This crypto treasury firm is vying to be the MicroStrategy of ether–but with a focus on generating yield

CNBC

4 days ago

The latest crypto treasury company is set to hit the public market with an ambitious plan to build the largest public vehicle for institutional exposure to ether.
The Ether Machine will begin trading on the Nasdaq Monday under the ticker ETHM, once a merger with blank check company Dynamix Corporation is complete. Andrew Keys, the co-founder and chairman of the new company, has committed about $645 million in an anchor investment. The entity is backed by crypto investors 10T Holdings, Electric Capital, Pantera Capital and more.
The company is the latest in an emerging cohort of new entities vying to become the MicroStrategy of Ethereum by replicating the bitcoin proxy's successful accumulation strategy, but around ether, the second largest cryptocurrency by market cap, rather than bitcoin.
Keys' company plans to differentiate with a focus on yield generation through "staking" rather than simply buying and holding the ether. Staking is a mechanism for generating yield by contributing to network operations around security and transaction processing.
By purchasing ether from a crypto exchange or buying shares of an ether ETF, investors would get exposure to the coin's price, "but without access to the dividend," Keys explained.
"Ether produces yield if it's properly managed," he told CNBC's "Squawk Box" Monday. "The ETFs right now don't generate yield because they don't enable staking … we're able to enable staking and we're able to do other additional risk management on top of that."
On Thursday, BlackRock filed with the SEC to include staking to its popular ETHA ether ETF, which just logged a record week of inflows.
The ability to stake makes ether a "more productive" asset than bitcoin, according to Keys.
The Bitcoin network "has one asset on it, bitcoin, that can be moved from peer to peer, but Ethereum can tokenize any asset," Keys said. It's "able to embed any type of digital asset – a bar of gold, a barrel of oil, a stock, a bond, a derivative – into digital legal agreements, and in doing so, you're able to expedite the velocity of money. You can have employment contracts that get paid by the minute, as an example."
Shares of Dynamix jumped 30% in premarket trading.
The Ether Machine follows Bitmine Immersion Technologies – the company newly chaired by Fundstrat's Tom Lee and more recently backed by Peter Thiel – in its ether treasury ambitions. Pantera was also a backer of Bitmine.
Also this year, SharpLink Gaming, whose board is chaired by Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin, also initiated an ETH treasury strategy; and Bit Digital recently exited bitcoin mining to focus on its ETH treasury and staking plans.
Ether has taken the spotlight in crypto from bitcoin in recent months as investors anticipated the stablecoin bill known as the GENIUS Act would be signed into the first major U.S. crypto law, which President Trump did Friday. The regulatory clarity should benefit institutions and brands becoming more interested in tokenization, which includes stablecoins, most of which are issued on the Ethereum network.
Ether has doubled in the last three months and last week, ether ETFs posted a record $2.18 billion in weekly inflows.