Yet the growing institutional interest has not translated neatly into ETH’s market performance, a disconnect that has frustrated many investors. Raman attributes that gap largely to timing.

“The sales cycles for institutions are especially long,” he said. “The piping is all in place. We just haven’t seen all the assets come onchain yet.”

He said his view is that Ethereum is currently in a transitional phase where the infrastructure has largely been built, but the scale of adoption has yet to be fully reflected in the asset itself. As more tokenized assets migrate onchain, he believes the market will eventually reevaluate ETH’s role as the asset securing the network.

“When you look at the headlines in retrospect, it’ll be: the global…