The Wolf Of All Streets - Bitcoin's New Bull Market Meets A $4 Trillion AI Revolution | Joseph Chalom

Episode Date: September 25, 2026

Joseph Chalom breaks down how AI agents, stablecoins, tokenization and DeFi could reshape the financial system and disrupt trillions in fees. He explains why Ethereum could become a key settlement layer for this agentic economy, while Bitcoin remains a hedge against monetary debasement. Ultimately, he believes AI agents could automate investing, saving and borrowing while putting more financial control back in consumers’ hands. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Discover coffee plus on nispresso.com. One of the most interesting narratives and markets right now is the intersection between AI and crypto. Today's guest, the CEO of Sharp Lake, Joseph Shalom, broke down in an incredible three-part series that he's just releasing today. How big this really can be. Give you a little hint, $4 trillion of financial services could be involved in this. We're going to talk about that and more right now. What is up, everybody, and welcome to the show. I am honored to have Joseph here, so I'm going to bring him.

on right now. How are you? Doing great, Scott. I'm excited about this conversation. So am I. So I want to dive right into this because you just released this and I think it's extremely powerful and is very much in line with what everybody's talking about right now. So you ran digital assets obviously at BlackRock. So you've got the credentials to be releasing this obviously. And now you run a company that stakes 900,000 ETH. And you just published, as I said, this three-part series basically saying that $4 trillion of financial services, revenue is up for grabs for AI agents. So I would love for you to walk us through this argument. Sure. Well, taking a step back, for 20 years, I had a front row seat on how really messed up the

financial services industry was. They love to control the rails, legacy infrastructure, and they really stepped in front of their customer relationships. And we often forget how much human trust is then required when trades take days to settle and other people control your money. Basically, once a decade, it all blows up in systemic risk. I wrote these articles because it's pretty rare that you can actually foresee a coming financial revolution. And if you could see it coming, you should be able to shape its outcome. And what do I mean by a financial revolution? we have four crypto ingredients that are ready to create a new agentic economy. Stable coins as a programmable digital cash, tokenized real world assets, that's the exposure layer,

defy, which is basically a new way to programmably execute trades, and AI agents that have unlimited machine intelligence that are going to automate it all for us on a continuous basis. you put these four things together and you really have a big bang, a new universe, and it's going to be massively disruptive. And I think in a very constructive way for consumers, probably the first time consumers are going to be the biggest beneficiary of a financial revolution. So Americans have, I think, roughly $15 trillion sitting in checking and savings accounts that's earning and I would say doing almost nothing. So let's go into this agentic world. What does it unlock? agent going to do with that money? How are they going to access it? So if you take a step back again,

idle cash, this $15 trillion that's sitting unproductive, means that Americans lose about $180 billion a year and lost interest. And they don't do it because they don't care. They leave it where it is, idle, unproductive, because moving it is either a hassle, no one reminds them or they really just don't know that there are better options. And the agentic economy, and agentic capabilities are going to change this in a massive way. Really for two reasons that people aren't talking about. In our economy, there is a lack of financial literacy, but more importantly, there's a lack of attention.

Our entire society lacks attention. Agents bring both to the table, and that's why I believe there'll be about $4 trillion of financial services fees disrupted. So what is the real life example? Well, agents will wake up in the morning or at night, and realize that your savings or checking accounts, pay less than a third of 1%. They'll move it to money market funds that pay 10 times that.

They'll build portfolios for you because they're going to know your goals and preferences. They will monitor the liability side of your balance sheet. They'll know you have mortgages that can be refinanced. Insurance policies will not auto-renew. They'll bid it out without being influenced by insurance brokers or commercials or Super Bowl ads. They'll look at your credit.

card balances, they will essentially move it to lower rates and refinance it for you, which means that a massive amount of fees are low-hanging fruit for these agents not only to get you a better productive portfolio, but to basically compress trillions of dollars of fees and put it back in your pocket. And I'm really, really excited. Again, this could be the first financial revolution where consumers and not financial services companies are the winners. talk about $4 trillion is the big number there and specifically financial services revenue. So that's the fees. I've got to imagine that some of those do not survive this new agentic economy. So which fees actually die and which survive?

