Joseph Chalom: Ethereum is Becoming the Global Financial "Trust Settlement Layer"

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

Compiled by: Cynthia (@cynthiaju333)

On June 8, 2026, at an exclusive VIP event co-hosted by Futu, SNZ, ETH HK Hub, and Sharplink, Sharplink CEO Joseph Chalom (former Head of Digital Assets at BlackRock, who led the launch of the BlackRock Bitcoin/Ethereum ETFs, the BUIDL tokenized fund, and managed Circle/USDC reserves) delivered a speech entitled "The Future Transformation of Financial Markets," which he summarized as "The Industrialization of Trust".

Drawing on his two decades of institutional experience at BlackRock, he 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 financial industry's operations in the coming years.

Table of Contents:

I. My Institutional & Crypto Journey: From BlackRock to Sharplink

II. Trust is Breaking Down: From Web1 to "Web2.5"

III. The "Trust Cost" of Traditional Finance: $9.3 Trillion Annually

IV. Infrastructure Rewrite: From 9 to 4 to 24/7 Tokenized Assets

V. Ethereum: The "Trust Commodity" for Global Finance

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

VII. The Fourth Pillar: Agentic Finance

I. My Institutional & Crypto Journey: From BlackRock to Sharplink

Today's topic is "The Future Transformation of Financial Markets," but if I were to give it a different title, I would call it "The Industrialization of Trust." Let me first provide some background—briefly talking about my career journey—and then share my outlook for the future.

I'm probably the oldest person in this room. I'm the CEO of Sharplink, a publicly listed company. But before that, I spent 20 years as a senior 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 roughly $50 trillion in assets held by buy-side institutions (pension funds, asset managers, etc.). In the last six years or so, roughly from 2018 to 2025, I led a team that spent several years researching the role asset managers could play in the crypto space—essentially acting as the bridge between traditional finance and the crypto industry.

Initially, the answer was "no"—the industry didn't meet the standards our clients expected. But eventually, we launched that strategy and did some very interesting things:

• We launched the Bitcoin ETF and Ethereum ETF in 2024—the first of their kind in the US. We engaged with regulators and educated them on the space. These products became the largest crypto ETFs globally, raising approximately $100 billion and allowing institutional investors to participate in digital asset investment more equitably.
• We also launched BlackRock's first tokenized fund—BUIDL. I didn't come up with the name. We weren't the first to do it either; Franklin Templeton had launched a tokenized money market fund before us. But our fund was natively deployed on Ethereum (and later expanded to other chains). We allowed clients to hold stablecoins when they wanted, but also to instantly transfer 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 globally. 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.

I've had a fairly extensive career, and I'm also a bit older, so let me share some of my thoughts on the future.

For context: Sharplink was the first company to build a digital asset treasury around a "non-Bitcoin token." We were the first company built around Ethereum, and we currently hold the second largest public ETH position—just over $2 billion. My friend Tom Lee holds a larger position at BitMine, and we share an aligned interest in making the ecosystem stronger. We actively manage our treasury and have been participating in DeFi since day one. By the end of this year, we will deploy approximately $325 million worth of ETH into DeFi protocols to support this ecosystem. We are truly in the midst of a significant transformation.

II. Trust is Breaking Down: From Web1 to "Web2.5"

Before talking about the future, I'd like to talk about the past. We are at a moment where "trust is breaking down"—partly caused by AI—and ultimately, it will be repaired by both AI and blockchain.

Let's go back to the era of Web1: it essentially unified the world's information—you could find information, it connected all of humanity. The promise of Web3 was: information is verifiable, authentic, identity is clear, and it's possible to securely and economically transfer value. But we are not there yet. We are not in Web3—today we are in what I call "Web2.5." In most societies—I'll use the US 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 vulnerabilities.

This sounds terrible, right? But no—we are on the cusp of the future. It's just that we can't fully trust information right now.

III. The "Trust Cost" of Traditional Finance: $9.3 Trillion Annually

So, what is the upcoming transformation? Let's start with the financial services industry. In the US alone—because people don't trust each other in economic transactions—the industry spends over $9.3 trillion annually on "artificially established trust": contracts, insurance, counterparty risk management, etc. This is all wasted capital.

Why? Because trade settlement takes 1 to 3 days—roughly same day in the US, two days in Hong Kong, and up to three days in most of Southeast Asia. You have to trust that your counterparty will actually perform and deliver at that future time—and that they will still exist then. This has led to over 1 million separate, fragmented databases worldwide, each maintained individually, requiring 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 US trading system was mostly built over the last 40 years.

IV. Infrastructure Rewrite: 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 US President declares war on a Friday night and you want to sell your stocks, you have to wait until Monday morning at 9:00 AM to do so. Did everyone hear what I just said? If the President declares war then, the only asset class you can sell over that weekend is crypto assets—tokenized stocks, tokenized precious metals, tokenized assets, and futures.

This is the direction of the future. We will have 24x7 tokenized assets available. You will be able to trade "programmable money" with others. Assets will be transferred and settled instantly on a decentralized blockchain—with no trust issues. This is what I mean: AI verifies identity and facts, while blockchain provides the final settlement confirmation.

