Ethereum's 10th Anniversary: 7 Dimensions Revealing Why the ETH Rise Is Just Beginning?

Abstract: Analyzing the key drivers behind the recent significant rise of ETH. Author: Biteye Core Contributor @viee7227 Ethereum has been around for ten years, with its ups and downs. Just as the market is heating up again, the price of ETH seems to be only a step away from its historical high. This article analyzes seven dimensions including institutional accumulation and the ETF boom, changes in foundations, K-line technical indicators, on-chain data, the rise of RWA and stablecoins, and roadmaps. Perhaps this round of ETH rise has only just begun.

1. ETH reserve concept stocks Recently, the ETH market has seen exceptionally strong buying activity, with many listed companies and asset management institutions actively increasing their holdings, even incorporating ETH into their financial strategic core. At the same time, ETH reserve concept stocks have surged, becoming a new favorite in the US stock market. The iconic event that triggered Wall Street's embrace of Ethereum was the high-profile bet on ETH by Wall Street's renowned strategist and co-founder of Fundstrat, Thomas Lee. He became the chairman of Bitmine in 2025, directly driving the transformation of this former Bitcoin mining company into an Ethereum asset company. Under Lee's leadership, Bitmine rapidly accumulated over 600,000 ETH positions in the market, worth more than $3 billion, as a major asset in its financial reserves. It was also under his marketing inspiration that Wall Street's excitement was ignited, with multiple publicly listed companies in the U.S. announcing their purchase of ETH as part of their asset allocation. For instance, Bit Digital previously converted its BTC holdings into ETH, spending $172 million to acquire 100,000 ETH, which has now accumulated to over 120,000 ETH. SharpLink Gaming currently holds approximately 438,000 ETH, with a total value of about $1.09 billion. This series of actions indicates that institutional investors are viewing Ethereum as a strategic reserve asset similar to Bitcoin for allocation, and Ethereum's market recognition has significantly increased, further strengthening bullish expectations.
2. ETF With the ETH price experiencing a significant pump, substantial off-market funds are pouring into Ethereum ETFs. According to SoSoValue data, as of July 29, Eastern Time, the total net inflow of Ethereum spot ETFs reached $219 million, continuing a net inflow for 18 days since July 3. The Ethereum spot ETF with the highest daily net inflow was Blackrock ETF ETHA, with a daily net inflow of $224 million, bringing the historical total net inflow of ETHA to $9.704 billion. On July 16, nine Ethereum spot ETFs in the United States collectively attracted over $726 million in net inflow, setting a record for the highest single-day inflow since their launch in July last year. In contrast, during the same period, the Bitcoin ETF in the United States cooled down after experiencing a surge at the beginning of the year. In late July, there was a slight net outflow for several consecutive days, indicating that some funds were being rebalanced from the BTC sector to the ETH sector, reflecting an increase in institutional confidence in the application prospects of Ethereum. Currently, the market value of the Bitcoin ETF accounts for 6.49% of the total Bitcoin market value, while the Ethereum ETF is only 4.71%. In comparison, there is still significant growth potential for the funds flowing into Ethereum through the ETF channel.

Source: SoSoValue Looking to the future, in addition to spot ETFs, Ethereum staking yield ETFs are also on the way. On July 17, BlackRock's iShares Ethereum Trust (ETHA) officially submitted the 19b-4 filing to the SEC, aiming to introduce staking functionality for its Ethereum ETF. According to analysts, the United States is expected to approve the first batch of ETH staking ETFs in the second half of 2025. These products will provide an annual staking yield of 3-5% based on holding spot Ethereum, making them more attractive to institutions. The most direct impact of the ETF effect on Ethereum is the enhancement of liquidity and the demand ceiling. After institutions have configured their BTC ETFs, the ETH ETF has become the only choice next. With ETFs, large funds amounting to hundreds of billions of dollars can easily allocate assets, which undoubtedly significantly enhances the investment attributes and market depth of ETH, making it one of the important external factors supporting a long-term bullish outlook. Three, Ethereum Foundation The recent strength of Ethereum is also closely related to the changes in the management team. The Ethereum Foundation has undergone a management adjustment in the past year. In March 2025, Hsiao-Wei Wang and Tomasz Stańczak were newly appointed as co-executive directors of the foundation. The dual-director model will decentralize decision-making, reduce single-point dependence, and introduce more professional management beyond technical leaders like Vitalik, thereby promoting efficiency improvements. It retains the community-driven open-source spirit while enhancing external communication and strategic execution capabilities, which is beneficial for promoting positive interactions between Ethereum and institutions and regulators. In addition, former core researcher of the Ethereum Foundation, Danny Ryan, has joined the Etherealize project founded by former banker Vivek Raman, aiming to bring ETH into the mainstream financial system of Wall Street through educating traditional institutions and market promotion. This marks the first proactive integration of the Ethereum core team into the traditional financial ecosystem, and the valuation logic of ETH will transition towards institutionalization, significantly enhancing long-term price support. IV. K-line Technical Indicators Ethereum has recently shown a strong pump trend. Over the past month, the price of ETH has surged by about 60% from around $2400, approaching the $4000 mark in late July. This rise far exceeds the market average, reflecting the market's optimistic expectations for Ethereum. From a technical indicator perspective, the ETH/BTC pair has ended a long period of sideways consolidation over the past three months and broke through a key range to the upside in mid-July, rising 40% in a single month. This indicates a shift in capital preference from Bitcoin dominance to Ethereum, reflecting a resurgence in market preference for risk assets.

