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

Translation: Cynthia (@cynthiaju333)

On June 8, 2026, at a VIP event jointly 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 ETF, BUIDL Tokenized Fund, and Circle/USDC reserve management) delivered a speech titled "The Future Transformation of Financial Markets," summarizing it as "The Industrialization of Trust."

Starting from his 20 years of institutional experience at BlackRock, he analyzed the enormous implicit costs of "building trust" in the traditional financial system, suggested that Ethereum is becoming the settlement layer and "trust commodity" of global finance, and predicted that stablecoins, tokenized assets, DeFi, and "Agentic Finance" will fundamentally change the way the financial industry operates in the coming years.

Table of Contents:

1. My Journey in Institutions and Crypto: From BlackRock to Sharplink

2. Trust is Crumbling: From Web1 to "Web2.5"

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

4. Infrastructure Rewritten: From "9 to 4" to 24/7 Tokenized Assets

5. Ethereum: The "Trust Commodity" of Global Finance

6. Three Pillars Accelerating Change: Stablecoins, Tokenized Assets, and DeFi

7. The Fourth Pillar: Agentic Finance

1. My Journey in Institutions and Crypto: From BlackRock to Sharplink

Today's topic is "The Future Transformation of Financial Markets," but if I had to change the title, I would call it "The Industrialization of Trust." Let me first provide some background information—briefly discussing my career experience—before sharing my outlook on the future.

I might be the oldest person in this room. I am the CEO of Sharplink, a publicly traded company. But before that, I spent 20 years as an executive at a large financial services firm named BlackRock in New York—BlackRock is the world's largest asset management company.

In the first 12 years, I was involved in building the Aladdin platform—this technology platform now provides risk management services for about $50 trillion in assets for buy-side institutions (pension funds, asset management companies, etc.). In the last six years or so, from around 2018 to 2025, I led a team that spent several years researching what role asset management companies could play in the crypto space—that is, becoming a bridge between traditional finance and the crypto industry.

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

• We launched the Bitcoin ETF and Ethereum ETF in 2024—these were among the first such products in the U.S. We communicated with regulators and educated them, and these products later became the largest crypto ETFs globally, raising about $100 billion, enabling institutional investors to participate more equitably in digital asset investments.
• We also launched BlackRock's first tokenized fund—BUIDL, a name that seems silly, and I didn't come up with it. We were not 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 extended to several other chains). We designed it so that clients could hold stablecoins when they wanted to, but could also— even in the middle of the night—instantly switch into this tokenized treasury fund. This fund raised about $2.6 billion and is currently the largest tokenized fund globally. The second largest is another fund BlackRock is launching, backed by about $8 billion in existing money market assets.
• We also made a substantial investment in Circle and became the reserve asset manager for the USDC stablecoin—managing about $75 billion in reserve assets for this globally leading, regulated stablecoin.

I have a wealth of professional experience and am a bit older, so let me share some of my thoughts on the future.

First, some background: Sharplink is the first company to establish a digital asset treasury around "non-Bitcoin tokens." We are the first company focused on Ethereum and currently hold the second-largest public ETH position—slightly above $2 billion. My friend Tom Lee has a larger position at BitMine, and we share a common interest in "strengthening the ecosystem." We actively manage our treasury and have engaged in DeFi from day one. By the end of this year, we will allocate about $325 million in ETH to DeFi protocols to support this ecosystem. We are witnessing a real transformation.

2. Trust is Crumbling: From Web1 to "Web2.5"

Before discussing the future, I want to talk about the past. We are at a moment where "trust is crumbling"—partly due to AI—and it will ultimately be repaired collectively with AI and blockchain.

Let's go back to the era of Web1: it basically unified the world's information—you could find information, and it connected all of humanity. The promise of Web3 is that information is verifiable, real, identities are clear and distinct, and funds can be transferred securely and economically. But we are not there yet. We are not in Web3 yet—we are currently at what is called the "Web2.5" stage. In most societies—take the U.S. as an example—you can't trust the information presented to you. Social media uses information as a weapon. I don’t trust the identities of anyone reaching out to me online, nor do I trust that any software company in the world—including Anthropic—can guarantee their code is completely bug-free.

