SharpLink CEO: AI agents will restructure the financial system, potentially generating $4 trillion in annual value by 2035.

Joseph Chalom, CEO of SharpLink, an Ethereum treasury firm, stated in a post that as AI agents integrate with stablecoins, real-world asset (RWA) tokenization, and on-chain financial infrastructure such as DeFi, more than $1 trillion in annual global financial services revenue will be reallocated by 2030, a figure that could reach $4 trillion by 2035. Chalom noted that AI agents will serve as the automation layer of the new financial system, capable of continuously managing investors’ financial activities—including securing lower bank, transaction, and lending fees, optimizing savings returns, building investment portfolios, dynamic rebalancing, and managing loans and credit card debt. He projected that AI agents will save investors roughly $350 billion annually by reducing fees by 2030, a figure that will rise to $1.4 trillion by 2035—equivalent to eliminating nearly a quarter of global financial industry fees. Stablecoins, tokenized real-world assets, and DeFi will provide AI agents with 24/7 programmable financial infrastructure, enabling agents to view asset ownership, prices, collateral requirements, and lending opportunities within the same on-chain environment, and autonomously execute asset transfers, collateralization, lending, and settlement. He added that financial institutions including Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, PayPal, Circle, Tether, Robinhood, Coinbase, Binance, as well as JPMorgan, Citigroup, and BlackRock are all competing for infrastructure and user entry points in the AI agent financial ecosystem. Whoever controls the infrastructure and agents will likely capture the value generated from transactions executed by agents on behalf of clients. In addition, Chalom pointed out that infrastructure such as Coinbase’s x402 machine-to-machine stablecoin payment standard and Ethereum’s ERC-8004 agent identity protocol are forming a new open agent economy. Over 10,000 AI agents have registered in the 10 weeks since ERC-8004’s launch.