Ethereum’s growing role in institutional finance took center stage during CNBC’s Power Lunch this week when Tom Lee, co-founder and head of research at Fundstrat Global Advisors, said Ether could surge to $7,000-$9,000 by early 2026 as Wall Street accelerates efforts to tokenize assets and move financial activities onto-chain.
Leeward he said Investment in Ether (ETH) is increasingly tied to its operate as financial infrastructure as Wall Street experiments with onchain settlements and tokenized securities.
“Wall Street wants to tokenize everything,” Lee said, pointing to initiatives at Robinhood and BlackRock. This change, he said, could augment the efficiency of time-honored finance while anchoring real-world operate cases in the Ether network. He added that as adoption deepens, Ether could eventually reach $20,000.
He was also bullish on Bitcoin (BTC), calling it a “real store of value” and saying a move to $200,000 next year “makes a lot of sense,” calling its recent underperformance compared to gold fleeting.
Lee is also the CEO of BitMine Immersion Technologies, a leading ether-focused treasury company that has 4,066,062 ETH held according to CoinGecko data.
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The Ethereum blockchain dominates tokenized RWAs
Tokenized real-world assets, time-honored financial instruments, and physical assets represented on the network have developed rapidly yearand the total market value will augment to approximately $18.9 billion, up from approximately $5.6 billion at the beginning of 2025.
According to data RWA.xyz shows that US Treasury debt is the largest tokenized asset class at around $8.5 billion, followed by commodities at around $3.4 billion.
Ethereum currently accounts for the majority of tokenized RWA on public blockchains. As of the end of December 2025, there are over $12 billion in tokenized assets on the network, well ahead of alternatives such as BNB Chain, Solana, and Arbitrum.
Ethereum is also a leader in stablecoin issuance, with approximately $170 billion worth of stablecoins issued on the network, strengthening its role as the primary settlement level for dollar-denominated activity on the network.
Institutional interest in tokenized risk-weighted assets continued to grow in December when the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) said it planned to tokenize a portion of U.S. Treasury securities held at its Depository Trust Company subsidiary at Canton Network.
DTCC operates post-trade infrastructure for the U.S. securities markets, and its subsidiaries process approximately $3.70 quadrillion in securities transactions last year.
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