Shares in SharpLink Gaming plummeted more than 70% in post-hours trading Thursday after the company—which recently announced that it would create an Ethereum treasury—filed an S-3 shelf prospectus with the SEC to potentially sell securities.
Minneapolis-based SharpLink, an online gambling marketer that lists on the Nasdaq, was recently changing hands at $10.35 per share, according to Yahoo Finance data, after briefly dipping below the $8 mark in after-hours trading. It closed Thursday trading at $32.53.
A page in the SEC filing appeared to show that participants in the PIPE sale had sold off their holdings. However, Ethereum co-founder, Consensys CEO, and SharpLink Chairman of the Board Joseph Lubin wrote on X that people are “misinterpreting” the S-3 filing.
Some are misinterpreting SBET’s S-3 filing:
It registers shares for potential resale by prior investors
The “Shares Owned After the Offering” column is hypothetical, assuming full sale of registered shares.
This is standard post-PIPE procedure in tradfi, not an indication of…
— Joseph Lubin (@ethereumJoseph) June 12, 2025
“It registers shares for potential resale by prior investors. The ‘Shares Owned After the Offering’ column is hypothetical, assuming full sale of registered shares,” Lubin wrote. “This is standard post-PIPE procedure in tradfi, not an indication of actual sales. To clarify, neither Consensys nor I have sold any shares.”
Decrypt reached out to SharpLink Gaming and the SEC, but did not immediately hear back from either.
SharpLink rose to nearly $80 on May 29, two days after announcing that it had raised $425 million in a private investment in public equity, or PIPE, offering to establish an Ethereum treasury—a move that boosted its stock price more than 400%.
A PIPE, or Private Investment in Public Equity, is a way for public companies to raise capital quickly by selling shares privately to institutional or accredited investors, rather than through a public offering.
The plan came amid a wave of publicly traded companies that have built crypto-focused treasuries, or raised money with that intent. They are, to varying degrees, following an approach popularized by Strategy, formerly MicroStrategy, which pivoted from software development to become a Bitcoin treasury that now holds 582,000 of the tokens worth more than $61 billion at current prices.
Other companies have also focused on Bitcoin, although a number in recent weeks have opted for treasuries based on altcoins like Solana and XRP.
Ethereum was recently trading at about $2,640, down more than 4% over the past 24 hours, according to crypto markets data provider CoinGecko.
Ethereum-centric software firm Consensys, along with firms Galaxy Digital, ParaFi Capital, Ondo, and Pantera Capital, participated in the PIPE offering, SharpLink said in a statement at the time. The group bought 69,100,313 of the firm’s shares at $6.15 each. (Disclosure: Consensys is one of 22 investors in an editorially independent Decrypt.)
Edited by Andrew Hayward
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