Ethereum co-founder and Consensys CEO Joseph Lubin just gave ETH bulls something to chew on. In a post on X, he applauded Fundstrat’s Tom Lee on his vision for the future of finance and the expanding role of Ethereum in traditional institutions.

“Yes, ETH will likely 100x from here. Probably much more.”

Joseph Lubin agrees; Wall Street will stake on Ethereum

As a blockchain pioneer, Joseph Lubin is best known as a co-founder of Ethereum and the founder and CEO of Consensys, the largest web3 software studio. Drawing on deep roots in finance as a former Goldman Sachs VP, Lubin has been instrumental in developing Ethereum as the preeminent platform for decentralized finance and smart contracts since 2014.

Responding to Tom Lee’s bullish outlook, Lubin predicts a seismic shift in global finance: Wall Street giants will soon run validators, operate L2s and L3s, and write smart contracts to move their business infrastructure onto Ethereum rails.

JPMorgan, for example, has used Ethereum-based technology for its permissioned blockchain projects for about a decade and is joined by Goldman Sachs, Onyx, and a growing roster of major banks launching stablecoin and DeFi initiatives on Ethereum.

Since June 2025, treasury companies, including Bitmine Immersion and Sharplink Gaming, have added 2.6% of all ETH in circulation to their reserves.

When combined with inflows to new ETH ETFs, institutional buyers account for nearly 5% of Ethereum’s supply so far this year. Sharplink and Bitmine now hold over $6 billion in ETH, setting industry benchmarks for corporate adoption.

And with the approval of multiple Ethereum ETFs, asset managers like BlackRock and VanEck have invested billions into ETH for their clients, marking a tipping point in its adoption as a primary digital asset for institutional treasuries.

Why Ethereum? ‘Decentralized trust’

VanEck’s CEO recently dubbed Ethereum “Wall Street’s token,” and Lubin argues that the transformative potential of Ethereum derives from “decentralized trust,” a quality Wall Street sorely needs.

As legacy institutions migrate from fragmented, siloed infrastructure to unified decentralized rails, staking ETH becomes both a technical and economic imperative:

“Nobody on the planet can currently fathom how large and fast a rigorously decentralized economy, saturated with hybrid human-machine intelligence, operating on decentralized Ethereum Trustware, can grow.”

In his view, not only will L2s and L3s drive more usage of the Ethereum base layer, but “ETH will likely 100x from here” and eventually “flippen the Bitcoin/BTC monetary base.”

September is Ethereum’s toughest month

Ethereum’s surging momentum doesn’t come without bumps in the road. September is historically Ethereum’s toughest month, averaging a -6.42% return since 2016.

The combination of a meteoric summer rally (up 76% year-to-date, nearly 25% in August) and seasonal trends may see a pullback in the month ahead, especially as macro sentiment, monetary policy, and profit-taking could weigh on prices.

Still, bullish fundamentals remain. Net ETH inflows from institutions, the steady climb in corporate treasury holdings, rising yields from staking (~3% APY), and ongoing upgrades all point to a stronger long-term outlook, as Lubin states:

“The one quibble that I have with what Tom has been saying, and I keep telling him this: he is not nearly bullish enough.”

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Dragonfly managing partner Haseeb Qureshi revealed that the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) will not bring criminal charges against the crypto venture firm, as Tornado Cash co‑founder Roman Storm’s federal trial in Manhattan neared its conclusion.

Qureshi, whose investment firm backed several blockchain startups, wrote on social media that federal prosecutor Nathan Rehn told the court July 28 that neither Dragonfly nor its principals were targets of the department’s investigation.

He called the public clarification “unprecedented” and “a clear violation of DOJ policy,” citing the Justice Department’s usual practice of keeping target information confidential. The development comes days after Qureshi publicly denounced the DOJ over targeting the firm for backing Tornado Cash in 2020 as part of Storm’s trial.

Storm, who co‑founded Tornado Cash in 2019 as an open‑source protocol to anonymize cryptocurrency transactions, is charged with laundering more than $1 billion and violating U.S. sanctions against North Korea’s Lazarus Group.

