The Ether Machine is bringing Ethereum to Wall Street through a SPAC merger and $2.1B in committed assets. Backed by ConsenSys veterans, it mirrors MicroStrategy’s playbook with convertible financing and promotion, while adding staking and restaking strategies that ETFs and Bitcoin wrappers cannot
On September 2, 2025, The Ether Machine announced in a regulatory disclosure that it had secured a private financing of approximately 150,000 ETH, valued at about $654 million, from Ethereum advocate Jeffrey Berns, who will also be joining the company’s board.
The Ether Machine was officially launched on July 21, 2025, through a definitive business combination agreement between The Ether Reserve and the SPAC Dynamix Corporation (NASDAQ: DYNX). Upon closing, the merged entity will trade on Nasdaq under the ticker ETHM, with over $1.5 billion of fully committed capital.
At the heart of the company is a team of Ethereum veterans from ConsenSys. Andrew Keys, Co-Founder and Chairman, was one of the earliest advocates of institutional Ethereum adoption and helped launch Microsoft’s Blockchain-as-a-Service offering.
David Merin, Co-Founder and CEO, previously led ConsenSys’s corporate development, raising more than $700 million and driving acquisitions and investments. Tim Lowe, CTO, and Darius Przydzial, Head of DeFi, also built institutional staking and DeFi strategies at ConsenSys. Together, they frame the company as what Keys called an “Ethereum Avengers” team.
Funding is anchored by Keys himself, who contributed about $645 million (in ETH), alongside a fully committed $800 million equity raise from top-tier backers such as 1Roundtable Partners / 10T Holdings, Archetype, Blockchain.com, cyber•Fund, Electric Capital, Kraken, and Pantera Capital.
To provide Wall Street credibility, the company added Jonathan Christodoro as Co-Founder and Vice Chairman. With decades of boardroom experience at firms like PayPal, Lyft, and Xerox, Christodoro represents the mainstream corporate blueprint that bridges Ether Machine’s Ethereum-native strategy with public market expectations.
With Berns’s injection added to Keys’s $645 million and the $800 million institutional raise, Ether Machine is set to launch with well over $2.1 billion in committed assets. This would give the company an initial market capitalization on par with mid-cap financial firms—an unprecedented scale for a pure-play Ethereum vehicle.
The Ether Machine joins a new class of firms that act as wrappers for digital assets: companies that raise capital through equity or debt markets and convert it into crypto holdings. The model was popularized by Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy), which turned itself into a proxy for Bitcoin by building a multibillion-dollar BTC treasury. More recently, TON Strategy (formerly Verb Technology) has applied the same playbook to Toncoin, rebranding its entire corporate identity around a single blockchain ecosystem.
Ether Machine is applying the same playbook to Ethereum—backed by more than $2.1 billion in committed assets at launch—making it the largest public vehicle of its kind and a comparable-scale counterpart to where Strategy stood at the start of its accumulation strategy. The bet remains the same: appreciation of the underlying asset. What these companies claim to add is better value for shareholders through a reduced cost of capital. That lower cost is achieved via convertible bond and preferred stock structures, where the embedded options are made more attractive to sophisticated investors by the volatility of the underlying crypto. This design, they argue, can deliver stronger results for shareholders than a passive ETF, which merely tracks the asset’s price without access to financial engineering.
In the case of Ethereum, there is another advantage over ETFs: U.S.-listed funds are prohibited from staking reserves, while in Europe and Canada only about 50% of holdings can be staked. Ether Machine plans to use its treasury more aggressively, staking ETH to generate yield on top of price exposure.
According to co-founder Andrew Keys, the company also intends to pursue advanced strategies such as restaking, which can amplify the utility of Ether reserves by securing additional layers of blockchain infrastructure. These mechanisms are presented as a way to compound returns beyond what traditional ETFs or passive corporate wrappers can offer.
The Ether Machine represents a new kind of leverage for investors: a way to amplify exposure to Ethereum through public markets, but with all the accompanying downside risks of volatility, dilution, and complex financing structures.
What sets it apart is the team behind it — Ethereum-native specialists who have lived through the protocol’s evolution and understand the technical realities of staking, restaking, and network mechanics. That depth matters, because small nuances like DeFi flows, lock-up, withdrawal cycles can make or break a corporate strategy built on ETH.
In many ways, the venture mirrors the Strategy playbook: bold financial engineering, heavy promotion, and even a SPAC pathway that echoes how Strategy once transitioned from a modest software business to a Wall Street proxy for Bitcoin. Ether Machine is aiming to play that role for Ethereum.
Its timing is also notable. Coming on the heels of Ethereum’s renewed momentum in the recent renaissance, the project is both a product and a signal of the ecosystem’s resurgence. Whether it ultimately delivers better results than an ETF or simply magnifies risk will be decided in the same place Ethereum itself is tested: in the market.