myriad Markets, a prediction market developed by Decrypt’s parent company DASTAN, give BitMine a 91.2% chance of holding more ETH than SharpLink by the last full week of 2025, despite SharpLink’s continued accumulation efforts. BitMine currently holds about $9.6 billion worth of ETH.

The world’s second-largest cryptocurrency is trading at $3,968, down almost 5% in the last 24 hours and 13% over the past week, according to CoinGecko.

In late August, SharpLink Gaming bought 39,008 ETH worth over $176 million, but has slowed its purchases since then, adding only 922 ETH since August 31.

SharpLink repurchased 1 million SBET shares last week at an average price of $16.67, bringing total buybacks to 1.93 million shares over two weeks using nearly $32 million of its $1.5 billion repurchase program.

SBET shares were recently trading for $16.34, down about 7% on the day.