Key conclusions

• Wall Street’s adoption of Ethereum is closely tied to its ability to automate settlements through sharp contracts, reducing reliance on tardy, manual reconciliation processes.

• Stablecoins and tokenized dollars currently serve as a primary entry point for banks, enabling regulated US dollar transfers on an ongoing basis on Ethereum-based rails.

• Financial institutions often avoid naming Ethereum directly, instead describing it as a neutral blockchain infrastructure that supports compatible financial systems.

• Tokenized real-world funds and assets apply Ethereum as their distribution and administration layer, while the underlying investments remain customary financial products.

For years, the financial world viewed Ethereum primarily as a playground for digital art and digital assets. However, by 2025, a gradual change had become clear. Wall Street has largely stopped treating the network as a “crypto” project and started using it as a primary tool.

At the end of 2025, Ethereum was processing over 5 trillion dollars in terms of quarterly transaction volume, which is comparable in scale to customary payment processors. Huge institutions are now migrating value onto this digital rail, often without even mentioning the word “cryptocurrency,” turning Ethereum into an increasingly used settlement layer in specific institutional contexts.

This article examines how the world’s leading financial institutions are quietly adopting Ethereum’s decentralized infrastructure.

Ethereum as financial plumbing, not crypto asset

To the average observer, Ethereum is a “coin” that must be traded. But for Wall Street, it has become something much more practical: high-tech financial plumbing. In August 2025, VanEck CEO Jan van Eck called Ethereum “the token of Wall Street,” highlighting that the network’s underlying architecture, the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), is becoming the global standard for inter-bank settlements.

Unlike legacy systems that require manual reconciliation, Ethereum functions as a “single source of truth” where transactions are verified by a global network of nodes rather than a central clearing house.

Instead of relying on routes that can take days to settle transactions, institutions apply Ethereum sharp contracts to automate much of the manual work performed by mid-level operations.

This change enables T+0 settlement, which means the transaction settles immediately. Previously, the transaction was settled on a T+2 basis as banks exchanged messages to verify funds and positions. On Ethereum, asset transfer and payment take place at the same time.

In this context, Ethereum functions as the underlying infrastructure that allows the customary financial system to operate faster, at lower costs, and with fewer errors. Because Ethereum is evaluative agnosticserves as a neutral platform where financial contracts can be codified and executed without human intervention.

Stablecoins and tokenization as an entry point

Wall Street’s adoption of Ethereum infrastructure is also evident in the rapid growth of “tokenized dollars.” Following the passage of the GENIUS Act in July 2025, a landmark piece of US legislation that established a clear framework for stablecoins, the total market capitalization of these assets increased to $300 billion. For banks, Ethereum stablecoins represent digital versions of the US dollar that can move around the clock, avoiding the settlement risks associated with customary bank opening hours and weekend closures.

Classic payments giants such as Visa and Mastercard have integrated stablecoin settlement APIs to support global payments on the network. These companies do not interact with the speculative side of cryptocurrencies. Instead, they apply Ethereum-based stablecoins to settle transactions between merchants and banks in near real time.

As banks adapt to customer demand for faster cross-border transfers, the Ethereum network provides the secure infrastructure needed to transfer regulated digital dollars.

Did you know? The GENIUS Act, signed on July 18, 2025, became the first federal regulation formally authorize US banks will issue stablecoins through subsidiaries. This change moved Ethereum from a regulatory gray area to a compliant infrastructure layer for the US dollar.

Tokenized funds and assets in the real world

Ethereum’s evolution has moved beyond payments towards the tokenization of more convoluted investment instruments. In December 2025, JPMorgan made headlines by launching its first money market fund on the public Ethereum blockchain. The fund, listed under the MONY stock exchange, allows qualified investors to access the yields of customary U.S. Treasury securities by using Ethereum as its distribution layer.

By listing a fund like MONY on the Ethereum blockchain, JPMorgan has enabled peer-to-peer transfers and daily dividend reinvestment that were previously hard to achieve. Investors can subscribe or redeem shares for cash or stablecoins through institutional platforms. In this structure, Ethereum is not the investment itself. It acts as a digital packaging that increases operational smoothness and efficiency.

This development marks a turning point where Ethereum sharp contracts handle most of the operational burden of fund administration, significantly reducing overhead costs. By automating the distribution of profits through code, Ethereum enables these funds to operate with a level of precision and transparency that older databases cannot easily replicate.

Strategic Silence: Why Wall Street Isn’t Naming Ethereum

If you analyze the marketing materials of leading banks, you will see terms like “onchain liquidity”, “distributed ledgers” or “programmable payments”, but the underlying technology is almost always Ethereum. This “invisible” adoption helps explain why Wall Street institutions often choose Ethereum.

A key technical factor is the network effect. Just as the Internet is built around standard protocols, the financial system is built around Ethereum programming standards. In slow 2025, numerous reports suggested that tokenized dollars on the network were quietly changing the way money flows between major clearinghouses.

As more assets, such as treasury bonds and real estate, are tokenized on Ethereum, the network’s utility becomes increasingly evident in institutional apply cases. Since its launch in 2024, BlackRock’s BUIDL fund has become the world’s largest tokenized money market fund, with over $1 billion directly on the Ethereum blockchain to enable near real-time dividend distribution.

Similarly, in slow 2025, JPMorgan renamed its blockchain division to Kinexys, enabling an average daily trading volume of over $2 billion to be executed via Ethereum-compatible rails.

By relying on Ethereum’s “plausible neutrality,” these companies avoid the limitations of proprietary private blockchains that lack global interoperability. Instead, they treat Ethereum as a neutral and largely imperceptible settlement layer. As a result, the network has come to function as a unified operating system for global capital, regardless of whether the brand is clearly recognizable in boardrooms.