Bitcoin's New Bull Market Meets A $4 Trillion AI Revolution | Joseph Chalom

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Scott Melker (0:14)

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Scott Melker (0:31)

One of the most interesting narratives in markets right now is the intersection between AI and crypto. Today's guest, the CEO of Sharp Lake, Joseph Chalom, broke down in an incredible three-part series that he's just releasing today, how big this really can be. Give you a little hint, $4 trillion of financial services could be involved in this. We're going to talk about that and more right now.

What is up, everybody? And welcome to the show. I am honored to have Joseph here, so I'm going to bring him on right now. How are you?

Joseph Chalom (1:17)

Doing great, Scott. I'm excited about this conversation.

Scott Melker (1:22)

So I'm excited about this conversation. I want to dive right into this because you just released this, and I think it's extremely powerful, and is very much in line with what everybody's talking about right now. So you ran Digital Assets, obviously, at BlackRock.

So you've got the credentials to be releasing this, obviously, and now you run a company that stakes 900,000 ETH. And you just published, as I said, this three-part series basically saying that $4 trillion of financial services revenue is up for grabs for AI agents. So I would love for you to walk us through this argument.

Joseph Chalom (1:53)

Sure, well, taking a step back, for 20 years, I had a front row seat on how really messed up the financial services industry was. They loved to control the rails, legacy infrastructure, and they really stepped in front of their customer relationships. And we often forget how much human trust is then required when trades take days to settle and other people control your money.

Basically, once a decade, it all blows up in systemic risk. I wrote these articles because it's pretty rare that you can actually first see a coming financial revolution. And if you could see it coming, you should be able to shape its outcome. And what do I mean by a financial revolution? We have four crypto ingredients that are ready to create a new agentic economy.

Stable coins as a programmable digital cash, tokenized real-world assets, that's the exposure layer. DeFi, which is basically a new way to programmably execute trades, and AI agents that have unlimited machine intelligence that are going to automate it all for us on a continuous basis. You put these four things together and you really have a big bang, a new universe, and it's going to be massively disruptive. And I think in a very constructive way for consumers, probably the first time consumers are going to be the biggest beneficiary of a financial revolution.

Scott Melker (3:21)

So Americans have, I think, roughly $15 trillion sitting in checking and savings accounts that's earning and I would say doing almost nothing. So let's go into this agentic world. What does it unlock? What's the agent going to do with that money? How are they going to access it?

Joseph Chalom (3:38)

So if you take a step back again, idle cash, this $15 trillion that's sitting unproductive means that Americans lose about $180 billion a year in lost interest. And they don't do it because they don't care. They leave it where it is, idle, unproductive, because moving it is either a hassle, no one reminds them, or they really just don't know that there are better options. And the agentic economy and agentic capabilities are going to change this in a massive way.

Really, for two reasons that people aren't talking about.

In our economy, there is a lack of financial literacy, but more importantly, there's a lack of attention. Our entire society lacks attention.

Agents bring both to the table, and that's why I believe there will be about $4 trillion of financial services fees disrupted. So what is the real life example? Well, agents will wake up in the morning or at night and realize that your savings or checking accounts pay less than a third of 1 percent. They'll move it to money market funds that pay 10 times that. They'll build portfolios for you because they're going to know your goals and preferences. They will monitor the liability side of your balance sheet. They'll know you have mortgages that can be refinanced. Insurance policies will not auto renew. They'll bid it out without being influenced by insurance brokers or commercials or Super Bowl ads. They'll look at your credit card balances. They will essentially move it to lower rates and refinance it for you. Which means that a massive amount of fees are low-hanging fruit for these agents, not only to get you a better productive portfolio, but to basically compress trillions of dollars of fees and put it back in your pocket. And I'm really, really excited. Again, this could be the first financial revolution where consumers and not financial services companies are the winners.