ETH’s moment of change: from retail investor consensus to Wall Street collusion?

When ETH broke through 3200 and the ETH/BTC exchange rate broke through 0.026, no one thought that ETH could change hands.

At the beginning of the year, ETH was like a derailed high-speed train, rising and falling off a cliff. From the end of 2024 to April 2025, the price of ETH fell from US$4,000 to US$1,500, halving again and again, underperforming BTC, SOL, and even lagging behind a bunch of meme coins.

While retail investors are wailing, KOLs are shorting, and institutions are silent, a quieter and more covert script is playing out off the stage: a classic market clean-up.

The crash is not just a pricing adjustment of ETH by the market, but more like a designed and purposeful exit and cleansing.

The price dropped from 4000 to 1500, not to prove that ETH has no value, but to allow retail investors who have held heavy positions at the high points of the bull market in the past two years to be washed out in an orderly manner.

When those who had been holding the E-Guards banner began to stop losses and flee, the buyers were no longer another group of retail investors, but more silent and disciplined funds: like a group of Wall Street suits coming in.

They did not shout about the long position of ETH on social platforms, nor did they build positions with great fanfare. Instead, they quietly bought in through fundraising from small-cap U.S. companies, market-making accounts, and structured arbitrage funds.

When everyone is asking Has the bottom been reached?, the actual position building has been completed.

Looking back, this plunge from 4000 to 1500 is not a sign of recession, but more like a handover ceremony of discourse power. Ethereum no longer belongs to KOLs or speculators.

But this time, is it really Wall Street that takes over?

Changing the market: How institutions quietly promote ETH

The story of the change of dealers had been widely circulated in the first half of the year. After the Hong Kong conference, the anecdote of the change of dealers in the Ethereum underground garage was even more popular.

At that time, most people’s evaluation of this was: leeks love to fantasize.

However, the data on the chain had already foreshadowed that from December 2024 to April 2025, Ethereums price would be in a free fall, but it was also the time when the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI) quietly turned upward.

Image source: Glassnode

HHI is an indicator to measure asset concentration. On the Ethereum chain, it represents the trend of the ownership of chips. While the price plummeted, HHI was rising rapidly, indicating that ETH was not generally sold off by the market. On the contrary, it was being concentrated from the hands of scattered retail investors to a few large investors or even institutional addresses.

From December 2024 to the present, ETHs Herfindahl Index has risen rapidly, returning to the 2018 high within 5 months, completing the chip concentration path that took the past 5 years to complete. During the same period, the price of ETH fell from US$4,000 to US$1,500, indicating that during the decline, large investors continued to collect chips, and the chips were not widely dispersed.

This concentration is conducive to market control and has also amplified the recent volatility of ETH. Although the current concentration is still far below the historical high, once the main force starts to build a position, they usually will not stop easily. It’s just that they are more likely to quietly accumulate funds rather than rush to pull the market.

This is a standard chip turnover, or to put it more directly – this is a structural shakeout.

If you look at it from an emotional perspective, it looks very much like a terminal collapse; but if you look at it from a structural perspective, it looks more like the main force re-deploying its positions: quietly accumulating shares when there is no hope, and remaining silent at the noisiest moments.

In the past, we often saw this kind of operation in A-shares, Hong Kong stocks or small-cap stocks in the US stock market, and now it appears in ETH.

Looking back, this round of decline to $1,500 was apparently a stampede by retail investors, but in fact it was a precisely controlled retreat space. The change of dealers is not necessarily completed before the start of the bull market, and sometimes it is hidden in the deep waters of the bear market. Now we realize that those who use ETF not approved, narrative collapse and ecological weakness as reasons for the market crash are actually part of a deeper script – to get the floating chips out and let the chips return to the side.

By the time we realize the change of dealers, ETH has returned to over $3,000. If you review the market now, you will understand that this position is not the end, but may be a new starting point – the turning point of ETHs wash-out has been quietly completed at $1,500.

So how did this group of institutions, which appear to be from Wall Street, quietly build momentum for ETH?

Image from 加密貨幣times

In May 2025, SharpLink Gaming ($SBET) announced that it had raised $425 million through PIPE and purchased 176,271 ETH, with a market value of over $460 million at the time.

On the day the news was announced, the stock price soared 400%, and the dual themes of financing and crypto assets set off the U.S. stock market. This was seen as the first tone of the ETH version of MSTR, and it also officially ignited the speculation logic of Wall Streets U.S. stock market exposure to ETH assets.

The surge in SBET was initially seen by the market as a small-cap stock passing the buck, but only one month later, followers emerged.

