SharpLink CEO Joseph Chalom — who previously led BlackRock’s digital assets strategy — framed the Ethereum-vs.-Solana debate as a clash between marketing narratives and how institutions actually behave. Speaking with CoinDesk’s Jennifer Sanasie on Jan. 26, Chalom said he would “just share facts,” pointing to observable market signals that he says favor Ethereum for high-value financial activity. Chalom’s core argument: institutions don’t choose chains like consumers pick apps. They pick settlement rails for moving money, tokenizing assets, and representing ownership — use cases where operational failure and security assumptions are existential. “Ethereum has been around for 10 years. It’s the secure, trusted, and liquid ecosystem,” he said, noting both the layer-1 mainnet and the growing set of layer-2 rollups that reinforce that position. By contrast, Chalom acknowledged Solana’s strengths — speed and low fees — but drew a hard line on reliability. “Solana has been fast and cheap but it has not been secure. It has had downtime,” he said, calling downtime risk disqualifying for “high value projects.” Chalom boils institutional decision-making into three priorities: trust, security, and liquidity. On that basis, he argued, “they’re building on Ethereum for high value projects — it’s happening on Ethereum.” He pointed to stablecoins and tokenized-asset activity as concrete evidence: “More than 65% of stablecoins and tokenized assets are happening there,” he said, estimating Ethereum’s share as roughly 10x that of Solana. “Ethereum leads in high quality assets in DeFi, tokenization, and stable coins by a factor of 10 to one over Solana. And that gap is only getting larger.” That said, Chalom does not advocate for a single-chain world. He framed Ethereum and Solana as serving different product surfaces based on security tolerance. “There’s a role for cheap, fast, less secure chains,” he said, suggesting Solana could win in areas where finality speed and cost matter more than institutional-grade assurances — for example, memecoins and gaming. The underlying takeaway is a segmentation story: Ethereum as the default rail for regulated, reputation-sensitive flows; Solana as a venue for high-throughput consumer and speculative activity where users accept different risk tradeoffs. “It’s not my perspective,” Chalom said. “People are voting with their feet.” SharpLink Gaming (Nasdaq: SBET) has itself become a major corporate Ethereum holder: public trackers put its holdings at roughly 864,840 ETH — about $2.5 billion at recent marks. At press time, ETH traded at $2,921. Read more AI-generated news on: undefined/news

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