This sounds terrible, right? But it’s not—we are at a critical point towards the future. It's just that we can’t fully trust the information at this moment.

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

So what is the imminent change? Let’s start with the financial services industry. Just in the United States—because people do not trust each other in economic transactions—this industry spends over $9.3 trillion annually on "artificially created trust": contracts, insurance, counterparty risk management, etc. These are all wasted capital.

Why? Because transactions settle in 1 to 3 days—in the U.S. it’s almost same day, in Hong Kong it’s two days, and in much of Southeast Asia, it can take up to three days. You must trust that your counterparty will fulfill their obligations by then—and that they will still be around. For this reason, over a million independent, disconnected databases exist worldwide, each requiring separate maintenance, resulting in endless daily reconciliations: Where is my cash? Where are my stocks? Where are my positions? This system is both slow and fragmented and is not a good economic system. The technology behind the U.S. trading system has mostly been built over the past 40 years.

4. Infrastructure Rewritten: From "9 to 4" to 24/7 Tokenized Assets

We are breaking away from this fragmented system—people can only trade between 9:30 AM to 4 PM, and if the U.S. president declares war on a Friday night, you may want to sell your stocks but can only wait until Monday at 9 AM to act. Did you hear what I just said? If the president announces a declaration of war at that time, the only asset you can sell that weekend is crypto—tokenized stocks, tokenized precious metals, tokenized assets, and futures.

This is the direction of the future. We will have 24/7 tokenized assets. You will be able to trade "programmable money" with others. Assets will be transferred and settled instantly on a decentralized blockchain—there will be no trust issues. This is what I mean: AI validates identities and facts, while blockchain provides final settlement confirmation.

5. Ethereum: The "Trust Settlement Layer" of Global Finance

But this takes time. In capital markets, Ethereum is leading this change, becoming the settlement layer for financial transactions—you can call it "trustware" or "proof layer," as it can confirm that transactions are real and identities are real, because in Web3, once a transaction is completed, it is irreversible. Today, Ethereum has over a million validation nodes distributed across 84 countries, having zero downtime for over a decade—it is the most rigorously tested financial infrastructure to date. The liquidity assets guaranteed by Ethereum and its Layer 2 networks exceed more than 10 times that of its closest competitor; currently, Ethereum supports over $300 billion in on-chain assets, with more than 65% of global stablecoins and tokenized assets 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 accumulate some experience and wisdom along the way. I can tell you: most traditional finance professionals want to work on trusted platforms, which won’t go down and are secure enough. There are indeed faster and cheaper public chains out there, but they go down, lack economic security, and don’t have the liquidity profile that the largest global institutions need.

This is where assets like ether come into play—it is the native token of this network, and you can stake it to help secure the network. This point is a bit hard to explain: on the one hand, it serves as a store of value; on the other hand, you can stake it to secure transactions, validate blocks, and thus earn returns—this is different from Bitcoin, which doesn’t generate yield on its own (people like Michael Saylor must leverage MicroStrategy to get returns on Bitcoin). Staked ETH can produce yields close to 10%—the more ETH staked, the stronger the economic security of the network. We have staked 100% of our held ETH to enhance this security.

6. Three Pillars Accelerating Change: Stablecoins, Tokenized Assets, and DeFi

Using a baseball analogy: in the U.S., a baseball game lasts nine innings. I think we are currently in the second inning. Although the crypto industry has been around for 16 or 17 years, we are at the brink of a shift that I would describe as "step-function" change. Bill Gates has a classic quote—people tend to overestimate what can happen in a year but underestimate what can happen in a decade. And that is what is going to happen in the remaining time of this decade.

