Joseph Chalom goes to Ethereum It’s not just another blockchain. He believes that is the infrastructure that Wall Street will eventually build.
Chalom, co-CEO of Sharplink and former head of digital assets at BlackRock, said the trust, security and liquidity qualities that financial institutions value most are all present in Ethereum. That’s why he’s betting his post-BlackRock career on it.
“Ethereum has the majority of stablecoins, tokenized assets, and high-quality smart contract activity,” Chalom told CoinDesk in an interview. “If we are going to digitize finance, we need a chain that financial institutions can trust, and that is Ethereum.”
At BlackRock, Chalom spent 20 years helping grow the Aladdin platform, the foundation of the company’s operations, which became the financial industry’s largest portfolio and risk management system. He then led BlackRock’s entry into the cryptocurrency space, supporting Circle, launching IBIT, the company’s most profitable exchange-traded fund, and investing in tokenization company Securitize.
That experience shaped his beliefs about Ethereum’s design. He described blockchain as a “multipurpose” platform that can support not only financial transactions, but also loans, trades, NFTs, and complex applications, in contrast to Bitcoin, which he calls “a great store of value.”
“productive assets”
Ether’s inherent yield through staking also sets it apart.
Unlike Bitcoin, which sits dormant in a portfolio, Ether generates a 3% annual yield through Ethereum’s proof-of-stake mechanism. “This is a productive asset,” Chalom said. “And that productivity can be returned to shareholders.”
At Sharplink, which holds $3 billion worth of Ether, Chalom is trying to prove just that.
Almost all of the company’s Ether is invested. And through new partnerships with ConsenSys, Linea, and Eigenlayer, Sharplink is exploring “re-staking” strategies to unlock additional revenue while storing assets in regulated custodians.
He says this type of capital is held on balance sheets without short-term redemption pressures, allowing financial institutions to offer DeFi-level returns without DeFi-level risk. “If you want to lock a period, you can be ‘L’ for the locked total value,” Chalom said. “This opens up access to safer and better returns.”
The future of DAT
Sharplink is one of several digital asset treasury companies accumulating ether, but Chalom believes most will struggle to scale. Without strong trading volumes, a clean balance sheet, and an in-house team to manage staking and investing, many government bonds will underperform, he said.
Chalom sees Sharplink not as a break from his career at BlackRock, but rather as a continuation of his mission of bridging traditional finance and the cryptocurrency ecosystem. “We spent decades building rails full of intermediaries,” he said. “Ethereum gives us the opportunity to rebuild rail faster, cheaper and more securely.”
He does not consider Ethereum to be a speculative technology. He sees this as the foundation for the next wave of digital finance. “Over time, we won’t call it DeFi or TradFi. We’ll just call it finance, and Ethereum will be the underlying infrastructure,” he said.