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

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 old school, risk-averse firms tend to move in a pack, and those in finance appear to have collectively chosen Ethereum as the default place to build on-chain this year, following similar moves made in 2024 by market leaders like BlackRock.

After years of standing on the sidelines, these firms now feel emboldened to commit to Ethereum chiefly because the crypto industry has been legitimized by the U.S. government, Danny Ryan, an Etherealize co-founder and former Ethereum core developer, told Decrypt.

In July, President Donald Trump signed the GENIUS Act into law, establishing a legal framework for issuing and trading stablecoins in the United States.

The law had little to do with integrating complex crypto maneuvers into the traditional financial system (a separate, pending crypto market structure bill covers such issues). But the GENIUS Act blessed the general concept of crypto as permissible, or perhaps more accurately, not impermissible, Ryan said.

And ever since, the crypto-cautious dam on Wall Street has burst, with or without market structure legislation.

“It didn't say, ‘Hey, all the capital markets you know and love are legal to put on a blockchain,’" Ryan said of the GENIUS Act. “It just said, ‘Hey, you can do things legally on blockchains. It's legitimate.’”

“After GENIUS, it's almost like the winds are at our back,” Raman said.

Death of the ivory tower

It’s not just external actors who have come to see Ethereum differently in 2025. Internally, leaders of the Ethereum Foundation have also made huge shifts this year, in an effort to revamp the network’s global image.

“There were a lot of unhappy people internally and externally,” James Smith, the Ethereum Foundation’s head of ecosystem, told Decrypt of the nonprofit’s previous woes.

For years, even Ethereum’s advocates complained that the network’s foundation had become mired in an isolated, holier-than-thou “ivory tower” approach—one that turned off key centralized institutions and small-scale crypto founders alike.

Smith’s job this year has been to completely reinvent how the Ethereum Foundation engages with the rest of the world.

“We’ve become much more intentional about how we engage with institutions in 2025,” he said. “We now have teams whose job is to help serious builders and enterprises plug into Ethereum.”

Take, for instance, a new initiative at the Foundation to host one-day conferences focused on appealing to big business. One upcoming event will explain staking to corporate firms in Zurich. Another, in New York, will showcase the benefits of Ethereum’s privacy features to enterprise players.

While such outreach might sound like a no-brainer, Smith says these efforts represent a “180 [degree] sea change” in the Ethereum Foundation’s approach.

“This is a really big moment for Ethereum,” he said, “which is why this is really needed.”

One growing sector that has become increasingly central to Ethereum this year—and thus to the Ethereum Foundation—has been artificial intelligence.

As the AI agent economy takes off, Ethereum's developers are betting that bots will eventually become the network’s core user base. This fall, the Foundation launched a full-time team dedicated to AI—which is rolling out collaborations with tech giants including Google.

Such alliances might seem counterintuitive for a network that has long pitched itself as a democratic alternative to the hyper-centralized power structures of Silicon Valley and Wall Street.

But Davide Crapis, the head of Ethereum’s AI team, doesn’t see the network’s growing popularity among tech and financial elites as a problem. On the contrary, he sees it as an inevitable outcome of the network’s rise to dominance.

“The focus needs to be on building the best decentralized technology we can offer,” Crapis said. “When they see the value, they will come.”