Wall Street piles into Ethereum as stablecoins are greenlit and RWAs expand

Key takeaways:

• ETH is increasingly viewed as a reserve asset for the digital dollar economy, with over 54% of stablecoins issued on Ethereum.

• Fidelity sees Ethereum as a sovereign digital economy, with ETH acting as both a store of value and a medium of exchange.

• Recent reports argue that ETH’s fee drop was a strategic move to scale via L2s, setting the stage for mass adoption and future value accrual.

Ether (ETH) has surged 23% over the last week, outpacing Bitcoin’s 13% gain and the broader crypto market’s 10%. Yet at $3,400, ETH still trades well below its all-time high of $4,855 set in November 2021. While Bitcoin has entered price discovery, Ethereum appears to have far more room to run, if the right narratives take hold.

Every major bull run needs a story that resonates. In 2021, Ethereum rallied on the back of NFTs and DeFi. But today, overpriced JPEGs and decentralized exchanges no longer carry the same market excitement. Instead, Ethereum’s appeal lies in its growing alignment with traditional finance (TradFi), primarily through its role in stablecoins and real-world asset (RWA) tokenization.

These evolving use cases reframe ETH as more than just a utility token. It is increasingly viewed as a reserve asset, a store of value, and even digital oil.

ETH as a reserve asset

A new report by Electric Capital highlights Ethereum’s leadership in stablecoin issuance and settlement. 

Despite declining trust in the US dollar, global demand remains strong for both individuals and businesses. And thanks to blockchains, for the first time in history, anyone with internet access can hold and use digital dollars without a bank. Since 2020, stablecoin adoption has seen a 60x increase, now amounting to over $200 billion. 

These stablecoins are evolving into financial instruments. Yield-bearing versions, now exceeding $4 billion in market cap according to The Block, are the fastest-growing segment, letting users earn passive income in stable assets.

Ethereum still dominates this space, hosting over 54% of all stablecoins. Electric Capital outlines three key criteria for stablecoin platforms: global accessibility, institutional security, and political neutrality. Ethereum is the only network that consistently meets all three. Tron comes second with 32%, but its low-cost edge is eroding as usage drives fees higher. Meanwhile, Ethereum’s fees have dropped thanks to upgrades and declining congestion, giving it a chance to consolidate its role as the core layer for the onchain dollar economy.

As this ecosystem grows, so does ETH’s function as a reserve asset. Like Treasurys or gold in TradFi, ETH provides collateral, settlement, and yield. It’s scarce, non-custodial, stakable, and deeply embedded in DeFi, already backing over $19 billion in loans. Electric capital believes that in the longer term, ETH could absorb a share of the $500 trillion global store-of-value market. It offers the resilience of Bitcoin, plus yield, a trait favored by US households, who now hold $32 trillion in dividend-paying equities but less than $1 trillion in gold.

ETH as a store of value

Fidelity’s latest report argues that blockchains like Ethereum are better understood as sovereign digital economies than Web2 platforms. Like an open economy, Ethereum enables anyone to consume or produce services, and ETH acts as base money, coordinating decentralized participants. 

Fidelity suggests using a GDP-like framework to gauge blockchain economic activity, where “consumption” refers to protocol fees, “government” captures spending by the Ethereum Foundation, “investment” includes ETH staking and changes in DEX liquidity, and “net exports” covers value flows across blockchains, to the physical world via DePIN, and to traditional economies through stablecoin issuance. 

To Fidelity analysts, ETH serves as both a medium of exchange and a store of value in this paradigm. As the Ethereum ecosystem expands, so does the demand for ETH. So far, the trend supports this thesis: according to Artemis, daily active wallets on Ethereum now exceed 2.5 million, and transaction counts have reached an all-time high of around 19 million.

Fidelity’s framework can be applied to most blockchains, offering TradFi a more straightforward way to assess smart contract platforms, just as they’ve come to understand Bitcoin. The choice to highlight Ethereum, likely due to its status as the most advanced blockchain economy, signals growing institutional recognition of its potential.

ETH as digital oil

A third perspective is outlined in the recent report by leading Ethereum stakeholders. The authors argue that ETH functions as a productive, yield-bearing commodity at the heart of the onchain economy. As the global financial system shifts toward a fully digital, decentralized infrastructure, Ethereum is emerging as the core settlement layer, security provider, and reserve asset. While Bitcoin embodies the “digital gold” narrative, Ethereum combines value storage with utility, powering computation and decentralized finance, while also offering native yield through staking.

Related: US SEC ‘Crypto Mom’ clarifies: ‘Tokenized securities are still securities’

The “digital oil” analogy reflects ETH’s multiple roles: it is burned as fuel for every transaction, used as collateral (with roughly a third of its supply securing stablecoins, tokenized assets, and DeFi protocols), and remains scarce by design, with issuance capped at around 1.51% annually.

The report also addresses Ethereum’s fees revenue, which has declined dramatically from the peak of $82 million during the 2021 rally to just $3 million today. According to its authors, this wasn’t a failure, but a strategic move to scale. Like Amazon or Tesla in their early growth phases, Ethereum prioritized long-term adoption over short-term revenue, pushing down transaction costs via layer-2 scaling. While this temporarily suppressed fee income, it expanded Ethereum’s total addressable market and will ultimately increase both ETH burn and staking rewards.

While the underlying logic of these three reports can be applied to other smart contract platforms, each one hints—or outright states—that Ethereum holds a clear advantage. This edge often comes down to its “industrial-grade” quality: Ethereum remains the most decentralized blockchain, with the most secure protocol and the most developed ecosystem in the space.

As Ethereum becomes increasingly attractive to TradFi, even its well-known scalability limitations, now mitigated by layer-2 solutions, appear to be less of a barrier to institutional adoption. Just as institutional interest has fueled Bitcoin’s rally this cycle, it is now poised to do the same for Ethereum.

This article does not contain investment advice or recommendations. Every investment and trading move involves risk, and readers should conduct their own research when making a decision.