Ethereum is very much ‘the Wall Street token,’ VanEck CEO says

Jan van Eck, CEO of investment manager VanEck, told Fox News Business that Ethereum is poised to become the dominant blockchain for banks handling stablecoin transfers. He argued that financial institutions will need to adopt blockchain infrastructure within the next 12 months to process stablecoins efficiently or risk losing business to competitors that do.

Van Eck described Ethereum succinctly as "the Wall Street token," saying the key question is which platforms developers and institutions will build on. He suggested the likely winner will be Ethereum or networks that adopt Ethereum’s methodology, which he referred to as ECM.

The comments come amid growing regulatory and market momentum around payment-focused stablecoins. The U.S. House recently passed the Genius Act, which President Donald Trump signed into law last month; the legislation is the first federal law focused specifically on payment stablecoins. Meanwhile, total stablecoin supply has risen into the hundreds of billions of dollars.

Supporting the industry case, a May report from enterprise digital-asset platform Fireblocks found that a large majority of institutional respondents are exploring stablecoin use in their operations. Van Eck warned that companies and banks must enable stablecoin transactions soon or customers will find other institutions to do so.

VanEck itself offers an Ether-based exchange-traded fund, which received SEC approval in July 2024. The ETF is designed to track the price of Ether rather than hold the asset directly, and at the time of reporting the product held hundreds of millions in assets.

The remarks arrived as Ether hit a new all-time high in August, passing the $4,900 level before pulling back slightly. Market observers note that corporate treasury adoption of Ether has helped reshape the narrative around the asset, making it more familiar to traditional investors. Over the past month, corporate treasury purchases of Ether exceeded several billion dollars, according to market trackers.

Van Eck’s comments reflect a broader debate about how banks and financial-services firms will integrate digital-dollar infrastructure and whether Ethereum will be the backbone for that transition.