So any fees that are based on customers not paying attention are at risk. If you're being paid, however, for taking risks or maybe you have a really important regulatory license or a large balance, that you use, you'll be much better protected. But when we did our analysis of the $4 trillion of fees that are going to be touched by agents, not run by agents, but touched, we predict about 35% of these fees will stay with traditional incumbents.

Banks, insurance companies, legacy payment companies, 15 to 20% are going to go to new disruptors. They tend to be crypto-native, digitally native. They're going to build super apps that are going to make your lives best. but about 50% of them are going to be compressed to near zero by our agents. And it doesn't mean the economics are going to go to zero, but the fees will likely be compressed in ways that we've never seen before.

And what's really going to die? Margin on idle cash, FX exchange, cross-border remittances, basically anything where a stable coin or a crypto asset can move money without intermediaries for near free. But if you have big balance sheets, maybe you take risk, you're a regulated provider, you have a good chance of surviving. But overall, we expect significantly better returns for consumers and lower fees to the tune of about a trillion dollars a year by 2035. I would imagine, though, even though those compressed, that it expands the market tremendously. 100%. You're going to have a new agentic economy. Your agents could be starting business.

isn't making money for you. Agents are going to pay agents. But there's a great example from, you know, the turn of the century where Skype didn't kill phone companies. It killed the economics and moved the value differently. Stable coins are going to do that for banks, and there'll be new winners here. Okay. So who plays the phone company here in that example? I think it's going to be the disruptors who are built on new technology. They have super, apps that will control both the asset side of your balance sheet, where you bank, how you earn, how you invest, but also where you borrow and lend. And those are going to be fully integrated with your entire financial life. But more importantly, they're going to have agenta capabilities

to do things on behalf of the users. And it's going to be built on top of blockchain rails. I think the traditional banks who have not been able to adapt and the traditional payment providers are going to be in a run for their money. And that's why this last part of what I talked about, the idea of there being a blockchain-based settlement layer will actually help determine the outcome here, whether there are just going to be new, closed, proprietary rails, or whether you can actually, for the first time, have agents and users control their own destiny. I am personally biased to believe that Ethereum is the most credibly neutral way that agents are going to move your money. And this will help prevent a repeat of history where a handful of technology

or corporate owners consolidate the innovation on their own behalf. And this will create actual agency for users. And that is how people own their sovereign lives again, as opposed to giving it up in another financial revolution. So I think there's plenty of examples historically where there's been a race to zero on fees, right? From one of the most famous, obviously, is a financial, markets in 75, the SEC ended fixed brokerage commissions. But that took decades of competition for everything basically to go to zero, right? I mean, really, really long time and maybe you would have thought it would be much faster. So you say here that the agenic shift is bigger and it happens on a much more accelerated timetable. So what makes it faster and bigger this time? So in the old days,

1975, May 1st, we called it May Day. It was the day the SEC removed fixed commission for stock trading. And it took a couple of decades, almost three, for commissions to go to zero and stock trading to go to zero. It didn't mean that brokerages weren't making money. They just weren't making it on stocks. That happened in slow motion. Agents with machine intelligence, with new blockchain rails, and with stable coins, tokenized assets, and defy are not going to do it in slow motion. They're going to do it in fast forward. And I think it's going to have a much more impact full magnitude of change. And it's going to happen because consumers are essentially going to tone over large parts of their financial decision making, not all of it and not immediately,

to these agents who will level all the fees and returns that took decades for consumers to discover in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. It's going to happen. And fast forward with a much bigger magnitude and hopefully a bigger outcome for consumers themselves. Do you have a projection as to how fast it happens? I'm pretty good at the hockey stick idea and trying to understand exponential growth, but this seems even from just my boomer utilization of AI to be happening exceptionally fast. Yeah, it took about a decade for e-commerce in the 1990s to go from 20-year-olds to 30-year-olds to my parents who sit at home all day ordering things from Amazon and don't even think twice.

