AI Agents Could Wipe Out $1.4 Trillion in Wall Street Fees, Sharplink CEO Says

Sharplink CEO Joseph Chalom projects that AI agents will eliminate nearly a quarter of global finance fees by 2035. 

His team’s model puts the resulting investor savings at $1.4 trillion a year. Chalom, a former BlackRock executive, set out the forecast in an X post on Wednesday.

A $4 Trillion Prize and a $180 Billion Blind Spot

Chalom’s team modeled 10 financial verticals through 2035. The model puts more than $1 trillion in annual financial services revenue up for grabs by 2030. Chalom expects that figure to reach $4 trillion a year by 2035.

The model assumes agents will make financial providers compete more aggressively on fees. Consumers would then keep an extra $350 billion a year by 2030, before the figure climbs to $1.4 trillion.

Chalom also points to roughly $15 trillion that US households hold in checking, savings, and short-term deposits. Much of it earns well below money-market rates, which he says costs savers at least $180 billion a year.

“Over $1 trillion of annual global financial services revenue is going to be up for grabs by 2030, growing to $4 trillion annually by 2035. Every major bank, broker, payments firm, and digital assets company is racing to capture a share in one of the most important battles over money and value we will see in our time,” he said.

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Visa, Coinbase, and Circle Race for the Agent’s Wallet

Chalom says the contest to control these agents has already begun. He names Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, PayPal, Circle, Tether, Robinhood, Coinbase, and Binance among the contenders. 

In his view, the winner would also decide which products agents recommend and where idle cash gets swept.

“Whoever owns the infrastructure, owns the agent, and therefore the customer,” Chalom added.

BlackRock’s research paper this week made a related case, naming stablecoins as the leading candidate for agent payments. 

Chalom argues that agentic transactions will predominantly occur where stablecoins, tokenized assets, and DeFi liquidity are concentrated, with much of that activity currently centered in the  Ethereum (ETH) ecosystem. He points to Ethereum’s record of 3.6 million daily transactions in April as evidence of the network’s growing activity.

That outlook lines up with Sharplink’s balance sheet. The company held 891,714 ETH as of September 14, according to its dashboard.

Fidelity Digital Assets offered a more cautious read in August. Senior research analyst Max Wadington warned that closed systems run by tech and fintech firms could instead absorb agent activity.

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