Joseph Chalom: Ethereum Is Becoming the "Trust Settlement Layer" for Global Finance

Guest: Joseph Chalom — CEO, Sharplink (NASDAQ: SBET) ｜ Former Head of Digital Assets at BlackRock

Compiled by: Cynthia (@cynthiaju333)

On June 8, 2026, at a VIP event co-hosted by Futu, SNZ, ETH HK Hub, and Sharplink, Sharplink CEO Joseph Chalom (former Head of Digital Assets at BlackRock, where he led the Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs, the BUIDL tokenized fund, and Circle/USDC reserve management) delivered a speech titled “The Future Transformation of Financial Markets,” which he encapsulated as “The Industrialization of Trust.”

Drawing on his 20 years of institutional experience at BlackRock, the speech analyzed the immense hidden costs of “building trust” within the traditional financial system, proposed that Ethereum is becoming the settlement layer and “trust commodity” for global finance, and predicted that stablecoins, tokenized assets, DeFi, and “Agentic Finance” will fundamentally reshape the way the financial industry operates in the coming years.

Table of Contents:

1. My Institutional and Crypto Journey: From BlackRock to Sharplink

2. Trust is Breaking Down: From Web1 to “Web2.5”

3. The “Trust Cost” of Traditional Finance: $9.3 Trillion Annually

4. Rewriting the Infrastructure: From “9-to-4” to 24/7 Tokenized Assets

5. Ethereum: The “Trust Commodity” for Global Finance

6. The Three Accelerating Pillars: Stablecoins, Tokenized Assets, and DeFi

7. The Fourth Pillar: Agentic Finance

1. My Institutional and Crypto Journey: From BlackRock to Sharplink

Today’s topic is “The Future Transformation of Financial Markets,” but if I were to give it another title, I would call it “The Industrialization of Trust.” I want to start by giving you some background—briefly covering my career journey—and then share my outlook for the future.

I am probably the oldest person in this room. I am the CEO of Sharplink, a publicly traded company. Before that, I spent 20 years as an executive at a large financial services firm in New York called BlackRock—the world’s largest asset manager.

For the first 12 years, I helped build the Aladdin platform—a technology platform that now provides risk management services for approximately $50 trillion in assets held by buy-side institutions like pension funds and asset managers. Over the last six years or so, roughly from 2018 to 2025, I led a team that spent several years researching what role an asset manager could play in the crypto space—essentially becoming a bridge between traditional finance and the crypto industry.

Initially, the answer was “not yet”—the industry didn’t meet the standards our clients expected. But we eventually launched a strategy and accomplished some very interesting things:

• We launched the Bitcoin ETF and Ethereum ETF in 2024—the first of their kind in the U.S. We engaged with regulators, provided education, and these products became the largest crypto ETFs globally, raising approximately $100 billion and enabling institutional investors to participate in digital asset investments on a more level playing field.
• We also launched BlackRock’s first tokenized fund—BUIDL. The name is silly; it wasn’t my idea. We weren’t the first to do it either; Franklin Templeton had launched a tokenized money market fund before us. However, our fund was natively deployed on Ethereum (later expanded to other chains). We allowed clients to hold stablecoins when they wanted, but also to instantly convert into this tokenized Treasury fund—even in the middle of the night. This fund raised about $2.6 billion and is currently the largest tokenized fund in the world. The second largest will be another fund BlackRock is launching, backed by approximately $8 billion in existing money market assets.
• We also made a significant investment in Circle and became the manager of the USDC stablecoin reserve assets—managing roughly $75 billion in reserves for this leading, regulated stablecoin.

With my extensive experience and age, let me share some of my perspectives on the future.

First, some context: Sharplink was the first company to build a digital asset treasury centered around a “non-Bitcoin token.” We are the first company built around Ethereum, currently holding the second largest public ETH position—slightly over $2 billion. My friend Tom Lee holds a larger position at BitMine, and our interests align in strengthening the ecosystem. We actively manage our treasury and have been participating in DeFi from day one. By the end of this year, we will deploy approximately $325 million of our ETH into DeFi protocols to support this ecosystem. We are undergoing a true transformation.

2. Trust is Breaking Down: From Web1 to “Web2.5”

Before discussing the future, I want to talk about the past. We are at a moment where “trust is breaking down”—partly caused by AI—and it will ultimately be repaired by the combination of AI and blockchain.