Source: TradingView In addition, the RSI (Relative Strength Index) of ETH fell to around 30 on the weekly K-line in April, which has historically been considered a "buying zone at the low point." Data shows that whenever the RSI reaches this range (30-40), ETH often experiences a significant rise. For example, during the period of 2023-2024, the last time this same signal appeared was accompanied by an over 290% rise in ETH.

Source: TradingView Analyst @MikybullCrypto pointed out this round of buy signals back in April, when he judged it to be a "very rare buying point that cannot be ignored" and predicted that ETH would double thereafter. He recently reiterated this view, believing that if the RSI continues to rise to high levels, the price of Ethereum may reach the range of 7000 to 10000 dollars. This means that, from a technical perspective, this round of ETH pump may not be over yet.

5. On-Chain Metrics From on-chain data, the activity of Ethereum has significantly risen. Transaction Activity: The daily average number of transactions on the Ethereum mainnet has remained stable in recent months, with approximately 42 million monthly transactions in June 2025 (about 1.4 million daily), which is basically flat compared to previous months. It is worth noting that although the current on-chain Gas fees are low, this may not be due to a decrease in users, but rather an increase in network processing capacity after the mainnet upgrade, leading to a decrease in the cost per transaction. According to Nansen data, in the past month, the number of active Ethereum addresses has increased by 16.3% over the past 30 days, and the number of transactions has increased by 14.2% over the past 30 days, reaching an average of 1.62 million transactions per day on July 22, setting a new high in nearly six months. Active on-chain activity indicates that more users and applications are utilizing the Ethereum network.

Source: Nansen On-chain transaction fees: With the recent recovery of cryptocurrency prices and on-chain activities, Ethereum's transaction fee revenue has also risen and has surpassed other public chains, returning to the second position in on-chain transaction fee revenue in the second quarter of 2025. According to data from Artemis, Ethereum's total network transaction fee revenue in June was approximately $39.1 million, second only to Tron, which to some extent reflects the return of demand for the Ethereum network.

Source: Artemis Total Value Locked (TVL) in DeFi: The chart from DefiLlama shows that Ethereum's TVL rose from $60.2 billion on June 28 to a three-year high of $85.9 billion on July 28, an increase of over 42% within the month. In addition, the total TVL across the DeFi network broke through $153 billion in late July, setting a new three-year high, with nearly 60% locked in Ethereum. However, it is noteworthy that Ethereum's price increased by 59.9% during the same period, surpassing the TVL growth rate. Moreover, when measuring the TVL growth rate in ETH terms, there was a 1% decline, indicating that the recent TVL record high was mainly driven by the ETH price increase. This suggests that if asset prices correct in the future, the TVL metric may also correspondingly decline.

Source: Defillama (the above image shows ETH TVL) Pledge situation: It is worth mentioning that the staking scale of Ethereum has repeatedly hit new highs—currently, over 36 million ETH are staked, close to 30% of the total supply, and these locked ETH effectively reduce the circulating supply, decreasing selling pressure from a supply-demand perspective. Although recently there have been over 500,000 ETH queued for unstaking, a large amount of new staking is entering simultaneously, which can hedge against the impact of the large withdrawals, and the coin price remains strong, so there is no need to panic excessively.

Source: Cryptoquant

Source: validatorqueue ETH Inflation Situation: It is worth noting that the current Ethereum network is exhibiting a slight inflation state, and the actual inflation rate is far lower than the general market perception. According to statistics, in the nearly three years since the merge, Ethereum's annual net inflation rate (+0.117%) is more than 11 times lower than Bitcoin's inflation rate (+1.338%). The logic of ETH is that the more it is used, the more it is burned, creating a positive cycle for network activity. This means that the traditional claim of "ETH unlimited inflation" is no longer valid. Over the past few years, ETH has essentially had low inflation, which may also be one of the important supporting factors in its rise logic.

