How Wall Street Is Using Ethereum Without Talking About Ethereum
Ethereum is increasingly powering tokenized money, faster settlement and regulated onchain infrastructure — even as institutions avoid naming it outright.
Wall Street’s adoption of Ethereum is closely tied to its ability to automate settlement through smart contracts, reducing reliance on slow, manual reconciliation processes.
Stablecoins and tokenized dollars now serve as a primary entry point for banks, allowing regulated US dollar transfers to move continuously on Ethereum-based rails.
Financial institutions often avoid naming Ethereum directly, instead describing it as neutral blockchain infrastructure that supports compliant financial systems.
Tokenized funds and real-world assets use Ethereum as a distribution and administration layer, while the underlying investments remain traditional financial products.
For years, the financial world viewed Ethereum primarily as a playground for digital art and digital assets. By 2025, however, a gradual shift had become clear. Wall Street had largely stopped treating the network as a “crypto” project and had begun using it as a foundational utility.
By late 2025, Ethereum was processing more than $5 trillion in quarterly transaction volume, a figure comparable in scale to traditional payment processors. Major institutions are now migrating value onto this digital rail, often without ever mentioning the word “cryptocurrency,” turning Ethereum into an increasingly used settlement layer in specific institutional contexts.
This article examines how the world’s leading financial institutions are quietly adopting Ethereum’s decentralized infrastructure.
To the average observer, Ethereum is a “coin” to be traded. To Wall Street, however, it has become something far more practical: high-tech financial plumbing. In August 2025, VanEck CEO Jan van Eck labeled Ethereum the “Wall Street token,” highlighting that the network’s underlying architecture, the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), is becoming a global standard for bank-to-bank settlement.
Unlike legacy systems that require manual reconciliation, Ethereum functions as a “single source of truth,” where transactions are verified by a global network of nodes rather than a central clearinghouse.
Source: CoinTelegraph
