Original author: Biteye core contributor @viee 7227

Ethereum has experienced ups and downs in the past ten years. Just when the market is hot again, the price of ETH seems to be only one step away from its historical high.

This article analyzes seven dimensions, including institutional increases in holdings and the ETF craze, foundation changes, K-line technical indicators, on-chain data, roadmap, RWA and the rise of stablecoins. Perhaps this round of Ethereum's rise has just begun.

1. ETH Reserve Concept Stocks

The recent ETH market has seen exceptionally strong buying, with many listed companies and asset management institutions actively increasing their holdings, some even incorporating ETH into their core financial strategies. Meanwhile, ETH reserve stocks have surged, becoming a new favorite on the US stock market.

The landmark event that sparked Wall Street's embrace of Ethereum was the high-profile bet on ETH by Thomas Lee, a renowned Wall Street strategist and co-founder of Fundstrat. He assumed the chairmanship of Bitmine in 2025, directly driving the transformation of the former Bitcoin mining company into an Ethereum asset management company. Under Lee's leadership, Bitmine quickly accumulated a market position of over 600,000 ETH, valued at over $3 billion, which served as a primary asset for its treasury reserves. His marketing campaign also ignited Wall Street's excitement, with several US-listed companies announcing their purchases of ETH as part of their asset allocations. For example, Bit Digital recently converted its BTC holdings into ETH, spending $172 million to acquire 100,000 ETH, bringing its total holdings to over 120,000. SharpLink Gaming currently holds approximately 438,000 ETH, valued at approximately $1.09 billion.

This series of actions shows that institutional investors are viewing Ethereum as a strategic reserve asset similar to Bitcoin. Ethereum's market recognition has increased significantly, further strengthening bullish expectations.

ETFs

As ETH prices soared, off-market funds poured into the Ethereum ETF.

According to SoSoValue data, Ethereum spot ETFs saw a total net inflow of $219 million on July 29th, Eastern Time, marking the 18th consecutive day of net inflows since July 3rd. The Blackrock ETF (ETHA) saw the largest single-day net inflow, with $224 million. ETHA's total net inflow has now reached $9.704 billion. On July 16th, nine US spot Ethereum ETFs attracted a combined net inflow of over $726 million, setting a new single-day record since their listing in July of last year.

In contrast, US Bitcoin ETFs cooled somewhat after experiencing a surge at the beginning of the year, with small net outflows occurring for several consecutive days in late July. This suggests a partial rebalancing of funds from the BTC sector to the ETH sector, reflecting increased institutional confidence in Ethereum's application prospects. Currently, the market capitalization of Bitcoin ETFs accounts for 6.49% of the total Bitcoin market capitalization, while that of Ethereum ETFs is only 4.71%. This suggests that there is still significant room for growth in the inflow of funds into Ethereum ETFs.

Source: SoSoValue

Looking ahead, in addition to spot ETFs, Ethereum staking yield ETFs are also on the horizon. On July 17th, BlackRock's iShares Ethereum Trust (ETHA) officially submitted a 19b-4 filing with the SEC, proposing to introduce staking functionality into its Ethereum ETF. Analysts predict that the US is expected to approve the first ETH staking ETFs in the second half of 2025. These products will offer an annualized staking yield of 3-5% on top of holding spot Ethereum, making them more attractive to institutions.

The most direct impact of the ETF effect on Ethereum is increased liquidity and demand. After institutions have invested in the BTC ETF, the ETH ETF becomes the only option. With ETFs, large funds worth tens of billions of dollars can easily allocate assets. This undoubtedly significantly enhances ETH's investment properties and market depth, becoming one of the key external factors supporting long-term bullish sentiment.

3. Ethereum Foundation

This round of Ethereum's strength is also closely related to changes in the management team.

The Ethereum Foundation underwent a management restructuring over the past year. In March 2025, Hsiao-Wei Wang and Tomasz Stańczak were appointed as Co-Executive Directors of the Foundation. This dual-director model will decentralize decision-making, reduce single-point dependency, and introduce more professional management alongside technical leaders like Vitalik to drive efficiency improvements. This will preserve the community-driven open source spirit while strengthening external communication and strategic execution, fostering positive interactions between Ethereum and institutions and regulators.

Furthermore, Danny Ryan, a former core researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, has joined the Etherealize project, founded by former banker Vivek Raman. The project aims to introduce ETH into the mainstream financial system on Wall Street through education and market promotion for traditional institutions. This marks the first time the Ethereum core team has actively integrated into the traditional financial ecosystem. This will shift ETH valuation logic towards institutionalization, significantly strengthening long-term price support.