Source: ultrasound.money, @LeonWaidmann The rise in transaction numbers + the recovery of fees + staking lock-up + low inflation levels, multiple on-chain indicators jointly support the positive fundamentals of Ethereum, providing strong support for the continued strength of the ETH price. 6. RWA and Stablecoin Narrative By deeply analyzing the key indicators of major on-chain networks supporting RWA (refer to the table below), it can be seen that Ethereum dominates the RWA and stablecoin markets.

Source: RWA.xyz RWA on-chain: 2025 is referred to by many industry insiders as the "RWA Year", with a large number of real assets being tokenized through the Ethereum ecosystem. According to RWA.xyz data, as of July 29, 2025, over 341 types of RWA assets have been hosted on Ethereum, covering government bonds, real estate equity, private equity, etc., with a market value accounting for about 55.2% of the entire on-chain RWA market, reaching $7 billion, ranking first among all blockchains, about 3 times that of the second place ZKsync. For example, the size of BlackRock's tokenized fund BUIDL has exceeded $2.4 billion, with over 90% of the assets still hosted on Ethereum. With the continuous breakthrough of the RWA tokenization market size in the future, Ethereum is expected to capture the largest share.

Source: RWA.xyz Stablecoin trends: Ethereum continues to solidify its position as the on-chain dollar carrier by 2025. As of July 29, 2025, the supply of stablecoins running on Ethereum accounts for over 54% of the entire market, firmly leading among all public chains. With a total amount of approximately $250 billion, over $137.7 billion of stablecoins (USDT, USDC, etc.) are circulating on the Ethereum network.

Source: RWA.xyz It is important to emphasize that in the past, ETH was often viewed as a "super Bitcoin" among crypto assets. However, with the significant accumulation of stablecoins and RWAs, ETH now possesses a broader value support. On one hand, ETH is indispensable as the "digital oil" for paying Gas; every stablecoin transfer and every RWA issuance requires burning a small amount of ETH. On the other hand, the "productive asset" nature of ETH is becoming increasingly prominent—staking ETH can yield native returns, similar to holding U.S. Treasury bonds for interest, which aligns with traditional capital's preference for income-generating reserve assets. When entering a rate-cutting cycle, the staking yield of ETH may exceed the yield of government bonds, and with a huge potential for rise, this makes ETH extremely attractive. Thomas Lee has publicly stated that Ethereum, as a platform for stablecoins and RWAs, has unlimited prospects, which also makes it the top choice for Wall Street's compliance chain layout. Lee believes that the value of the Ethereum network is severely underestimated, with its "fair value" expected to be in the range of $10,000 to $15,000, and it has the potential to appreciate more than tenfold in the coming years. In summary, the rise of stablecoins and RWA is redefining the investment value of ETH, also providing Ethereum the opportunity to become a global digital dollar clearing network, which is one of the important reasons why institutional investors are daring to significantly allocate ETH recently. Seven, Ethereum Technology Roadmap Ethereum has continued to iterate and upgrade over the past decade, and the progress of its technical roadmap is an important internal driving force for the rise of ETH.

The latest major upgrade - the Pectra upgrade, was successfully implemented on May 7, 2025. It integrates two sub-proposals, Prague and Electra, covering changes to both the execution layer and the consensus layer. It introduces account abstraction (EIP-7702), an increase in the validator staking cap (to 2048 ETH), data expansion (increased blobs), a more flexible exit mechanism, and BLS precompilation, aiming to enhance scalability and user experience, paving the way for future sharding and Verkle trees, marking a key step in Ethereum's medium to long-term roadmap. In the next phase, the Fusaka upgrade is expected to go live around the end of 2025, which will expand the number of data blobs per block by 8 times and introduce PeerDAS technology to enhance on-chain data availability. Overall, the Ethereum development roadmap has progressed as planned in the past quarters with Proto-Danksharding, deepening account abstraction, data expansion, and reforming the validator mechanism, continuously enhancing Ethereum's performance. Looking ahead, Ethereum will focus on completing Danksharding full sharding, achieving Statelessness, and refining various modular components, which will also lay a solid foundation for the long-term value of ETH. Summary In summary, standing at the milestone of Ethereum's tenth anniversary, we can see the resonance between internal fundamentals and external environment: core indicators are improving, technical upgrades are ongoing, and team governance is optimized, making the Ethereum network stronger; at the same time, the emerging narratives of stablecoins and RWA, along with the incremental funds brought by ETFs, provide a continuous rise momentum for ETH. For this reason, more and more asset management institutions and analysts hold an optimistic view on Ethereum's medium to long-term prospects, believing it is likely to challenge new heights in the coming years. Of course, challenges from other public chains, regulatory changes, and so on may still bring fluctuations. But what can be assured is that at the starting point of the next decade, ETH is transforming towards a "new financial infrastructure," and the excitement may just be beginning.