In June, BitMine Immersion Technologies ($BMNR) announced that it would raise $250 million through PIPE to purchase ETH, clearly transforming into an ETH infrastructure asset manager. After the news was released, BMNR surged for several consecutive days, becoming another ETH concept stock after SBET.

Unlike SBET, BMNR is no longer just about buying and hoarding coins, but is clearly targeting ETH staking income, on-chain cash flow and DeFi ecosystem participation. This is the first time that a traditional mining company has transformed into a long ETH with ETF-like logic, which also shows that the thinking of the banker has changed from directional betting to structural capture.

Almost at the same time, BTCS ($BTCS) did not announce how much ETH it bought in one go, but emphasized the innovativeness of the financing structure: the hybrid financing model of DeFi + TradFi. It bought not only ETH, but also an anchor asset for stablecoin liquidity.

Bit Digital ($BTBT) also quietly disclosed that it had purchased 20,000 ETH, planning to transform from a BTC mining company to an ETH staking node operator. In this rotation, some players in the BTC camp have begun to stand on the other side.

From SBET firing the first shot to BMNR, BTCS, BTBT and other US stocks and mining companies taking over in turn, the whole process took less than a month, with a fast, clear and orderly pace.

Who is the mastermind behind this long-planned change of dealers? Is it really Wall Street that picked up the bloody chips?

The man behind the “change of dealer”

Putting aside the fantasy of Wall Streets value discovery of ETH, and carefully reading the fundraising statements released by these Ethereum Strategic Reserve companies, former ETH believers may sigh:

Because there are familiar names appearing one after another: Pantera Capital, Galaxy Digital, Joseph Lubin, Peter Thiel…

It is these institutions and figures that are very familiar to the crypto circle that have packaged Ethereum to a new level of Wall Streetization through investment, technical support and publicity.

潘特拉資本

Pantera Capital is a pioneer in the field of cryptocurrency investment. In 2013, Pantera launched the first institutional investment fund in the United States dedicated to Bitcoin, and later expanded to Ethereum and other blockchain projects.

As an early angel investor in Ethereum’s initial coin offering (ICO), Pantera bet on its potential as early as Ethereum’s crowdfunding in 2014, establishing a deep connection with Ethereum.

Panteras investment portfolio also covers various projects in the DeFi field in the Ethereum ecosystem, including Uniswap, Aave, Arbitrum and other basic applications on Ethereum.

In May 2025, Pantera once again emphasized Ethereums central role in stablecoins and DeFi applications in its Blockchain Letter, calling it the backbone of the blockchain economy.

At the same time, it launched the DAT Fund, which specializes in investing in companies that use digital assets as strategic reserves (Digital Asset Treasury Companies, DATs), and called this model: a new narrative for cryptocurrency exposure using the public market.

“Digital Asset Treasury (DAT) will follow the example of MSTR by providing exposure to digital assets through a perpetual capital vehicle listed on a public stock exchange. After researching the strategy, we developed confidence in the investment thesis and made a concentrated bet.”

DAT companies invested by Pantera

Currently, Pantera is behind the top two strategic reserve companies in ETH holdings: SharpLink and Bitmine.

In May 2025, Pantera participated in SharpLinks $425 million private equity financing, investing jointly with crypto VCs such as ConsenSys, ParaFi Capital, and Galaxy Digital.

On June 30, 2025, Pantera participated in BitMines $250 million private equity financing, and Galaxy Digital and ParaFi Capital also co-invested with Pantera.

Among them, Galaxy Digital manages the ETH ETF, and ParaFi Capital, like Pantera, has invested in many Ethereum DeFi applications including Uniswap and Aave.

In addition, ParaFi has also invested in Consensys, which is the main promoter of SharpLink and a partner of Pantera for more than ten years.

共識系統

Consensys has developed important infrastructure applications for Ethereum, such as Metamask, Infura, and Linea. Its founder, Joseph Lubin, is also the co-founder of Ethereum, whose influence is no less than Vitalik.

Joseph Lubin not only holds a large amount of Ethereum, but also became the chairman of the board of directors of SharpLink after investing in it. He holds 9.9% of SBETs shares and becomes its largest public individual shareholder.

Before joining Ethereum, Joseph Lubin also worked at Goldman Sachs. He is a cross-border person between traditional finance and the crypto world.

In addition to Consensys and Pantera, which are Ethereum whales from the ICO era, another crypto giant: Founders Fund has also set its sights on the Ethereum strategic reserve track.

Founders Fund

Founders Fund was founded by Silicon Valley and crypto legend Peter Thiel and invested $200 million in cryptocurrencies in 2023, of which $100 million was used to purchase 58,824 ETH at an average price of $1,700.

