At the Digital Assets Summit (DAS) 2025 in London on Tuesday, industry leaders explored Ethereum’s growing role at the institutional level during the panel “The Path to Trillions: Ethereum’s Institutional Dominance.”
Featuring Joseph Lubin, founder and CEO of Consensys, Joseph Chalom, Co-CEO of SharpLink, and moderated by Arjun Kharpal of CNBC, the discussion examined how Ethereum’s infrastructure, staking yields, and tokenization capabilities are positioning it as the backbone of the next trillion-dollar phase of digital finance.
Speakers debated the catalysts behind institutional adoption — from on-chain fund issuance to regulatory clarity and interoperability — and the milestones Ethereum must cross to sustain its lead in decentralized finance and tokenized assets.
Thoughts Following ‘Black-Friday’s’ Crypto Crash
“Friday was a terrible day for humans,” Chalom said. “People lost their skin, some their lives. If the ecosystem can’t self-police itself, leverage works itself through — in any market.”
Chalom, who spent two decades at BlackRock, said the crash exposed the dangers of excessive leverage and the tight correlation between decentralized finance (DeFi) and centralized exchanges.
“Most of what you saw, which was sadly closed out, was insidious leverage garbage — and you can quote me on that,” he added.
Institutions Seek a ‘Flight to Quality’
Despite the turmoil, Chalom said the institutional outlook remains strong. “Institutions are here, they’re ready to go,” he noted. “But it’s going to be a flight to quality, not a flight to speculation.”
He argued that Bitcoin and Ethereum emerged from the recent volatility as “high-quality growth assets that can stand the test of time,” contrasting them with over-leveraged tokens and synthetic products. “When you tokenize,” he said, “you’re talking about a multi-trillion-dollar adoption curve happening soon.”
The End of a Super Cycle
Lubin, whose firm Consensys builds key infrastructure for Ethereum, framed recent disruptions within a broader historical cycle. “We’re at the end of a super cycle — a monetary debt super cycle, a generational super cycle,” he said. “There’s too much debt in the system, geopolitical instability, and technology has become so centralized it’s hard for people to manage their lives.”
A Call for Rigorous Decentralization
Lubin urged the industry to focus on rebuilding trust through true decentralization. “What we need in the next system of the world is decentralization,” he said. “We’ve lost trust in centralized authorities. Centralized systems have become abusive. We need censorship resistance, which comes from rigorous decentralization — and systems that integrate artificial intelligence and decentralized protocols.”
Both speakers agreed that the road to trillions will not be paved by speculation, but by resilient, decentralized infrastructure capable of supporting the next generation of global finance.
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