Joseph Chalom: Ethereum Will Be the Future of Wall Street

Joseph Chalom, who shapes BlackRock's digital asset strategy, believes that Ethereum (ETH) will become the foundational infrastructure of the traditional finance world in the future. Having spent over 20 years at BlackRock, Chalom now serves as the co-CEO of Sharplink in the crypto sector, building the new phase of his career entirely on Ethereum.

Chalom states that Ethereum inherently possesses the most valuable elements of traditional finance, such as trust, liquidity, and security. "If you are going to digitalize finance, you need a chain that institutions can trust, and that is Ethereum," he says. His belief in Ethereum's impressive design has been reinforced by processes such as investments in Circle and partnerships with Securitize during his tenure at BlackRock.

While Chalom characterizes Bitcoin as a “great store of value,” he highlights Ethereum’s “multi-purpose” structure, which supports lending, trading, NFTs, and institutional applications. According to Chalom, the annual yield of approximately 3% provided by staking makes Ether “a productive asset.” "Bitcoin sits passively in a portfolio, while Ether generates value and this yield can be returned to shareholders," he states.

Chalom reveals that a significant portion of these assets is staked, noting that Sharplink holds over $3 billion in Ethereum assets. The company is working on "restaking" models through collaborations with Consensys, Linea, and EigenLayer, enabling institutions to earn yields at the DeFi level while maintaining their assets with regulated custodians.

Chalom sees Sharplink not as a “breakaway,” but as a continuation of the mission to merge traditional finance with crypto. He believes that in time, we will refer to it simply as finance instead of DeFi or TradFi, and Ethereum will form the infrastructure of this finance.