Joseph Chalom: Ethereum 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 a 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 BlackRock’s Bitcoin/Ethereum ETFs, the BUIDL tokenized fund, and Circle/USDC reserve management) delivered a speech titled "The Future Transformation of Financial Markets," which he summarized as "The Industrialization of Trust."

Drawing on his 20 years of institutional experience at BlackRock, the speaker analyzed the massive hidden costs of "building trust" within the traditional financial system, proposing that Ethereum is emerging as the global financial settlement layer and a "commodity of trust," and predicting that stablecoins, tokenized assets, DeFi, and "Agentic Finance" will fundamentally transform the way finance operates over the coming years.

Table of contents:

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

Two: Trust is collapsing: From Web1 to "Web2.5"

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

Four: Infrastructure Overhaul: From "9-to-4" to 24/7 Tokenized Assets

Five: Ethereum: The "Trust Commodity" of Global Finance

Six: The Three Pillars Accelerating Toward Us—Stablecoins, Tokenized Assets, and DeFi

Seven: The Fourth Pillar — Agentic Finance

Today’s topic is "The Future Transformation of Financial Markets," but if I were to rename it, I would call it "The Industrialization of Trust." I’d like to begin by giving you some background—briefly sharing my professional journey—before discussing my vision for the future.

I’m probably the oldest person here. I’m the CEO of Sharplink, a publicly traded company. But before that, I spent 20 years as an executive at BlackRock, a large financial services firm in New York—BlackRock is the world’s largest asset management company.

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 for buy-side institutions such as pension funds and asset management firms. Over the past six years, roughly from 2018 to 2025, I led a team that spent several years researching the role asset management companies can play in the crypto space—serving as a bridge between traditional finance and the crypto industry.

The initial answer was "no"—the industry at that time did not meet the standards our clients expected. But we eventually launched this strategy and did some very interesting things:

• In 2024, we launched the first Bitcoin ETF and Ethereum ETF in the United States. Through active communication and education with regulators, these products became the largest crypto ETFs globally, raising approximately $100 billion and enabling institutional investors to participate more equitably in digital asset investments.
• We also launched BlackRock’s first tokenized fund—BUIDL, a name that’s kind of silly, though not one I came up with. We weren’t the first to do this; Franklin Templeton launched a tokenized money market fund before us. But our fund was natively deployed on Ethereum (and later expanded to several other chains). We allow clients to hold stablecoins when they want to, but also instantly switch into this tokenized Treasury fund—even at 3 a.m. The fund raised approximately $2.6 billion, making it the largest tokenized fund in the world to date. The second-largest will be another fund BlackRock is launching, backed by approximately $8 billion in existing money market assets.
• We have also made a significant investment in Circle and serve as the custodian of the reserve assets for USDC, managing approximately $75 billion in reserves for this leading, regulated global stablecoin.

I have considerable experience in the industry and am a bit older, so let me share with you my perspectives on the future.

Let me provide some context: Sharplink was the first company to build a digital asset treasury around "non-Bitcoin tokens." We were the first company centered on Ethereum and currently hold the second-largest publicly disclosed ETH position—slightly over $2 billion. My friend Tom Lee holds a larger position at BitMine, but we share the same goal as him in strengthening the ecosystem. We actively manage our treasury and have been participating in DeFi since day one. By the end of this year, we will allocate approximately $325 million in ETH to DeFi protocols to support this ecosystem. We are undergoing a true transformation.

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

Let’s go back to the era of Web1: it essentially unified the world’s information—you could find information, and it connected all of humanity. The promise of Web3 is: information that is verifiable, authentic, identities that are clear and defined, and the ability to transfer funds securely and with economic assurance. But we’re not there yet. We are not in Web3 today—we are currently in what’s called the “Web2.5” stage. In most societies—let me take the United States as an example—you cannot trust the information presented to you. Social media uses information as a weapon. I do not trust that the identity of anyone who contacts me online is genuine, nor do I trust that the code of any software company in the world—including Anthropic—is completely free of vulnerabilities.

