Investors have not priced in Ethereum’s (ETH) potential to replace Wall Street’s outdated settlement infrastructure, according to SharpLink CEO Joseph Chalom and EigenLayer founder Sreeram Kannan.
During a Sept. 15 Milk Road podcast discussion, Chalom, who previously led BlackRock’s digital asset initiatives, outlined the fundamental friction plaguing traditional finance.
Current systems require day-long settlement periods, create counterparty risks, and force market participants to post collateral for overnight financing while intermediaries extract rents from these inefficiencies.
He stated:
“The current ecosystem is pretty inaccessible and filled with friction where intermediaries are taking rents.”
SharpLink CEO then contrasted the dynamic with Ethereum’s atomic settlement capabilities that execute trades in seconds without counterparty risk. He also argued that Ethereum represents “an emerging fundamental new kind of public infrastructure, almost like Web1, where the internet was a category of investments.”
He positioned the blockchain as a universal settlement layer for both financial and economic systems.
Programmable finance transformation
Ethereum’s programmable nature enables portfolio rebalancing through smart contracts, dividend distribution in minutes rather than days, and composable transactions, allowing any asset to trade against any other asset at any time.
These capabilities create what Chalom described as “the license to win” for institutions seeking efficiency over current systems.
Kannan extended this vision beyond finance, describing Ethereum as “the platform for verifiable trust” that solves counterparty risk through cryptographic verification, rather than relying on institutional guarantees.
He noted that EigenLayer enables Ethereum to power additional networks beyond the base protocol, and explained:
“Verifiability is the substrate of society itself.”
Kannan mentioned applications in AI agent verification, prediction markets like Polymarket, and autonomous systems requiring trust without human oversight as examples.
Infrastructure investment timing
Both executives emphasized the education-to-adoption transition occurring among institutional investors.
Chalom noted that while Bitcoin required explaining digital gold concepts, Ethereum demanded deeper infrastructure explanations that took more time but generated stronger conviction once understood.
The launch of Ethereum ETFs in July 2024 marked an adoption inflection point, with treasury companies now accumulating approximately $14-15 billion in ETH holdings.
Chalom predicted acceleration beyond Strategy’s Bitcoin accumulation pace as institutional players recognize Ethereum’s productive asset characteristics through staking and DeFi yields.