Ethereum (ETH) broke its 2021 all-time high in August, nearing $4,945 and a market cap of $600 billion, while exchange balances hit record highs.
Corporate Treasuries and spot ETFs now control nearly 11% of the circulating supply. By every structural metric, ETH should look like it’s having a moment.
This is not the case. No Bored Apes sells for seven figures. No TikTok explainer goes viral. The ETH 2025 rally is real, measurable and entirely clinical. This is a quiet reallocation by institutions that treat Ethereum less as a speculative trade and more as a yield-generating infrastructure.
The cultural void raises a more acute question: Is ETH transitioning from Tier 1 casino to institutional plumbing, and what does price discovery look like when buyers don’t care about the hype?
ETH leaves exchanges
The story of the offer is unambiguous. As of Dec. 21, just 10.5% of all ETH was on centralized exchanges, one of the lowest shares since the network’s launch and down 43% since July, according to Coinglass data.
Additionally, over 35.6 million ETH was locked in staking as of December 20.
This is not speculative hoarding, but rather operational infrastructure. Nansen’s holder composition shows that the largest addresses are staking contracts, institutional custodians, and ETF wrappers, not whale wallets.
Foreign exchange float is running out, but not in day trading accounts. It moves through the pipes: layer 2 bridges, recovery protocols, treasury vaults.
Corporate balance sheets tell the same story. Treasury data from December 19 estimates that holding companies and Ethereum spot ETFs now control 10.72% of the circulating supply. This amount is divided into 5.63% in corporate hands and 5.09% in ETFs, according to data from Strategic ETH Reserve.
BitMine has accumulated over 4 million ETH, or 3.36% of the total supply, and explicitly plans to reach 5%.
These are not risk bets, but strategic positions related to Ethereum’s role in settling stablecoins and tokenized asset rails.
ETF flows confirm the institutional bias. Year-to-date, ETPs tracking ETH have attracted approximately $12.7 billion in net inflows, with Ethereum spot ETFs accounting for $12.4 billion.
The infrastructure is built. The dispatchers are there.
ETH as infrastructure, not just in beta
The 2025 research cycle began treating ETH as yield-bearing infrastructure rather than a leveraged bet on tokens.
Citi’s September memo setting a year-end target of $4,300 is explicit: the driver is demand for Ethereum-based stablecoins and tokenization, not speculative trading. The bank highlights staking yield as a differentiator for corporate portfolios, outlining a bullish scenario to $6,400 if stablecoin adoption moves on an optimistic trajectory.
Binance Research argued that if stablecoin settlement and Layer 2 scaling continue according to current trends, the valuation logic of ETH shifts from a “deflationary asset” to an “ecological infrastructure asset.”
Data from rwa.xyz shows that Ethereum controls $12.5 billion of the real-world tokenized asset (RWA) market, or 66.6%.
Ethereum’s growth in RWA tokenization since 2024 has been meteoric, growing from $1.5 billion, a 735% increase from its current size.
Stablecoin usage has also skyrocketed. According to data from Artemis, Ethereum recorded $1.6 trillion in monthly stablecoin transaction volume as of December 21 and $172.1 billion in stablecoin supply. Supply growth is 141% from the $71.3 billion recorded in January 2024.
The thesis emerging from these reports is consistent: ETH is increasingly treated as a yield-bearing asset and an essential part of the system in professional portfolios.
It’s about needing Ethereum to function as plumbing for the token dollars, securities, and derivatives that institutions are already building.
Cultural void
NFTs represent the clearest cultural contrast. Data from CryptoSlam shows that NFT art sales fell from nearly $16.5 billion in 2021 to just $2.2 billion in 2025, a drop of about 87%.
LG shut down its Art Lab NFT marketplace, Tennis Australia’s Artball collection saw floor prices collapse by around 90%, and CryptoPunks were transferred to a non-profit organization, with coverage bluntly observing that the “days of making money” are over.
Google Trends data shows that crypto-related searches in the United States remain well below previous cycle highs, reaching 100 only when prices rise between July and August.
The composition of the participation confirms this change.
The retail trading mania has shifted heavily toward trading single stocks in the United States rather than altcoins. Ethereum ETP flows fluctuate between huge weeks of inflows and very big weeks of outflows, resembling more of a tug-of-war between structured products than a one-way retail stampede.
What this means for price discovery
The gap between accumulation and attention creates a medium-term headache.
Traditional price discovery depends on a mix of fundamental flows and narrative dynamics. Ethereum in 2025 will have the first without the second.
ETFs and Treasuries generate slow and steady demand. Staking locks in supply and tokenization brings real-world assets to Ethereum.
But the cultural engine that drove 2021, of retail users treating every transaction like a statement, has stalled.
This is important because Ethereum’s valuation has always been partly reflexive.
The network becomes more valuable as more applications rely on it, in part because developers expect its value to increase.
This virtuous circle depends on dynamics, and not just infrastructure. When corporate buyers treat ETH as a tool to settle token obligations rather than as a bet on the future of finance, they stabilize the asset but flatten its narrative arc.
The thread shows the purchase of ETH. Data shows that supply is running out of trade. What’s missing is cultural proof that any of this matters to anyone outside the profession.
Ethereum may be transitioning from speculative layer 1 to financial plumbing, and if that is the case, the sentiment of 2021 may not return.
The question is whether the next phase of steady institutional and infrastructure-driven flows can maintain the valuations that retail madness once supported.
