Ethereum is coming for the$16 trillion mortgage market.

At least if Vivek Raman, CEO of Ethereum lobby group Etherealize, has anything to say about it.

Having spent the first year of the company’s life educating Wall Street giants on the merits of blockchain tech, Raman and his team are taking aim at tokenising an even larger slice of financial markets, such as US housing.

“Full mortgage securities, and the whole packaging and repackaging of structured products based on that makes all the sense in the world,” he told DL News.

The initiative not only comes on the back of a top US regulator opening the door to bring crypto and mortgages closer together, but also highlights how dramatically the narrative around Ethereum has shifted this year.

At the beginning of 2025, Ethereum was treated as the sick man of crypto.

While rival blockchains’ prices hit record highs, buoyed by supportive policies emerging from US President Donald Trump’s second term in the White House, Ethereum seemed unable to capture the momentum.

That’s all changed this summer.

‘The stablecoin bill really unlocks a lot because it says blockchains are now part of law.’

—  Vivek Raman, Etherealize CEO

Wall Street buy-in

Ethereum broke a new record in August, shortly after a new landmark stablecoin law paved the way for financial institutions to tap into blockchain technology.

Indeed, since Trump signed the Genius Act into law in July, a wave of banks — including Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, and Wells Fargo — and fintech firms like Stripe are exploring adding stablecoins to their portfolio.

That proved a boon for Ethereum as the vast majority of the $295 billion stablecoin supply is held on the blockchain, according to DefiLlama.

“The stablecoin bill really unlocks a lot because it says blockchains are now part of law,” Raman told DL News. “That was a major inflexion point.”

Meanwhile, Ether, the native gas token powering the $503 billion blockchain, also began to take flight.

In August, the token reached an all-time high of $4,964 as publicly listed companies, such as Joe Lubin’s venture Sharplink and Tom Lee’s Bitmine enterprise, began scooping up millions in Ether.

For Raman, this means that his and Etherealize’s mission to “onboard Wall Street” is finally paying dividends.

‘I went to all of them. Said, ‘hey, now’s the time.“’

—  Vivek Raman, Etherealize CEO

What is Etherealize?

Founded in August 2024, Etherealize has emerged as one of Ethereum’s most vocal champions on Wall Street.

The mandate, issued with a grant from Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin and the Ethereum Foundation, was simple: educate traditional financial institutions to adopt Ethereum-based products.

Initially, this meant that Raman sought to educate his former colleagues at major financial institutions, such as Morgan Stanley, UBS, Deutsche Bank, and Nomura.

Raman traded fixed-income instruments for nearly a decade before joining the crypto industry in 2021.

“I kept a really good network while I was working there,” he told DL News. “I went to all of them. Said, ‘hey, now’s the time.’”

‘Huge asset class’

Today, Ethereum hosts more than half of the $17 billion real-world asset market, comprised of onchain treasuries, credit, and stocks, according to data from rwa.xyz.

While treasuries and stocks are appearing more and more onchain, Raman says there are much larger, more niche financial instruments that still need to be tokenised, including components of the housing market.

But that means shifting gears.

These days, he says that Etherealize is also busy building products based on the feedback they gathered from chatting with financial institutions.

“The whole fixed income space of really esoteric objects, such as mortgages, is a huge design space to tokenize those natively,” he said.

Tokenising US treasuries is different from tokenising US stocks. Indeed, says Raman, every financial asset is added to the blockchain in a different manner. But the rewards are serious.

According to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, mortgages for multi-family homes in the US during the second quarter were worth more than $16 trillion alone.

“It’s a huge asset class, so it’s worth the lift,” Raman said.

That’s why he and the Etherealize engineering team, which includes former core Ethereum Researcher Danny Ryan and Ethereum security engineer Zach Obront, are also building an incubator to do precisely this.

“We’re not just going to sit idle,” Raman told DL News. “We said that we would build solutions that would allow institutions to actually onboard onto Ethereum and make their life easier.”

Housing onchain

Raman’s ambition to tokenise the mortgage market with Ethereum comes amid William Pulte, the director of the US Federal Housing Finance Agency, advocating for bringing crypto and mortgages closer together.

In June, Pulte ordered Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, two government-sponsored mortgage guarantors, to permit cryptocurrencies to be used as a criterion in assessing the risk of homebuyers.

While the statement was in line with the pro-crypto tilt of the Trump Administration, it ramped up ante a few notches.

After all, the housing market’s collapse was one of the key catalysts that triggered the global financial crash of 2008.

The sweeping tokenisation push also comes with additional privacy challenges.

“One common denominator across every single institutional asset classes, no one wants their full trade details visible,” Raman said.

He added that the industry has yet to develop a privacy tool for this type of user, adding that there’s a large market for such an offering.

“We’ve seen a lot of iterations before, but tokenised assets aren’t going to trade through Tornado Cash,” said Raman.

He referred to the privacy-preserving protocol that was sanctioned in 2022 by the Department of Justice and whose co-founder was found guilty of conspiracy of operating an unlicensed money transmitting business in August.

The DoJ lifted those sanctions in March this year.

Regulatory hurdles

To be sure, bringing financial assets – let alone the housing market – onchain still relies heavily on key changes in financial regulations.

The passage of new market structure rules in the US would accelerate that process, but bills from the House and Senate are still in limbo.

However, even as lawmakers debate provisions, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission are already providing builders in the crypto space with room to experiment before any laws are passed.

Called Project Crypto, SEC chair Paul Atkins unveiled a 160-page report in August that would move “markets from an off-chain environment to an on-chain one.”

“The SEC being very constructive is a very good tailwind,” said Raman.

And even if market structure bills don’t come into place, the CEO is unfazed.

“We’re still gonna keep doing our mission. It’s not like one bill makes or breaks it,” he said. “It’ll just slow it down.”

Liam Kelly is a Berlin-based reporter for DL News. Got a tip? Email him at liam@dlnews.com.