A new study from analytics firm Artemis claims that Ether receives the same reputational pivot bitcoin that he experienced in the mid-2010s, but is experiencing it in a fundamentally different terminology. “To purely assess a cash flow or protocol fee lens is a category error,” writes lead author Kevin Li. “It is better understood as a rare yet productive and programmable reserve asset.
Ethereum’s path to book asset status
Li begins by addressing a long-term critique that Ethereum’s flexible monetary policy will disqualify it as a valuable repository. He models the worst-case scenario in which all ETHs exist are staked and the issuance hits its theoretical ceiling. Still, annual inflation was around 1.52% in 2025, attenuated to 0.89% by 2125, below the US dollar’s average M2 expansion since 1998, under Gold’s long-term annual supply growth rate. The paper argues that the combination of Sablin’s publication and EIP-1559 burns has already pushed net inflation to near zero.
Macro conditions provide background to the paper. Artemis points out that decades of financial expansion has eroded faith in Fiat, pushing investors into stores worthy of alternatives. The US consumer price index averaged 2.53% since 1998, but money supply is growing more than twice as fast, claiming that the gap the report claims “can hold a significant share of nominal stock market profits.” Ethereum’s adaptive monetary policy offers a disciplined alternative without sacrificing the network’s ability to pay for the balleter.
Institutional adoption is the second pillar of discussion. Over the past 12 months, JPMorgan, BlackRock and Robinhood have selected their selected Ethereum Rail (basic tier or affiliated rollup) for tokenized deposits, money market funds and equity trading prototypes, respectively. The report proves that BlackRock’s Buidl fund and JPMorgan’s upcoming JPMD deposit tokens are no longer experimenting with testnets, but building products that solve value on a large scale. “As traditional finance moves over the chain, the need to hold ETH and hold interests becomes structural rather than discretion,” writes Li.
That dynamic is displayed in on-chain data. Artemis calculates that while supply of Stablecoins and Tokenized Real World assets at Ethereum reached a record $123 billion in June, the amount of ETH trapped in validators rose to 35.5 million. The year-on-year correlation between the value of on-chain assets and the value of dyed ETH is above 88% for all major categories that companies track, reinforcing the idea that security and payment demand drives demand for native tokens.
Regulations are wildcards for staking-based value propositions and have begun to lean in Ethereum favor. On May 29, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s Corporate Finance Department issued guidance indicating that protocol-level staking, power of attorney staking, and certain management staking arrangements themselves do not constitute a securities offering. The ruling left fact-specific enforcement room, but cleared the way in which Spot-ETH ETF filers included staking clauses in S-1 amendments. Since then, some future issuers have done just that, with investors pledging both passive exposure to ETH and a share of consensus rewards.
Bitcoin competition?
The Artemis report also highlights a new “Treasury Asset Wave” that is reminiscent of MicroStrategy’s Bitcoin strategy in 2020. Currently they currently have over 730,000 ETH, or about $2.6 billion at current prices. The accumulation coincided with the period of ETH outperformance with BTC. This is an extraordinary trend in the current cycle, otherwise dominated by Bitcoin stories such as supply shocks and future US reserve holdings.
Critics say that Layer 2 networks “miss out points” on Ethereum’s fee base. Rollups expand the entire addressable market for Ethereum by running solutions and data availability while pinning the base tier without compromising your security budget. Li compares the arrangements to the Federal Reserve. “Local banks handle daily transportation, but the ultimate settlement depends on the central bank.” In that analogy, ETH is a reserve asset that guarantees finality.
This paper acknowledges that other high-throughput layer 1, particularly Solana, sucked up “meme coin speed” and microtransaction volumes. Solana has processed more transactions than Ethereum in five of the last six quarters. However, Li argues that the market for assets that require the greatest security is “orders of scale” than the market for speculative trading throughput, particularly as traditional finance tokenizes bonds, deposits and financial market funds.
Perhaps the most pointed section of the report revisits Bitcoin’s own “digital gold” story. Just as early critiques once dismissed BTC as unstable, illiquid and meaningless, today ETH faces doubts about its identity. “Bitcoin users had to justify why purely digital bearer assets could compete with gold,” writes Li. “Ethereum users need to justify why programmable, harvested, burn-limited assets can compete with Bitcoin.
Just two months after Ethereum’s long-awaited proof and the SEC’s staking guidance, the conversation on ETH has shifted from a “utility token” to something much closer to “asset bookings.” If Li’s paper applies, future debates could unfold more about whether Ethereum can capture Bitcoin’s market capitalization, and what happens when institutions treat ether not as gasoline for smart contracts, but as the basis money of an emerging on-chain economy.
At the time of pressing, ETH traded for $3,585.
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