Let's go back to the Web1 era: it essentially unified the world's information—you could find information, and it connected all of humanity. The promise of Web3 is that information is verifiable, authentic, identity is clear and certain, and you can securely and economically transfer value. But we haven't arrived there yet. We are not in Web3—we are in what I call the “Web2.5” phase today. In most societies—I'll use the U.S. as an example—you cannot trust the information presented to you. Social media uses information as a weapon. I wouldn't trust the identity of anyone contacting me online to be real, and I wouldn't trust the code of any software company in the world—including Anthropic—to be completely free of bugs.

Sounds terrible, right? But no—we are at the tipping point on the path to the future. We just can't fully trust information right now.

3. The “Trust Cost” of Traditional Finance: $9.3 Trillion Annually

So, what is the upcoming transformation? Let's start with the financial services industry. Just in the U.S., because people do not trust each other in economic transactions, this industry spends over $9.3 trillion annually on “artificially engineered trust”: contracts, insurance, counterparty risk management, and so on. This is wasted capital.

Why? Because trade settlement takes 1 to 3 days—roughly same-day in the U.S., two days in Hong Kong, and up to three days in most of Southeast Asia. You have to trust that your counterparty will actually deliver on settlement day—and that they still exist. This has led to over 1 million mutually independent, fragmented databases worldwide, each requiring individual maintenance and endless daily reconciliation: Where is my cash? Where are my stocks? Where are my holdings? This system is slow, fragmented, and not a good economic system. The technology behind the U.S. trading system was mostly built over the last 40 years.

4. Rewriting the Infrastructure: From “9-to-4” to 24/7 Tokenized Assets

We are moving away from this fragmented system where people can only trade between 9:30 AM and 4:00 PM, and if the U.S. President declares war on a Friday night, you want to sell your stocks but have to wait until Monday 9:00 AM to do so. Did everyone hear what I just said? If the President declared war then, the only assets you could sell that weekend would be crypto assets—tokenized stocks, tokenized precious metals, tokenized assets, and futures.

This is the direction of the future. We will have 24x7 tokenized assets. You will be able to transact “programmable money” with others. Assets will move and settle instantly on decentralized blockchains—no trust issues. This is what I mean: AI verifies identity and facts, while blockchain provides the final settlement confirmation.

5. Ethereum: The “Trust Settlement Layer” for Global Finance

But this takes time. In capital markets, Ethereum is leading this transformation, becoming the settlement layer for financial transactions—you could call it “trustware,” or a “proof layer” that confirms a transaction is real and an identity is real, because in Web3, once a transaction is done, it's irreversible. Today, Ethereum has over 1 million validators distributed across 84 countries, with zero downtime in over 10 years—it is the most battle-tested financial infrastructure by far. The liquidity assets secured by Ethereum and its Layer 2 networks are also more than 10 times that of its closest competitor. Currently, Ethereum secures over $300 billion in on-chain assets, with over 65% of global stablecoins and tokenized assets securely stored and transacted on Ethereum.

When you've worked in financial services for 20 years, you make a lot of mistakes—but if you're lucky, you also accumulate some experience and wisdom. I can tell you this: most traditional finance people want to operate on trusted platforms that don't go down and are secure enough. There are other, faster and cheaper public chains in the market, but they go down, lack economic security, and don't have the liquidity profile required by the world's largest institutions.

This is where assets like ether come into play—it's the native token of this network, and you can stake it to help secure the network. This is a bit tricky to explain: on one hand, it's a store of value; on the other, you can stake it to secure transactions, validate blocks, and earn yield—unlike Bitcoin, which itself is non-yielding (people like Michael Saylor have to lever up MicroStrategy to get returns on Bitcoin). Staked ETH generates yields close to 10%, and the more ETH staked, the stronger the network's economic security. We stake 100% of our ETH holdings to enhance this security.

6. The Three Accelerating Pillars: Stablecoins, Tokenized Assets, and DeFi

Using a baseball analogy: In the U.S., a baseball game has nine innings. I think we are probably in the second inning. Although the crypto industry is already 16 or 17 years old, we are on the cusp of what I call a “step-function” change. Bill Gates famously said that people tend to overestimate what can happen in one year and severely underestimate what can happen in ten. This is precisely what will unfold in the remaining years of this decade.

Stablecoins: The total market capitalization of stablecoins is currently around $330 billion, with approximately 99.75% being dollar-denominated. There's a small portion in Europe; Hong Kong just approved a regulatory framework, and Korea will follow soon. Initially, stablecoins served almost exclusively one purpose: “I want to participate in the crypto market, but my USD funds can't get in directly, so I need a stablecoin as a bridge.” But this is changing. Stablecoins will become a rail for cross-border payments. Corporations will use them to move funds between thousands of subsidiaries; individuals will be able to transfer money across borders instantly and nearly for free. Your salary in a year or two might be paid in stablecoins—efficient, fast, and nearly fee-less.

