Ethereum won 175% in less than a quarter. This time the foundations have appeared

How has Ethereum continued its worst quarter with 175% rebound since 2022? Can ETFs and tokenization maintain that momentum?

Ethereum’s 175% rebound since April

Ethereum (ETH) has quietly increased one of its most powerful recovery in recent years. After falling to a low of around $1,386 in early April 2025, the second largest crypto had started to steadily rise in market value, almost doubled by early June.

The recovery continues. On July 20th, ETH violated the $3,800 mark, traded nearly $3,800 as of July 21st, recovering lost ground and returning to the level it last saw in late 2024.

In the first quarter of 2025, ETH showed its weakest quarterly performance since 2022, down nearly 12%. However, the second quarter brought a reversal, with assets increasing by about 30% compared to offsetting previous losses.

Starting from April Low, Ethereum’s total price rise is now around 175%, with the second quarter being the most successful period on record.

The upward movement of Ethereum came along with a broader market recovery, particularly the new strength of Bitcoin (BTC). Still, Ethereum’s rebounds outweigh Bitcoin in relative terms.

Understand what’s driving this rebound, what changes are coming to the Ethereum Network, and how they stack up with competing platforms.

ETF inflow and reduced supply support rallies

Ethereum gatherings from April onwards are supported by a combination of structure-driven catalysts.

One of the clearest indicators is the new capital flows to Exchange-Traded funds focused on Ethereum.

ETF behavior in June showed a sudden deviation from the attention observed in the first quarter.

The Spot ETH ETF attracted $1.13 billion that month, surpassing the influx seen in April and May. BlackRock alone reportedly added more than $500 million in ETH in just two weeks.

Network dynamics also play a role in strengthening Ethereum’s price recovery. By mid-2025, ETH numbers exceeded 35 million, effectively removing about 28% of the circulation supply from trading activities.

Currently, Validator’s contract holds approximately $96 billion at ETH, helping to tighten supply.

Furthermore, as Stubcoin regained excellence in 2025, Ethereum’s position as their primary foundation became more prominent.

Circle’s public list highlighted this relationship. The company’s stock price surged 270% in its first week, bringing attention to the USD Coin (USDC) ecosystem built primarily on Ethereum.

Meanwhile, reports from companies like Bernstein position Ethereum as the foundational architecture for tokenized money, lending markets and asset settlements, suggesting that we can grasp the growing value as adoption deepens.

Real-world asset tokenization is becoming an important part of this story. As of mid-2025, Ethereum accounted for more than 55% of the tokenized assets across the public blockchain.

Despite recent profits, Ethereum’s market capitalization is far below Bitcoin’s market capitalization. On July 21st, ETH valuation was close to $400 billion compared to Bitcoin’s $2.3 trillion.

Ethereum is built towards higher throughput

Ethereum developers continue to upgrade major protocols, and 2025 already offers major milestones in the process.

In May, core contributors implemented the “Pektra” hard fork. This was implemented in a unified release that covers both the run and the consensus layer, with a wide range of updates that integrate two separate upgrade tracks, Prague and Electra.

Pectra has introduced more than dozens of technical improvements. Among them was EIP-7702, which aimed to advance the abstraction of native accounts.

In fact, this narrows the gap between user wallets and smart contracts, offering the possibilities for a more flexible and programmable wallet design.

One notable addition is the new encryption framework, BLS12-381 PRECOPILES, which will enhance support for privacy-providing applications such as ZK-SNARKS.

This upgrade improved the staking experience through features such as triggerable exits.

Smart contract developers now have access to Ethereum Object Format (EOF), a newly designed system that helps streamline contract code and improve security.

Further improvements to Ethereum’s data “BLOB” mechanism have continued network progress towards more scalable data availability, based on previous sharding-related efforts.

Two additional upgrades, Fusaka and Glamsterdam, are already in development.

Fusaka was expected in the second half of 2025, so it will introduce Peerdas, a data sampling technique that allows nodes to more efficiently verify large amounts of blockchain data.

This forms part of the foundation of Ethereum’s long-term purpose of implementing Danksharding, a structure aimed at reducing operational complexity and supporting higher transaction throughput.

Planned as a follow-up, Gram Stardom will focus on optimizing gas costs and broader network performance improvements, particularly during heavy activity periods.

