(Bloomberg) — Shares of SharpLink Gaming Inc. plunged 69% on Friday following the registration of shares for a group of investors, a move the company’s chairman defended as standard procedure.
The firm, which is becoming an Ether treasury company, announced a $425 million private investment in public equity last month that would see investors led by Consensys Software Inc. buying 69.1 million shares of SharpLink or their equivalent, according to a statement at the time.
The day after SharpLink registered the PIPE shares and pre-funded warrants for future sale via a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission — an announcement that enables the new shareholders to sell at the time of their choosing, but that typically doesn’t indicate an intention to sell right away — the stock swooned, prompting Chairman and Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin to post a defense of the move on X.
“This is standard post-PIPE procedure in tradfi, not an indication of actual sales,” Lubin wrote in the post, referring to traditional finance.
Shares of SharpLink declined to $10 each as of 2:53 p.m. on Friday in New York.
The stock had seen a meteoric rise in the days following its late-May announcement that it would be adopting an Ethereum treasury strategy. The sports betting and gaming technology company joined a growing list of firms attempting to copy the playbook of Strategy’s Michael Saylor, which involves selling a mix of equity and fixed-income securities to raise money to buy Bitcoin.
In the span of just four days following the announcement, SharpLink shares soared as much as 1,747%, with their market value topping $5 billion. Since their May 29 peak, the shares have lost nearly 90% of their value, including Friday’s record decline.
The company’s filing Thursday also announced 3.5 million strategic adviser warrants issued to Consensys and 2.8 million placement agent warrants to A.G.P./Alliance Global Partners, which was the sole placement agent on the PIPE offering.
Separately, SharpLink announced on Friday that it had purchased 176,270.69 Ethereum tokens for an aggregate purchase price of about $462.9 million. But with Ethereum trading lower on Friday, the company’s purchases that took place between May 30 and June 12 are now worth less than what the company paid, with current value at around $445 million. SharpLink is now the largest publicly-traded holder of Ethereum, according to the company.
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