A new report argues that ETH is a vastly underpriced asset that has become the “digital oil fueling the digital economy.”

“The Bull Case for ETH” is aimed at institutional buyers, making the case that Ethereum’s native asset is deeply underpriced and ripe for inclusion in institutional digital asset portfolios.

The report lists 21 authors, including leading Ethereum ecosystem builders and researchers such as etherfi founder Mike Silagadze, investor and researcher William Mougayar, and Etherealize’s Vivek Raman.

“One thing we noticed, as part of ongoing institutional conversations, is people know that stablecoins are on Ethereum, people know that tokenized assets are largely on Ethereum,” Raman, co-founder and CEO of Etherealize, told The Defiant in an interview: “Institutional adoption starts there, but people kind of skip over ETH the asset.”

That’s something Etherealize’s Raman thinks should change.

In the new “digital asset renaissance” going on in the United States and globally, with new rules of the road and new participants coming onboard, real adoption of crypto is happening, he argued.

“If there’s any capital and interest coming in this space, there’s probably going to be more than one stored value asset for the ecosystem,” Raman said. “And we think ETH is an excellent complement, digital oil to Bitcoin’s digital gold.”

ETH Underpins the Economy

It took 15 years for the narrative of Bitcoin as a digital gold to take hold, Raman noted to The Defiant. That’s the point of this report: Building a narrative for ETH as a complement to BTC.

It is undeniable, Raman said, that adoption of Ethereum has grown tremendously.

“Whether you measure the number of stablecoins, number of tokenized assets, the amount of institutions building infrastructure, including layer 2s — Deutsche Bank is building a layer 2,” he said. “You have Base, Ink, Soneium, etc. — there is an economy building on Ethereum.”

That tokenized asset economy is a market, Raman believes, that will grow to include hundreds of billions and even trillions of assets of all kinds.

“Those are rooted in the real world,” Raman said. “Those are rooted in jurisdictions across the globe. To trade between them and to have a layer of neutrality as participants, governments, banks go in and out of them, you need a medium of exchange. You need a reserve asset that’s neutral, and that’s where ETH’s real upside comes in.”

ETH is Underpriced

Yet with all that upside, the price of ETH — now around $2,500 — is still far lower than it was during the last bull cycle, despite current prices being a solid post-Pectra improvement after months of lagging at or below $2,000.

Arguing that we’re going to see a fundamental adoption of blockchains driven by regulatory clarity, Raman said ETH has the potential to reprice. It’s been looked at — wrongly he says — as a tech stock rather than the digital asset store of value that it is.

From a risk-reward perspective, Raman argues, ETH has a lot of potential for growth. Calling it the most secure and decentralized blockchain in the world, offering unparalleled reliability and zero downtime, he adds, Wall Street will start to realize that “it is the fundamental neutral asset across jurisdictions, across geographies, across different institutions, and it’s completely censor resistant, always up, always running.”

And having a neutral asset in a world of tokenized assets has a high and growing value, Raman says, echoing the predictions made in the report.

“In the last cycle, Bitcoin went from $10,000 to $100,000,” he said. “Well, the next best risk adjusted trade, we think, is repricing from here where ETH is now $2,600 to a lot higher.”

Citing the report, Raman told The Defiant:

This week, the amount of staked ETH hit a new all-time high, with over 34.6 million ETH locked into Ethereum’s Proof-of-Stake (PoS) system, signaling confidence in the ecosystem.