about exchanging financial information. We saw how quickly generative AI took part in our lives. You can argue in six months, most Americans and consumers around the world were leveraging generative AI. I think it'll take a little bit of time for people to fully trust agents, but the impact is going to be on every element of their financial lives. And I think it's going to go much, much faster than e-commerce did, and the magnitude will be greater.

we estimate that in the next seven years, again, 50% of all financial services fees are going to be impacted. Some are going to stay. Some are going to get disrupted to new providers, but most of it is going to get collapsed to the benefit of a consumer. It's going to happen slowly and then really, really rapidly. Interesting. It's the benefit the consumer because I've heard you say that whoever owns the rails owns the customer, right? And that's the consumer at the end of the day. and every tech wave ends with a few giants owning everything, right? I think people, we always look back to the dot-com boom and, you know, thousands of companies washed out, but the biggest companies in the world were the ones

who emerged from it, so that sort of idea now. So who do you think's winning now? And I want to go specifically to Ethereum because I know that you think that Ethereum sort of changes the ending for that. Yeah, I think history should inform us, but history does not need to be circular, prophetic, or repetitive. For the first time we see a revolution before it happens, most revolutions are surprises, and in retrospect, they looked inevitable. We know an agentic revolution is coming. The elements are coming together. The question is, can we avoid that outcome that has plagued

history, railroads, telecommunications, the browser wars, commercial cloud, AI. We've seen a handful of winners. In this case, we have new technology and methods of transacting. We have blockchains, and blockchains allow stable coins to move instantly. It allows assets to be tokenized and avoid intermediaries. You have defyne on-chain borrowing, lending, and trading, and now you have agents to do it. Ethereum and other blockchains can be the new neutral rails, programmable, decentralized, and censorship-resistant. What does that mean? You can't be debanked. Your agent cannot be owned. These elements can help break the cycle of history. And that's where we have an ability to start building those guardrails

and being aware of history a year into this agenic revolution, not two to three late years later where we're worried about doomsday scenarios and have to slow down, which is the narrative for AI today. And I think if we can get ahead of this revolution, we can help shape its outcome. So my audience, I think, is probably primarily Bitcoinsers, but I know a lot of them are still very passionate about it like myself. But in the world that you're describing, what does Ethereum do that Bitcoin can't? Sure. Let me just start with a positive. I am a big owner of Bitcoin equal to Ethereum. When I was at BlackRock, we launched the fastest growing ETF in history, Ibit,

to put Bitcoin in the hands of tens and tens of thousands of new investors. And Bitcoin is incredibly simplistic. It is the hedge against monetary debasement. It is the hedge against the scourge of war and risk that we see in today's economy. You described it as an exit asset that no human, no CEO controls. And we need to give it its props. Ethereum is slightly different in that it's more programmable. Bitcoin has not become a payment instrument.

or an instrument where markets and defy are built on it. Ethereum you can think of as programmable infrastructure. And what I'm describing of a new on-chain economy with stable coins, tokenized assets, defy, and now agentic rails, most of that we predict is going to happen in the Ethereum or other blockchain ecosystem. And that's not to denigrate Bitcoin in any way. We just think they serve different purposes. but similar to Bitcoin, no one controls Ethereum.

It's credibly neutral. It's cryptographic. There is no CEO who can step in and change the rules of the game. And that's why at Sharplink, we give our investors an opportunity to take advantage of owning Ether, taking advantage of this Ethereum opportunity, likely owning Ether's side by side with Bitcoin in your portfolio. One is a hedge and an exit asset. One is making a bet that the current system.

will run on new rails, and Ethereum is poised to win that game. Look at the scoreboard. It's already doing exceptionally well in stable coin space, tokenized real-world assets, and defy, but it could sit side by side with Bitcoin in your portfolio. And as I mentioned in the beginning, you're staking 900,000 eth, so you're participating in the network very much. Correct, correct. And those 900,000 eth are run in a treasury, actively managed portals.

