Sharplink CEO Says AI Agents Could Cut $1.4 Trillion in Fees, With Ethereum (ETH) at the Center

A $1.4 Trillion Fee Forecast

Sharplink CEO Joseph Chalom expects artificial-intelligence agents to eliminate close to a quarter of global finance fees by 2035, a shift he values at $1.4 trillion a year in investor savings. The forecast appeared in a Wednesday post on X from the former BlackRock executive, who now runs Sharplink, an Ethereum (ETH) treasury company. Agentic finance, in his framing, is software that researches products, negotiates terms and executes payments without human clicks — and it attacks the fee layers on which banks, brokers, crypto exchange operators and payments firms currently depend. Fee compression at this scale would not land evenly: trading commissions, FX spreads, account maintenance and distribution charges are all exposed to automation that performs the same task at near-zero marginal cost.

Xhttps://x.com/joechalom/status/2102729939543863754

His team modeled 10 financial verticals through 2035. The model puts more than $1 trillion of annual financial-services revenue up for grabs by 2030, with the figure reaching $4 trillion a year by 2035. The mechanism is straightforward: agents comparison-shop on the user’s behalf and push providers into price competition, so consumers would keep an extra $350 billion a year by 2030 before annual savings climb to the full $1.4 trillion. Chalom also highlights the roughly $15 trillion that US households hold in checking, savings and short-term deposits, much of it yielding well below money-market rates. That gap, he estimates, costs savers at least $180 billion a year — recoverable, in part, by an agent that sweeps idle cash automatically. He described the emerging contest as “one of the most important battles” over money and value, drawing every major bank, broker and digital-asset firm into the field. The projection is a forecast, not a measured outcome: it assumes agents win access to consumer decision-making, which is precisely the infrastructure fight now under way.

The Race for the Agent Wallet

The contest he describes is already running. Chalom names Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, PayPal, Circle, Tether, Robinhood, Coinbase and Binance among the contenders racing to control the agent’s wallet — and with it, the decisions about which products agents recommend and where idle cash gets swept. The infrastructure owner, he argues, effectively “owns the agent,” and therefore the customer relationship that follows. Exchange networks and card schemes are approaching from opposite ends: the former from trading and custody, the latter from everyday payments rails, and the workload spans everything from stablecoin settlement to futures execution and savings sweeps.

BlackRock’s research paper this week made a related case, naming stablecoins — tokens pegged to fiat currency — as the leading candidate for agent payments. Chalom’s own view goes further: agentic transactions will settle mainly where stablecoins, tokenized assets and decentralized exchange liquidity are concentrated, and much of that activity sits in the Ethereum ecosystem today. He points to Ethereum’s record of 3.6 million daily transactions in April as evidence that the blockchain network can carry that load. The thesis is not abstract for Sharplink itself: the company’s investor-relations dashboard showed holdings of 891,714 ETH as of September 14, making its balance sheet a direct bet on the same settlement layer. Not everyone reads it the same way. Fidelity Digital Assets struck a more cautious note in August, when senior research analyst Max Wadington warned that closed systems run by technology and fintech firms could absorb agent activity instead, keeping agentic payments inside proprietary apps rather than on open rails. Readers tracking the market in real time can follow live spot and futures prices on Gate.

Ethereum’s Agent-Settlement Case

In COINOTAG’s reading, the two threads of the past 24 hours converge on one question: where will agentic money settle? The primary record is Chalom’s own X post, which states the $4 trillion revenue figure and the $1.4 trillion savings estimate directly, alongside Sharplink’s investor-relations dashboard confirming the 891,714 ETH position backing the thesis. Both point the same way — toward Ethereum as the default settlement layer for machine-driven payments. The counter-scenario, closed fintech agent wallets, is the risk that keeps this forecast from being a straight line. The test ahead is which rails the first production agent payments actually use.