Who Is Mike Silagadze and Did He Sell His Top Hat Stake Before ether.fi?

Mike Silagadze is the ether.fi CEO who co-founded Top Hat, and Top Hat's 4 February 2021 release has him handing over day-to-day leadership while he stays on as founder and board member. Profiles say he sold his Top Hat stake that year. No primary record shows a sale.

The sale wording appears in an 18 August 2023 interview in The Logic, which says he "sold most of his equity in the company". It quotes him on "selling [Top Hat]" with the company's name inside the publication's own brackets. Neither Top Hat release carries that line. ETHFI printed 0.7105 dollars at the Saturday 12 September close, up 5.17% on the session and 60.28% across thirty sessions.

Mike Silagadze at a Glance

Who Is Mike Silagadze, the ether.fi CEO

Mike Silagadze runs ether.fi, the staking protocol behind the ETHFI token, and the company's 13 August 2026 blog post pitches its app as a non-custodial crypto neobank. The credit line under that post's closing quote reads "Mike Silagadze, CEO, ether.fi". He has no English Wikipedia article, so the first page of results for his name is speaker pages and wiki-style profiles. The ether.fi glossary entry on Phemex covers the protocol side in plainer terms than the blog does.

A second ether.fi post dated 22 July 2026 credits the same man as "Founder, ether.fi" under a quote about the asset manager KPK. So the ether.fi founder title has a primary source behind it as well, and CEO and founder are the two titles these posts print. The team page at ether.fi/team returned a 404 on 13 September 2026, which leaves the blog carrying the written record of his title.

Before ether.fi, he ran Top Hat, the Toronto courseware company that its own 2021 release says he co-founded in his dorm room at the University of Waterloo.

Mike Silagadze at Top Hat

Top Hat's 4 February 2021 release did two jobs at once. It announced a $130M Series E from existing investor Georgian and named Joe Rohrlich, a former Bazaarvoice chief revenue officer, as the incoming CEO. Silagadze would "hand over day-to-day leadership" to a "handpicked successor", the release said, and Rohrlich took the role effective 15 March 2021. The release also credits him with growing Top Hat to "400+ employees" and says 2020 brought 40% revenue growth and three publisher acquisitions. Its sentence on his future at the company is short and specific. "Silagadze will continue to support the company as founder and board member."

On 23 March 2021 Top Hat posted a short note on its own site about his decision to step down as CEO. The note points readers to a Globe and Mail feature and says he "initiated and led the process of finding his successor". Neither Top Hat page contains the word "stake" or the word "sold".

Did Mike Silagadze Sell His Top Hat Stake?

The claim in its plainest form appears in a Traders Union profile updated 8 September 2026. It states that "Silagadze sold his stake in Top Hat in 2021" and lists a "previous equity sale from Top Hat" among his sources of wealth. The same profile gives Top Hat 500 employees, where Top Hat's own release said "400+".

Top Hat's two pages say something narrower. They record a CEO hand-over and a founder who kept his board seat. The $130M in the February release is new funding for the company from an investor that already held shares. Neither document describes a founder selling shares, and neither names a buyer.

Sale language does appear in The Logic's 18 August 2023 interview by Claire Brownell. Its introduction says that in 2021 Silagadze "stepped down as chief executive" of Top Hat "and sold most of his equity in the company". In the question-and-answer section he says "Part of the motivation for selling [Top Hat] was the fact that products actually started to emerge in the crypto space". Asked how his hedge fund became ether.fi, he opens with "When we sold [Top Hat]" before describing the fund. Both times the company name sits in square brackets, the mark a publication uses when it supplies a word the speaker left out.

The likelier story is that profile writers took a reporter's "most of his equity" and rounded it up to "his stake". In the rounding they lost the board seat Top Hat's release kept him in. An interview summary and an editor's bracket give you no share count and no buyer. The sale stays a secondary claim until a filing or a Top Hat statement puts one on the page.

What the ether.fi Founder Built After Top Hat

Silagadze's own account of the road to ether.fi runs through a hedge fund. "We had two separate funds," he told The Logic in 2023. The first of them "was an Ethereum staking fund, and that's what Ether.fi emerged out of," he said. The Logic names the vehicle as Gadze Finance and says it launched with US$25 million under management.

