Stablecoins, Tokenized RWAs, DeFi and AI Agents Converging Into a New Financial Stack
TREE NEWS reports: Joseph Chalom, CEO of Ethereum treasury company SharpLink, has outlined a sweeping thesis on the future of finance, arguing that the convergence of stablecoins, tokenized real-world assets (RWAs), DeFi, and AI agents will fundamentally reshape the global financial industry. His team’s internal modeling projects that the annual revenue pool contested by AI agents in financial markets could reach as much as $4 trillion by 2035.
The projection places autonomous software agents — programs that can transact, negotiate, and allocate capital without direct human intervention — at the center of the next phase of crypto adoption. Rather than retail users or institutions being the primary drivers of on-chain activity, Chalom’s thesis suggests AI agents will become the dominant counterparties in tokenized markets.
Why the Convergence Matters
The logic rests on several reinforcing trends:
- Stablecoins as settlement rails: Dollar-denominated tokens already provide 24/7, programmable settlement that traditional banking infrastructure cannot match, making them a natural medium of exchange for machine-to-machine payments.
- Tokenized RWAs as collateral: As treasuries, private credit, commodities, and equities migrate on-chain, AI agents gain access to a broad universe of yield-bearing and collateralizable assets that can be composed programmatically.
- DeFi as execution layer: Lending protocols, DEXs, and yield strategies offer permissionless, composable financial primitives that agents can call directly via smart contracts — no intermediaries, no business hours, no paperwork.
- AI agents as the demand side: Autonomous agents managing portfolios, executing arbitrage, or optimizing treasury operations could generate transaction volumes far exceeding human capacity.
If this vision materializes, the revenue pool — spanning trading fees, lending spreads, asset management, and data services — would be enormous. A $4 trillion annual figure would rival the combined revenue of today’s largest global banks and asset managers.
SharpLink’s Strategic Positioning
Chalom’s comments carry particular weight given SharpLink’s positioning as an Ethereum treasury company — a vehicle that accumulates ETH and related on-chain assets. The thesis implicitly argues that Ethereum, as the dominant settlement layer for tokenized assets and DeFi activity, stands to capture a disproportionate share of value if AI-agent-driven finance scales as projected.
The remarks also reflect a broader shift in how crypto-native firms are framing their long-term bets. Instead of pitching blockchain as a better payment network or a speculative asset class, the emerging narrative positions it as the native financial infrastructure for a machine economy.
Risks and Open Questions
The forecast is not without caveats. Regulatory treatment of AI agents executing financial transactions remains unsettled, and questions of liability, identity, and compliance are unresolved. Technical challenges — including oracle reliability, smart contract security, and cross-chain interoperability — could slow adoption. And the $4 trillion figure assumes aggressive compounding of current trends over a decade, a horizon over which many projections prove optimistic.
Still, the direction of travel is notable. Major financial institutions are already piloting tokenized funds, stablecoin settlement, and AI-driven trading. If Chalom’s model is even partially correct, the intersection of AI and tokenized finance may prove to be the defining market structure of the 2030s — and the firms positioned at that intersection could capture extraordinary value.