Tokenized Assets: Asset tokenization started about eight years ago, but after eight years, the total size of tokenized assets is only about $35 billion—which is somewhat unbelievable. I believe the world's largest institutions are poised to completely change this. Four announcements have been made this year that were unimaginable just a few years ago. The New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq—the world's two largest exchanges—are both moving towards 23-hour-a-day, 7-day-a-week trading, allowing tokenized assets to trade freely around the clock. Then there's DTCC—you might not have heard of them, but they are the world's largest securities settlement and clearing institution—handling transaction volumes in the range of approximately 15 quadrillion dollars annually. They are currently piloting DeFi-style models under regulatory authorization—think lending, swaps, mostly based on Ethereum—which will change how centralized trading venues operate and how capital works, as there will be more uses for stablecoins, more tokenized assets, and more things to trade.

I believe, within the next few years, this will no longer be a conversation about “crypto”—we might not even use the term “crypto” anymore. The financial industry will undergo a digital transformation on a scale not seen since stocks moved from paper to electronic form in the 1970s.

DeFi (the third pillar): A year ago, I would have said the three pillars driving this transformation were stablecoins, tokenized assets, and DeFi—these decentralized protocols that already offer automated trading, lending, and liquidity services on-chain, available 24/7. The volume of capital flowing through DeFi protocols has now surpassed $200 billion.

7. The Fourth Pillar: Agentic Finance

I believe the force that could truly and permanently change the game is “Agentic Finance.” AI agents are already trading autonomously—executing payments, making investments, and autonomously managing portfolio operations. What they truly need is “programmable settlement”: stablecoins combined with smart contracts that allow funds to execute automatically when conditions are met—no bank account needed, no wire transfer, no intermediaries. Standards are already emerging—like X402, which defines machine-readable payment protocols, and ERC-8004, which enables agents to perform programmable, permissioned financial operations.

How many people here have a “smart wallet”? Probably very few? There are about 800 million such wallets globally now. I envision that soon, everyone with a securities account will also have a digital “avatar” wallet—operated by a regulated agent within a regulated company—essentially your own digital twin, an AI agent that understands your goals, risk tolerance, and asset situation, capable of doing things that are difficult for retail investors to do on their own today.

What I mean is, by the end of 2027, essentially everyone in this room will have a “CFO in your pocket.” It will scan all your accounts for idle cash that isn't earning the interest it should, and move it to higher-yielding accounts. If you hold tokenized assets like SpaceX or Tesla, it will operate like a large institution: take those positions on-chain, lend them out, return the yield to you, and rebalance your portfolio allocation accordingly. Your AI agent will become a mirror of yourself, helping you achieve better investment outcomes.

Boston Consulting Group (BCG) estimates that within about a year, the number of on-chain transactions could reach roughly 1,000 times the current level—these will be “agent-to-agent” transactions operating within rules and guidelines, moving funds and managing wealth in ways almost impossible today. If you get a chance, speak with the team from Canopy later; some of the things they're building will give you a feel for the direction of the future.

About

Sharplink (NASDAQ: SBET) is a leading institutional-grade Ethereum reserve platform, designed to provide public market investors with a smarter, more efficient way to gain exposure to Ethereum. Ethereum underpins the majority of global stablecoins, tokenized real-world assets, and decentralized finance settlement, making it a unique asset combining native yield with long-term network growth.

ETH HK Hub is Asia's first physical Ethereum community hub, supported by the Ethereum Foundation's “Ethereum Everywhere” team and operated in partnership with SNZ and ETHTAO. The hub is dedicated to bridging the East-West ecosystem and fostering a connection between traditional finance and decentralized innovation.

SNZ is a research-driven investment firm active in Web3 and fintech since 2014, with a portfolio spanning over 200 companies in blockchain infrastructure, decentralized finance (DeFi), payment systems, and practical applications. As one of the earliest institutional supporters of Ethereum in Asia, SNZ has been continuously involved in ecosystem development since the network's inception and provides support to founders.

Futu is a leading integrated digital financial platform in Hong Kong. Its SFC-licensed virtual asset trading platform, PantherTrade, offers institutional and high-net-worth clients a one-stop service, enabling seamless access to both on-chain digital assets and traditional securities markets through a single account.