Ethereum's growing role in institutional finance was the main focus of CNBC's Power Lunch this week, as Tom Lee, co-founder and head of research at Fundstrat Global Advisors, said Ether could rise to $7,000 to $9,000 by early 2026 as Wall Street accelerates its efforts to tokenize assets and move financial activity on-chain.
Lee said Ether's (ETH) investment case is increasingly tied to its use as a financial infrastructure as Wall Street experiments with on-chain settlement and tokenized securities.
“Wall Street desires to tokenize every little thing,” Lee said, pointing to initiatives from Robinhood and BlackRock. He said the change could increase the efficiency of traditional finance while anchoring real-world use cases on Ether. He added that as adoption increases, Ether could eventually reach $20,000.
Source: Fundstrat YouTube channel
He also expressed bullishness on Bitcoin (BTC), calling it a “real store of value” and saying an increase to $200,000 next 12 months “makes a number of sense,” calling the recent underperformance against gold temporary.
Lee can also be chairman of BitMine Immersion Technologies, the leading Ether-focused treasury firm, which has reported holdings of 4,066,062 ETH, based on CoinGecko data.
The five largest Ethereum treasury firms. Source: CointGecko
The Ethereum blockchain dominates tokenized RWA
Tokenized real-world assets, traditional financial instruments, and physical assets represented on-chain have increased rapidly this 12 months, with the full market cap rising to about $18.9 billion, up from about $5.6 billion firstly of 2025.
According to data from RWA.xyz, US Treasuries are the most important tokenized asset class at around $8.5 billion, followed by commodities at around $3.4 billion.
Ethereum currently accounts for the vast majority of tokenized RWA value on public blockchains. At the tip of December 2025, the network hosted greater than $12 billion in tokenized assets, well ahead of alternatives comparable to BNB Chain, Solana and Arbitrum.
Tokenized RWA through Blockchain. Source: RWA.xyz
Ethereum can also be a pacesetter in stablecoin issuance, with around $170 billion price of stablecoins issued on the network, strengthening its role as the first settlement layer for on-chain dollar-denominated activity.
Stablecoin market caps by network. Source: RWA.xyz
Institutional interest in tokenized RWAs further increased in December when the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) announced that it plans to tokenize a portion of U.S. Treasury securities held at its subsidiary Depository Trust Company on the Canton Network.
DTCC operates post-trade infrastructure for U.S. securities markets, with its subsidiaries processing roughly $3.7 quadrillion in securities transactions last 12 months.
