[DigitalToday reporter Jinju Hong] Etherealize co-founders Vivek Raman and Danny Ryan said Ethereum is securing an advantage in an "institutional competition" to modernise the global financial system.

On Jan. 16, blockchain media outlet CoinDesk reported that Raman recently appeared on CoinDesk's market outlook programme and said that despite rising interest in alternative blockchains such as Solana, global financial institutions including BlackRock, Fidelity and JPMorgan are still choosing Ethereum as the foundation for on-chain strategies.

Ryan also stressed that "institutions don't want to build a meme coin casino" and said they are trying to redesign financial markets from first principles and need proven infrastructure. He said Ethereum has established an "institutional precedent" through near-100 percent uptime, the absence of counterparty risk and its status as the oldest smart contract platform.

The two founders said changes in the U.S. regulatory environment are accelerating Ethereum adoption. With market structure legislation, the Clarity bill, delayed, they assessed the GENIUS bill as a decisive turning point because it legalises the use of public blockchains for stablecoins.

Raman said the GENIUS bill signalled to banks and broker-dealers that using blockchain infrastructure is no longer a risky gamble and compared it to "letting the genie out of the bottle". The legislation allows traditional financial institutions to move tokenised money market funds and real-world assets worth billions of dollars onto Ethereum without waiting for a full overhaul of market structure.

Examples are also emerging. The world's largest asset manager BlackRock's tokenised fund, BUIDL, started on Ethereum and expanded to Solana, Polygon and Arbitrum, and its assets under management have now surpassed $2 billion. JPMorgan Chase also announced it launched an Ethereum-based tokenised money market fund last December with an investment of about $100 million.

The two also offered a strongly optimistic outlook. Raman said Ethereum's market capitalisation could be re-rated from hundreds of billions of dollars to trillions of dollars and that its price could reach $15,000 by the end of 2026. Ethereum is currently trading around $3,200.

He cited a fivefold expansion in the stablecoin and real-world asset market and Ethereum's rise as a productive store of value similar to bitcoin. Raman added that "Ethereum is the infrastructure of civilisation" and that even with a market capitalisation of $2 trillion it would still be smaller than major global technology companies.

Asked about concerns over whether Ethereum can handle large capital inflows, Ryan said Ethereum is already ready for "game time". He said recent protocol upgrades and layer-2 scaling solutions have significantly improved the gas limit and data availability.

Privacy was also singled out as a key task. Ryan said, "We are solving the privacy issues institutions require by using zero-knowledge proofs," and added that Ethereum is currently developing a ZK-based stack with institutions to enable private transactions and confidential market interactions on a public blockchain.