4. K-line technical indicators

Ethereum has recently seen a strong upward trend. Over the past month, the price of ETH has surged by approximately 60% from approximately $2,400, reaching nearly $4,000 in late July. This increase far exceeds the broader market average, reflecting the market's optimistic outlook for Ethereum.

From the perspective of technical indicators, ETH/BTC ended its long period of sideways consolidation in the past three months and broke through the key range in mid-July, rising 40% in a single month, indicating that the capital preference previously dominated by Bitcoin began to shift to Ethereum, and the market's preference for risky assets rebounded.

Source: TradingView

Furthermore, ETH's RSI (Relative Strength Index) dipped back to around 30 on its weekly candlestick chart in April, historically considered a "buy low" zone. Data shows that whenever the RSI hits this range (30-40), ETH tends to experience significant rallies. For example, the last time this signal appeared, between 2023 and 2024, ETH saw a surge of over 290%.

Source: TradingView

Analyst @MikybullCrypto first hinted at this buy signal in April, calling it an "extremely rare buy point that cannot be ignored" and predicting that ETH would double in value. He recently reiterated this view, arguing that if the RSI continues to climb to high levels, ETH's price could reach the $7,000 to $10,000 range.

This means that from a technical point of view, Ethereum's current round of growth may not be over yet.

https://x.com/MikybullCrypto/status/1945580696140919266

5. On-chain indicators

Judging from the on-chain data, Ethereum's activity has increased significantly.

Transaction Activity: The average daily transaction count on the Ethereum mainnet has remained stable in recent months. In June 2025, the total monthly transaction count on Ethereum reached approximately 42 million (approximately 1.4 million per day), roughly the same as in previous months. It is worth noting that while on-chain gas fees are currently low, this is likely not due to a decrease in users, but rather to a decrease in unit transaction costs due to increased network processing capacity following the mainnet upgrade. According to Nansen data, over the past month, the number of active Ethereum addresses increased by 16.3% over the past 30 days, and the number of transactions increased by 14.2% over the past 30 days, reaching an average daily transaction count of 1.62 million on July 22, a six-month high. This high on-chain activity indicates that more users and applications are utilizing the Ethereum network.

Source: Nansen

On-chain Fees: With the recent recovery in coin prices and on-chain activity, Ethereum's fee revenue has also rebounded, surpassing other public chains again and returning to second place in on-chain fee revenue by the second quarter of 2025. According to Artemis data, Ethereum's network-wide fee revenue in June was approximately $39.1 million, second only to Tron, which to some extent reflects the return of demand for the Ethereum network.

Source: Artemis

DeFi Total Value Locked (TVL): The DefiLlama data below shows that Ethereum's TVL rose from $60.2 billion on June 28th to a three-year high of $85.9 billion on July 28th, representing a monthly increase of over 42%. Furthermore, the total TVL of DeFi across the entire network exceeded $153 billion in late July, a three-year high, with nearly 60% of this locked in Ethereum. However, it is worth noting that Ethereum's price increased by 59.9% during the same period, exceeding the TVL growth rate. Furthermore, when measured in ETH terms, the TVL growth rate declined by 1%, indicating that the recent record high in TVL was primarily driven by the ETH price. This means that any subsequent price correction in the asset class could also lead to a corresponding decline in the TVL metric.

Source: Deflama (above: ETH TVL)

Staking Status: It's worth noting that Ethereum's staking has reached new highs—currently over 36 million ETH is staked, representing nearly 30% of the total supply. This locked-up ETH effectively reduces circulating supply, alleviating selling pressure from both a supply and demand perspective. While over 500,000 ETH recently saw a queue for unstaking, the significant influx of new staking has offset the significant withdrawals, keeping the price strong. There's no need to panic.

Source: Cryptoquant

Source: validatorqueue

ETH Inflation: It's worth noting that the Ethereum network currently exhibits mild inflation, with actual inflation rates far lower than generally perceived. Statistics show that over the three years since the merger, Ethereum's average annual net inflation rate (+0.117%) is over 11 times lower than Bitcoin's inflation rate (+1.338%). The logic behind ETH is that the more it's used, the more it's destroyed, creating a positive cycle that boosts network activity. This means that the traditional narrative of "unlimited ETH inflation" is no longer valid. Over the past few years, ETH has experienced substantially low inflation, which may be a key factor supporting its upward trajectory.

Source: ultrasound.money, @LeonWaidmann

The increase in transaction numbers + the recovery in transaction fees + staking and lock-up + low inflation levels, multiple on-chain indicators jointly prove that Ethereum's fundamentals are positive, providing strong support for the continued strengthening of ETH prices.

