Ether’s (ETH) price climbed as much as 8% Wednesday while stocks tied to the cryptocurrency saw significant gains this week.
As the coin approaches its 10th anniversary in late July, ETH has faced investor doubts over its value proposition and declining revenue, currently trading at about 75% below its all-time high.
However, investor enthusiasm around real-world asset tokenization and stablecoins reignited interest in the Ethereum ecosystem.
Happy 4 July
While Bitcoin ETFs ended a 15-day inflow streak on Wednesday, Ether ETFs attracted $40 million in new investments, led by BlackRock’s iShares Ethereum Trust.
That helped boost the stock prices of BitMine Immersion Technologies, and Bit Digital, two Bitcoin miners that recently announced plans to adopt ETH as their primary treasury reserve asset. BitMine soared as much as 190% during Thursday trading ahead of the 4 July holiday when traditional markets closed.
Sports betting platform SharpLink Gaming, which also began shifting reserves to Ether, also advanced before paring gains towards the end of Thursday.
Smart contracts
The Ethereum network’s smart contract functionality underpins most major stablecoins, including USDC and USDT. It has become the go-to blockchain for institutional tokenization experiments like BlackRock’s BUIDL fund.
Its promise of transparency, efficiency, and security to automatically execute transactions when specific conditions are met has driven investor enthusiasm.
“Stablecoins were the first real-world use case to reach scale,” said Devin Ryan of Citizens JMP. “But tokenization is going to unlock a much broader opportunity across traditional finance.”
Where to next?
Ethereum faces challenges including high volatility and low revenue growth since its last technical upgrade, and rising competition for investment from Solana, a rival network.
Still, growing confidence in the digital asset markets combined with improving real-world applications for cryptocurrencies as a medium of exchange may offer Ethereum an opportunity to cement its network as a foundational layer of crypto’s evolution.
