6 min readBitcoin may have gained the greatest traction as a cryptocurrency, but Ethereum has helped to drive a significant part of the innovation in the digital space by introducing greater functionality to blockchain technology. It’s the foundation of a new digital economy, where money, ownership, and services run on open networks rather than banks, corporations, or governments. Others have followed in its wake, but Ethereum has capitalised on its first-mover advantage to establish itself as the second-biggest blockchain, with a market capitalisation of €444B (as of September 2025). So what has fuelled the protocol’s success to date?
Programmable finance
The main source of Ethereum’s innovation is smart contracts, programs that automatically execute when preconditions are met. These are the building blocks of decentralised applications (dApps), letting people interact directly without banks, brokers, or payment processors in the middle.
This kind of disintermediation goes far beyond convenience:
Payments, transfers and remittances: anyone with a digital wallet (available through a simple smartphone) can send value under the form of digital assets across the globe instantly, at a fraction of the costs billed by traditional money transfer companies. And there is no need to wait for banking hours.
Credits: applications such as Aave, Compound or Morpho let you borrow against your crypto holdings or lend your funds to earn interest, without paperwork or credit score required.
Trading and investing: platforms such as Uniswap or OpenSea allow users to swap assets or purchase collectibles 24/7, without intermediaries.
This type of usage, already significant (in August 2025, the volume of transactions on Ethereum network reached $320 billion, according to The Block), is set to increase over time as tokenisation of assets is gaining traction: tokenisation is the process of turning financial assets (debt, securities, or even real estate) or commodities (like precious metals) into digital representations (tokens) tradable on-chain. Stablecoins such as USDT or USDC (instances of crypto-dollars) were the first step in this trend, tokenised gold (Paxos’ PAXG, Tether’s XAUT) have followed, and other securities are expected.
McKinsey projects that tokenised real-world assets (RWAs) could be worth €1.7T by 2030. Tom Lee, managing partner at Fundstrat Global Advisors, believes Ethereum’s head start in tokenisation makes it “the preferred choice for Wall Street. ”Indeed, platforms like Robinhood already let users purchase tokenised stocks on blockchain, a glimpse of how mainstream this could become.
Owning a stake in the new Internet
Ethereum isn’t only about using apps — it also allows you to own a piece of the infrastructure itself.The old internet (dubbed as Web2) is dominated by a handful of centralised platforms that monetise user data. Ethereum, by contrast, is designed to distribute ownership and governance across its community. Holding ETH, the network’s native token, means holding the “fuel” that powers the system. And through staking (the mechanism that secures its blockchain), anyone can contribute to network security and earn rewards in return.
By helping to keep the system secure, one receives a reward (between 3% and 6%) for doing so. Although the native method requires a high minimum stake (the ETH equivalent of nearly €120K as of September 2025), many services providers make staking accessible with just a few clicks, and no minimum. This opens participation to everyday investors, not just large players.
In practical terms, this means individuals can now benefit from the growth of a global financial and communication infrastructure used by corporations, asset managers, gaming studios, and cultural platforms.
The ground where cities are built
Ethereum’s base layer currently processes about 20 transactions per second (TPS). That’s modest compared to global demand. This is why layer-2 (L2) networks emerged. The first wave, such as Arbitrum, Optimism, and Polygon, have addressed this issue by handling transactions on their networks and then settling them back to Ethereum. Today, these networks collectively process more than ten times Ethereum’s own throughput.
But the story has shifted. What began as a technical fix for scalability has become a broader movement: corporations and institutions have begun launching their own secondary networks built on Ethereum to run specific activities:
Coinbase’s Base powers decentralised finance (DeFi) activity.
Sony’s Soneium develops gaming and collectible projects.
Worldcoin, co-created by OpenAI’s Sam Altman, uses Ethereum as the anchor for identity verification.
Ethereum has become the foundational settlement layer for this expanding ecosystem. It is the ground on which these new digital “cities” are built — securing transactions, providing finality, and anchoring trust. Even as networks multiply, they still rely on Ethereum for security and finality. In this sense, Ethereum is less a competitor to other blockchains and more the anchor for a new generation of financial and consumer applications running on-chain, from payments and stablecoins to social platforms and gaming.
Why Ethereum matters
By combining programmability, settlement, and ownership, Ethereum enables an economy that is more open, efficient, and inclusive than the one dominated by today’s intermediaries. Its smart contracts have already transformed payments, lending, and trading, while its expanding role in tokenisation positions it at the heart of the shift toward digital representations of real-world assets.
For investors, Ethereum is not simply a speculative asset but a stake in this infrastructure. Holding ETH means owning the fuel that powers applications across finance, gaming, identity, and culture. Through staking, it also provides a yield-generating way to participate in securing the network itself. At the same time, the rise of layer-2 networks demonstrates that Ethereum’s influence extends well beyond its own throughput: it is the settlement layer underpinning a growing ecosystem of specialised chains, corporate initiatives, and consumer platforms.
This convergence of technology, adoption, and institutional recognition explains why Ethereum has retained its position as the second-largest blockchain by market capitalisation and why it continues to attract developers, enterprises, and investors alike. As the tokenised economy grows and more activity migrates on-chain, Ethereum’s first-mover advantage, network effects, and adaptability make it uniquely placed to capture that growth.