That sounds bad, right? But no—we’re at a critical juncture on the path to the future. We just can’t fully trust information yet.

So, what is the upcoming transformation? Let’s start with the financial services industry. Just in the United States—where people lack trust in each other during economic transactions—this industry spends over $9.3 trillion annually on "manually constructed trust": contracts, insurance, counterparty risk management, and more. These are all wasted capital.

Why? Because settlement takes one to three days—about the same day in the U.S., two days in Hong Kong, and up to three days across most of Southeast Asia. You must trust your counterparty to actually deliver by then—and that they’ll still exist by then. That’s why over a million separate, isolated databases have emerged worldwide, each requiring individual maintenance and endless daily reconciliations: Where is my cash? Where are my stocks? Where are my positions? This system is slow and fragmented, and it’s not a sound economic structure. Most of the technology underlying the U.S. trading system was built over the past 40 years.

We are moving away from a fragmented system where people can only trade between 9:30 a.m. and 4 p.m., and if the U.S. President announces a war on a Friday night, you can’t sell your stocks until Monday morning at 9 a.m. Did everyone hear what I just said? If the President makes that announcement, the only assets you can sell over that weekend are crypto assets—tokenized stocks, tokenized precious metals, tokenized assets, and futures.

This is the direction of the future. We will have tokenized assets available 24x7. You will be able to trade "programmable money" with others. Assets will be transferred and settled instantly on decentralized blockchains—without any trust issues. This is what I mean: AI verifies identity and facts, while blockchain provides final settlement confirmation.

But this takes time. In capital markets, Ethereum is leading this transformation as the settlement layer for financial transactions—you can think of it as "trustware" or a "proof layer" that verifies transactions are genuine and identities are authentic, because in Web3, once a transaction is completed, it is irreversible. Today, Ethereum boasts over one million validation nodes spread across 84 countries and has maintained zero downtime for over a decade—it is by far the most rigorously tested financial infrastructure to date. The value of on-chain assets secured by Ethereum and its Layer 2 networks exceeds ten times that of its closest competitors, with Ethereum currently safeguarding over $300 billion in on-chain assets; more than 65% of global stablecoins and tokenized assets are securely held and transacted on Ethereum.

After 20 years in the financial services industry, you make a lot of mistakes—but if you're lucky, you also gain experience and wisdom along the way. I can tell you: most traditional finance professionals want to work on trusted platforms that don’t go down and are sufficiently secure. While there are other faster and cheaper public blockchains on the market, they experience outages, lack economic security, and don’t offer 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 hard 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 rewards in return—a key difference from Bitcoin, which generates no yield on its own (people like Michael Saylor must leverage Bitcoin through MicroStrategy to generate returns). Staked ETH can generate yields of nearly 10%, and the more ETH that is staked, the stronger the network’s economic security becomes. We’ve staked 100% of our held ETH to enhance this security.

To use a baseball analogy: in the U.S., a baseball game consists of nine innings. I believe we’re currently around the second inning. Although the crypto industry has already existed for 16 or 17 years, we’re on the brink of what I call a “step-function” change. Bill Gates once said that people tend to overestimate what can be achieved in one year, but severely underestimate what can be achieved in ten years. And that’s exactly what will unfold over the remainder of this decade.

Stablecoins: The total supply of stablecoins in the market is currently around $330 billion, with approximately 99.75% pegged to the U.S. dollar. There is also a small portion in Europe; Hong Kong has just approved its regulatory framework, and South Korea is set to follow soon. Initially, stablecoins had essentially one purpose: “I want to participate in the crypto market, but my USD funds can’t enter directly, so I need a stablecoin as a bridge.” But this is changing. Stablecoins will become a cross-border payment rail. Businesses will use them to move funds between thousands of subsidiaries, and individuals will be able to transfer money across borders instantly and at nearly zero cost. The salary you receive in one or two years may well be paid out in stablecoins—efficient, fast, and almost fee-free.

