How Wall Street uses Ethereum as financial infrastructure

Key takeaways

• Wall Street’s adoption of Ethereum is closely tied to its ability to automate settlement through smart contracts, reducing the reliance on slow, manual reconciliation processes.

• Stablecoins and tokenized dollars now serve as the primary entry point for banks, allowing regulated US dollar transfers to move seamlessly on Ethereum-based rails.

• Financial institutions often avoid naming Ethereum directly, instead describing it as a neutral blockchain infrastructure that supports compliant financial systems.

• Tokenized funds and real-world assets use Ethereum as a distribution and administration layer, while the underlying investments remain traditional financial products.

For years, the financial world has viewed Ethereum primarily as a playground for digital art and digital assets. By 2025, however, a gradual change had become evident. Wall Street had largely stopped treating the network as a “crypto” project and began using it as a fundamental utility.

By the end of 2025, Ethereum was processing more than $5 trillion in quarterly transaction volume, a figure comparable in scale to traditional payment processors. Large institutions are now migrating value onto this digital rail, often without ever mentioning the word “cryptocurrency,” making Ethereum an increasingly used settlement layer in specific institutional contexts.

This article examines how the world’s leading financial institutions are quietly adopting Ethereum’s decentralized infrastructure.

Ethereum as financial plumbing, not a crypto asset

To the average observer, Ethereum is a “coin” to trade. For Wall Street, however, it has become something much more practical: high-tech financial plumbing. In August 2025, Jan van Eck, CEO of VanEck, called Ethereum a “Wall Street token”, emphasizing that the network’s underlying architecture, the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), is becoming a global standard for bank-to-bank settlement.

Unlike existing systems that require manual reconciliation, Ethereum functions as a “single source of truth,” where transactions are verified by a global network of nodes rather than a central clearinghouse.

Instead of relying on routes that can take days to settle transactions, institutions use Ethereum smart contracts to automate much of the manual work done by middle office operations.

This change enables T+0 settlement, meaning transactions clear instantly. Previously, a transaction was settled on a T+2 basis, with banks exchanging messages to verify funds and positions. On Ethereum, asset transfer and payment occur at the same time.

In this context, Ethereum functions as a fundamental infrastructure that allows the traditional financial system to operate faster, cheaper and with fewer errors. Since Ethereum is value agnostic, it serves as a neutral platform where financial agreements can be codified and executed without human intervention.

Stablecoins and tokenization as an entry point

Wall Street’s adoption of Ethereum’s infrastructure is also visible in the rapid growth of “token dollars.” Following the passage of the GENIUS Act in July 2025, a landmark US law that established a clear framework for stablecoins, the total market capitalization of these assets soared to $300 billion. For banks, stablecoins on Ethereum represent digital versions of the US dollar that can move around the clock, avoiding the settlement risk associated with traditional bank opening hours and weekend closures.

Traditional payments giants such as Visa and Mastercard have integrated stablecoin settlement APIs to support global payments on the network. These companies do not interact with the speculative side of crypto. Instead, they use Ethereum-based stablecoins to settle transactions between merchants and banks in near real time.

As banks adapt to customer demand for faster cross-border transfers, the Ethereum network provides the secure infrastructure needed to move these regulated digital dollars.

Did you know? The GENIUS Act, signed into law on July 18, 2025, became the first federal framework to officially authorize US banks will issue stablecoins through subsidiaries. This change repositioned Ethereum from a regulatory gray area to a legally compliant infrastructure layer for the US dollar.

Tokenized funds and real-world assets

Ethereum’s evolution has gone beyond payments towards the tokenization of more complex investment vehicles. In December 2025, JPMorgan made headlines by launching its first money market fund on the public Ethereum blockchain. Trading under the symbol MONY, the fund allows qualified investors to access the returns of traditional US Treasury securities, using Ethereum as a distribution layer.

By placing a fund like MONY on the Ethereum blockchain, JPMorgan enabled peer-to-peer transferability and daily reinvestment of dividends that were previously difficult to achieve. Investors can subscribe or redeem in cash or stablecoins via institutional platforms. In this structure, Ethereum is not the investment itself. It functions as a digital envelope that increases liquidity and operational efficiency.

This development marks a turning point in which Ethereum smart contracts take over much of the operational burden of fund administration, significantly reducing overhead costs. By automating the distribution of returns through code, Ethereum allows these funds to operate with a level of precision and transparency that existing databases cannot easily replicate.

Strategic silence: why Wall Street does not name Ethereum

If you look at marketing materials from leading banks, you’ll see terms like “on-chain liquidity,” “distributed ledgers,” or “programmable payments,” but the underlying technology is almost always Ethereum. This “invisible” adoption helps explain why Ethereum is frequently chosen by Wall Street institutions.

The network effect is a key technical factor. Just as the Internet relies on standardized protocols, the financial system converges around Ethereum’s programming standards. By late 2025, several reports suggested that tokenized dollars on the network were quietly reshaping the way money flows between major clearinghouses.

As more assets such as treasuries, bonds, and real estate are tokenized on Ethereum, the network’s usefulness is becoming increasingly evident in institutional use cases. Since its launch in 2024, BlackRock’s BUIDL fund has become the world’s largest tokenized money market fund, deploying over $1 billion directly on the Ethereum blockchain to enable near real-time dividend distribution.

Similarly, in late 2025, JPMorgan rebranded its blockchain division Kinexys, facilitating over $2 billion in average daily transaction volume via Ethereum-compatible rails.

By leveraging Ethereum’s “credible neutrality,” these companies avoid the constraints of proprietary private blockchains that lack global interoperability. Instead, they treat Ethereum as a neutral and largely invisible settlement layer. As a result, the network began to function as a standardized operating system for global capital, whether or not the brand was explicitly recognized in corporate boardrooms.