Why Everything Settles on Ethereum
Ethereum Korea One: Genesis · Day 1 · 2026-09-28 · 11:23 · In English
When AI agents send and receive money, who will own the settlement rails? At Ethereum Korea One: Genesis, SharpLink CEO Joseph Chalom discusses the agentic economy and Ethereum's role in it.
Speakers
- Joseph Chalom, CEO, SharpLink
About this session
A keynote by Joseph Chalom, who spent 20 years at BlackRock (the last 8 leading its digital assets business), on why the future of financial settlement is converging on Ethereum. Chalom covers the failed experiments with permissioned chains, the US regulatory environment, and how AI agents will shake up existing payment networks, and asks what Ethereum means in the race for the rails of next-generation money.
Key takeaways
- More than 50% of stablecoins are on Ethereum, and for tokenized assets no chain comes close. Chalom stressed that the Ethereum ecosystem, including L2s, is ahead on the "scoreboard."
- BlackRock spent most of 2018 to 2020 trying to make permissioned chains work, and failed. It launched its actual regulated products on Ethereum mainnet. Chalom recalled that BUIDL in 2024 was also built to send a message to US financial institutions that "we tried private chains, it didn't work."
- Because the Clarity Act did not pass, the industry missed the clarity the BRCA provision could have provided (the standard that DeFi developers who do not control custody are not regulated entities). Chalom noted this is a point of difference from earlier speakers.
- The US ACH network, launched in 1975, cannot work for AI agents. Agents need instant movement of funds and settlement.
- Chalom said about $15 trillion in the US sits in low-yield checking and savings accounts, costing consumers about $180 billion a year, and expects agents to enrich financial literacy and attention. The talk also presented a forecast that by 2035, a quarter of financial services fees, about $1.4 trillion, will be disrupted, with $350 billion of that flowing back to consumers.
- Citing Coinbase's x402 and ERC-8004, which enables trustless payments between agents, Chalom said "a war has begun, a battle to own the next rails," and that the number of agents using Ethereum could be "measured in the tens if not hundreds of billions."
Chapters
- Opening and speaker introduction
- The scoreboard: stablecoins and tokenized assets
- BlackRock's permissioned chain failure and BUIDL
- The Clarity Act and DeFi regulation
- AI agents and instant settlement
- The path of technology revolutions and the agentic revolution
- Stablecoins and fee compression
- x402, ERC-8004, and the war over rails
- Regulators' concerns and the future of money
- Hundreds of billions of agents and Ethereum's role