Bitwise: Ethereum will return to its peak in 2025

In 2024, two key narratives dominated cryptocurrency headlines: Bitcoin’s meteoric rise, driven by the launch of a Bitcoin ETF and record inflows; and Solana’s rise to retail darling, driven by meme coin speculation.

That has left Ethereum — the world’s second-largest crypto asset — largely overlooked. Sure, its 66% year-to-date return is good in absolute terms, but pales in comparison to Solana’s 106% and Bitcoin’s 130%.

But something interesting has happened recently: over the past 10 days, investors have started to become interested in Ethereum again.

You can see this clearly in spot Ethereum ETFs, which have attracted a whopping $2 billion in net inflows during this time. In comparison, the same ETFs saw net inflows of just $250 million in the first four months.

So what's going on here?

This realization dawned on me as I reviewed Bitwise’s recently released crypto predictions for 2025. Among the various price predictions, we laid out several “real world” megatrends that we believe will shape the industry in the year ahead, from the continued rise of stablecoins to the proliferation of AI agents using cryptocurrencies to conduct transactions.

But one of the biggest and most overlooked opportunities centers on tokenization: the process of bringing the massive market of real-world assets (RWAs) to the blockchain.

Today, the market is dominated by Ethereum.

“This is not just a story for tomorrow”

Tokenization is the process of digitizing traditional financial assets, such as government bonds or real estate, into tokens that can be traded on a blockchain. Tokenization promises to make the buying, selling and settlement of financial assets faster, cheaper and more digital. Many believe it could disrupt the fundamental basis of how financial markets operate.

This isn’t just a story for tomorrow. Tokenized assets are growing rapidly right now, with companies like BlackRock, UBS, and others bringing tokenized real-world assets to the web, covering government securities, commodities, real estate, private equity, and more. For example, BlackRock has a $578 million tokenized Treasury fund and is looking to do more. We think tokenized fund assets will triple next year, and Ethereum is the driving force behind it.

Why Ethereum?

To paraphrase an old saying: you can’t get fired for building on Ethereum.

Ethereum is the most battle-tested, secure, and decentralized smart contract platform. Since its founding in 2015, it has become a leader in decentralized applications, smart contracts, and tokenization. It currently dominates the tokenized asset market with 81%, and its long track record and large network of distributed validators give asset managers confidence in its security and reliability when moving assets on-chain.

Here’s the thing: It’s hard to overstate how big the RWA market is. Real-world assets are worth about $100 trillion globally. It will take time (perhaps decades) for most of those assets to move to a tokenized orbit. But if they do, fees on RWA-related assets could exceed $100 billion per year. That’s more than 40 times Ethereum’s $2.4 billion in total fees so far this year. With an incoming pro-crypto SEC expected to provide the regulatory clarity needed to accelerate tokenization, investors who bet on Ethereum now could be handsomely rewarded for some time to come.

This is just one of the many reasons why we believe 2025 is the year Ethereum returns to its prime.