6. RWA and the Stablecoin Narrative

By deeply analyzing the key indicators of the major on-chain networks that support RWA (see the table below), it can be seen that Ethereum dominates the RWA and stablecoin markets.

Source: RWA.xyz

RWAs on-chain: 2025 is being hailed by many industry insiders as the "Year of RWAs," with a significant number of real-world assets being tokenized through the Ethereum ecosystem. According to RWA.xyz, as of July 29, 2025, over 341 RWA assets were already hosted on Ethereum, encompassing government bonds, real estate equity, and private equity. Their market capitalization accounted for approximately 55.2% of the entire on-chain RWA market, reaching $7 billion, ranking first among all blockchains and approximately three times that of the second-place ZKsync. For example, BlackRock's tokenized fund, BUIDL, has surpassed $2.4 billion in assets, with over 90% of these assets still hosted on Ethereum. As the RWA tokenization market continues to expand, Ethereum is poised to capture the lion's share.

Source: RWA.xyz

Stablecoin Trends: Ethereum continues to solidify its position as an on-chain USD carrier in 2025. As of July 29, 2025, the total stablecoin supply running on Ethereum accounts for over 54% of the total market, firmly ranking first among all public chains. Of the approximately $250 billion in total supply, over $137.7 billion of this stablecoins (such as USDT and USDC) are circulating on the Ethereum network.

Source: RWA.xyz

It's important to emphasize that in the past, ETH was often viewed as a cryptoasset "surpassing Bitcoin." However, with the significant accumulation of stablecoins and RWAs, ETH now has a broader value proposition. On the one hand, ETH is indispensable as the "digital crude oil" for gas payments; each stablecoin transfer and RWA issuance requires a small amount of ETH to be burned. On the other hand, ETH's "productive asset" attributes are becoming increasingly prominent. Staking ETH yields a native yield, similar to the interest earned on US Treasury bonds, which aligns with traditional capital's preference for yielding reserve assets. During a period of interest rate cuts, ETH's staking yield could exceed Treasury yields, and with significant upside potential, ETH is extremely attractive. Thomas Lee has publicly stated that Ethereum has unlimited potential as a stablecoin and RWA platform, making it Wall Street's top choice for compliant blockchain investments. Lee believes that the Ethereum network is severely undervalued, with its "fair value" ranging from $10,000 to $15,000, with the potential for over tenfold appreciation in the coming years.

In summary, the rise of stablecoins and RWAs is redefining the investment value of ETH, and also giving Ethereum the opportunity to become a global digital dollar clearing network. This is also one of the important reasons why institutional investors have dared to allocate large amounts of ETH recently.

7. Ethereum Technology Roadmap

Ethereum has been continuously iterating and upgrading for a decade, and the progress of its technical roadmap is an important internal driving force for the bullish outlook on ETH.

The most recent major upgrade, Pectra, was successfully implemented on May 7, 2025. It integrates the Prague and Electra sub-proposals, encompassing changes to both the execution and consensus layers. It introduced account abstraction (EIP-7702), an increase in the validator staking limit (to 2048 ETH), data expansion (increased blob size), a more flexible exit mechanism, and BLS precompiles. These upgrades aim to improve scalability and user experience, paving the way for future sharding and Verkle trees. This represents a key step in Ethereum's medium- to long-term roadmap.

In the next phase, the Fusaka upgrade is expected to go online around the end of 2025. It will expand the number of single-block data blobs by 8 times and introduce PeerDAS technology to improve on-chain data availability.

Overall, the Ethereum development roadmap progressed as planned over the past quarter, including Proto-Danksharding, deepening account abstraction, data expansion, and validator mechanism reform, continuously enhancing Ethereum's performance. Looking ahead, Ethereum will focus on completing full Danksharding sharding, achieving statelessness, and improving various modularization aspects. These performance improvements will lay a solid foundation for ETH's long-term value.

Summarize

In summary, as Ethereum celebrates its tenth anniversary, we can see a convergence of internal fundamentals and external factors: positive core indicators, continuous technological upgrades, and optimized team governance have strengthened the Ethereum network. Meanwhile, the emerging narrative of stablecoins and RWAs, as well as the incremental capital generated by ETFs, have injected a steady stream of upward momentum into ETH. Consequently, a growing number of asset management institutions and analysts are optimistic about Ethereum's medium- and long-term prospects, believing it has the potential to reach new heights in the coming years.

Of course, challenges from other public chains and regulatory changes may still bring volatility. But what is certain is that at the beginning of the next decade, Ethereum is transforming into a "new financial infrastructure," and the excitement may just be beginning.

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