A new research from analytics firm Artemis argues that Ether is undergoing the same reputational pivot Bitcoin experienced in the mid-2010s, but on fundamentally different terms. “Evaluating ETH purely through the lens of cash flows or protocol fees is a category error,” writes lead author Kevin Li. “It is better understood as a scarce yet productive, programmable reserve asset whose value accrues through its role in securing, settling and powering an increasingly institutionalized on-chain economy.”
Macro conditions provide the backdrop for the thesis. Artemis notes that decades of monetary expansion have eroded trust in fiat and driven investors toward alternative stores of value. The US consumer-price index has averaged 2.53 percent a year since 1998, but the money supply has grown more than twice as fast, a gap the report claims “may account for a significant share of nominal equity-market gains.” Ethereum’s adaptive monetary policy, Li contends, offers a disciplined alternative without sacrificing the network’s ability to pay validators.
That dynamic is visible in on-chain data. Artemis calculates that the supply of stablecoins and tokenized real-world assets on Ethereum reached a record $123 billion in June, while the amount of ETH locked in validators climbed to 35.5 million. The year-on-year correlation between the value of on-chain assets and staked ETH exceeds 88 percent across every major category the firm tracks, reinforcing the idea that demand for security and settlement drives demand for the native token.
The Artemis report also highlights an emerging “treasury-asset wave” reminiscent of MicroStrategy’s Bitcoin strategy in 2020. Sharplink Gaming disclosed in late May that it would begin allocating corporate cash to Ether, a move followed by a cluster of smaller US and Asian public companies. Together they now hold more than 730,000 ETH, or roughly $2.6 billion at current prices. The accumulation has coincided with a period of ETH outperformance versus BTC—an unusual trend in the current cycle, which has otherwise been dominated by Bitcoin narratives such as halving supply shocks and prospective US reserve holdings.
Critics who argue that Layer 2 networks cannibalize Ethereum’s fee base “miss the point,” Li says. By off-loading execution while anchoring settlement and data availability to the base layer, roll-ups expand Ethereum’s total addressable market without eroding its security budget. Li compares the arrangement to the Federal Reserve System: “Regional banks handle day-to-day traffic, but ultimate settlement rests with the central bank.” In that analogy ETH is the reserve asset that guarantees finality.
The paper concedes that other high-throughput Layer 1s, particularly Solana, have siphoned off “meme-coin velocity” and micro-transaction volume. Solana processed more transactions than Ethereum in five of the past six quarters. Yet Li argues that the market for assets requiring maximal security is “orders of magnitude” larger than the market for speculative trading throughput, especially as traditional finance tokenizes bonds, deposits and money-market funds.
After Ethereum’s long-awaited transition to proof-of-stake and barely two months after the SEC’s staking guidance, the conversation around ETH has shifted from “utility token” to something far closer to “reserve asset.” If Li’s thesis holds, future debates may revolve less around whether Ethereum can catch Bitcoin’s market cap and more around what happens when institutions treat Ether not as gasoline for smart contracts but as the base money of the emerging on-chain economy.
At press time, ETH traded at $3,585.
