Chalom: Ethereum is the "trust commodity" behind agentic finance, echoing Fink's toll-road line

Two rival theses left Ethereum "stuck in the middle"

Joseph Chalom, CEO of SharpLink and former Head of Digital Assets at BlackRock, opens by describing how the market split into a "hard money" thesis around Bitcoin and Zcash, and a "revenue meta" thesis around protocols like Hyperliquid, Lighter and Pump.fun that generate direct token-accruing revenue. Ethereum, he says, got caught between the two: it isn't hard money, and despite Robinhood Chain's trading activity surging, Ethereum's own captured revenue has stayed flat because Arbitrum takes a scaling revenue share while Ethereum charges a flat block-space fee.

Chalom pushes back on the bearish read this created. He points to what he calls the scoreboard: Ethereum holds over 50% of all stablecoin activity in a $300 billion stablecoin market he expects to reach the trillions, over 50% of tokenized real-world assets (currently $30 billion, which he expects to reach the hundreds of billions by next year), and DeFi TVL "by a factor of eight or nine" over competitors. He argues agentic activity will only reinforce this because agents "will run where the liquidity is."

He also flags that some prominent holders capitulated on ETH at $1,530 in June and missed a subsequent 70% run in three months, calling it evidence the bearish narrative had it backwards.

Ethereum as a "trust commodity"

Asked to unpack the phrase, Chalom says institutions care about security, trust and liquidity rather than hype, and Ethereum dominates on all three. He points to Robinhood's Arbitrum-based build settling on Ethereum mainnet and using ETH for gas as the case study: every transaction on top of it still requires the trust commodity underneath. He compares this to early Amazon and Uber, businesses that looked unprofitable while building market share before pricing power emerged.

Chalom argues that, in the future, "ether as the trust commodity" replaces the human trust, insurance and contracts currently underpinning T+1 settlement, citing Ark's tokenized VC fund launch and BlackRock's own fund launches on Ethereum as signals institutions already believe this.

"Ethereum has no CEO. It can't change the rules of the game." — Joseph Chalom

He prefers an internet analogy over a DTCC comparison, framing Ethereum as "the internet with a token," with applications like Robinhood, Ark, DTCC and BlackRock built on top, and value accruing to both layers.

Agentic finance and BlackRock's research

Chalom discusses a new BlackRock research paper he says converges with pieces he has separately published, arguing LLMs and blockchains share "computer-native" foundations, that agentic commerce needs machine-native payment rails (stablecoins), and that compute is emerging as a large digital-asset market. He cites Deloitte estimates of $17-30 trillion of agent-driven commerce and says his own focus is agentic finance specifically: agents managing idle cash, portfolios, tax-loss harvesting and more, made possible because "you have an AI agent that has unlimited machine intelligence" and "unlimited attention."

He estimates agents will touch about $4 trillion of existing financial fees, much of which he expects to go to zero or shift to disruptors, with the hope that some returns to consumers. He compares the pace to the decades-long move to zero stock-trading commissions after 1970s SEC deregulation, but expects agentic finance to unfold in "quarters or maybe a year" rather than decades, while cautioning full adoption likely won't be complete in 2026.

Fink's "toll road" and the case for regulation

Chalom returns to Larry Fink's Davos remark that "Ethereum is the toll road to tokenization," endorsing it as the clearest mental model: a public good everyone can use by paying a modest toll, unlike the internet, which was built without a token or ownership layer. He argues this ownership structure is what could let consumers, rather than a handful of gatekeepers, capture more value from this cycle than they did from prior tech revolutions.

He explicitly welcomes regulation, arguing it "helps markets thrive" by creating trust, citing the pharmaceutical industry as an analogy, and says self-policing has failed in past tech revolutions. He does not give a specific timeline for regulatory outcomes, leaving that open, but frames Ethereum and other decentralized chains as the mechanism that could prevent value being extracted purely by big tech or big finance.