Ethereum’s growing role in institutional finance took center stage on CNBC’s Power Lunch this week, when Tom Lee, co-founder and head of research at Fundstrat Global Advisors, said Ether could climb to $7,000–$9,000 by early 2026 as Wall Street accelerates efforts to tokenize assets and move financial activity onchain.
Lee said Ether’s (ETH) investment case is increasingly tied to its use as financial infrastructure, as Wall Street experiments with onchain settlement and tokenized securities.
“Wall Street wants to tokenize everything,” Lee said, pointing to initiatives at Robinhood and BlackRock. The shift, he said, could bring efficiencies to traditional finance while anchoring real-world use cases on Ether. He added that Ether could eventually reach $20,000 as adoption deepens.
He was also bullish on Bitcoin (BTC), calling it a “genuine store of value” and saying a move to $200,000 next year “makes a lot of sense,” framing its recent underperformance versus gold as temporary.
Lee is also chairman of BitMine Immersion Technologies, the leading Ether-focused treasury company that has reported holdings of 4,066,062 ETH, according to CoinGecko data.
Related: 70% of Ether positions are ‘long’ as whale accumulation tightens ETH supply
Ethereum blockchain dominates tokenized RWA
Tokenized real-world assets, traditional financial instruments and physical assets represented onchain have expanded rapidly this year, with total market value rising to about $18.9 billion, up from roughly $5.6 billion at the start of 2025.
According to data from RWA.xyz, US Treasury debt is the largest tokenized asset class at around $8.5 billion, followed by commodities at approximately $3.4 billion.
Ethereum currently accounts for the majority of tokenized RWA value across public blockchains. As of late December 2025, the network hosts more than $12 billion in tokenized assets, well ahead of alternatives such as BNB Chain, Solana and Arbitrum.
Ethereum also leads stablecoin issuance, with roughly $170 billion in stablecoins issued on the network, reinforcing its role as the primary settlement layer for dollar-denominated activity onchain.
Institutional interest in tokenized RWAs continued to build in December, when the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) said it plans to tokenize a portion of US Treasury securities held at its Depository Trust Company subsidiary on the Canton Network.
DTCC operates post-trade infrastructure for US securities markets, with its subsidiaries processing about $3.7 quadrillion in securities transactions last year.
