The story of Bitcoin is happening on Ethereum.

Author: Mask

After Michael Saylor's Bitcoin reserve strategy was emulated by over 50 companies, Wall Street has turned its attention to more productive assets, this time with Ethereum taking center stage.

"We are currently experiencing an arms race in the Ethereum treasury," said Yang Mindao, founder of dForce, in a recent comment describing the current market situation. "The old OG war machine represented by Sharplink and the Wall Street war machine represented by Bitmine, and many more are on the way."

The story of Bitcoin is being replayed on Ethereum.

Wall Street capital is quietly reaching for Ethereum. As traditional financial giants like BlackRock and Fidelity enter the market through spot ETFs, a reserve competition led by publicly listed companies for ETH has quietly begun. In just two months, more than 50 institutions have hoarded over 1.6 million ETH, worth over $5 billion.

This group of new capital elites is no longer satisfied with passive holding but is deeply involved in staking, DeFi yield farming, and other core aspects of the crypto economy. The core driving force for enterprise capital flowing into Ethereum lies in its unique productive characteristics. Unlike Bitcoin, which is positioned as a passive, gold-like value storage, Ethereum offers the ability to generate active yields through staking and DeFi strategies. This is different from the "digital gold" logic of Bitcoin reserves. The allocation of ETH by publicly listed companies highlights three levels of advanced value:

1. Staking Creates Cash Flow: The cases of SharpLink and BitDigital demonstrate that ETH staking can provide an annualized yield of 3%-5%, converting idle reserves into productive assets. This addresses the pain point of Bitcoin reserves not being able to generate cash flow.

Currently, over 32 million ETH are staked, with an annualized yield between 3% and 5%. According to the Ethereum technical roadmap, the optimization of the validator economy will increase the annualized yield for staking to 6-8%, while the staking threshold will gradually decrease from 32 ETH to 16 ETH, or even 1 ETH.

This will drive the ETH staking rate from the current 25% to over 40%, locking up approximately 48 million ETH and further reducing the circulating supply.

2. DeFi Yield Engine: GameSquare's target yield of 8%-14% reveals a more aggressive capital utilization path. Through strategies like liquidity provision and re-staking, enterprises can participate in the value distribution of the Ethereum ecosystem, forming a growth flywheel of "stablecoin trading growth → Gas fee increase → ETH demand rise → staking volume increase → network security enhancement." The technological evolution of Ethereum strengthens its fundamental support. The five major technological directions in the next two years include: zkEVM integration will reduce zero-knowledge proof verification costs by 80%; the new RISC-V architecture will lower Gas costs by 50-70%; L1-L2 collaboration will reduce cross-layer transaction costs by 90%; and the return of sharding technology.

<span leaf="" para",{"tagname":"p","attributes":{},"namespaceuri":""}]'="">These upgrades will significantly enhance network performance, giving rise to new application scenarios such as high-frequency trading and AI inference. "Institutions choose Ethereum because it is stable, secure, and does not go down." — Vitalik Buterin emphasized in a recent statement!

4. Market Impact and Future Outlook, Synergistic Co-evolution of Capital and Technology

The impact of corporate ETH reserves on the market has begun to show, with the ETH/BTC exchange rate rising over 50% in the past four months. Analysts predict it may continue to rise by 30%, reaching a level of 0.035 BTC. The Ethereum ETF has seen inflows for 12 consecutive weeks, totaling $990 million, which equates to 19.5% of its assets under management, significantly higher than the 9.8% of the Bitcoin ETF.

As the holdings of ETH by publicly listed companies surge, the influence of traditional capital on the Ethereum ecosystem is quietly being restructured:

1. Position size reshuffle: Institutions holding over 1.6 million ETH account for 35% of the total size of the spot ETF, with newcomers like SharpLink and BitMine surpassing the Ethereum Foundation (242,500 ETH) and traditional whales like Golem.

2. Governance Power Game Concerns: Currently, most participants are financially driven institutions aiming to "hedge against inflation, boost stock prices, or seek short-term gains." If they continue to expand their holdings, the governance voice of the developer community and early OG investors may be diluted.

3. Absence of a Key Figure: Bitcoin has Michael Saylor as its spiritual leader, while Ethereum has yet to find a preacher who possesses both the power of faith and capital influence. Whether figures like Tom Lee from Wall Street can fill this gap remains uncertain.

dForce founder Yang Minda predicted that the Ethereum holdings of listed companies could reach 10% of the total circulation (close to the 30% staking ratio), which will become the "biggest change in Ethereum's capital and governance structure."

This structural transformation deeply binds corporate interests with the health of the Ethereum network, forming a symbiotic relationship.

However, challenges still exist. High premiums may amplify the downside risk during ETH price corrections; DeFi strategies, while offering higher returns, also come with additional risks; regulatory uncertainty remains a sword of Damocles hanging over all crypto assets.

Standard Chartered Bank predicts that the price of ETH may reach $14,000 by the end of 2025, while independent analyst Sassano is even more optimistic, forecasting it could rise to $15,000. Driven by price expectations, more listed companies may join the ranks of ETH reserves. The three-tiered yield system of basic staking (3%-5%) → DeFi portfolio strategies (8%-14%) → re-staking derivative yields is gradually maturing, allowing enterprises to customize reserve plans based on their risk preferences.

When traditional enterprise treasuries form a positive capital cycle with blockchain protocols, this may be the most solid value anchor of the crypto economy. The stock price myth of SharpLink and the capital surge of BitMine reveal that Ethereum is transforming from a developer paradise into an enterprise-level financial infrastructure.

The entry of institutional capital is not the end point, but the starting point for the deep integration of the Ethereum value network with the real economy. When ETH in the treasury of listed companies continues to "generate blood" through staking and DeFi, and when corporate earnings are deeply tied to network security — this reserve race that starts with financial returns will ultimately reshape the symbiotic logic between capital and technology.

The ultimate proposition of blockchain may be to allow value to flow as unstoppable as code, and when corporate treasuries form a positive capital cycle with blockchain protocols, this may be the most solid value anchor of the crypto economy.