The trial, which began July 14 in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, has heard testimony from blockchain tracing experts and former Tornado Cash users. Closing arguments are expected later this week.

Tornado Cash was added to the U.S. Treasury Department’s sanctions list in August 2022, marking the first time a software protocol faced such action. Prosecutors allege Storm personally approved transactions for illicit actors, while defense attorneys argue that the protocol’s code, not its creator, should be judged.

Dragonfly invested in Tornado Cash in 2020 after obtaining an outside legal opinion that the mixer complied with U.S. anti‑money‑laundering guidance issued by the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN).

The outcome of Storm’s case could reshape how open‑source developers are held accountable for user activity. If convicted, Storm faces up to 45 years in prison, a sentence that critics warn could chill innovation in privacy‑enhancing tools.

Qureshi wrote:

“With that behind us, the focus should remain on Roman Storm’s trial, which is now nearing closing arguments as soon as this week. Its outcome will have massive implications for open-source software and privacy rights in America.”

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Ripple’s executive chairman Chris Larsen has accelerated his long-running distribution of personal XRP, moving the equivalent of roughly $200 million since 17 July, according to public ledger data highlighted by on-chain investigator ZachXBT. “Since July 17 an address linked to Ripple co-founder Chris Larsen transferred out 50 M XRP (≈ $175 M) to four addresses. ≈ $140 M ended up at exchanges,” the pseudonymous investigator wrote on X, appending the destination addresses for the largest tranches.

Subsequent movements flagged by analysts at CryptoQuant lifted the 10-day tally to about 57 million XRP, taking dollar outflows past the $200 million mark at Thursday’s average price.

The transfers landed while XRP was retreating from last week’s local peak of $3.66. On Thursday, the token had slipped to an intraday low near $2.95, before stabilising above $3.000. Although correlation is not causation, critics seized on the timing. On-chain analyst JA Maartun told his followers that Larsen “just dumped ≈ $200 M worth of XRP in the past 10 days… You’re the exit liquidity. Think twice.”

Blockchain forensics firm Lookonchain, corroborating ZachXBT’s figures, estimates that wallets attributed to Larsen still control about 2.81 billion XRP. In a reply on X, ZachXBT confirmed that “wallets linked to Chris Larsen only have another 2.81 B+ XRP ($8.4 B) left,” signalling that even after the recent sell-down Larsen remains one of the market’s single largest potential sources of supply.

The Original Ripple “Founders Reward”

Court filings in the US Securities and Exchange Commission’s 2020 enforcement action against Ripple describe the initial allocation with rare precision. When the XRP Ledger was finalised in December 2012, its fixed supply of 100 billion tokens was divided so that 80 billion went to Ripple and 20 billion to the three founders “as compensation.” Nine billion XRP went to Larsen and nine billion to fellow co-founder Jed McCaleb; two billion went to early engineer Arthur Britto.

Brad Garlinghouse, Ripple’s current chief executive but not a founder, never received a “founders reward.” Instead, Ripple’s board granted him 500 million XRP as part of his elevation to CEO on 13 December 2016 and a further 250 million on 29 May 2019. By the time the SEC filed its complaint, 521 million of those tokens had been delivered, valued then at about $246 million.

A December 2024 Forbes deep-dive put Larsen’s fortune at $9.2 billion, noting that “roughly half is still denominated in XRP.” Jed McCaleb, who finished liquidating his “Tacostand” wallets in 2022, is listed at $2.9 billion in the April 2025 Forbes Billionaires ranking. Arthur Britto’s wealth is notoriously opaque—he eschews publicity—but if he retained his full two-billion-token grant it would be worth about $6.2 billion at current prices. No credible publication has ventured a formal estimate.

In March this year, Fox Business journalist Charles Gasparino estimated that “the net worth of Brad Garlinghouse, Ripple’s CEO, is around $10 billion, making him one of the richest people in the country.”

At press time, XRP traded at $3.11.

