Joseph Chalom, former head of crypto at BlackRock, said his pitch to Wall Street institutions starts with Ethereum’s role in the next phase of financial infrastructure rather than with price targets. Chalom, who now leads the $1.5 billion Ethereum treasury firm SharpLink, said discussions with traditional finance firms focus on fundamentals and on why ETH has a distinct role inside a growing digital financial system.
Stablecoins and tokenized assets lead the institutional case
Chalom said investor conversations usually begin with the scale of the Ethereum ecosystem. In his outline, stablecoins currently total about $310 billion and could eventually grow into the trillions. He also pointed to tokenized real-world assets, which he said stand near $32 billion today and could also expand to the trillions. Institutional adoption of DeFi is part of the same discussion. Taken together, these areas are used to show Ethereum as long-duration infrastructure rather than a trade built on short-term market moves.
That framing presents Ethereum as a settlement network and, in Chalom’s words, a future global ledger for digital finance. The sequence matters. First explain the economic activity happening on the network, then explain why the native asset becomes necessary as that activity grows.
ETH is described as a “trust commodity”
After laying out the ecosystem, Chalom shifts to Ether itself. He said ETH secures and settles transactions across the Ethereum network, and that more network activity means more ETH is needed to support the system. On that basis, he described Ether as a “trust commodity”, an asset whose value comes from helping secure network operations rather than from speculative narratives alone.
Chalom said his team avoids short-term price forecasts when speaking with institutions. The conversation is built around structural demand instead. As Ethereum usage expands, ETH is required to process transactions and maintain security. He added that investors often use several valuation frameworks to assess Ethereum’s intrinsic value, including models that look at usage activity, network demand, and settlement volume.
Why Chalom separates Ethereum from Bitcoin
He also addressed a comparison that often comes up with traditional investors: the idea that Ethereum is simply a smaller version of Bitcoin. Chalom said that view misses Ethereum’s actual function. In his explanation, Ether carries intrinsic value tied to financial infrastructure and should not be treated as a derivative of Bitcoin’s price action.
He said Ethereum supports a separate economic system, and drawing that distinction is a central part of institutional education. Once the Bitcoin comparison is removed, investors are better able to evaluate Ethereum on its own terms — as infrastructure for settlement, security, and long-term digital financial activity.