Wall Street in August 2025 is undergoing a quiet yet profound transformation.

When Ethereum's price broke through the $4,800 mark on August 23rd, reaching a four-year high and accumulating a gain of over 200% from the low point in April this year, the market gradually realized that behind this rally was not just speculative fervor in cryptocurrencies, but also a strategic bet by traditional financial giants on blockchain technology.

Wall Street institutions, represented by BlackRock and Franklin Templeton, are migrating billions of dollars worth of Real World Assets (RWA) onto the Ethereum network, propelling the world's second-largest cryptocurrency to become the core infrastructure connecting traditional finance with the digital economy.

01 Major Institutional Deployment

Institutional-grade RWA deployment on the Ethereum network has already shown a pattern of flourishing across multiple fronts.

The BUIDL fund launched by the world's largest asset manager, BlackRock, in March 2024, surpassed $1 billion in size in 2025 and obtained an investment company license from Spain's National Securities Market Commission (CNMV). Its core strategy is the compliant tokenization of U.S. short-term Treasury bonds through Ethereum.

The world's largest asset manager, BlackRock, has quietly accumulated $11.3 billion worth of Ethereum, accounting for 2.46% of the total ETH circulating supply.

This move is not an isolated case. Franklin Templeton followed closely by launching a tokenized money market fund on Ethereum, while Apollo Global Management issued a diversified credit securitization fund through Ethereum, with assets under management reaching hundreds of millions of dollars.

In the field of U.S. Treasury tokenization, Ondo Finance has established a leading position, with its platform's Total Value Locked (TVL) exceeding $1 billion, capturing a core share of the global $5 billion tokenized Treasury market.

JPMorgan predicted in its latest report that such yield-bearing stablecoin products will capture 50% of the future stablecoin market share, further confirming the growth potential of the RWA model on Ethereum.

It is worth noting that these projects all use the ERC-20 standard to issue tokens, ensuring deep compatibility with the Ethereum ecosystem and allowing seamless integration into mainstream DeFi protocols like Aave for collateralized lending, thereby achieving secondary enhancement of asset liquidity.

The布局 (bùjú - deployment/strategy) of renowned Silicon Valley investor Peter Thiel is even more forward-looking. His Founders Fund, by holding a 7.5% stake in ETHZilla and controlling a 9.1% equity stake in Bitmine, is deeply involved in the Ethereum ecosystem development.

Among these, Bitmine company raised $250 million specifically to purchase Ethereum. Its stock price has soared over 1000% since the end of June 2025, reaching a market capitalization of $9.2 billion, reflecting the capital market's strong confidence in the Ethereum RWA narrative.

Thiel's investment logic clearly points to: if Ethereum becomes an alternative channel for the clearing and settlement of traditional financial assets, its native token will significantly benefit from the surge in network activity.

02 Technological Upgrades and Regulatory Breakthroughs

The dual catalysts of technological iteration and improved regulatory environment are crucial reasons why Ethereum has won Wall Street's favor.

The Pectra and Fusaka upgrades implemented in 2025 provided solid technical support for RWA applications, not only increasing transaction throughput but also addressing the efficiency and cost issues most concerned by traditional financial institutions by optimizing smart contract security and reducing Gas fees.

Data shows that the average cost of processing RWA transactions on the upgraded Ethereum network decreased by 60%, with settlement times shortened to seconds, already possessing the technical conditions to support large-scale institutional capital entry.

Breakthrough progress on the regulatory front is equally critical.

In early 2025, the new U.S. administration promoted crypto asset compliance. The SEC revoked the SAB 121 policy that restricted banks from custodying digital assets and accelerated the Ethereum ETF approval process.

More importantly, the SEC launched the "RWA Compliance Acceleration Program," providing regulatory exemptions for commercial real estate tokenization projects by institutions like BlackRock and Fidelity. This "regulatory sandbox" model both prevents risks and leaves ample room for innovation.

The synchronized release of the "Virtual Asset Tokenization Implementation Guide 2.0" by the Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) clarified the compliance framework for real estate tokenization, creating cross-regional regulatory synergy.

