For Joseph Chalom, Ethereum It is not just another blockchain. It’s the infrastructure he believes Wall Street will eventually build.
Chalom, co-CEO of Sharplink and former head of digital assets at BlackRock, says the qualities that financial institutions care about most – trust, security and liquidity – are present in Ethereum. That’s why he’s betting his post-BlackRock career on it.
“Ethereum has the most high-quality stablecoins, tokenized assets, and smart contract activity,” Chalom told CoinDesk in an interview. “If you’re going to digitize finance, you need a chain that institutions can trust, and it’s Ethereum.”
At BlackRock, Chalom spent 20 years helping scale the Aladdin platform, a cornerstone of the firm’s internal operations that became one of the largest portfolio and risk management systems in the financial industry. He later led BlackRock’s entry into the crypto space, backing Circle, launching the company’s most profitable exchange-traded fund (ETF), IBIT, and investing in tokenization company Securitize.
That experience shaped his conviction about the design of Ethereum. He describes the blockchain as a “multipurpose” platform, capable of supporting not only financial transactions, but also loans, transactions, NFTs and complex applications, in contrast to bitcoin, which he calls “a huge store of value.”
‘Productive asset’
Ether’s native staking performance also sets it apart.
Unlike bitcoin, which sits idle in wallets, ether generates a 3% annual return through Ethereum’s proof-of-stake mechanism. “It’s a productive asset,” Chalom said. “And that productivity can be returned to shareholders.”
At Sharplink, which holds more than $3 billion in ether, Chalom is trying to prove just that.
Almost all of the company’s ether is at stake. And through new partnerships with Consensys, Linea and EigenLayer, Sharplink is exploring “recapture” strategies to unlock additional yield, keeping assets in the hands of regulated custodians.
He says this type of capital, held on balance sheets without short-term repayment pressure, allows institutions to offer DeFi-level returns without DeFi-level risk. “If you’re willing to lock the duration, you can lock the ‘L’ in total value,” Chalom said. “That opens up access to better and safer returns.”
future DAT
Sharplink is one of several digital asset treasury companies accumulating ether, but Chalom believes most will find it difficult to scale. Without strong trading volumes, clean balance sheets and internal teams managing bets and investments, many Treasuries will underperform, he says.
Chalom sees Sharplink not as a break in his career at BlackRock, but as a continuation of his mission: uniting traditional finance with the crypto ecosystem. “We spent decades building roads full of middlemen,” he said. “Ethereum gives us the opportunity to rebuild those rails: faster, cheaper and more secure.”
It does not consider Ethereum a speculative technology. He sees it as the foundation for the next wave of digitized finance. “Over time,” he said, “we won’t call it DeFi or TradFi. We’ll just call it finance. And Ethereum will be the underlying infrastructure.”
