AI Agents Could Erase $1.4 Trillion in Wall Street Fees by 2035, Sharplink CEO Says
TREE NEWS reports: Sharplink CEO Joseph Chalom, a former BlackRock executive, has projected that AI agents will eliminate nearly a quarter of global finance fees by 2035, saving investors an estimated $1.4 trillion annually. Chalom outlined the forecast in a post on X on Wednesday, citing his team’s internal modeling. The projection frames AI agents not merely as productivity tools but as a structural threat to the fee-based economics that have long underpinned traditional asset management, brokerage, and advisory services.
The $4 Trillion Prize
The total pool of global finance fees sits near $4 trillion. AI agents — autonomous software that can execute research, portfolio construction, rebalancing, and transaction routing without human intermediaries — could capture or compress roughly a quarter of that value. The mechanism is straightforward: agents negotiate, compare, and execute at near-zero marginal cost, stripping out layers of intermediation that currently justify management fees, ticket charges, and advisory spreads.
The implication for asset managers is uncomfortable. Firms whose revenue depends on basis-point fees for services that AI can replicate — routine allocation, index replication, basic advisory — face margin compression. The winners may be platforms that own the agent layer, the data pipelines feeding it, and the settlement rails it transacts on.
Why This Is a Crypto Story
Chalom’s forecast lands squarely in the crypto and DeFi conversation because autonomous agents need permissionless, programmable money to operate at scale. An AI agent that manages a portfolio across borders, rebalances in real time, and settles instantly is poorly served by batch-processing banking infrastructure. Stablecoins, tokenized treasuries, and on-chain settlement networks provide the native rails for agent-to-agent commerce.
- Stablecoins offer 24/7 settlement and programmable escrow, essential for agents transacting without human oversight.
- Tokenized RWAs give agents direct access to yield-bearing instruments like treasuries without traditional brokerage accounts.
- DeFi protocols supply the lending, swapping, and yield strategies agents can compose permissionlessly.
Sharplink’s own positioning reflects this thesis. The firm has pivoted toward Ethereum treasury and staking strategies, betting that institutional capital will migrate on-chain as agent-driven finance matures. If AI agents become the primary interface for allocating capital, the venues they choose will capture disproportionate flows.
Forward-Looking Perspective
The $1.4 trillion figure is a projection, not a certainty, and Chalom’s model assumes aggressive agent adoption, favorable regulation, and continued cost declines in inference. Skeptics will note that finance is heavily regulated, that fiduciary duties resist full automation, and that human relationships still drive large allocations. Yet the direction of travel is clear: every layer of intermediation that can be expressed as software will be, and the fee pools attached to those layers will shrink.
For crypto, the strategic question is whether on-chain rails become the default settlement layer for agent-driven finance or remain a niche. If Chalom is even half right, the next decade of financial infrastructure will be built for machines, not people — and the protocols that win will be those agents can actually use.
