Joseph Chalom: Ethereum Is The Toll Road To Everything (Larry Fink's Words)

Joseph Chalom argues that Ethereum’s importance is better measured by its role in financial infrastructure than by fee revenue alone. He says it supports more than 50% of stablecoin activity and tokenized real-world assets, and has the largest DeFi total value locked by a factor of eight or nine. Chalom puts stablecoins at about $300 billion today and tokenized real-world assets at about $30 billion, and expects them to grow to trillions and hundreds of billions, respectively, in the coming years. In his view, those markets make Ethereum’s position consequential even if current fees do not reflect their potential scale.

Chalom describes Ethereum as internet infrastructure and Ether as a potential trust commodity for future financial rails. He says institutions prioritize security, trust, and liquidity, and points to BlackRock starting funds on Ethereum as evidence that the network can meet those needs. Layer 2 networks such as Arbitrum settle transactions on Ethereum mainnet and use Ether for gas, helping secure those transactions. Chalom expects more on-chain settlement to increase the value secured by ETH and potentially accrue value to the token, while presenting that outcome as a possibility rather than a certainty.

The host contrasts Robinhood’s reportedly tenfold increase in trading activity and revenue with flat Ethereum fee revenue. Chalom attributes the disconnect in part to Ethereum’s flat-fee blockspace model and notes that Arbitrum has a scaling revenue-share agreement with Robinhood. He cautions against using revenue as the sole measure of Ethereum’s value, comparing its early economics to Amazon and Uber, which he says faced criticism before their broader businesses were understood. The comparison supports his point that today’s fee figures may not capture the future value of infrastructure, but does not establish that Ethereum’s economics will follow the same path.

At Davos, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink described Ethereum as “the toll road to tokenization,” as Chalom quoted him. Chalom’s analogy is a safe, high-volume road with a modest toll: Ethereum supplies security, trust, liquidity, and transaction finality, while greater transaction volume can make the system valuable. He contrasts Ethereum with the internet’s tokenless model, arguing that Ethereum has a token that rewards holders for securing transactions. He also emphasizes that Ethereum has no CEO, cannot have its rules changed unilaterally, and is censorship-resistant, which he says gives users confidence that the rules will not change beneath them.

The host compares Ethereum with the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation, saying the DTCC clears roughly $100 trillion in securities and settles about $4–5 quadrillion annually; Chalom says the internet is a better analogy. He expects blockchain infrastructure to become largely invisible while supporting financial activity. Chalom sees agentic finance as a major possible use: stablecoins could provide machine-native payment rails for agents making rapid, large-scale payments or micropayments that traditional rails are not designed to handle. He estimates agents could touch about $4 trillion in fees that might disappear or move to disruptors, while the host cites estimates of $17–30 trillion in agent-driven commerce.

Chalom expects financial super-apps from Stripe, Coinbase, Binance, and Robinhood to progress gradually from monitoring activity and recommending actions to taking on more responsibility as users build trust. Users might first authorize low-risk actions, such as moving cash to a higher-yield account, before permitting portfolio rebalancing. He anticipates rapid development over the next few quarters or roughly a year, but cautions that agentic finance will not be fully realized in 2026. He forecasts that agents could expand into commerce and finance, bring hundreds of billions of new users, and drive transaction value into the hundreds of trillions; he says Ethereum could capture 50% or more of agentic finance, with stablecoins serving as a proxy. He argues that regulation can build trust and decentralized blockchains could help keep large technology and financial firms from capturing most of the value, allowing consumers and societies to benefit.