Is Vitalik Buterin Planning Ethereum Makeover With Wall Street Connection?

Vitalik Buterin and the Ethereum Foundation are reportedly working on a Wall Street makeover of Ethereum, to help the Bitcoin challenger gain institutional recognition. With the successful launch of Bitcoin ETFs, BTC is already becoming Wall Street’s favorite. To accomplish a similar success for ETH, Buterin has reportedly invested in a startup that wants to market Ether as the best cryptocurrency for Wall Street.

Vitalik Buterin Invests in An Ethereum-Promoting Startup

Vivek Raman, who’s a former bond trader at Nomura Holdings and UBS Group AG, is founding Etherealize, which has received investments from Vitalik Buterin as well as the Ethereum Foundation. This new startup from Raman will market Ether (ETH) on Wall Street as one of the best cryptocurrencies, Bloomberg reported on January 23.

Although dubbed as a BTC challenger, ETH has underperformed Bitcoin to a great extent. While the BTC price surged 160% surging past $100K levels last year, ETH has gained only 40% during the same period. Apart from just Bitcoin, Ether has also underperformed other top altcoins like Solana, XRP, etc.

To recover this gap, Vitalik Buterin and the Foundation are making a push with Etherealize, with an undisclosed investment amount. Raman revealed that he and his team of eight full-time employees have started operations this month in New York.

Their focus is on promoting Ethereum to financial institutions and developing products designed to streamline the network’s usability for banks.

“If there’s any time it’s going to work, it’s right now when all the headwinds that existed in the past are now suddenly tailwinds, from regulatory to technology to Ethereum being ready to have institutional presence”.

Addressing the Recent Criticism for Ether

Ethereum is reportedly losing competition to competitors like Solana and other layer-1 blockchains. It has been the go-to choice for meme coin launches last year. Furthermore, Solana has received greater recognition after the Trump family launched their TRUMP and MELANIA meme coins on the blockchain.

The Ethereum Foundation and Vitalik Buterin have come under fire from users for not capitalizing more swiftly on the network’s first-mover advantage. In response to the criticism, Buterin addressed the concerns on X last week, pledging “significant changes” to the foundation’s structure and objective.

Raman emphasized the need for stronger advocacy for Ethereum and aims to be a prominent voice for the network on Wall Street. An early priority will be tokenization—the process of transforming traditional financial products into digital tokens that can be traded on a blockchain. He added:

Financial institutions “want safety, they want security, they want reliability, they want a track record. And the only blockchain that stood the test of time and has 10 years of operating history and some regulatory clarity is Ethereum.”

Will Ether ETFs Help in Recovery?

The launch of the Bitcoin ETFs in the US, last year in January 2024, provided a great institutional boost to the asset class. Also, with corporate players like MicroStrategy accumulating Bitcoins over the past four years, BTC has gained further global recognition. Moreover, with a greater focus on building US Bitcoin reserves, ETH has taken a backseat for investors as of now.

Unlike Bitcoin ETFs, the launch of Ether ETFs in July 2024, didn’t catch up fast. However, after Donald Trump’s victory in November 2024, inflows into spot Ethereum ETFs have picked up once again.

Currently, the net inflows across all Ether ETFs since inception stand at $2.725 billion. If the efforts from Etherealize materialize further, we can see strong demand for ETH moving ahead in 2025. However, the ETH price also needs to catch for this. While consolidating at around $3,300 levels, ETH is seeing strong whale accumulation that sets the ETH price target of $4,000.