Ethereum positioned to replace Wall Street infrastructure, yet remains undervalued by investors
Investors haven’t priced in Ethereum’s (ETH) potential to replace Wall Street’s outdated settlement infrastructure, in accordance to SharpLink CEO Joseph Chalom and EigenLayer founder Sreeram Kannan.
During a Sept. 15 Milk Road podcast discussion, Chalom, who beforehand led BlackRock’s digital asset initiatives, outlined the basic friction plaguing conventional finance.
Current methods require day-long settlement intervals, create counterparty dangers, and drive market members to submit collateral for in a single day financing whereas intermediaries extract rents from these inefficiencies.
He acknowledged:
“The present ecosystem is fairly inaccessible and crammed with friction the place intermediaries are taking rents.”
SharpLink CEO then contrasted the dynamic with Ethereum’s atomic settlement capabilities that execute trades in seconds with out counterparty danger. He additionally argued that Ethereum represents “an rising elementary new sort of public infrastructure, virtually like Web1, the place the web was a class of investments.”
He positioned the blockchain as a common settlement layer for each monetary and financial methods.
Programmable finance transformation
Ethereum’s programmable nature permits portfolio rebalancing by way of sensible contracts, dividend distribution in minutes moderately than days, and composable transactions, permitting any asset to commerce in opposition to every other asset at any time.
These capabilities create what Chalom described as “the license to win” for establishments looking for effectivity over present methods.
Kannan prolonged this imaginative and prescient past finance, describing Ethereum as “the platform for verifiable belief” that solves counterparty danger by way of cryptographic verification, moderately than counting on institutional ensures.
He famous that EigenLayer permits Ethereum to energy further networks past the bottom protocol, and defined:
“Verifiability is the substrate of society itself.”
Kannan talked about functions in AI agent verification, prediction markets like Polymarket, and autonomous methods requiring belief with out human oversight as examples.
Infrastructure funding timing
Both executives emphasised the education-to-adoption transition occurring amongst institutional investors.
Chalom famous that whereas Bitcoin required explaining digital gold ideas, Ethereum demanded deeper infrastructure explanations that took extra time however generated stronger conviction as soon as understood.
The launch of Ethereum ETFs in July 2024 marked an adoption inflection level, with treasury corporations now accumulating roughly $14-15 billion in ETH holdings.
Chalom predicted acceleration past Strategy’s Bitcoin accumulation tempo as institutional gamers acknowledge Ethereum’s productive asset traits by way of staking and DeFi yields.
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