All of these upgrades fit Ethereum’s long-term roadmap. This organizes evolution into the thematic phases of surges, tragedy, and verges.

The overall goal is to ensure that more than 100,000 transactions per second can be processed through a rollup-centric model, while still maintaining decentralization and security.

Corporate strategy reflects deeper beliefs in ETH

Ether has played a greater role in the facility portfolio as public disclosures in recent months have shown a steady increase in corporate ETH accumulation. In mid-2025 alone, public companies won ETH of over $1.6 billion.

Sharplink Gaming was one of the first moves, rebuilt into an Ethereum-centric holding company under the leadership of Joe Lubin, one of the original co-founders of Ethereum.

Within a few weeks, the company had acquired around 280,000 ETH, worth more than $840 million. Rubin characterized the wave of institutional demand as permanent and compared it to an industrial vacuum that absorbs ETH from the market.

Bit Digital, a registered NASDAQ company, took a similar approach. The company shifted its focus entirely to Ethereum in June 2025, building a Treasury Department of Finance that was more than $436 million at the time of this writing.

Its CEO described Ethereum as a programmable infrastructure that supports not only financial assets but a range of real-world use cases, including staking and decentralized finance.

Several other companies have announced relevant strategies. On July 17, Bitmine Immersion reported that its Ethereum holdings exceeded $1 billion, more than tripled the $250 million raised through private placements just a week ago.

BTCS Inc., an early blockchain-focused company, has increased its ether reserve to nearly 29,000 ETH. GamesQuare, a company in the gaming sector, has committed $100 million to Ethereum accumulation as part of its broader blockchain roadmap.

The growing interest from the Finance Ministry of Finance could also be bet on price increases. Ethereum’s staking mechanism allows holders to earn an annual yield of around 4-5%, providing a return on idle capital that is not designed to match traditional Fiat reserves.

Ethereum is worth it, Solana and BNB lead the way

While Ethereum continues to lead ecosystem depth and capital concentration, other smart contract platforms are growing rapidly, each offering clear benefits of speed, cost, or user engagement.

Solana (Sol) and the BNB chain (BNB) stand out among challengers. Both attract a large user base and maintain high daily activity by focusing on high throughput and low trading fees.

From a protected on-chain perspective, Ethereum remains the dominant network. At the time of writing, it holds nearly 60% of the total amount locked across the major Defi protocols, which amounts to around $84.5 billion.

Support for this scale comes from Ethereum’s extensive ecosystem, with nearly 1,400 distributed applications on the network. In comparison, Solana supports around 230 applications.

However, activity-based metrics tell a different story. Solana has consistently processed more than 100 million transactions, and averages well over Ethereum’s daily average of 10,000 to 1.5 million.

Solana also leads in her daily active wallet, sometimes over 3 million, while Ethereum tends to range from 400,000 to 500,000.

The BNB chain shows similar momentum. After a recent infrastructure upgrade, the network records nearly 2 million users every day, generating around 115,000 blocks each day.

On certain days, the BNB chain is better than the decentralized exchanged volume of Ethereum, including one instance that registered $21.2 billion in transactions in one instance in June, compared to the typical range of $1-2 billion.

These numbers highlight the use of high frequency, but do not fully reflect economic density. Ethereum still generates higher daily fee revenue, reaching $3.24 million as of July. This suggests that users who carry out transactions of greater value will continue to support the network.

Network decentralization is also an important differentiator. Ethereum is supported by over 500,000 validators, contributing to its resilience and trust assumptions.

Solana has smaller, smaller, more demanding hardware requirements, bringing out surveillance over potential centralization risks.

The result is a fragmented but complementary market. Solana and BNB chains lead in transaction volume and retail level participation. It is often driven by applications that include Meme tokens, games, NFTs, or microscale definitions.

Meanwhile, Ethereum remains a major location for high-value financial activities and deeper liquidity. It locks out a large portion of Defi’s total value and generates higher protocol-level revenue despite low raw activity.

In the future, Ethereum’s challenge is to improve accessibility while maintaining quality that is positioned at the heart of the Web3 financial infrastructure. Has Ethereum been following the worst quarter since 2022 with 175% rebounds?

The 175% meetings on ETH since April have been one of the sharpest reversals of recent years, and are meetings that suggest that deeper beliefs are finally taking shape in this cycle.