Institutions are getting ready.
It’s been a long and anxious wait for Ethereum enthusiasts looking to break even or boost their profits, nearly four years since the it set a new price record.
Even though the market has continued to mature and Ethereum has successfully rolled out major upgrades such as The Merge, the London Hard Fork (particularly Ethereum Improvement Proposal/EIP-1559), Proto-Danksharding (EIP-4844) and Phase 1 of the Pectra Upgrade, its performance has been mostly disappointing.
As I covered in my last article, a major reason why Bitcoin hasn’t moved is due to the over-the-counter (OTC) buying by institutional investors.
While OTC also relates to Ethereum, it’s far less influential.
Unlike Bitcoin, Ethereum has experienced significant competition since the last bull cycle.
Despite the rise of Solana and Layer 2s, especially Base, Ethereum remains the dominant platform for smart contracts.
Its total value locked (TVL) in the protocol has held above $100 billion for most of the time since returning above this milestone last November.
However, it is still down from its TVL peak of ~$179 billion in November 2021. Considering the overall cryptocurrency market is more than $500 billion above its 2021 all-time high (most of this is due to Bitcoin), it has still been disappointing for the second-largest crypto asset by market cap.
Aside from TVL, there are promising signs from a daily usage perspective.
On June 25, Ethereum set a new record of 24.45 million transactions on a single day.
Based on data from L2 Beat, the figure above likely refers to the combined number of transactions on the base chain and L2s.
Nonetheless, focusing on its base chain, Ethereum processed over 42 million user operations over the past 30 days, equating to 16.86 user operations per second (UOPS*).
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Before continuing, a quick sidenote about this metric.
UOPS is a more accurate way of determining throughput on a blockchain than using the outdated metric of transactions per second (TPS).
As a simple analogy, imagine a package that contains 10 letters inside—TPS sees one package, but UOPS sees 10 letters.
UOPS will become increasingly relevant now that we have smart contract wallets on Ethereum (i.e., account abstraction/ERC-4337) and the growing popularity of batching activities off-chain (such as sending or swapping tokens, DAO voting, and minting an NFT) into one transaction on-chain.
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Ethereum will continue to play an important role in hosting stablecoins, with 70% of these operating on this blockchain.
Furthermore, Ethereum accounts for approximately 45% of Tether USD in circulation, which amounts to roughly $74 billion of USDT. Tron leads the pack at around $80 billion (mostly for Asian markets), followed by Solana at around $2 billion.
Don’t forget that there are USDC and other emerging stablecoins, which are still predominantly built on Ethereum.
Taking a leaf from Strategy’s playbook
Since Michael Saylor, executive chairman and co-founder of (Micro)Strategy, decided to go all in on BTC, other companies have been boosting their holdings, especially Metaplanet.
Now we’re seeing enterprises beginning to do the same with ETH, and not just the spot ETH providers.
GameSquare Holdings (NASDAQ: GAME) and SharpLink Gaming (NASDAQ: SBET) have been (or will be) snapping up thousands of Ether. The latter currently holds 205,634 ETH in its treasury, valued at ~$568 million.
Expect this to become a talking point once ETH and other altcoins regain and sustain momentum, and articles start circulating about the profits these companies have made since their initial acquisition, similar to El Salvador’s earnings from its BTC holdings and mining activity.
What stands out with ETH is the ability for these firms to further boost their holdings courtesy of native staking options, unlike Bitcoin, which would depend on Wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC) or a service such as Core.
Nonetheless, well done to all these companies for diversifying their portfolios, offering options to shareholders seeking further exposure to BTC or ETH, in addition to holding these assets directly.
Additional thoughts
Unless there’s a catastrophic failure in its network and its core developers leave the project, or another blockchain manages to take away most of Ethereum’s market share in the coming years, then I doubt it will become irrelevant, dare I say, vanish into the ether.
This raises the question, “Is Ethereum still worth investing in?”
Yes and no.
While it will likely do well compared to USD and many conventional asset classes, I believe BTC will continue to prove a better investment than ETH.
Most of us are here to make money, and savvy investors are mindful of opportunity costs by not investing in other cryptocurrencies or even BTC.
This isn’t about coming across as a Bitcoin maximalist. Instead, I am basing this on what the charts are saying, particularly this one.
ETH/BTC (orange) and ETH/USD (light blue) historical price chart. Snapshot taken on June 8, 2025. Source: CoinGecko.
While ETH appears to have bottomed out versus BTC in this cycle, it’s still around January 2021 levels; it is currently worth 6 to 6.5 times less (0.02352 BTC) than its all-time high of 1 ETH (Ξ) = 0.15 BTC (₿).
Yes, there will be periods where Bitcoin’s dominance drops and Ethereum picks up again.
Still, the latter will have an uphill battle not only to claw back some market share from Bitcoin but also to compete with other smart contract platforms and regain lost revenue from L2 activity that was once on Ethereum.
At the time of writing, Bitcoin is sitting around $111,000 and is within 1% of its $112,000 ATH set two months ago, whereas Ethereum is still 40% below its peak.
Mind you, Tom Lee, Founder and CIO of Fundstrat, as well as a prominent crypto commentator, is also very bullish on Bitcoin and believes ETH could reach $10,000.
“I think Ethereum is attractive, in my opinion, because it is the layer 1 blockchain where real-world assets are becoming tokenized.”
Tom Lee, interview with Zack Guzman at the Coinage podcast, July 2, 2025.
He was recently appointed CEO of Bitmine Immersion Technologies (NYSE: BMNR), a company specialising in high-performance, efficient Bitcoin mining. This business has recently raised $250 million through a private placement, helping further its ETH treasury strategy.
Do you believe ETH still has a fairly bright future ahead, or will you convert some of it to BTC or another crypto? Comment below.
P.S. There are blockchain data and intelligence platforms with detailed Ethereum metrics, including the percentage of Ethereum wallets in profit. Glassnode is a popular one that comes to mind. More info here.
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You might also be interested in these stories:
https://cryptowithlorenzo.medium.com/this-is-why-bitcoins-price-is-barely-moving-1d321043f26d
https://medium.com/@cryptowithlorenzo/its-ethereum-s-moment-of-truth-0b0bf6a83737
https://medium.com/@cryptowithlorenzo/its-not-too-late-to-own-at-least-half-a-bitcoin-eba7ac43a21c
Disclaimers
- This blog post is for informational purposes only. It is not financial, legal, or investment advice. You are ultimately responsible for your decisions.
- My opinions in this piece may not reflect those of any news outlet, person, organisation, or entity listed here.
- Please do sufficient research before investing in any cryptocurrency assets, staking, NFTs, or other products associated with this space.
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