Stablecoins: Currently, the total market cap of stablecoins is about $330 billion, of which approximately 99.75% is dollar-denominated. There is a small portion in Europe; Hong Kong just approved the relevant regulatory framework, and South Korea is about to follow. Initially, stablecoins had basically one use—"I want to participate in the crypto market, but my dollar funds can't go directly in, so I need a stablecoin as a bridge." But this situation is changing. Stablecoins will become a channel for cross-border payments. Businesses will use them to transfer funds among thousands of subsidiaries; individuals will also be able to conduct cross-border transactions instantaneously and almost for free. Your wages that you get in a year or two might be paid in stablecoins—efficient, fast, and almost free of charge.

Tokenized Assets: Asset tokenization began about eight years ago, but eight years later, the total scale of tokenized assets is only about $35 billion—this is somewhat incredible. I believe the largest institutions globally are preparing to radically change this situation. This year alone, there have been four announcements that were unimaginable a few years ago. The New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq—the two largest exchanges in the world—are moving towards trading 23 hours a day, 7 days a week, so that tokenized assets can be freely traded around the clock. Additionally, DTCC—an organization many of you may not have heard of, but it is the largest securities settlement and clearing institution in the world—handles transaction amounts reaching about $15 quadrillion annually. They are currently piloting a DeFi-style model under regulatory approval—operations like lending and swaps, mostly based on Ethereum—this will change how centralized trading venues operate and how funds are managed because the use of stablecoins will increase, tokenized assets will rise, and more things will be tradable.

I believe that in the coming 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 of unprecedented scale since the shift from paper to electronic stocks in the 1970s.

DeFi (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 around the clock, currently with over $200 billion flowing through DeFi protocols.

7. The Fourth Pillar: Agentic Finance

I believe the power that could truly change the game permanently is "Agentic Finance." AI agents are now autonomously trading—executing payments, making investments, and managing investment portfolios independently. What they need is "programmable settlement": stablecoins combined with smart contracts allowing funds to be executed automatically when conditions are met—no need for bank accounts, no need for wire transfers, no need for intermediaries. Relevant standards are beginning to emerge—such as X402, which defines machine-readable payment protocols; and ERC-8004, which allows agents to perform programmable, permissioned financial operations.

How many of you own a "smart wallet"? Probably very few, right? Currently, there are about 800 million such wallets globally. I envision that soon everyone with a securities account will also have a digital "twin" wallet—operating with regulated agents within regulated companies—that is your digital twin, an AI agent understanding your goals, risk tolerance, and asset situation, capable of helping you do things that retail investors find very difficult today.

What I want to say is that by the end of 2027, everyone in this room will essentially have a "CFO in their pocket." It will scan for idle funds across all your accounts that aren't earning interest and move them to higher-yielding accounts. If you hold assets like SpaceX or Tesla in tokenized form, it will operate like large institutions: putting those positions on-chain, lending them out, returning the generated earnings to you, and adjusting your investment configuration accordingly. Your AI agent will become a reflection 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 1000 times the current level—these will be trades conducted between "agents," adhering to rules and guidelines to transfer funds and manage wealth in a way that is nearly impossible today. If there’s an opportunity, you can later chat with the Canopy team about some things they are working on that will give you a sense of what the future direction is.

About

Sharplink (NASDAQ: SBET) is a leading institutional-grade Ethereum reserve platform designed to provide more intelligent and efficient Ethereum investment opportunities for public market investors. Ethereum underpins most of the world's stablecoins, tokenized physical assets, and decentralized financial settlements, making it a unique asset with both native yield and long-term network growth.

ETH HK Hub is Asia's first physical Ethereum community center, supported by the Ethereum Foundation's "Ethereum Everywhere" team and operated in partnership with SNZ and ETHTAO. This center is committed to connecting Eastern and Western ecosystems and fostering the bridging role between traditional finance and decentralized innovation.

SNZ is a research-driven investment company active in the Web3 and fintech sectors since 2014, with a portfolio encompassing over 200 companies in blockchain infrastructure, decentralized finance (DeFi), payment systems, and practical application scenarios. As one of the earliest institutional investors supporting Ethereum in Asia, SNZ has continuously participated in ecosystem development since the network's inception and provides support to founders.

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

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