Ethereum’s Wall Street Moment: An in-depth analysis of the migration of global financial infrastructure to public ledgers

Vitalik 2026-1-30 11:36 66264人围观 ETH

1. Introduction: Paradigm shift from experiment to cornerstone At the beginning of 2026, the global financial system is experiencing a silent but violent crustal movement. This revolution is no longer about speculative fluctuations in cryptocurrency pric

1. Introduction: Paradigm Shift from Experiment to Cornerstone

At the beginning of 2026, the global financial system is experiencing a silent but violent crustal movement. This revolution is no longer about speculative fluctuations in cryptocurrency prices, but about the complete restructuring of the underlying financial “pipelines.” Once viewed as the high-risk, unregulated “Wild West,” Ethereum has now firmly established itself as Wall Street’s settlement layer of choice.

According to confirmation from the Ethereum Foundation and multiple market analysts, 35 of the world's top financial institutions, including BlackRock, JPMorgan and Fidelity, have substantially deployed products and services on Ethereum and its Layer 2 network. This shift marks the financial industry’s leap from siled private databases to a unified, programmable public ledger. This "institutionalization" not only verifies the maturity of blockchain technology, but also indicates that capital efficiency, liquidity management and asset ownership structures will undergo fundamental changes in the next decade.
2. Capital territory and performance of market giants

Before delving into technical and macro analysis, it is necessary to examine the market position of the core listed companies leading this change. The stock price performance of these institutions has shown an increasingly close positive correlation with their strategic layout in the field of digital assets.

BlackRock (NYSE: BLK): As the world’s largest asset manager, BlackRock is leading the RWA (real world assets) wave with its tokenized fund BUIDL. As of the beginning of 2026, due to its successful layout in digital asset ETFs and on-chain funds, the market has actively revalued its technological transformation, and its stock price has maintained a strong trend, reflecting the dividends from the integration of traditional finance and digital finance.

JPMorgan Chase (NYSE: JPM): The bank has become a leader in blockchain payments through its Kinexys (formerly Onyx) unit and its JPM Coin project. Its share price has performed solidly, thanks to its use of blockchain technology to significantly reduce operating costs and improve capital efficiency in cross-border payments and repo markets.

Fidelity National Information Services (NYSE: FIS) / Fidelity Investments: Not only is Fidelity a major issuer of Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs, its launch of the Tokenized Money Market Fund (FDIT) also demonstrates its ambitions in the field of on-chain settlement, solidifying its position as a technology-forward financial giant.

Franklin Templeton (NYSE: BEN): As one of the first traditional asset management giants to bring mutual funds (FOBXX/BENJI) to the public chain, its multi-chain layout on Stellar, Polygon and Ethereum Layer 2 has made it a key hub connecting traditional accounts and on-chain liquidity. Its recent performance reflects the market’s recognition of its digital transformation.
3. Strategic turning point: Why is Ethereum the first choice of Wall Street?

In the past decade, financial institutions have made a lot of attempts on private chains (such as Hyperledger Fabric, R3 Corda), but ultimately faced the "island effect" of liquidity fragmentation and poor interoperability. The consensus has now been fundamentally reversed: public ledgers provide network effects and deep liquidity that private networks cannot match.

The reason why Ethereum wins is mainly due to its positioning as "the world's most secure smart contract platform" and the maturity of its Layer 2 network ecosystem. Layer 2 solutions (such as Coinbase's Base, Arbitrum, Optimism) solve the high handling fees and throughput bottlenecks of the main network, while inheriting the security of the Ethereum main network. For example, JPMorgan Chase moved its JPM Coin deposit token from a private chain to the Base network precisely to take advantage of the public network’s interoperability and round-the-clock settlement capabilities.
4. The on-chain journey of 35 institutions: product and ecological analysis

The layout of these 35 institutions is not superficial, but goes deep into the reconstruction of core business logic. We group these initiatives into three core categories:
4.1 Asset Management and Tokenized Funds (Tokenized Funds)

This is currently the most successful institutional application scenario, aiming to migrate trillions of dollars of traditional assets to the chain.

BlackRock’s BUIDL Fund: Hailed as the “gold standard” for institutional tokenization. The fund is issued on Ethereum and achieves the perfect combination of compliance and technology through the "iron triangle" cooperation model established with Securitize and Bank of New York Mellon (BNY Mellon). As of early 2026, BUIDL's asset management scale (AUM) has exceeded US$2.8 billion, becoming the world's largest tokenized government bond fund. Its innovation lies in its integration with Circle's smart contract, which allows investors to redeem fund shares instantly 24/7 through USDC, solving the pain points of the traditional financial T+1/T+2 settlement cycle.

Franklin Templeton's BENJI: This fund (FOBXX) utilizes blockchain as the only accounting system (Transfer Agent), allowing investors to hold and trade U.S. government money market fund shares directly on the chain. It has been extended to multiple networks such as Ethereum, Arbitrum, Polygon, etc., demonstrating the potential of multi-chain interoperability.
4.2 Bank settlement and deposit tokens (Deposit Tokens)

Banks are using blockchain to transform the “pipelines” of the financial system.

JPMorgan Chase’s Kinexys and JPM Coin: The bank not only launched MONY, a tokenized money market fund, but also upgraded JPM Coin into a programmable payment instrument based on the Base network. Its Tokenized Collateral Network (TCN) allows clients such as BlackRock and Fidelity to pledge tokenized money market fund shares as collateral in minutes, greatly improving the efficiency of intraday liquidity management.

