Over 35 major financial institutions are now actively building on the Ethereum blockchain, marking an unprecedented level of Wall Street adoption according to the Ethereum Foundation. The surge is driven by tokenized assets, with giants like JPMorgan, BlackRock, and Fidelity leading the charge.
Key developments include Kraken's launch of xStocks, issuing U.S. stocks and ETFs as ERC-20 tokens, and Ondo Finance's Ondo Global Markets offering over 100 tokenized stocks and ETFs. China AMC created a USD Money Market Fund on Ethereum with $449 billion in assets, while Fidelity introduced the FDIT tokenized money-market fund to accelerate blockchain settlement.
Significant banking integrations are underway. JPMorgan migrated its JPM Coin tokenized deposit product to Base, an Ethereum Layer 2. Santander's Openbank began offering ETH trading in Germany under MiCA regulations. A consortium including UBS, PostFinance, and the Swiss Bankers Association successfully tested Deposit Tokens on Ethereum for cross-bank settlement.
Payment and infrastructure expansion is notable. Google published the Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) on Ethereum, developed with Coinbase and MetaMask, for AI-agent payments. SWIFT, with over 30 banks, is developing a tokenized asset ledger using Consensys. Stripe added stablecoin-based subscriptions, and Société Générale FORGE deployed EURCV and USDCV lending on Morpho and Uniswap.
Institutional investment activity is intensifying. Hong Kong-based Trend Research increased its ETH holdings to 636,815 ETH (worth $1.98 billion), recently buying 9,939 ETH and borrowing $20 million in USDT to buy more. Publicly-listed company BitMine Immersion Technologies purchased an additional 35,268 ETH last week, bringing its total holdings to 4,203,036 ETH (worth $12.73 billion), representing 3.48% of Ethereum's total supply. BitMine also stakes 1.77 million ETH, generating approximately $374 million in annual staking fees.
U.S. spot Ethereum ETFs have accumulated $584.91 million in inflows in January alone, with a single-day high of $175 million on January 14. These funds now hold $20.43 billion in Ethereum. Despite this massive institutional buying, Ethereum's price experienced a recent dip, trading around $3,019 at the time of reporting.
