Wall Street Loves Ethereum, So Why Doesn’t the Market Love ETH?

The biggest names in finance are building on Ethereum, but ETH itself is bleeding value against bitcoin. Here’s where the money is really going.

Ethereum is winning the institutional platform war, and it isn’t even close.

Asset manager Janus Henderson, all $480 billion of it, made a strategic investment in ENA and partnered with DeFi synthetic dollar protocol Ethena around tokenized CLO collateral and potential USDe distribution. Around the same time, DeFi lending and vault protocol Morpho raised a record $175 million at a $2 billion valuation; the largest DeFi raise in history, according to Morpho cofounder Merlin Égalité.

In fact if you zoom out, the gang’s all here: BlackRock’s tokenized Treasury fund, BUIDL, holds more than $2 billion onchain. JPMorgan put its first tokenized money-market fund on Ethereum. 

Franklin Templeton, VanEck, and Apollo are building or tokenizing across Ethereum and adjacent onchain rails, while Citi is pushing tokenized private markets through separate blockchain infrastructure.

Some of the architects of Wall Street’s crypto on-ramps have gone all in. Joseph Chalom spent two decades running digital-assets strategy at BlackRock, where he helped launch its Ethereum ETF, before leaving to run SharpLink, an Ethereum treasury company that now holds more than 875,000 ETH. “In capital markets, Ethereum is leading this transformation as the settlement layer for financial transactions, […] it is by far the most rigorously tested financial infrastructure to date,” he said at a conference on Thursday.

The institutional bid for Ethereum is real. The problem is, the bid for ETH isn’t.

In this issue, subscribers get:

• Why the institutional bull case for Ethereum is red hot
• Why ETH’s big value-capture problem finds the asset stalled
• The tokens to which the money is actually accruing
• The bull, base and bear cases, plus what to watch

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