Tokenized Assets: Asset tokenization began about eight years ago, but despite that time passing, the total value of tokenized assets today is only around $35 billion—which is hard to believe. I think the world’s largest institutions are preparing to completely transform this landscape. This year alone, there have been four announcements that would have been unimaginable just a few years ago. The New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq—the two largest exchanges globally—are moving toward 24/7 trading, enabling tokenized assets to be traded around the clock. Then there’s DTCC—many may not have heard of this institution, but it’s the world’s largest securities settlement and clearing house, handling transaction volumes annually in the range of $15 quadrillion. They are currently running pilot programs under regulatory approval for DeFi-style models—such as lending and swapping—largely built on Ethereum—which will transform how centralized trading venues operate and how capital flows, because stablecoins will have broader use cases, tokenized assets will increase, and more assets will become tradable.

I believe that in the coming years, this will no longer be a conversation about "crypto"—we won't even use the word "crypto" anymore. The financial industry will undergo a digital transformation on a scale never seen since the shift from paper to electronic stocks 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 now provide automated trading, lending, and liquidity services on-chain, available 24/7 and accessible at any time, with over $200 billion currently flowing through DeFi protocols.

I believe the force that could truly permanently change the game is "Agentic Finance." AI agents are already autonomously conducting transactions—executing payments, making investments, and managing portfolios on their own. What they truly need is "programmable settlement": stablecoins combined with smart contracts that enable funds to execute automatically when conditions are met—without requiring bank accounts, wire transfers, or intermediaries. Relevant standards are already emerging—such as X402, which defines machine-readable payment protocols, and ERC-8004, which enables agents to perform programmable, permission-controlled financial operations.

How many people in the room own a "smart wallet"? Probably very few? Currently, there are about 800 million such wallets worldwide. I envision that soon, everyone with a securities account will also have a digital "avatar" wallet—operated by regulated agents within regulated companies—your own digital twin, an AI agent that understands your goals, risk tolerance, and asset situation, capable of doing what retail investors today find difficult to accomplish on their own.

What I’m saying is that by the end of 2027, everyone here will essentially have a “CFO in their pocket.” It will scan all your accounts for idle funds that aren’t earning their fair share of interest and move them into higher-yielding accounts. If you hold assets like SpaceX or Tesla in tokenized form, it will operate like a large institutional investor: placing those holdings on-chain, lending them out, returning the generated yields to you, and rebalancing your portfolio accordingly. Your AI agent will become a mirror of yourself, helping you achieve better investment outcomes.

The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) estimates that within about a year, the number of on-chain transactions could reach roughly 1,000 times today’s levels—these will be transactions between agents following rules and guidelines to transfer funds and manage wealth in ways that are nearly impossible today. If you have the chance, feel free to chat with the Canopy team later; what they’re building offers a glimpse into where things are headed.

About

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

ETH HK Hubis Asia’s first physical Ethereum community hub, supported by Ethereum Foundation’s “Ethereum Everywhere” team and operated in collaboration with SNZ and ETHTAO. The hub is dedicated to connecting Eastern and Western ecosystems and serving as a bridge between traditional finance and decentralized innovation.

SNZ is a research-driven investment firm active in the Web3 and fintech sectors since 2014, with a portfolio spanning over 200 companies in blockchain infrastructure, decentralized finance (DeFi), payment systems, and real-world applications. As one of Asia’s earliest institutional investors to support Ethereum, SNZ has consistently contributed to ecosystem development and provided support to founders since the network’s inception.

Futu is a leading integrated digital financial platform in Hong Kong. Its virtual asset trading platform, PantherTrade, licensed by the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission (SFC), provides institutional investors and high-net-worth clients with a one-stop service to seamlessly access on-chain digital assets and traditional securities markets through a single account.