Sharplink Stakes $200m of ETH Through Lido, Expands Liquid Staking

Sharplink, a publicly listed company and one of the largest corporate holders of Ether (ETH), has staked $200 million of its ETH holdings through the Lido protocol. This move is part of a growing trend among publicly listed companies to make their digital asset reserves more productive. According to Lido, approximately $16.5 billion of ETH is currently staked through its protocol.

Sharplink's ETH is staked through Lido's middleware, which pools assets across a distributed set of node operators running Ethereum validators. In return, Sharplink receives wrapped staked ETH (wstETH), a rebasing token that accrues staking rewards automatically. Unlike native validator staking, staking through Lido begins accruing rewards immediately.

Sharplink will hold the resulting wstETH on its balance sheet, with custody managed by Anchorage Digital, the first federally chartered crypto bank in the United States. According to Joseph Chalom, CEO of Sharplink, the allocation leverages wstETH's composability while maintaining institutional-grade risk standards.

The move follows Anchorage Digital's integration of wstETH last month, which extended institutional access to Lido's liquid staking product for firms already using the custodian. Kean Gilbert, head of institutional relations at the Lido Ecosystem Foundation, said treasuries increasingly want their ETH working for them without surrendering liquidity, and described Lido as the standard for liquid staking at scale.