Ethereum’s rising position in institutional finance took middle stage on CNBC’s Energy Lunch this week, when Tom Lee, co-founder and head of analysis at Fundstrat International Advisors, stated Ether may climb to $7,000–$9,000 by early 2026 as Wall Avenue accelerates efforts to tokenize belongings and transfer monetary exercise onchain.
Lee said Ether’s (ETH) funding case is more and more tied to its use as monetary infrastructure, as Wall Avenue experiments with onchain settlement and tokenized securities.
“Wall Avenue needs to tokenize the whole lot,” Lee stated, pointing to initiatives at Robinhood and BlackRock. The shift, he stated, may convey efficiencies to conventional finance whereas anchoring real-world use instances on Ether. He added that Ether may 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 lots of sense,” framing its current underperformance versus gold as momentary.
Lee can be chairman of BitMine Immersion Applied sciences, the main Ether-focused treasury firm that has reported holdings of 4,066,062 ETH, in keeping with CoinGecko data.
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Ethereum blockchain dominates tokenized RWA
Tokenized real-world belongings, conventional monetary devices and bodily belongings represented onchain have expanded quickly this year, with whole market worth rising to about $18.9 billion, up from roughly $5.6 billion initially of 2025.
In accordance with data from RWA.xyz, US Treasury debt is the most important tokenized asset class at round $8.5 billion, adopted by commodities at roughly $3.4 billion.
Ethereum at present 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 belongings, nicely forward of options such as BNB Chain, Solana and Arbitrum.
Ethereum additionally leads stablecoin issuance, with roughly $170 billion in stablecoins issued on the community, reinforcing its position 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) stated 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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