Why Ethereum Is Now Following Amazon’s Playbook: Sharplink CEO
Sharplink CEO Joseph Chalom explains why Ethereum could be following Amazon's playbook, as tokenization and AI agents create a massive opportunity
By Zack Guzman
November 4, 2026
Ethereum investors may be making the same mistake Wall Street once made with Amazon: Focusing too much on what the technology does today and overlooking the much larger market it could eventually transform.
That's the argument Sharplink CEO Joseph Chalom is making, as the former BlackRock executive doubles down on his company's long-term bet that Ethereum will become the foundation of a new global financial system.
In a new interview with Coinage at The Tie's conference, Chalom compared Ethereum's current position to Amazon's early years, when investors questioned whether Jeff Bezos could build a profitable business selling books online. What they failed to appreciate, he argues, was that Amazon wasn't simply trying to become a better bookstore. It was building the infrastructure for an entirely new kind of commerce.
"The analogy I'll give, because there's a lot of skeptics out there, is the early days of Amazon and Uber, where people thought that the TAM was Jeff Bezos building a faster, cheaper bookseller losing money, subsidizing transactions," Chalom told Coinage. "And Ethereum is in very much the same place."
"What people missed is that Jeff Bezos was rewriting what e-commerce was going to be," he added.
For Chalom, the parallel is particularly relevant as investors debate whether growing adoption of stablecoins, tokenized assets and decentralized finance will ultimately translate into higher prices for ether, Ethereum's native cryptocurrency.
His answer is that the real opportunity lies not in any individual application, but in Ethereum becoming the infrastructure supporting an increasingly digital financial system.
"The belief and the strongly held view is that ETH will be that trust commodity that's going to secure stablecoins and tokenization and agentic finance," Chalom said. "And you want to have that asset because it will get more scarce and more and more institutions are going to need to hold it to do their daily jobs."
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Chalom's conviction comes as some of Wall Street's largest institutions are moving beyond experimenting with blockchain technology and beginning to put real financial assets onchain.
Stablecoins were the first major success story, followed by tokenized Treasury securities and money market funds. But many building in crypto now believe the next wave could be substantially larger with publicly traded equities.
Chalom estimates that roughly $3.5 billion in public equities had been tokenized as of today, compared with virtually none a year earlier. That represents a small fraction of the approximately $150 trillion global public equity market he sees as an eventual opportunity.
"I think the litmus test for me is how quickly U.S. public equities get tokenized," Chalom said. "Because I think that is the biggest TAM. And I think that is the biggest opportunity."
Some companies are pushing back, however, at the prospect of seeing their shares be tokenized. As of this week, more than 55 companies had alerted the joint-venture of OKX and NYSE parent Intercontinental Exchange that they wanted to opt out of seeing their shares trade onchain.
Chalom said that is to be expected as the industry still grapples with whether investors will own native tokenized shares carrying traditional shareholder rights or wrapped representations of existing stocks, and whether blockchain-based markets can attract enough liquidity to compete with existing exchanges.
"I actually have more conviction today than I did 15 months ago because I think you're seeing green lights on tokenization like you haven't seen before," he said.
The outcome matters for Ethereum because Chalom believes institutional investors will gravitate toward networks offering the greatest combination of security, neutrality and liquidity.
He pointed to the growing adoption of Ethereum and its layer-2 networks as evidence of that advantage, arguing that Ethereum already accounts for more than half of stablecoin settlement activity and tokenized assets across the blockchain ecosystem.
The challenge for ether holders, however, is whether increased activity on those networks will actually produce greater demand for the underlying token.
That's where Chalom's Amazon comparison becomes central to his investment thesis — and running things at Sharplink.
Just as Amazon initially sacrificed near-term profitability to build a much larger business, he believes Ethereum's long-term economic opportunity could be difficult to recognize by focusing solely on today's transaction fees.
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