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