Ethereum Smashes 2025 Records as Institutional FOMO Fuels July’s Meteoric Rally

Wall Street's crypto crush goes full throttle—ETH notches best monthly close this year.

The institutional pump is real

BlackRock's ETF inflows and CME's record ETH futures volumes lit the fuse. Suddenly every hedge fund manager remembers their "long-term blockchain thesis."

Retail trails the smart money—again

Main Street investors piled in after the 30% July surge. Because nothing screams "sound strategy" like chasing ATHs after the whales already took positions.

DeFi TVL spikes, layer-2 adoption soars, and Vitalik casually tweets about "phase 4" scaling. Meanwhile, Goldman Sachs quietly launches ETH collateralized loans—just in time to take credit for the next bull run they'll later call a bubble.

Garg claims ETH today is what Bitcoin was in 2019

The co-founder and general partner at Electric Capital, Avichal Garg, said ETH is today what Bitcoin was in 2019, when Bitcoin hit the 10-year milestone. His company has invested heavily in ETH for a long time, and he is surprised that it has taken nearly a decade for ETH to hit the big time.

Garg suspected ETH to have its “institutional arc” in the next four to five years, similar to what happened with bitcoin between 2019 and 2024. 

Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock, previously said ETH is an important factor in the technological transformation of financial markets. He added that Ethereum is way ahead of its competition despite its shortcomings.

Omni Network’s co-founder and CEO, Austin King, said the “value proposition” of Ethereum’s decentralization is starting to show as institutional interest in stablecoins increased.

“The North Star that Ethereum has stuck to from the very beginning was a maximally decentralized network…So much of the value that this whole technology class is providing is about removing the need to rely on other parties.”

–Austin King, co-founder and CEO of Omni Network

King pointed out that Ethereum is critical for those seeking a neutral platform on which people could operate, whether to manage hundreds of billions of dollars or trillions of dollars in assets. He mentioned that solana is an “incredible network,” but added that Ethereum’s decentralization really stood out. 

Newton believes ETH could hit $4,000

Fundstrat’s Mark Newton claimed that ETH could hit the $4,ooo mark before July ends. He asserted that current price actions showed that Ethereum is testing multi-month highs while maintaining a strong volume support. Newton believes this indicates genuine interest and buying rather than what he calls “speculative froth.”

The Director at Wincent, Paul Howard, agreed with Newton’s sentiment, arguing that ETH had “a multitude of use cases” because it was the “digital oil” powering transactions and many L2s. Howard added that ETH is re-establishing itself as an “original OG” as its recent performance mirrored that of the “heavy NFT days” when the crypto saw its last ATHs. He also pointed out that Ethereum is well-positioned with yield-returning POS validators, strong smart contracts, DeFi use cases, and a deflationary mechanism.

Tom Lee of Fundstrat Global Advisors predicted that ETH could reach 15,000, referring to the network as “Wall Street’s preferred” ecosystem infrastructure. Lee gave examples of Robinhood’s tokenization and JPMorgan’s stablecoin as evidence that Ethereum had a strong backing from traditional finance. He stressed that “unprecedented institutional adoption” was one of the key reasons ETH was skyrocketing.

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