Featured image created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com

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Ethereum co-founder Joseph Lubin says the project’s development focus could have been behind the lag in ETH‘s price.

In a new interview with Milk Road, Lubin, the chair of SharpLink, a gaming company with an Ethereum treasury, notes that the ecosystem is focused on block space.

“The way the technology is built, it’s built out in the open with a lot of people bickering about a lot of great ideas and prioritizing them, and so that may look like there’s discord in the Ethereum ecosystem, or it just looks like we’re building and scrutinizing lots of different potential paths forward, so pretty healthy in general. When it gets to feel negative, is when price leads sentiment, so if for some reason, the price is lagging, if it’s lagging for a couple of years or three years, against big brother Bitcoin or little brother Solana, then people start to get stressed and they start pointing fingers.

So as I said before, we didn’t have as many applications as we would’ve liked to have, we didn’t have as many users as we would’ve liked to have. We had has much block space as we wanted because that was our goal, to build as much capacity as we could as fast as we could because we want to move the web onto Web3 and we want to move the entire global economy onto sounder, decentralized rails, so that they can take advantage of the much greater trust properties of Ethereum and decentralized trust in general.”

Lubin explains that the “glut” of block space and ETH led to a lack of demand. ETH accumulators are now focused on trying to “tighten up” the asset’s supply/demand dynamics, the Sharplink chair explains.

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Financial technology (Fintech) companies may move away from traditional lending services, as decentralized alternatives offer more accessible loans with smaller fees.

Decentralized finance (DeFi) lending protocols enable users to lend and borrow their cryptocurrency for passive income in a permissionless manner, via smart contracts instead of numerous financial intermediaries.

The growing efficiency and accessibility of DeFi lending protocols may inspire more fintech companies to opt for them over centralized lending alternatives, according to Merline Egalite, co-founder of Morpho, the second-largest decentralized lending protocol.

He told Cointelegraph during an exclusive interview at EthCC 2025:

“Fintechs have realized that integrating DeFi is a strategic move. If they don’t do it, they will lag behind others because fintechs are competing on the UX and the product they give to users.”

“Fintechs are realizing that DeFi can provide a higher rate,” explained Egalite, adding that DeFi adoption can help financial institutions “provide the best financial products,” in terms of lending and trading.

This will inspire the lion’s share of global fintech firms to migrate to DeFi within the next three years, he added.

Related: Chainlink reveals compliance standard, targets $100T institutional crypto flows

Morpho is the crypto industry’s second-largest lending protocol, worth over $5.5 billion in total value locked (TVL) across 20 blockchains, behind AAVE’s industry-leading $31 billion TVL, DefiLlama data shows.

DeFi loans can present an important financial lifeline for global citizens without access to traditional banking infrastructure. 

Related: Trump administration mulls ‘debanking’ executive order: WSJ

DeFi’s permissionless nature helps bypass traditional banking restrictions

Increasingly more fintech firms are recognizing the advantages of DeFi’s permissionless nature, which removes financial intermediaries and centralized risks involved in the lending and borrowing process.

Fintech using traditional banking rails still risk losing their license or Application Programming Interface (API) access, Egalite said, adding:

“So are you hooked by large banks? In DeFi, you don’t fear that because there are no intermediaries. You just trust the code itself.” 

While fintech firms already recognize these advantages, regulated yield-bearing products may inspire even more financial institutions to explore DeFi lending in the future, added Egalite.

DeFi lending rose to a new cumulative all-time high of $66.7 billion in TVL on Friday, according to DefiLlama data.

AAVE protocol’s $31.7 billion TVL currently accounts for 47% of the total DeFi lending value, while Morpho’s $5.5 billion accounts for over 8.2%.

This marked a significant recovery for crypto lending, which saw a decline starting in 2022 when centralized finance (CeFi) lenders Genesis, Celsius Network, BlockFi and Voyager filed for bankruptcy within two years as crypto valuations fell.

Magazine: Crypto-Sec: $11M Bittensor phish, UwU Lend and Curve fake news, $22M Lykke hack

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