Milana Valmont, Co-founder of Valmont Group, a digital asset and market structure advisory firm, argued in a recent post that Ethereum’s biggest shift happened while most of crypto was busy watching its price fall.
According to Valmont, while traders spent years comparing ETH to faster chains and calling it dead, Ethereum moved in a different direction. Away from speculation and toward infrastructure.
Valmont noted that institutions first tried building on private and permissioned blockchains. She compared this to how enterprises built intranets before the public internet took over. The result was the same every time.
“Liquidity fragmented. Standards diverged. Network effects never fully materialized,” she wrote.
Public blockchains fixed these issues. But institutions needed more than speed. They needed security, neutrality, and a track record under real stress with real money on the line. According to Valmont, Ethereum is the only programmable blockchain that has proven all three across a full market cycle.
Valmont said the approval of Ethereum ETFs and the resolution of proof-of-stake investigations removed a major barrier for institutional money.
“Capital does not move until uncertainty is reduced to an acceptable level,” she stated.
Once that cleared, tokenization on public blockchains went from experimental to competitive.
Valmont described Ethereum not as a standalone asset but as “financial middleware.” A neutral base layer where different institutions, protocols, and products can operate without one entity running the system.
She laid out the progression: stablecoins proved the model. Tokenized treasuries confirmed it. Funds are now connecting traditional asset management with blockchain-based settlement.
Ethereum currently holds around 68% of all DeFi total value locked. And just yesterday, BlackRock listed its $2.2 billion BUIDL tokenized Treasury fund on Uniswap and bought UNI tokens. That marks the world’s largest asset manager stepping directly into DeFi infrastructure built on Ethereum.
As Valmont put it, “Infrastructure shifts rarely announce themselves loudly. They tend to happen quietly and then all at once.”
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