In 1995, most serious business people thought the internet was a toy. By 2005, the ones who'd bought Amazon at $1.50 were quietly retired. I think we're sitting inside a very similar moment right now with Ethereum.
A Quick Analogy
When the internet took off, the real money wasn't made by understanding TCP/IP protocols. It was made by understanding that something big was being built, and buying a stake in the infrastructure early, before the mainstream caught on.
Amazon won because it was the most trusted, most reliable place to transact online. The same network effects that made it impossible to compete with Amazon in 2005 were quietly forming in 1998. Ethereum is playing out the same way, except this time the infrastructure isn't for e-commerce. It's for the entire global financial system.
Here's what makes me confident about that. And it comes straight from the people building it.
What Is Ethereum, Actually?
At its core, Ethereum is a global, neutral, always-on platform where financial agreements are codified, executed automatically, and can be verified by anyone without needing a bank, a lawyer, or a middleman. The internet gave us a common layer that every business, from corner shops to multinationals could build on. Nobody owns it. Everyone can use it. That's exactly what Ethereum is doing for finance. And right now, the biggest financial institutions on the planet are building on it. Here's why they chose Ethereum specifically.
Banks don't adopt the newest, flashiest technology. They adopt the thing that's been around the longest, has the most developers, and won't get them fired if something goes wrong. There's an old saying in corporate IT: nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft.
Ethereum has become that for finance.
Wall Street Is Already Moving. Most People Haven't Noticed.
Vivek Raman, a former credit trader at Morgan Stanley, UBS, Deutsche Bank and Co-Founder of Etherialize, spent twelve years on Wall Street before leaving to build institutional infrastructure for Ethereum. He's been pitching blockchain to banks since 2020.
Last year, the US passed legislation, the GENIUS Act, that put stablecoins and public blockchains into law for the first time. The legal uncertainty that kept institutions on the sidelines evaporated overnight.
What happened next? FOMO. Fast.
"It's exactly like when every bank suddenly needed an AI strategy after ChatGPT launched," Vivek said on Raoul Pal’s ‘The Journeyman’ Podcast. "Except now it's blockchain. Every bank, every asset manager, everyone wants to learn and do things in digital assets. And so when we stepped in, the demand was already there."
The Neutral Ground Problem - And Why It Matters
Here's something that doesn't get talked about enough, and it comes from someone who lived it. JP Morgan doesn't want to use Goldman's platform. Goldman doesn't want to use JP Morgan's. Nobody wants to hand a competitor a structural advantage by building on their infrastructure.
"Wall Street's got this coordination problem always in everything it does," as one insider put it bluntly. "I would suggest 80% of industry-wide initiatives to solve a particular problem fail."
This is the eternal Wall Street problem, massive egos, competing interests, zero appetite for genuine coordination. The irony is that the coordination problem is harder than the technical problem. The technology works. Getting institutions to agree on shared infrastructure is the hard part.
Ethereum solves it. Because nobody owns Ethereum. It's genuinely neutral ground. In a room full of institutional giants, that's the only table everyone will sit at. The same dynamic played out with the internet. Nobody wanted to build their business on a competitor's proprietary network. But everyone was happy to build on the open internet.
So What's The Investment Angle?
Here's where it gets interesting for you specifically.
When the internet boomed, most people couldn't buy a piece of "the internet." You could buy Amazon or Google, companies riding the wave. But the underlying infrastructure itself? Not directly ownable. With Ethereum, that's completely different.
ETH, the token that powers the Ethereum network, is directly ownable by anyone, anywhere. When you buy ETH, you own a fractional piece of the infrastructure that global finance is being built on.
Think about it this way. Something like $110 trillion of the world's $200 trillion of investable assets are managed by financial institutions. If even a fraction of that activity migrates onto Ethereum, the demand for ETH increases. The more the network is used, the more valuable the token becomes.
It's not a company with quarterly earnings you're betting on. It's more like owning a toll road that every financial transaction has to pass through, except the toll road is also a productive asset that generates yield when you stake it.
The Intersection of AI and Crypto
Here's perhaps the most striking idea I've come across in all of this. Blockchain wasn't actually built for us. "It feels like blockchain wasn't built for us," as one Ethereum insider put it. "We were the beta users. It's built for this."
The "this" he was referring to is AI agents, software that autonomously executes tasks, makes decisions, and transacts on behalf of businesses and individuals. They're coming faster than almost anyone realises.
Here's the thing about AI agents: they speak protocols natively. They don't send emails and wait for wire transfers. They need to transact with each other globally, instantly, atomically, meaning the asset and the payment move simultaneously, with no settlement risk. They need infrastructure that works at machine speed, across borders, without human intermediaries.
That infrastructure is Ethereum. And when hundreds of millions of AI agents start transacting, making micropayments, executing contracts, coordinating capital across the globe, the demand for Ethereum's network could dwarf anything the financial institutions bring on their own. The financial institutions are arriving. The AI agents are coming. The infrastructure is already built.
In 1998, you didn't need to understand how the internet worked to understand that something enormous was being built, and that the people who got in early would be rewarded.
You just needed to recognise the pattern.
The people building Ethereum's institutional infrastructure are former Wall Street credit traders and the engineers who literally built the network. They're not selling a dream. They're describing what they're already doing, with clients who are already moving.
The question isn't whether this plays out. It's whether you're positioned when it does.
The Upside Edge is a weekly briefing on crypto and AI from an investment angle, written for professionals who want to get ahead of the curve without wading through the noise.