Ethereum’s challenge to the crypto crown
Ethereum as a digital asset “with yield”
2025 saw bitcoin’s market cap skyrocket to 1.34 trillion USD, almost doubling from last year’s low. During Q1 of 2025, ethereum’s daily transaction volume totaled more than 17.2 billion USD, outperforming bitcoin for the fourth consecutive quarter. As the year progressed, ETH, the second-largest digital currency by market capitalization, gained even more traction.
In August 2025, ETH surpassed the psychological 4,000 USD mark for the first time, as global markets had already priced in a Federal Reserve interest rate cut announced by Fed Chair Powell. Cheered by crypto bulls, this watershed moment for ETH was not surprising for institutional figures like Ryan Sean Adams, co-founder of Bankless, who had predicted ethereum’s bull run since October 2024.
Adams, who had been carefully following ethereum’s performance, came forward with a bold projection of what ETH would reach. Broken down, this would account for nearly 17,000 USD per token. This theory is underpinned by a transformative narrative of repositioning ethereum as a form of “digital gold with yield”, which is not far-fetched at all, considering its evolution over the past two quarters of 2025.
Analyzing ethereum’s fundamentals, its evolutionary path begins to unfold three years earlier. Following its merge in 2022, ETH started behaving more and more like a yield-generating asset or a deflationary commodity. The staking rewards and the fee-burning mechanism introduced through the EIP-1559 protocol were key transformative drivers. Consequently, ethereum evolved into a hybrid digital asset that possessed the same store-of-value characteristics as bitcoin, with the yield-bearing nature of US Treasuries.
This vision quickly gained traction within professional investment circles. ARK Invest, for example, likened ETH staking to “digital bonds” while others associated it with “digital silver” and even “digital oil”.
Neither of these perspectives is totally new, and each tackles key facets of the digital asset. Thanks to its robust technology underpinning DeFi projects, NFT marketplaces, alongside a plethora of other applications, ETH exceeds bitcoin’s applicability by far. Ethereum has stopped being a mere money-moving vehicle.
Therefore, it serves as both a store of value and a yielding commodity in the digital space. It’s utility-focused, offers greater liquidity, there’s no limit on ETH’s supply (whereas bitcoin will stop being mined when supply reaches 21 million coins), and it has a store-of-value characteristic that resembles that of silver.
At the same time, ethereum’s interoperability, wide-range applicability beyond finance, swift integration, and compatibility with other software replicate oil’s behavior in the digital world.
Like nations regularly refill their oil stockpiles, corporations stash up their ETH treasuries. The fact that 69 global corporations collectively hold over 4.1 million ETH (17.6 billion USD) in their reserves reinforces this hypothesis. With this in mind, whether ETH will solidify its commodity-like position remains to be determined.
