SharpLink Chief Executive Officer Joseph Chalom said institutional adoption of Ethereum has entered a new phase, with financial firms moving beyond research into active blockchain deployment. Speaking on Strata Media's Talking Tokens podcast during the Injective Summit in Washington, D.C., Chalom told journalist Jacquelyn Melinek that growing activity across tokenization, stablecoins, and decentralized finance signals a shift toward production-grade use of the network. The comments come amid a broader wave of Wall Street engagement with public blockchains, spurred by the approval of spot Ethereum ETFs in the United States and growing regulatory clarity around tokenized securities.

Ethereum's Institutional Market Position

Chalom said Ethereum already leads several areas critical to institutional investors, including stablecoins, tokenized assets, and decentralized finance, where the network holds more than half of the market. He emphasized that Ethereum delivers the security, trust, and liquidity that institutions require.

However, he noted that the ecosystem has lacked a unified approach to communicating those strengths to institutional participants — a gap that has at times left Ethereum competing against rival smart-contract platforms offering more coordinated enterprise outreach.

Following restructuring efforts at the Ethereum Foundation, Chalom joined Joe Lubin of Consensys and Tom Lee of Bitmine in supporting three new organizations. According to Chalom, ETH Systems will develop privacy tools, ETH Labs will focus on scaling infrastructure, and Ethereum Institutional will assist organizations in building and launching blockchain products. The entities aim to address long-standing concerns from enterprises around confidentiality, transaction throughput, and the operational complexity of deploying on a public network.

Tokenization Activity Expands Across Finance

As institutional participation grows, Chalom said the market has shifted from creating new blockchain-native products toward tokenizing existing financial products — a transition he described as a major change for the industry. Tokenization of traditional assets such as money market funds, bonds, and deposits is viewed by banks and asset managers as a way to streamline settlement, improve collateral mobility, and enable round-the-clock trading.

Several major financial institutions have already expanded their tokenization efforts. Robinhood built its blockchain using Arbitrum technology, an Ethereum Layer-2 network. BlackRock continues tokenizing its USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund on Ethereum and other blockchains, and has submitted filings for two additional products.

JPMorgan has also broadened its blockchain offerings. According to Melinek, the bank launched its second tokenized money market fund on Ethereum in May, bringing roughly $800 million on-chain across both funds. The expansion reflects a pattern in which large banks are progressively migrating portions of their treasury and fund-management operations onto programmable infrastructure.

Institutions Move Into Production

Chalom said private discussions increasingly reflect institutional urgency around blockchain adoption. Banks are tokenizing deposits, while asset managers and fund managers continue reassessing deployment timelines.

He also noted that institutions have moved beyond education and are now building dedicated teams. Chalom compared Ethereum's institutional adoption trajectory to the gradual digitization of equity markets, while cautioning that the process remains in its early stages. Industry watchers are closely monitoring whether upcoming protocol upgrades, including continued development of Ethereum's data-availability and scaling roadmap, will further reduce transaction costs on Layer-2 networks and accelerate institutional deployment.