Joseph Chalom: Ethereum Will Be the Future of Wall Street

Joseph Chalom, who shapes BlackRock's digital asset strategy, believes that Ethereum (ETH) will be the foundational infrastructure of the traditional finance world in the future. Having worked at BlackRock for over 20 years, Chalom now serves as co-CEO of Sharplink in the crypto sector and is 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 digitize finance, you need a chain that institutions can trust, and that is Ethereum,” he says. His experiences during his time at BlackRock, such as the investment in Circle and the partnership with Securitize, have reinforced his belief in Ethereum's impressive design.

While describing Bitcoin as a "great store of value," Chalom emphasizes Ethereum's "multifunctional" structure, enabling it to support lending, trading, NFTs, and institutional use cases. According to Chalom, the approximately 3% annual yield provided through Ethereum's staking makes Ether a "productive asset." “Bitcoin remains passive in the portfolio, while Ether generates value, and this yield can be returned to the shareholders,” he states.

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

Chalom sees Sharplink not as a "breakaway," but as a continuation of the mission to merge traditional finance with crypto. According to him, over time we will refer to it simply as finance instead of DeFi or TradFi, and Ethereum will form the backbone of that finance.