Former BlackRock executive: Ethereum has become Wall Street infrastructure; in the future, finance will no longer be divided into DeFi and traditional finance.

Wall Street is quietly rewriting its underlying code. Former BlackRock Head of Digital Assets and current Sharplink Co-CEO Joseph Chalom summed up the direction of traditional finance: “Ethereum is the infrastructure for future finance.” In 2025, institutions are shifting with both speed and scale, driving capital and applications that place Ethereum at the center of finance.

Why Wall Street Is Choosing Ethereum

Chalom spent 20 years at BlackRock, where he helped expand the Aladdin platform, launch the IBIT spot Bitcoin ETF, and invest in Securitize, among other initiatives. With deep experience in financial infrastructure and blockchain implementation challenges, he now believes Ethereum unifies “trust, security, and liquidity” into a single service layer. Through smart contracts and massive stablecoin circulation, Ethereum meets the rigorous risk management demands of institutional players.

Trust comes from a network with 100% uptime; security is anchored by decentralized validators; and liquidity is driven by the world’s largest developer and capital communities. Unlike Bitcoin’s role as a pure store of value, Ethereum enables tokens to generate on-chain yield. Chalom considers this versatile utility a true financial “public utility.”

Ethereum dominates stablecoins, tokenized assets, and high-quality smart contract activity. To digitize finance, institutions require a trustworthy blockchain—Ethereum fits that role perfectly.

ETH Staking: Legal and Secure Yields

Sharplink has turned ETH into a source of yield. The company holds about 859,853 ETH, valued between $2.9 billion and $3.45 billion, with the vast majority staked. This generates annual returns of roughly 3% to 4.5%. In a single week, Sharplink earned 459 ETH, with cumulative rewards exceeding 6,575 ETH. This was accomplished without leverage, thereby reducing price volatility risk.

The company also invested $200 million in Consensys’s Linea Layer 2, leveraging EigenLayer and EigenCloud restaking services. This allows the same ETH to simultaneously earn native staking rewards, AVS security delegations, and partner incentives. Anchorage Digital Bank securely custodies the assets. Chalom calls these results “DeFi-level returns without DeFi-level risk.”

As a productive asset, ETH paves the way for safer, more reliable returns.

2025: Key Catalysts

The SEC’s approval of spot Ethereum ETFs in mid-2024 opened compliance pathways, making 2025 the turning point for institutional inflows. Spot Ethereum ETF assets under management quickly reached $20 billion, reflecting investors’ view of ETH as a regulated, yield-generating asset.

After success with the IBIT ETF, BlackRock issued a tokenized money market fund on-chain through Securitize. JPMorgan invested $102 million in Bitmine Immersion Technologies to strengthen Ethereum infrastructure. UBS completed its first tokenized fund transaction on Ethereum, showcasing the process in action. Third-quarter data shows institutions holding $11.32 billion in ETH, with 8.3% of the circulating supply is locked in staking contracts.

Finance Is Blurring the Line Between DeFi and TradFi

Chalom predicts that soon the terms “decentralized” and “traditional” will disappear, as the underlying rails have already converged. He states publicly:

“We’ll simply call it finance. Ethereum will be the underlying infrastructure.”

Ethereum reduces transaction settlement to the block level. It provides transparent and traceable execution, and eliminates single points of failure through global validators, lowering costs. Stablecoins and tokenized assets enable 24/7 capital movement, providing continuous market liquidity.

Sharplink’s experience and major Wall Street investments make the message clear: This makes it clear that Ethereum is now the standard, not an experiment. As regulatory clarity improves and technology matures, a unified financial backbone that merges traditional and digital finance is rapidly emerging. Over the next decade, investors, engineers, and regulators will face the shared challenge of building services, distributing yield, and maintaining a balance between transparency and security on this backbone. In the future, users may not even realize they’re using blockchain. But every capital movement will depend on Ethereum as the public infrastructure layer.

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