SharpLink CEO Joseph Chalom: AI Agents Will Redistribute Trillions in Financial Income
Joseph Chalom, CEO of SharpLink, an Ethereum treasury company, stated that AI agents are integrating with on-chain financial infrastructures such as stablecoins, tokenized real-world assets, and DeFi. According to his estimates, by 2030, over $1 trillion in annual revenue from the global financial services industry will face redistribution; by 2035, this figure could expand to $4 trillion.
He defines AI agents as the automation layer of the new financial system, continuously managing financial activities for investors: finding lower banking, trading, and borrowing fees, optimizing savings yields, constructing portfolios, dynamically rebalancing, and managing loans and credit card debt. He estimates that after reducing fees, AI agents could save investors about $350 billion annually by 2030, increasing to $1.4 trillion by 2035, equivalent to wiping out nearly a quarter of the costs in the global financial industry.
Chalom believes that stablecoins, tokenized real-world assets, and DeFi provide AI agents with a programmable financial foundation available around the clock. On the same chain, agents can directly see asset ownership, prices, collateral requirements, and lending opportunities, autonomously completing asset transfers, collateralization, lending, and settlement without needing to interface with banks, brokers, and clearing institutions one by one.
He named institutions competing for agent financial infrastructure and user entry points: payment networks Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, PayPal, stablecoin issuers Circle, Tether, trading platforms Robinhood, Coinbase, Binance, and traditional financial giants like JPMorgan, Citigroup, and BlackRock. His judgment is that whoever controls the infrastructure and the agents themselves can capture the value generated when agents trade on behalf of clients.
At the protocol level, he mentioned two infrastructures. One is the x402 inter-machine stablecoin payment standard launched by Coinbase, which enabled the long-idle 402 "Payment Required" status code in the HTTP protocol, allowing agents to pay API and data fees directly per use. The second is Ethereum's ERC-8004 agent identity protocol, providing identity, reputation, and verification registration for on-chain agents. Within 10 weeks of the ERC-8004 launch, over 10,000 AI agents had registered.
In terms of market mechanisms, this is an output of viewpoints without direct buying or selling actions, but the interests are clear. The beneficiaries are the on-chain settlement layer and stablecoin issuers: every payment, collateralization, and settlement between agents consumes on-chain settlement and stablecoin liquidity. SharpLink holds Ethereum assets, and this narrative directly raises the long-term demand expectations for its holdings. The pressure is on intermediaries that rely on information asymmetry for fees, including credit card interest, retail broker commissions, active management fees, and bank lending spreads, as AI agents will continuously compare prices, compressing this portion of income. The direction of capital migration is from fee-based intermediaries to platforms that control agent entry points and settlement networks.
Source: Public information
ABAB AI Insight
Joseph Chalom worked at BlackRock for about 20 years, serving as the head of strategic ecosystem partnerships before leaving, where he was involved in the digital asset layout of the world's largest asset management company, including the Bitcoin spot ETF IBIT and the tokenized currency fund BUIDL launched in collaboration with Securitize. In July 2025, he became the CEO of SharpLink. Originally a sports betting marketing technology company based in Minneapolis, SharpLink completed a private placement of approximately $425 million in May 2025, led by Consensys, with Consensys founder Joseph Lubin serving as chairman, and the company transformed into an Ethereum treasury. Subsequently, its stock price soared, but then fell about 88% from a 52-week high of $40.46, with its market value dropping below the net value of its held ETH.
SharpLink's capital path is a typical "equity financing for tokens" model. It has raised funds through private placements, ATM issuances, and registered direct offerings (one of which was $75 million) to purchase ETH, holding over 860,000 coins, most of which are staked for yield; in January 2026, it staked approximately $170 million of ETH on Linea to earn additional returns. After its stock price fell below net value, it turned to buybacks, having repurchased over 4 million shares, and co-funded Ethereum development organization Ethlabs with BitMine. In this context, Chalom's narrative about AI agents and on-chain finance essentially serves to provide a demand narrative for ETH: only with an increase in ETH's usage demand can the company's net value and stock price premium recover.
Historically, the redistribution of financial income has always been triggered by technologies that "lower fees." In 1976, Vanguard launched the first index fund, and for decades, passive investing compressed active management fees to just a few basis points. In October 2019, Charles Schwab announced zero commissions in response to Robinhood's zero-commission disruption, followed by TD Ameritrade and E*Trade on the same day, ultimately leading to industry mergers, with Schwab acquiring TD Ameritrade and Morgan Stanley acquiring E*Trade. The competition for entry points in agent finance has already begun: in 2025, Visa launched Intelligent Commerce, Mastercard launched Agent Pay, Stripe and OpenAI released the Agentic Commerce Protocol, and Google released AP2 compatible with x402. The industry is currently in a period of protocol standard expansion, not yet at the stage of entry monopolization.
Structurally, this matter belongs to the transfer of pricing power. The high fees of traditional finance are based on two premises: high user comparison costs and high switching costs for service providers. AI agents reduce comparison costs to nearly zero, while on-chain assets reduce switching costs to a single transaction. When both premises fail, fees shift from intermediaries to agents making decisions for users. The new pricing power lies not in assets, but in the agent entry points and settlement networks that determine the flow of funds, which is precisely why payment networks, exchanges, stablecoin issuers, and asset management giants are all getting involved.
ABAB News · Cognitive Laws
Information asymmetry is the source of fees; when comparison costs approach zero, fees disappear.
Whoever makes decisions for users will take the money that past intermediaries received.
Fees will not disappear; they will simply move to new entry points.