Sharplink Executive Sees AI Agents Cutting $1.4 Trillion in Fees
Chalom names Visa, Circle, Tether, and Coinbase as players in the race for AI payments. He says growth is shifting mainly toward stablecoins, wallets, and Ethereum.
Key Takeaways
- Sharplink executive Joseph Chalom expects AI agents to push out nearly a quarter of global financial fees by 2035.
- His model calls for $1.4 trillion in annual savings for investors and $4 trillion in revenue at stake in 2035.
- Chalom says stablecoins, tokenized assets, and Ethereum are important for agent payments, while Fidelity also sees closed tech and fintech systems as a possible scenario.
Sharplink executive Joseph Chalom expects AI agents to push out nearly a quarter of global financial fees by 2035. According to his model, that would save investors $1.4 trillion (€1.2 trillion) a year. The former BlackRock executive shared that forecast Wednesday in a post on X.
Biggest Battle Over Money Flows
Chalom is sketching out a market where financial firms have to compete much harder on price. His team modeled ten financial sectors through 2035 and came up with more than $1 trillion (€0.9 trillion) in annual revenue already at risk in 2030. By 2035, that would rise to $4 trillion (€3.5 trillion) per year.
Using the same calculation, consumers would keep about $350 billion (€308 billion) more in 2030, before that figure rises to $1.4 trillion (€1.2 trillion) in 2035. Chalom also points to the roughly $15 trillion (€13.2 trillion) that American households hold in checking accounts, savings accounts, and short-term deposits. He says those balances often earn much less interest than money market rates, which costs savers at least $180 billion (€158 billion) a year.
Stablecoins and Wallets
According to Chalom, the fight over those AI agents has already started. He names Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, PayPal, Circle, Tether, Robinhood, Coinbase, and Binance as companies trying to decide which products agents recommend and where idle money gets swept.
BlackRock made a similar analysis this week and named stablecoins as the top candidate for agent payments. Chalom says those transactions will mainly happen where stablecoins, tokenized assets, and DeFi liquidity come together, with a lot of activity in the Ethereum ecosystem. He pointed to Ethereum's record of 3.6 million daily transactions in April as a sign of growing activity.
That view also fits Sharplink itself. The company held 891,714 ETH on September 14, according to its dashboard. At the same time, Fidelity Digital Assets pointed to a different scenario in August: closed systems from tech and fintech companies could also absorb agent activity. That lines up with Fidelity's warning that AI may bring more crypto activity, but the economic value does not necessarily end up in public tokens.
Why This Matters
For European crypto investors, the key point is that Chalom ties the role of stablecoins and Ethereum to a broader shift in financial infrastructure. If AI agents really start handling a bigger share of payments and cash management, that could increase demand for crypto services around wallets, settlement, and tokenized assets. At the same time, Fidelity's warning shows that this trend will not automatically flow into open crypto ecosystems.