Citi and Standard Chartered: These banks are testing and deploying regulated “deposit tokens,” a digital asset that represents claims on commercial bank deposits that, unlike stablecoins, operate entirely within the banking regulatory system but with the instant settlement properties of blockchain.
4.3 Payment and Stablecoin Infrastructure

Visa and Stripe: Visa has directly processed the settlement of USDC stable currency on the Ethereum main network for acquiring business. Stripe has restored crypto payments functionality, allowing merchants to accept USDC, signaling that Ethereum’s utility as a payment settlement layer has been fully embraced by the payments giant.

Société Générale (SG-FORGE): Issued EURCV, a Euro stablecoin that complies with MiCA regulations, and successfully deployed it on Ethereum and Solana for settlement of tokenized bonds, opening up the on-chain closed loop between legal currency and digital assets.
5. Technology evolution: building compliant on-chain finance

Large-scale institutional adoption is inseparable from the evolution of underlying technology standards that address compliance, privacy, and scalability challenges.
5.1 ERC-3643: The cornerstone of compliant tokens

In order to meet the strict requirements of KYC (Know Your Customer) and AML (Anti-Money Laundering), the Ethereum community adopted the ERC-3643 standard. Unlike the permissionless ERC-20 standard, ERC-3643 introduces a “permission-based token architecture”:

Identity authentication (ONCHAINID): Each holder must have a verified digital identity bound to its on-chain address.

Automated compliance checks: Smart contracts automatically verify before each transfer that the recipient is on a whitelist, complies with jurisdictional regulations, and meets accredited investor thresholds. This "embedded compliance" enables assets to automatically execute regulatory rules while maintaining on-chain liquidity, greatly reducing compliance costs.
5.2 Modularization and Layer 2 extension

Ethereum’s Dencun upgrade (which introduced the EIP-4844 Blob data structure) and subsequent Pectra upgrade reduced Layer 2 data availability costs by more than 90% and increased throughput to thousands of TPS (transactions per second). This makes high-frequency, low-value institutional trading economically viable, paving the way for mass adoption by the likes of JPMorgan Chase and Visa.
6. Regulatory framework: from hindrance to catalyst

2025-2026 is a watershed in global regulatory clarity, with legal certainty removing the last obstacle for institutions to enter the market.

The European MiCA Act (Markets in Crypto-Assets): provides the world's most comprehensive regulatory framework for crypto assets, especially strict reserve and audit requirements for stablecoin issuers (such as SG-FORGE's EURCV), making Europe a safe haven for institutional crypto businesses.

US GENIUS Act and Clarity Act: The regulatory environment in the United States has changed significantly. The GENIUS Act establishes a federal framework for payment stablecoins, allowing regulated banks and non-bank institutions to issue stablecoins. This allows national banks like SoFi to confidently issue SoFiUSD on the public chain. At the same time, the FASB’s accounting standards change, which allows crypto assets to be measured at fair value, also removes balance sheet barriers for companies to hold digital assets.
7. Risk assessment and prudential perspective

Although promising, the institutionalization process is not without risks.

Protocol complexity risk: Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has warned that as more and more financial logic is written into the underlying protocol or implemented through complex smart contracts, the vulnerability of the system may increase. Excessive feature stacking may lead to unknown security vulnerabilities.

Centralization and systemic risks: The influx of institutional capital has led to a high concentration of staking in a few custody institutions (such as Coinbase, Figment, etc.), which may threaten the decentralized censorship-resistant properties of the network. In addition, the popularity of tokenized treasury bonds as DeFi collateral means that if the underlying smart contract fails, the risk may be instantly transmitted to the entire lending and derivatives market, triggering a new systemic financial crisis.
8. Endgame Prediction: Global Digital Business Architecture in 2035

Looking to the future, Ethereum is evolving from a speculative asset trading platform to the underlying operating system for global digital commerce.

Programmable Finance: With the integration of AI and blockchain (Agentic Economy), future financial interactions will mainly be automatically executed on the chain by AI agents. Google has launched the Ethereum-based AI Agent Payment Protocol (AP2), heralding the explosive growth of machine-to-machine (M2M) economic activities.

A Leap in Capital Efficiency: The market for tokenized real-world assets (RWA) is expected to reach $30 trillion by 2030. Ethereum will carry most of the world’s tokenized bonds, stocks and carbon credits, releasing hundreds of billions of dollars in stranded capital through 24/7 atomic settlement.

Reshaping the capital market: By 2035, the Ethereum network may not only be the "backend" of Wall Street, but will also become the core operating mechanism of the global capital market. The traditional SWIFT messaging layer will be integrated with the on-chain value settlement layer to form a unified, transparent and efficient global ledger.

To sum up, the entry of 35 financial giants is not a short-lived experiment, but an irreversible migration in financial history. Ethereum has successfully crossed the gap from "geek toy" to "national financial infrastructure" and is leading the global financial system into a new era of transparency, efficiency and programmability.

Disclaimer The information provided in this article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute any investment advice, financial advice, trading advice or other advice of any kind. Companies such as BlackRock, JPMorgan, Fidelity and their related products (such as BUIDL, JPM Coin, BENJI, etc.) mentioned in the article are only used as case studies and do not represent recommendations or endorsements of these assets. The cryptocurrency and digital asset markets are highly volatile and risky, and investors should conduct independent research and consult a professional financial advisor before making any investment decisions. The author and the publishing platform are not responsible for any losses caused by relying on the information in this article.

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