In June 2025, the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government officially released the "Hong Kong Digital Asset Development Policy Declaration 2.0", marking the official transition of Hong Kong's digital asset strategy from a "testing ground" stage to a new journey of "institutionalization, scaling, and globalization."

The dual benefits of technology and regulation have propelled Ethereum to form an overwhelming advantage in the RWA field.

According to RWA.xyz data, as of December 2024, the total value of RWA assets locked on Ethereum reached $14.9 billion, accounting for 81% of the global RWA market share, far exceeding other blockchain platforms.

This ecosystem dominance creates a positive feedback loop: more institutions joining bring richer asset types, which in turn attract more developers to build tools and protocols, ultimately forming a network effect that is difficult for Wall Street to replace.

03 Undercurrents Beneath the Prosperity

Although Ethereum's current leading advantage is obvious, competition in the RWA track is quietly heating up.

Goldman Sachs and Bank of New York Mellon (BNY Mellon) chose to launch tokenized money market funds on their own privately built blockchains, attempting to maintain absolute control over asset flow.

The Noble chain in the Cosmos ecosystem is also diverting some stablecoin-related RWA demand by supporting native USDC and cross-chain issuance mechanisms. However, these competitors have not yet achieved scale effects. With its 83.69% share of the RWA tokenization market, Ethereum remains the preferred platform for institutions.

Industry development still faces multiple challenges. The inherent contradiction between compliance and decentralization is particularly prominent. Most successful RWA projects like Superstate and Securitize implement strict KYC/AML processes, even restricting participation by non-accredited investors, creating tension with blockchain's "permissionless" original intention.

On the technical level, the trust gap between off-chain data and on-chain verification has not been fully resolved. In 2024, an incident occurred where a RWA platform suffered a $127 million asset valuation deviation due to an attack on its oracle nodes, exposing infrastructure vulnerabilities.

Market structure homogenization is also a hidden concern. Currently, the most successful RWA applications on Ethereum are concentrated in the tokenization of U.S. Treasuries and stocks, resembling more of a variant of "Stablecoin 2.0," while the on-chain transformation of non-standardized assets like real estate and artwork is still in the exploratory stage.

Nansen research analyst Nicolai Søndergaard cautioned that the current narrative of "Wall Street rebuilding financial infrastructure on Ethereum" might be partially exaggerated, and the price increase might reflect speculators searching for Bitcoin alternatives rather than genuine recognition of Ethereum's future.

04 Future Outlook

Boston Consulting Group predicts that the RWA market size will reach $16 trillion by 2030, becoming the largest application scenario for blockchain technology.

In this wave of value reassessment, Ethereum is establishing its position as a core player by virtue of its technological maturity, ecological completeness, and institutional recognition.

With the advancement of the 2025-2030 technology roadmap, Ethereum will achieve more breakthrough progress, including sharding technology to further improve transaction efficiency and zero-knowledge proof applications to enhance privacy protection, providing more comprehensive technical support for RWA.

The expansion of asset types will be the focus of the next stage. Beyond the existing tokenization of bonds and stocks, areas such as real estate, carbon credits, and intellectual property are becoming new hotspots for RWA.

Shenzhen Ya Tan Ji Intelligent Tech's carbon credit tokenization project has already converted certified emission reductions into ERC-20 tokens, with an estimated market size of $1.03 billion in 2025. This practice of "green asset financialization" not only responds to global carbon neutrality goals but also expands the application boundaries of Ethereum RWA.

For investors, Ethereum's RWA narrative has moved from concept to reality. When publicly traded companies' Ethereum reserves exceed 3.04 million ETH, and when BlackRock's Ethereum ETF attracts $255 million in a single day, this blockchain network, once seen as a marginal asset, is steadily integrating into the core of the global financial system.

As Juan Leon, senior investment strategist at Bitwise, said, RWA has become the biggest driving force behind Ethereum's rebound in 2025, and Wall Street's major deployment might just be beginning.