Ethereum built the highway of tokenized finance and lets traffic through almost for free. The network hosts roughly half of the world's stablecoins — $157 billion of a $315 billion market, with a chain-by-chain share that makes it the most used blockchain for stablecoins — and the largest share of tokenized assets. JPMorgan has put two money market funds on it (MONY in December 2025, JLTXX in May 2026), BlackRock its BUIDL, Crédit Agricole a MiCA-compliant euro stablecoin. The token trades around $1,900: about 62% below its August 2025 peak.
The paradox is not a mystery. Activity moved to layer 2s, which pay the base layer a fraction of what mainnet fees used to bring in: daily L1 revenue fell from nearly $40 million in early 2025 to a low of around $10 million in 2026. And the admission has come from Vitalik Buterin himself: in February he called the original L2-centric scaling vision "no longer makes sense", pushing for native rollups that bring value and security back to the base layer. More than undervalued, ETH is an asset whose value-capture mechanism was dismantled by the success of its own roadmap — and not yet reassembled.
Two opposing bets remain. Buyers bet that the next roadmap upgrades (Glamsterdam, Hegotá) pull the rollup economy back toward the base layer and that the roughly $30 billion in tokenized assets — the figure J.P. Morgan Asset Management itself cites in the JLTXX release — become trillions. That is Tom Lee's thesis: he calls ETH "grossly undervalued" and sketches a network valuation between $1 trillion and $5 trillion, remembering, however, that Lee chairs BitMine, the largest corporate ETH vehicle, with about 5.7 million tokens on its balance sheet. It is also, more prudently, Standard Chartered's thesis: the bank cut its end-2026 target by 47% (from $7,500 to $4,000) but kept its $40,000 call for 2030.
