The Year in Ethereum 2025: Institutions Embrace ETH as the 'Ivory Tower' Crumbles - Decrypt

In brief Institutions flocked to Ethereum in 2025, with major banks and tech firms choosing its layer-2 ecosystem for tokenization and on-chain services. Regulatory clarity unlocked Wall Street demand, making Ethereum the default network for traditional finance. The Ethereum Foundation also shed its “ivory tower” image, ramping up enterprise outreach and launching major AI collaborations. In an industry well-accustomed to flash and self-promotion, Ethereum has long seemed an outlier. The network’s builders have historically focused on technical accomplishments and an ideal of decentralization so pure, critics say , that they can sometimes lose sight of the bigger economic and political picture. But this year, amidst seismic regulatory developments for the crypto industry, Ethereum has stealthily made huge inroads in arenas it long was perceived to have neglected. From Wall Street board rooms to social media timelines, 2025 was the year Ethereum finally conquered centralized institutions. For nearly half a decade, Wall Street veteran Vivek Raman has attempted to onboard top traditional finance players onto Ethereum. “They all told me to politely leave their offices for four years,” Raman told Decrypt . The executive figured a paradigm shift might come this year, given crypto’s newfound political influence. But even he was blown away by what 2025 reaped for Ethereum at an institutional level. “This year was validation beyond what we would have expected,” Raman said. “The winds are at our back” In January, Raman co-founded Etherealize , an organization dedicated to making Ethereum “the backbone of global finance”. Over the course of this year, he said, centralized institutions have followed three significant trends when it comes to crypto. For one, they all are now “urgently” attempting to expand their businesses onto blockchain networks. Two: They have near-universally embraced Ethereum’s distinctive multi-layer network model as the way to do so. And three-perhaps most crucially-this embrace of Ethereum has come about organically, he claimed. “People have just chosen Ethereum, not because there's a [business development] team, but because it's the right place to do business,” Raman said. The success stories are almost too many to count. Base , the Coinbase-incubated layer-2 network built on Ethereum, has become one of the year's buzziest success stories in Wall Street circles . When financial services mainstay Fidelity began tokenizing assets this spring, it went with Ethereum to get the job done. So did the global banking cooperative SWIFT . And after Robinhood went all-in on offering tokenized stocks this summer, the trading giant opted to create its own layer-2 network on Ethereum. Beyond that, there’s the rest of globe: Upbit in South Korea, Ant Group in China, IHC in Abu Dhabi, Amundi in Europe, and Bailie Gifford in the UK. When those financial institutions-some of the most important in the world-dove headfirst into tokenization projects this year, they all chose Ethereum (generally via layer-2 networks) as the place to do business. Efficiency, automation, reduced counterparty risk, increased access to capital, transparency in some cases, privacy in others-there are many incentives drawing big institutions to crypto. But...

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