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Milana Valmont, co-founder of Valmont Group, a digital asset and market structure advisory firm, argued that Ethereum’s most significant shift occurred while much of the crypto market focused on falling prices.
Valmont said institutions initially tried to build on private and permissioned blockchains, comparing the approach to how enterprises built intranets before the public internet took over. She argued the outcome was consistent: liquidity fragmented, standards diverged, and network effects failed to fully materialize.
In her view, public blockchains addressed these problems. However, institutions needed more than performance. They required security, neutrality, and proof that the system could operate under real stress with real money involved. Valmont said Ethereum is the only programmable blockchain that has demonstrated those qualities across a full market cycle.
Valmont also pointed to the approval of Ethereum exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and the resolution of proof-of-stake investigations as factors that reduced a major barrier for institutional capital.
“Capital does not move until uncertainty is reduced to an acceptable level,” she said. Once that uncertainty was addressed, she argued, tokenization on public blockchains moved from experimentation toward competitiveness.
Valmont described Ethereum less as a standalone asset and more as “financial middleware”—a neutral base layer where different institutions, protocols, and products can operate without a single entity running the system.
She outlined a progression: stablecoins demonstrated the model, tokenized treasuries validated it, and funds are now connecting traditional asset management with blockchain-based settlement.
Valmont cited market concentration in decentralized finance (DeFi), saying Ethereum holds around 68% of all DeFi total value locked.
She also referenced a recent move by BlackRock: the firm listed its $2.2 billion BUIDL tokenized Treasury fund on Uniswap and bought UNI tokens. Valmont characterized this as the world’s largest asset manager stepping directly into DeFi infrastructure built on Ethereum.
Valmont concluded that infrastructure shifts often do not announce themselves loudly, instead occurring quietly and then becoming apparent all at once.
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