SharpLink CEO: AI Agents Will Reconstruct the Financial System, Potentially Creating $4 trillion in Value Annually by 2035

September 23 - Joseph Chalom, CEO of Ethereum treasury company SharpLink, stated in a post that as AI agents integrate with stablecoins, real-world asset tokenization, and on-chain financial infrastructure such as DeFi, more than $1 trillion in annual revenue across the global financial services industry will face redistribution by 2030, and this figure could reach $4 trillion by 2035.

Chalom said that AI agents will become the automation layer of the new financial system, capable of continuously managing investors' financial activities, including finding lower banking, trading, and lending fees, optimizing savings yields, building investment portfolios, dynamic rebalancing, and managing loans and credit card debt. He estimates that by 2030, AI agents could save investors approximately $350 billion annually by driving down fees, and by 2035 this number will rise to $1.4 trillion, equivalent to eliminating nearly a quarter of fees across the global financial industry.

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 complete asset transfers, collateralization, borrowing, lending, and settlement. He also said that financial institutions including Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, PayPal, Circle, Tether, Robinhood, Coinbase, Binance, as well as JPMorgan, Citigroup, and BlackRock are all competing for the infrastructure and user entry points of the AI agent financial ecosystem. Whoever controls the infrastructure and the agents may control the value generated when agents transact 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. Currently, more than 10,000 AI agents have completed registration within 10 weeks after ERC-8004 went live.