Ethereum Crosses 10-Year Mark, Outpaces Traditional Payment Giants
Ethereum reached its 10th anniversary on July 30, 2025, without much fanfare. But behind the quiet moment is a big fact: Ethereum is now handling more money than Visa and Mastercard together. In 2024 alone, it processed over $28 trillion in stablecoin transactions. This number shows how far Ethereum has come from a small project launched in a Berlin office in 2015.
The idea started as “programmable money.” But today, Ethereum does much more. It supports a big part of the global financial system. Stablecoins, tokenized assets, and even stocks are now using Ethereum as the base. And many large firms are jumping in.
Big Firms Now Use Ethereum for Real Work
Large financial companies like JPMorgan, BlackRock, and Deutsche Bank are now using Ethereum daily. For example, BlackRock created a money market fund called BUIDL that runs on Ethereum. This lets users get their money back quickly in USDC, a stablecoin tied to the US dollar. Robinhood, a trading app, recently launched stock trading using Arbitrum, which is a tool built on top of Ethereum that works faster and cheaper.
Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong even shared how U.S. visa rules helped spark Ethereum’s birth. He said in a post that Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum’s founder, had visa issues in 2013, so he couldn’t work with Coinbase in the U.S. While staying in Canada, Vitalik worked on Ethereum instead.
Many financial leaders now prefer Ethereum not because it’s the fastest, but because it works well and rarely goes down. In fact, the network has stayed online with no major outages in its entire 10-year run.
Ethereum’s Role in Stablecoins and Asset Tokens
Ethereum is now the main highway for stablecoins like USDC. About 80% of all stablecoin transactions happen on Ethereum or Binance Smart Chain. But Ethereum stands out more because it is also used for real-world assets.
Firms like Franklin Templeton and platforms like Securitize are putting real assets, like company shares and government bonds, on the Ethereum network. These are called tokenized assets. Ethereum’s smart contract rules—like ERC-1400 and ERC-3643—make it possible to follow legal rules while doing this.
This market is still small now, worth about $12 billion. But experts believe it could grow to $18.9 trillion by 2033. That would make Ethereum even more central to global finance.
Major Upgrades Have Made Ethereum More Useful
Ethereum has not stayed the same. In 2022, it made a major change from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake. This cut down energy use by more than 99%. It also made the network more friendly for users and developers.
Ethereum has also grown in speed and efficiency thanks to “layer-two” tools. Arbitrum, Optimism, and zkSync are all built to work on top of Ethereum but process transactions faster and cheaper. Just Arbitrum alone now handles over 2.8 million transactions every day.
The value of ETH, the token that powers Ethereum, has also gone up. At the time of the anniversary, ETH was near $3,800, up almost 50% in July 2025. Experts say it could rise to $15,000 in the next five years, mostly because of more institutional interest and better rules around crypto in general.
Personal Take
Ethereum is no longer just a place for new tech ideas or small online apps. It has quietly turned into the digital base layer of modern finance. Banks and big companies now use it for real services. Ethereum may not always be fast or cheap, but people trust it. And in finance, trust is everything.
Ethereum’s biggest strength is that it keeps running and keeps growing. As more real-world use cases move on-chain, Ethereum is becoming something close to a global financial network. It’s no longer just a tool for crypto users. It’s a tool for everyone.
Sources: CNBC
