Former BlackRock executive: Ethereum has become Wall Street's infrastructure; future finance will no longer distinguish between DeFi and traditional finance.

Ethereum Becomes the Core Infrastructure of Wall Street, Chalom and Financial Giants Lead Capital Shift

(Background: Ethereum confirms the December 3rd Fusaka upgrade hard fork, introducing PeerDAS and raising Gas limits)
(Additional context: The Fusaka upgrade in one month: Ethereum’s boldest scalability gamble to date)

Wall Street is quietly rewriting the underlying code. Joseph Chalom, former head of digital assets at BlackRock and current co-CEO of Sharplink, states, “Ethereum is the infrastructure of future finance,” revealing the direction of traditional finance in a single sentence. By 2025, institutions are simultaneously shifting in speed and scale, with capital and applications propelling Ethereum to the center stage.

Why Wall Street Chooses Ethereum
Chalom, with 20 years at BlackRock—including expanding the Aladdin platform, launching the IBIT spot Bitcoin ETF, and investing in Securitize—knows the pain points of financial pipelines and blockchain implementation. Now he believes Ethereum has integrated “trust, security, and liquidity” into a single service layer, and through smart contracts and a large circulation of stablecoins, it meets the strict risk control requirements of institutions.

Trust comes from an always-on network record; security is built on decentralized validators; liquidity is accumulated by the world’s largest developer and capital communities. Compared to Bitcoin’s simple store-of-value positioning, Ethereum also enables tokens to generate on-chain yields. Chalom views this multifunctionality as a “public utility” of finance.

Ethereum hosts the majority of stablecoins, tokenized assets, and high-quality smart contract activity. If you want to realize digital finance, you need a blockchain trusted by institutions—and Ethereum is precisely that blockchain.

ETH Staking Yields Are Legal and Secure
Sharplink turns ETH into a yield engine. The company holds about 859,853 ETH, valued between $2.9 billion and $3.45 billion, most of which is staked, generating annual returns of about 3% to 4.5%. In one week, they received 459 ETH in rewards, accumulating over 6,575 ETH, all without leverage, reducing price volatility risks.

The company is also investing $200 million in Consensys’s Linea Layer 2, combining EigenLayer and EigenCloud’s re-staking services, allowing the same ETH to generate multiple income streams—native staking, AVS security delegation, and partner incentives. Assets are stored securely through Anchorage Digital Bank. Chalom describes this achievement as “DeFi-level returns with no DeFi-level risks.”

It is a productive asset, opening the door to safer, better returns.

Key Catalyst for 2025
The SEC’s approval of a spot Ethereum ETF in mid-2024 will open the regulatory door, making 2025 a turning point for capital inflows. The spot Ethereum ETF has quickly accumulated assets reaching $20 billion, indicating investors view ETH as a compliant, income-generating asset.

Following BlackRock’s IBIT ETF, Securitize is issuing tokenized money market funds on-chain. JPMorgan has invested $102 million in Bitmine Immersion Technologies, injecting infrastructure capital into Ethereum. UBS completed its first Ethereum tokenized fund transaction, demonstrating real-world processes. Data from Q3 shows institutional holdings of ETH totaling $11.32 billion, with 8.3% of circulating supply locked in staking contracts.

Finance No Longer Distinguishes Between DeFi and TradFi
Chalom expects that the coming world will no longer use the labels “decentralized” or “traditional” because the underlying layers have already converged. He openly states, “We will only call it finance. And Ethereum will be the underlying infrastructure.”

Ethereum shortens transaction settlement times to the block level, with transparent, traceable records, and removes single points of failure through global validators, reducing costs. Meanwhile, stablecoins and tokenized assets enable capital to flow continuously, providing ongoing market liquidity.

From Sharplink’s experience to Wall Street giants’ investments, the signals are consistent: Ethereum is no longer an experiment but a standard. As regulatory pathways clear and technology matures, a unified financial backbone blending traditional and digital finance is rapidly forming. The next decade’s shared challenge for investors, engineers, and regulators is how to build services, distribute yields, and maintain transparency and security on this backbone.

In the future, users may not need to perceive blockchain at all, but every fund flow will be completed through Ethereum’s public infrastructure layer.

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Ethereum confirms December 3rd Fusaka upgrade hard fork, introduces PeerDAS, raises Gas limits
(BlackRock former executive: Ethereum has become Wall Street’s infrastructure; future finance will no longer distinguish DeFi from traditional finance)

This article was first published by BlockTempo, the most influential blockchain news media.