Ethereum’s rising function in institutional finance took heart stage on CNBC’s Energy Lunch this week, when Tom Lee, co-founder and head of analysis at Fundstrat International Advisors, mentioned Ether might climb to $7,000–$9,000 by early 2026 as Wall Road accelerates efforts to tokenize property and transfer monetary exercise onchain.
Lee mentioned Ether’s (ETH) funding case is more and more tied to its use as monetary infrastructure, as Wall Road experiments with onchain settlement and tokenized securities.
“Wall Road needs to tokenize every little thing,” Lee mentioned, pointing to initiatives at Robinhood and BlackRock. The shift, he mentioned, might convey efficiencies to conventional finance whereas anchoring real-world use circumstances on Ether. He added that Ether might finally attain $20,000 as adoption deepens.
He was additionally bullish on Bitcoin (BTC), calling it a “real retailer of worth” and saying a transfer to $200,000 subsequent 12 months “makes plenty of sense,” framing its latest underperformance versus gold as non permanent.
Lee can also be chairman of BitMine Immersion Applied sciences, the main Ether-focused treasury firm that has reported holdings of 4,066,062 ETH, in response to CoinGecko information.
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Ethereum blockchain dominates tokenized RWA
Tokenized real-world property, conventional monetary devices and bodily property represented onchain have expanded quickly this 12 months, with whole market worth rising to about $18.9 billion, up from roughly $5.6 billion in the beginning of 2025.
In accordance with information from RWA.xyz, US Treasury debt is the biggest tokenized asset class at round $8.5 billion, adopted by commodities at roughly $3.4 billion.
Ethereum presently accounts for almost all of tokenized RWA worth throughout public blockchains. As of late December 2025, the community hosts greater than $12 billion in tokenized property, properly forward of alternate options akin to BNB Chain, Solana and Arbitrum.
Ethereum additionally leads stablecoin issuance, with roughly $170 billion in stablecoins issued on the community, reinforcing its function as the first settlement layer for dollar-denominated exercise onchain.
Institutional curiosity in tokenized RWAs continued to construct in December, when the Depository Belief & Clearing Company (DTCC) mentioned it plans to tokenize a portion of US Treasury securities held at its Depository Belief Firm subsidiary on the Canton Community.
DTCC operates post-trade infrastructure for US securities markets, with its subsidiaries processing about $3.7 quadrillion in securities transactions final 12 months.
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