Founders Fund is also an investor in many star Ethereum-based projects such as Polymarket and Ondo Finance.

Founders Fund also participated in BitMines $250 million private equity financing and holds a 9.1% stake (5,094,000 shares).

BitMine currently holds more than 163,000 ETH, worth approximately $500 million, and Founders Fund’s investment is equivalent to indirectly holding approximately 14,853 ETH through Bitmine.

Bitmine announced the appointment of Tom Lee as the new chairman of the board of directors at the same time as completing the private placement of Ethereum Strategic Reserve.

Tom Lee

Tom Lee was once a well-known market strategist on Wall Street. From 1999 to 2014, he served as the chief equity strategist of JP Morgan Chase Co. and has been ranked as a top analyst by institutional investors every year since 1998.

In 2014, Lee left JP Morgan and co-founded Fundstrat, which provides equity research and advisory services to institutional investors, pension funds, family offices and high net worth individuals.

At the same time, Lee is also a frequent guest in the financial media, frequently appearing on programs such as CNBC, Fox Business and Bloomberg to analyze the cryptocurrency and stock market sectors.

Lee has been publicly bullish on Bitcoin since 2017 and predicted that the price of Ethereum will reach $5,000-6,000 in 2024.

Now, this crypto-friendly Wall Street figure seems to have become the “new mouthpiece” of Ethereum’s strategic reserve narrative, singing the praises of ETH on mainstream financial media such as CNBC, claiming that Ethereum is the underlying architecture of stablecoins, and boldly predicting:

“When banks like Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase issue stablecoins on Ethereum, they will want to stake more Ethereum to secure them, and they will do this by building a strategic reserve of Ethereum.”

Tom Lees background in traditional finance and stock analysis, as well as his good relationship with mainstream financial media, make him very suitable for the role of calling orders for Ethereums strategic reserve.

Dovey Wan, chairman of Primitive Ventures, also expressed his positive views on Ethereum’s strategic reserve model at X:

“The Ethereum Strategic Reserve is not just a company buying ETH, it is an experiment in trust and financial architecture. SharpLink’s model (stock premium → more ETH → bigger flywheel effect) shows how Ethereum can become a bridge to institutional investment through listed companies.”

It is worth noting that Primitive Ventures had previously announced that it had invested in SharpLink.

Dovey Wan himself also serves as a member of the CoinDesk advisory board. Coindesk was acquired by Bullish on November 20, 2023. One of Bullishs investors is Founders Fund.

These highly repetitive names make the Ethereum strategic reserve narrative very different from Microstrategys spontaneous purchase of Bitcoin as an outsider company.

This is not bottom-up value discovery, but top-down repackaging.

Ethereum Core Circle Collusion

The rise of the Ethereum Strategic Reserve Company, from organization, initiation, to dissemination, every step behind it is carefully planned by Ethereum OGs and whales.

These crypto institutions and core figures not only hold a large amount of Ethereum and have complex relationships with each other, but also have invested deeply in Ethereum infrastructure and Defi-related projects.

It can be said that it was the core capital behind ETH that dominated this change of dealer with ETH strategic reserves as the narrative.

They are using traditional capital market tools to access on-chain DeFi revenues, trying to build a new flywheel for Ethereum and sell this story to the mainstream financial circle.

It is unknown whether these OG players were once the old dealers of Ethereum, but these strategic reserve companies are indeed almost buying into the new dealers of ETH.

Ethereum Strategic Reserve Company: The “New Owner” of ETH

According to data as of July 14, there are more than 50 Ethereum strategic reserve companies on the market, holding ETH with a total value of more than US$4 billion, accounting for more than 1% of the total ETH circulation.

According to data from Strategic ETH Reserve, among the top 11 institutional holdings of Ethereum, 4 are Ethereum Strategic Reserve companies.

The amount of Ethereum held by these companies accounts for more than 40% of the holdings of the top 10 institutions, more than twice the amount held by the Ethereum Foundation, and more than 9 times the amount held by the U.S. government.

The 30-day gains of these strategic reserve companies also far exceed those of established crypto projects such as Lido and exchange giants such as Coinbase.

BTCS was also announced last night to be included in the Russell Micro-Cap Index.

Does “changing dealers” change the fundamentals of ETH?

Seemingly influenced by Ethereum’s strategic reserve narrative, ETH’s trend has been unusually strong in recent days.

But have the fundamentals of Ethereum really changed?

This is the most controversial issue in this round of rotation. Supporters believe that ETH is just being killed by emotions, with a clear technical route and a stable economic model, and is heading towards the end of the global settlement layer; while bears mock it for losing vitality, users and imagination, and from DeFi to NFT to L2, it has completely stalled.