portfolio, but they're giving equity holders in our sharpling stock access to the yield, but also access to the capital appreciation. I think we've turned the corner of Bitcoin, Eath, and other majors are in a bull market. And it is a great time to start investing in that future, whether it's Bitcoin or ETH. So there's a lot in these three pieces that you've written here. So is there one thing from all of those, the best takeaway that they need want people to really walk away with and understand. Yeah, I think it's not a question in any way whether AI agents are going to reshape finance, they will. The number one question is who's going to end up owning the rails they run on? As we know from every historical revolution in technology, as you said,

it ends up in the hands of one, two, three winners who often try to control the rails. And even if something is no fee or fee, we know they're monetizing our eyeballs, our data, our became pictures, our social graphs, they shouldn't be monetizing our agents. Our agents should run on neutral rails and essentially act on behalf of their users. That is why it's called agency. That's why it's called autonomy. And I think it can deliver tremendous prosperity for investors. And the final, final thing is in a world of AI doom and gloom, you know, the robots are going to come for us. Let's focus on the positive that AI is going to provide. Unlimited financial literacy. unlimited attention span.

And if you control your agent truly, it will create massive prosperity for consumers around the world. So I'm bullish, I'm passionate, and I hope people have an opportunity to read these three pieces. They're meant to be thought-provoking. So let me ask you a more practical question.

With all of that in mind, would you let an agent run your own money today? If so, what's the first thing you'd hand off to it? Because I'm actually, I'm at this point now. I really feel like we're at this point. Let them plan your vacations. Agents can plan vacations better than University of Pennsylvania anthropology majors, which I know you are one.

Then let it touch your idle cash. That's oddly specific, Joseph. Then let them touch your idle cash, put it in higher yielding accounts, then share with it your risk tolerances and your goals and suggest that it build a better portfolio. Don't let it execute, but once you review it with a human in between, let them execute. And then before you know it, they should be rebalancing your portfolio. They should be bidding out your insurance renewal. They should suggest to you if your mortgage rate is too high.

So I think it'll take a little bit of time. Your agent needs to learn you and you need to learn your agents. But let's be absolutely clear. Over time, people are comfortable turning things over to others who have better expertise and have their best interest at hand. I think it'll take longer for me to allow an agent to lend my money or take out debt, but that will come in turn. Over time, when your agent learns your preferences, it'll act autonomously on your behalf within guardrails. Until then, we have to train them, just like we train our financial advisors. So I'm very bullish that in a year from now, Scott, you and I are going to be doing a lot through our agents. And in five years from now, we're not even going to realize what they're doing. they're just doing it on your behalf behind the scenes.

And they'll be working for you, not for a big corporation or a financial intermediary who wants to own the agent relationship. Yeah, I mean, like I said, I've been, you know, very impressed with how fast it's moved. I mean, to me, it's just crazy. We started here with trying to set up open claw on a computer and it was clunky, and we were trying to get it to sort of do these chief of staff duties and to manage things. But we were constantly updating models. Now you're going Grockbot. and all of a sudden, I was like, I would never give email access to an agent, and all of a sudden, Grockbots sending emails for me, right?

And that only took a matter of months. So I can't even imagine how much trust we're going to put in these things and how much we're going to use them. It's all with guardrails, of course, but still the unimaginable already happening. And when it does, the magnitude of change on the financial industry is actually unimaginable, but we actually know it should help consumers. We just need to avoid the pitfalls of every other revolution. This time we know it's coming, and we can control its outcome.

Yeah, I mean, you're already pointing at basically 1.4 trillion in savings for consumers of those 4 trillion in fees, right? That kind of the back of the napkin math. And that doesn't even account for all the things are just going to do for us. Correct. And the other, you know, like not even fees, just finding a cheaper price or all the other incredible things. Yeah, I find this so fascinating. And I love that you wrote these three pieces because I think it really is time for people to start thinking very deeply about this. Because if you're not touching it or testing it, you were going to need to very soon.

I fully agree. And again, this does not have to be part of a doomsday. This could be the most optimistic consumer-friendly story in the entire AI narrative. Anything else I might have missed that you want to add? No, I think you got it all. And I hope this doesn't become a Bitcoin versus Heath or Eith versus Solana story. This becomes a user controlling his destiny or her destiny and the agent serving as their agent and nothing more and nothing less. I love it. Thank you so much for your time, I deeply appreciate it. Scott, thanks for having me on.