Wall Street Wants Ethereum, But Not for the Reasons You Think Over the past few weeks, it's become increasingly clear that Ethereum will become the base layer for the next generation of financial rails. If you're watching $ETH without watching what's being built around it, you're missing half the trade. 1. DeFi as Infrastructure The ETF headlines might have distracted most traders, but behind the scenes, the biggest players like BlackRock, JPMorgan, Fidelity are building. BlackRock's BUIDL fund is tokenized on Ethereum, not Solana, not any L2, but Ethereum mainnet. Franklin Templeton's BENJI product too. We're not in the "experimental phase" anymore, these are SEC-compliant, yield-bearing money market products actively settling onchain. And where are they settling? Not some private chain, but Ethereum. 2. Modular Fit for Institutions What's changed? Institutions don't want full exposure to DeFi volatility but they do want programmable money, transparent flows, and atomic settlement. Ethereum's evolving stack (think ERC-4626, restaking, L2 interoperability) allows them to interact without compromising. The separation between settlement and execution is key here: institutions can anchor assets on mainnet, then interact with L2s or app-chains for scale. 3. Price Lags the Build The price action might look unexciting right now, but under the surface, ETH's role in the global financial system is expanding fast. When you zoom out, ETH is being monetized not as a "tech trade", but as a coordination layer. The flows into Ethereum-native ETFs and tokenized funds are structurally sticky. When capital allocation gets this sticky, price usually follows. Just not instantly. 4. What to Watch If you're trading this, start thinking in infrastructure terms. $ETH is a bet on modular financial rails. Look at: - Flows from Circle's USDC minting - Wallet distribution from ETF inflows - Real-world asset deployments like Ondo and Backed. Add those charts to your ETH view! When the dust settles on ETF narratives, will ETH be valued for what it hosts or for what it enables at scale?