When the Ethereum Foundation posted a thread on January 19 claiming that “Ethereum is the number one choice for financial institutions around the world” and providing 35 examples to support that claim, it went beyond standard protocol updates and developer announcements to become a hot topic.
It looks like institutional marketing. Ranked claims, stacks of curated evidence, and call-to-action funnels direct readers to a unique landing page where financial institutions can see live metrics and click “contact.”
This change in tone and structure is important because it signals something more strategic than day-to-day developer communication.
The Foundation is actively fighting to document what is happening with Ethereum while controlling the narrative about which blockchain institutions are chosen as the payment layer.
And it does so at a time when rival rails, particularly Solana, are gaining mainstream credibility with talk of institutional tokenization, while Ethereum itself is seen as slowing down.
The question is not whether the 35 stories are true. The question is why the Foundation chose this moment to package them into a narrative weapon for the public sphere, and what changed within and outside the organization to demystify its movements.
Is Ethereum communication centralized?
The most obvious internal explanation is a structural one. In 2025, the Ethereum Foundation formalized “Communications and Marketing” as an explicit management focus area and assigned it to Josh Stark as part of a broader effort to strengthen execution.
This is a shift from the Foundation’s historically decentralized and developer-centric communication posture. Making the story someone’s formal responsibility means the organization can launch a coordinated campaign towards the organization, rather than relying on ad hoc community evangelism.
The institutions portal, institutions.ethereum.org, was not compiled for the January thread. It is a fully built funnel with a data hub that displays real-time network metrics such as ETH staking, stablecoin TVL, tokenized real-world assets, DeFi TVL, layer 2 counts, and more.
Additionally, this funnel includes a library that explicitly references thought leadership and updates from the Foundation’s Enterprise Acceleration team.
The January 19th post will not serve as a standalone announcement, but rather as a top-of-funnel delivery of an already published institutional landing page. It’s the marketing infrastructure, not the developer relationship.
The story being told about Ethereum has changed.
Two external pressures made it costly to maintain silence.
First, competing institutional tokenization narratives are increasingly associated with rails other than Ethereum. R3, an enterprise blockchain consortium with major banks as customers, announced a partnership with Solana in late 2024, with a framework to bring the tokenization efforts of “big banks” to Solana’s infrastructure.
R3 continues its plans for the Solana-native “Corda Protocol” yield vault, scheduled for the first half of 2026, adding further oxygen to the “Solana Institutions” storyline.
This is a direct challenge to Ethereum’s position as the default institutional payments layer.
Additionally, Ethereum has grown by 3.72% in the tokenized real world asset (RWA) market over the past 30 days, according to data from rwa.xyz. However, Solana, BNB Chain, and Stellar recorded growth of 15.9%, 20.4%, and 35.3%, respectively, during the same period.
Although these three blockchains account for just 33% of Ethereum’s total market share, their accelerated growth rate is cause for alarm.
Second, mainstream outlets have begun to frame Ethereum as losing momentum. The Financial Times explicitly used the term “midlife crisis” to contrast Ethereum with faster, cheaper rivals and question whether the network can maintain its advantage in the face of increased competition.
This kind of framework is published in outlets read by the exact institutional decision-makers that Ethereum hopes to attract, increasing the reputational costs of silence.
In summary, foundations faced both competitive narrative pressures and reputational construction pressures. A proactive “here’s your receipt” post is easier to read as a response to the story being told about Ethereum, rather than a response to a single new development.
What 35 Stories Really Prove and Why It Matters Now
Not all 35 items carry equal weight, and treating threads as truth tables rather than press releases reveals useful nuances.
Some claims can be verified with measurable activity. Kraken has launched xStocks on Ethereum. Fidelity has launched the FDIT Tokenized Money Market Fund on its network. Amundi has tokenized the share class of its money market fund “CASH EUR”.
JP Morgan has issued deposit tokens on Base, Layer 2 of Ethereum. Société Générale’s SG-FORGE has deployed EURCV and USDCV stablecoins to DeFi protocols such as Morpho and Uniswap. Stripe has built stablecoin-based recurring billing into its payments stack.
These are actual products with issuer announcements, on-chain contracts, and in some cases disclosed volumes and assets under management.
This timing reflects a real shift in the competitive landscape for institutional adoption.
The global stablecoin market capitalization is approximately $311 billion, of which approximately $188 billion is issued on the Ethereum ecosystem on the mainnet or layer 2 blockchain.
The total distributed value of tokenized real-world assets tracked by RWA.xyz is approximately $21.66 billion.
These numbers are large enough that the question of “which chain will win over financial institutions” is no longer a niche one, but a contested issue with real economic stakes.
Ethereum holds structural advantages. That means the deepest liquidity, the most established DeFi protocol, the broadest developer ecosystem, and a multi-year head start on institutional experimentation.
However, the advantage disappears when the narrative changes.
If banks, asset managers, and fintech decision-makers begin to internalize the narrative that Solana is faster, cheaper, and aligned with institutional needs, those perceptions could become self-fulfilling as liquidity and developer interest shift.
The same thing happens if these institutions believe that Ethereum is slowing down under its own weight.
The Foundation’s response appears to directly challenge that narrative by claiming that Ethereum already serves as a liquidity layer for institutions, backed by carefully selected proof points and self-service portals through which institutions can verify and communicate claims.
This is a deliberate attempt to capture a share of the story before the perception gap becomes an adoption gap.
real signal
The Jan. 19 post is not material because it reveals a deal with a new institutional investor. This is important because it reveals that the Ethereum Foundation is now treating narrative control as a formal organizational capability, rather than as a byproduct of developer evangelism.
Publications, institutional portals, formal communication structures, and explicit funding for narrative-focused initiatives like Etherealize all point in the same direction. The Foundation determined that winning institutional adoption stories requires more than just building great infrastructure.
Engaging institutional interest also requires actively shaping how the institutions you want to attract perceive your infrastructure.
Whether that strategy works will depend less on the quality of 35’s stories and more on whether the underlying argument that Ethereum is the default institutional payments layer remains true as competitors build competing rails and mainstream outlets question Ethereum’s momentum.
The Foundation is betting that active storytelling can prevent perception from drifting away from reality. The risk is that reality itself changes while the Foundation is busy protecting its narrative.
(Tag translation) Ethereum