Staking is still the base of the business, because Ethereum pays rewards to the validators that secure it under proof of stake. Its liquid staking token is weETH, and the 22 July 2026 post is a case study of one allocator buying it.

That post says KPK, an onchain asset manager with "$200m+ under management", allocated "$25m+" to weETH as a core holding. The post says KPK checked the protocol's controls onchain, including a 10-day timelock on every core contract upgrade. KPK runs the token as collateral across six Morpho vault markets on Ethereum and Arbitrum.

The wider product is liquid restaking, where staked ETH keeps earning while a receipt token moves around DeFi. Phemex Academy's explainer on what restaking is walks through the mechanics.

The 13 August 2026 post is where the company reaches past staking. It lists tokenized stocks and metals alongside an integrated Aave lending market on Optimism. It also claims "more than half a million members" and "a $2 billion annual transaction run-rate". The ether.fi Cash card pays "3% cash back on all purchases", according to the same post. Tokenized trading is "not available in the United States and certain other markets", the post adds. Silagadze's quote sets the ambition in one line. "Our goal is to replace the traditional bank for most users," he said.

ETHFI Price and What Traders Should Watch

The ETHFI price printed 0.7105 dollars at the Saturday 12 September close on Phemex spot, up 5.17% from the Friday close of 0.6756 and 23.63% across seven sessions. The thirty-session gain of 60.28% runs from the 13 August 2026 close of 0.4433. That was the date ether.fi published its neobank post, and ETHFI had closed 17.21% higher on that bar. One daily bar can't tell you why a token moved, so read the overlap of the two dates as a timeline and nothing more.

At that close the market cap rebuilds to $685.9 million, taking the 965.35 million circulating supply CoinGecko reports against a maximum of 1 billion. The market cap arithmetic is circulating supply times the dated close, and with 96.5% of the maximum in circulation, the remaining 34.65 million tokens are a small overhang. Volume on 12 September ran at 0.17 times that cap on CoinGecko's dated record, and CoinGecko's close came in 0.11% above the Phemex print.

Using 50-day and 200-day simple averages of Phemex spot closes, ETHFI printed a golden cross on 24 August 2026. The 50-day stood 11.67% above the 200-day at the anchor. That's the fifth sign change since December 2024. The previous golden cross of 19 July 2025 turned into a death cross on 17 November 2025. That history is a reason to treat the 50-day and 200-day averages as lagging signals.

In the 365-session window ending Saturday 12 September 2026, the highest Phemex spot close was 1.823 dollars on 4 October 2025. The lowest was 0.286 dollars on 5 June 2026. The anchor close is 61.03% below that high and 148.43% above that low.

The FOMC meets on 15 and 16 September 2026 with a Summary of Economic Projections. Its 29 July 2026 statement held the federal funds target range at 3-1/2 to 3-3/4 percent, and three voters dissented because they preferred a quarter-point rise.

ETHFI has no live perpetual on Phemex, where its perpetual contract is marked delisted, so the spot pair is the direct route to the token. A spot position charges you no funding and carries no liquidation price. That matters on a token that ran 60.28% in thirty sessions and still trades 61.03% below its 365-session closing high.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much had Top Hat raised before Mike Silagadze handed over the CEO job?

Top Hat's February 2021 release says the company raised $55M in Series D capital one year earlier. A Top Hat news page from the same day says the $130M round more than doubled the total it had raised since launching in 2009.

Who replaced Mike Silagadze as chief executive of Top Hat?

Joe Rohrlich took the job after serving as chief revenue officer of Bazaarvoice, a software company based in Austin, Texas. At the hand-over Top Hat said more than 3 million students used its courseware at 750 of the top 1,000 higher-education institutions in North America.

What did Mike Silagadze do between Top Hat and ether.fi?

He started the hedge fund The Logic calls Gadze Finance. The Globe and Mail reported on 14 October 2021 that the fund would charge 2 percent of assets a year plus 20 percent of returns. The same report said he was putting millions of dollars of his own money into it.

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and is not financial advice. Cryptocurrency trading involves substantial risk. Always do your own research before making investment decisions.