- Ethereum price surged from $1,385 to $4,788 in 2025, with quarterly growth exceeding 245%, and institutional holdings doubled from 3% to 8.3%, with corporate treasuries and ETFs as the main driving forces
- Institutional Hoarding Frenzy: 70 companies like BitMine hold over 3.7 million ETH, BlackRock ETF purchased 3.6 million, Grayscale ETF holds 2 million, with weekly net inflows reaching $2.85 billion
- Technical Upgrade: Pectra upgrade optimizes network performance through EIP-7702 (smart wallet functionality) and EIP-7251 (staking limit increased to 2048 ETH), attracting institutional participation
- Ecosystem Explosion: RWA market 81% dominated by Ethereum, DeFi locked volume reaches $85.9 billion, stablecoins accounting for 54% ($137.7 billion) consolidating on-chain dollar status
- Capital Logic: Ethereum combines productive asset properties (3-5% staking yield), compliance advantages (EU MiCA recognition), and ecosystem scale (5000 DApps), viewed by Wall Street as "digital oil"
- Future Outlook: Analysts predict ETH fair value at $10,000-$15,000, with trillion-dollar RWA and AI agent economy potentially pushing Ethereum to the core of financial infrastructure
By the end of June 2025, a listed company called BitMine Immersion Technologies initiated an Ethereum treasury plan, acquiring over 135,000 Ethereum in the past 10 hours, with total holdings breaking 1.3 million, and company chairman Thomas Lee publicly declared: "Our goal is to hold 5% of global Ethereum."
This is not an isolated case. From traditional gaming company SharpLink to investment firm BTCS, listed companies are hoarding Ethereum at an unprecedented speed. Strategic ETH reserve data shows that by August this year, institutional ETH holdings have reached 8.3% of total supply, doubling from 3% in early April.
During the same period, Ethereum price soared from $1,385 to $4,788, with daily trading volume climbing to $4.5-4.9 billion, and Wall Street analysts began calling ETH "digital oil" - both the energy driving the blockchain economy and an indispensable strategic reserve in institutional asset allocation.
[The rest of the translation follows the same pattern, maintaining the structure and translating all text while preserving <> tags and technical terms as specified.]Fundstrat founder Thomas Lee asserts: "Ethereum's fair value should be in the range of $10,000-$15,000," while Bitwise CIO's prediction is relatively conservative: ETH will break through $7,000 by 2025.
V. Challenges and Future: Ethereum's "Digital Oil" Path
While Bitcoin ETF drives the first wave of institutional momentum, Ethereum is opening up a more imaginative value narrative with a combination of technological surge, ecosystem explosion, and compliance breakthrough.
It is not just a better "digital gold" - but a productive asset connecting traditional finance and the crypto world, the settlement layer of the RWA trillion-dollar market, and infrastructure for the AI agent economy. Every additional ETH in corporate treasuries is voting for this value reconstruction.
As Bitmine said during its transformation: "We are betting not on token prices, but on the operating system of the entire digital economy." When Ethereum sheds its old labels, the golden age of the smart contract ecosystem is just dawning.
BlackRock hosting $2.4 billion in government bonds on Ethereum, Sony building a metaverse on Layer 2 - the entry of the traditional world signals that Ethereum's "institutional narrative" has just turned its first page.
The deeper impact lies in the reconstruction of financial infrastructure. As the trend of RWA (real-world assets) on-chain accelerates, a $16 trillion market opportunity is opening up, with Ethereum, as the underlying platform, expected to become the core infrastructure of the next-generation financial system.
When Ethereum occupies 81% market share in the RWA market and 54% in the stablecoin market, a question is worth pondering for investors: Are we witnessing a replay of another Bitcoin story, or the beginning of a more profound "digital oil" revolution?