But if you take your perspective away from the emotional side, you will find that ETH’s on-chain structure and economic foundation have not collapsed. What has really changed is the way ETH is told – it is no longer an asset that is hyped up by narratives, but a financial instrument that can be used by Wall Street to generate structured returns.

From the perspective of the chain, the supply and demand structure of ETH remains solid. With the continuous implementation of EIP-1559, the supply of ETH tends to be mildly deflationary; the pledge rate has steadily increased, and more than a quarter of the circulation is locked in the main network or LRT structure, which not only provides a chassis for network security, but also makes ETH have the nature of on-chain treasury bonds.

The expansion route is clear, EIP-4844 has been launched, and the cost of Rollup continues to decline. Although the L2 developer ecosystem is not very popular, the infrastructure continues to improve.

Image from the block

But off-chain, ETHs narrators are changing. In the past few years, the subject of Ethereum has been KOL, VC, DeFi protocol, and the growth curve built by imagination and market dream rate. But since the LSD narrative was extinguished in 2024, the NFT sector was silent, and the L2 expansion was slow, the market has become tired of ETHs future story.

VCs couldn’t present new PPTs, retail investors were attracted away by memes, and Ethereum suddenly lost the reason for its price to rise.

But just when retail investors were tired of the meme Ponzi scheme and their confidence was dampened by the shipment of copycat coins, Ethereum OG replaced ETH with a microphone that conforms to traditional financial logic.

The logic behind ETHs rise has been changed to: Can it be packaged into a structured note? Can it produce an annualized 6% stable on-chain return? Can it become the treasury-like asset in the TradFi investment portfolio?

Among them, BTCSs approach is particularly typical: this veteran Web3 company in the US stock market announced in June 2025 that it will issue up to US$100 million through S-3 registration. The funds will be used to increase ETH holdings, expand node operations and on-chain revenue management.

BTCS proposed a flywheel model of DeFi + TradFi hybrid structure:

With a certain leverage ratio, use listed companies for ATM and convertible bond financing, purchase ETH, and then use ETH as a pledge base, combined with on-chain lending, node pledge income, MEV extraction, and even future linkage with the Builder ecosystem, to build a stable cash flow model.

In their hands, ETH is not a speculative target, but a financial instrument that can be discounted repeatedly and is part of the institutional financial model.

This narrative switch essentially conforms to the logic of traditional financial institutions paying the bill.

In this sense, ETH has not changed, but its audience and narrative have changed. The old consensus is withering, but the new financial pricing narrative is slowly growing.

From consensus to collusion, ETH’s script seems familiar

In the past, when we talked about ETH, we looked at technological iterations, narrative rotations, and the strength of consensus.

But today, the people who truly determine the next fate of ETH are no longer the storytellers but the people who write the structure.

After all, cryptocurrencies cannot only be about memes, Ponzi schemes, and gaming. The narrative of blockchain application value and decentralized finance must continue to be told before it can be truly discovered by mainstream financial value.

SBET, BMNR, BTCS, BTBT… Behind these US stock companies that have quietly entered the market are Ethereum’s most OG investors and whales, and they are also the players who are most familiar with the “traditional financial game”.

They know that once a digital asset can be standardized, structured, and included in a traditional investment portfolio, its price will be re去中心化金融內德。

When Joseph Lubin and Tom Lee began to be interviewed by mainstream financial media such as CNBC, they deeply tied the potential of Ethereum to the stablecoin narrative; when Pantera and Peter Theil began to disclose their Ethereum strategic reserve holdings:

Crypto giants and Ethereum whales are selling Ethereum’s “new story” to Wall Street and more traditional financial institutions.

Looking back, the process of Ethereum’s “changing dealers” is actually very typical: emotional panic, retail investors fleeing, and then the main players using PIPE financing, “on-chain staking income model” and “secondary market speculation in US stocks” to take over and build positions.

This is not a native Web3 story, but a reproduction of a familiar TradFi script: channelizing assets, structuring narratives, and commoditizing volatility.

ETH is also changing from a consensus asset to a collusion asset. Consensus is the self-identification of retail investors in the community, while collusion is the silent handover of institutions behind structured transactions.

All of these are signs that the main force has started to control the market after completing the position change.

Eventually we will find that the underlying structure of ETH has not changed, the chain is still running, the code is still being updated, and the largest holdings are still held by the same group of people. But who is talking about it, who is matching it, the narrative that drives ETH up, and the audience it is targeting have changed.

The mask is worn by the face of Wall Street, but the ones manipulating the market are still the familiar old sickles.

This article is sourced from the internet: ETH’s moment of change: from retail investor consensus to Wall Street collusion?

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