V. 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 transactions are real and identities are authentic, because in Web3, once a transaction is complete, it's irreversible. Today, Ethereum has over 1 million validators spread across 84 countries, with zero downtime in over a decade—it is by far the most battle-tested financial infrastructure. The liquidity assets secured by Ethereum and its Layer 2 networks are more than 10 times greater than its closest competitor. Currently, Ethereum secures over $300 billion in on-chain assets, and more than 65% of global stablecoins and tokenized assets are securely stored and traded on Ethereum.

When you've worked in financial services for 20 years, you make many mistakes—but if you're lucky, you also accumulate some experience and wisdom. I can tell you: most traditional finance people want to work 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 experience downtime, lack economic security, and don't have the liquidity profile required by the world's largest institutions.

This is where an asset like ether comes into play—it's the native token of this network, and you can stake it to help secure the network. This is a bit difficult 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 in return—this is different from Bitcoin, which itself doesn't generate yield (people like Michael Saylor must leverage MicroStrategy to get returns on Bitcoin). Staked ETH can yield 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.

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

Using a baseball analogy: In the US, a baseball game lasts nine innings. I think we are currently in about the second inning. Even though the crypto industry is already 16 or 17 years old, we are on the verge of what I call a "step-function" change. Bill Gates has a classic saying—people tend to overestimate what can happen in one year and vastly underestimate what can happen in ten years. And this is precisely what will happen over the remainder of this decade.

Stablecoins: The total market capitalization of stablecoins is currently around $330 billion, with approximately 99.75% of it denominated in USD. There's a small portion in Europe; Hong Kong has just approved a regulatory framework, and South Korea is about to follow. Initially, stablecoins had essentially one use case—"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 cross-border payment rail. Enterprises will use them to transfer funds between thousands of subsidiaries; individuals will also be able to transfer money across borders instantly and almost for free. The salary you receive 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 market cap of tokenized assets is still only around $35 billion—which is somewhat unbelievable. I believe the world's largest institutions are preparing to completely change this. There have been four announcements this year that would have been unimaginable just a few years ago. The New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ—the world's two largest exchanges—are both moving towards trading 23 hours a day, 7 days a week, allowing tokenized assets to trade freely around the clock. And then there's the DTCC—you may not have heard of it, but it's the world's largest securities settlement and clearing institution—handling transactions roughly on the scale of $15 quadrillion annually. They are currently piloting DeFi-type models—like lending, swaps, mostly on Ethereum—with regulatory permission, which will change how centralized trading venues operate, and how capital flows, because there will be more uses for stablecoins, more tokenized assets, and more tradeable instruments.

I believe that, within the next few years, this will no longer be a conversation about "crypto"—we might not even use the word "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 change were stablecoins, tokenized assets, and DeFi—these decentralized protocols that already provide automated trading, lending, and liquidity services on-chain, operating 24/7 and accessible to anyone, with over $200 billion in total value flowing through DeFi protocols.

VII. The Fourth Pillar: Agentic Finance

I think the force that could truly be a permanent game-changer is "Agentic Finance." AI agents are already trading autonomously—executing payments, making investments, and autonomously managing portfolios. What they truly need is "programmable settlement": stablecoins plus smart contracts that allow funds to execute automatically when conditions are met—no bank accounts, no wire transfers, no intermediaries. Standards are already emerging—like X402, which defines machine-readable payment protocols, and ERC-8004, which allows agents to perform programmable, permissioned financial operations.

How many people here have a "smart wallet"? Very few, I'd imagine? There are currently about 800 million such wallets globally. 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 holdings, capable of doing things that retail investors find difficult to do on their own today.

What I'm saying is, probably by the end of 2027, everyone in this room will effectively have a "CFO in their pocket." It will scan all your accounts for idle cash not earning its proper interest and move it to higher-yielding accounts. If you hold tokenized assets like SpaceX or Tesla, it will operate like a large institution: lend those holdings out on-chain, return the yield to you, and rebalance your portfolio 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 current levels—these will be "agent-to-agent" transactions following rules and guidelines, moving money and managing wealth in ways almost impossible today. If you have a chance later, please talk to the team from Canopy; they are working on things that will give you a feel for where the future is headed.

About

Sharplink (NASDAQ: SBET) is a leading institutional-grade Ethereum reserve platform designed to provide public market investors with smarter, more efficient access to Ethereum investment opportunities. Ethereum underpins the majority of global stablecoins, tokenized real-world assets, and decentralized finance settlements, making it a unique asset offering both native yield and 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 aims to connect Eastern and Western ecosystems, bridging the gap between traditional finance and decentralized innovation.

SNZ is a research-driven investment firm active in Web3 and fintech since 2014, with a portfolio covering over 200 companies in blockchain infrastructure, decentralized finance (DeFi), payment systems, and practical use cases. As one of Asia's earliest institutional investors in Ethereum, SNZ has continuously participated in ecosystem development since the network's inception and supports founders.

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