ETH’s Breakout Moment: Why Wall Street Is Catching Onto Ethereum

Ethereum just had its most active day ever. And most people missed it.

This past Friday, the network processed 2,885,524 transactions according to Etherscan — the highest daily total in its decade-long history. But instead of fees spiking, they stayed near multi-month lows. Proof that Ethereum's efforts to tackle scaling have paid off, and according to Vivek Raman, it is the whole point of the blockchain's inflection point.

“The fact that we had record transactions and fees are at record lows means that we’re scaling,” said Raman, the co-founder and CEO of Etherealize. “There was no world where you can onboard the entire global financial system and have fees be very high.”

After a decade of building, Ethereum is entering a new phase — not just one of technical maturity, but institutional legitimacy. Raman, who launched Etherealize to help onboard Wall Street to Ethereum, says the architecture is now winning over some of the biggest names in finance.

“We saw JP Morgan deploy their money market fund directly on Ethereum mainnet,” he said. “Fidelity, BlackRock, BNY Mellon — they’re all building. Amundi, the largest asset manager in Europe, is putting their euro money market fund on Ethereum. Baillie Gifford is tokenizing a bond fund. This isn’t theory anymore — this is production.”

Unlike previous adoption cycles where crypto chased retail speculation, the new wave is coming from institutions. And the biggest shift might be how they’re thinking about ETH, the asset.

“Bitcoin is digital gold. ETH is digital oil,” Raman said. “It’s a store of value, it has a yield, it has utility. Oil’s market cap is higher than that of gold — and its utility is higher. So if Bitcoin is gold, ETH is the resource that powers the digital economy.”

That narrative — ETH as infrastructure-grade capital — is quietly taking hold. Tom Lee, one of Wall Street’s most recognized strategists, is now publicly championing Ethereum, investing $200 million into Beast Industries to potentially onboard new users of famed YouTuber Mr. Beast. And unlike the early Ethereum era, Raman says today’s ETH is built for this moment: low-fee, high-throughput, deeply decentralized — and now visibly neutral.

“Goldman Sachs isn’t going to use JPMorgan’s proprietary blockchain. JPMorgan’s not going to use Fidelity’s,” he said. “The only place where everyone can coordinate and have equal footing is a neutral playing ground. Ethereum is that.”

Maybe that's why Ethereum’s validator exit queue has dropped to zero — even with new demand flowing in. The network is managing peak activity levels without major bottlenecks, while staking remains steady. To Raman, this proves Ethereum’s modular roadmap is working. Layer-1 is secure and reliable. Layer-2s like Base and Linea are absorbing throughput. And zero-knowledge tech is setting the stage for even more scale, and privacy, to keep pace with new challengers like Canton as they also attract Wall Street giants.

“Ethereum will keep getting technically better. It will keep scaling while staying safe, secure, decentralized, never having any downtime,” he said. And while Ethereum’s architecture remains rooted in idealism — decentralization, neutrality, censorship-resistance — Raman believes pragmatism is finally driving its most important adoption curve.

“We’re seeing more excitement than I’ve ever seen in five years of doing institutional adoption,” he said. “It’s not just for crypto anymore. It’s going to be what powers the global economy."

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