GuShiio.com Ethereum remains the preferred blockchain for traditional financial companies to issue RWAs and stablecoins.
Author: Christine Kim, Galaxy
Compilation: Baishui, Golden Finance
overview
There are more than 50 non-encryption companies that have built products and services on Ethereum or Ethereum L2. These companies include fashion brands such as Louis Vuitton and Adidas, as well as financial institutions such as Deutsche Bank and Paypal. These products and services clearly do not include those related to general market infrastructure such as cryptocurrency trading, custody, auditing and compliance. Instead, they are related to cryptographic dedicated infrastructure and use cases such as NFT, RWA, Web3 Developer Tools, and L2. Of the 20 financial institutions that have established dedicated crypto infrastructure and applications, 10 are banks, most of which issue RWAs on Ethereum. This report aims to highlight the early and major use cases of traditional companies and institutions using Ethereum.
preface
For the purposes of this report, the main sectors of the crypto industry can be divided into three categories:
Universal infrastructure-Companies that provide products and services related to cryptocurrency and blockchain-related that are not unique or exclusive to the crypto industry, such as universal market infrastructure (i.e. exchanges, market makers, asset management) and universal business support (i.e. banking, accounting, consulting, compliance).
Crypto Dedicated Infrastructure-Companies that provide unique and exclusive products and services to crypto. For example, this includes companies involved in mining, pledging, and building on-chain oracles that are responsible for infrastructure that is only useful in cryptographic and blockchain environments.
Cryptography use cases and applications-Companies that are building consumer applications that run in whole or in part on blockchain. For example, a decentralized exchange will automatically perform cryptocurrency transactions on the blockchain without relying on third-party intermediaries.
Rather than expanding existing suite of applications and services to support cryptocurrencies, traditional companies have gone further and innovated new products and services that can only be supported through blockchain. In addition, many of these companies (at least 55) are innovating on public blockchains such as Ethereum and Ethereum L2, such as Polygon, Arbitrum and Base.
Here is a market map of the 55 non-crypto native companies that have or are building crypto dedicated infrastructure and applications on Ethereum and Ethereum L2.
Of these 55 companies, at least 23 publish NFTs on Ethereum or Ethereum L2.
While most companies build directly on Ethereum, at least 17 companies have or are attempting to build across multiple common blockchains and Layer-2 Rollup.
RWA on Ethereum
One of the most common types of non-crypto companies in the Ethereum ecosystem is financial institutions such as banks, asset management companies, payment processors, trading platforms, and accounting firms. Of the 20 financial institutions that have been identified as having built dedicated crypto infrastructure and applications, 13 have issued RWAs on Ethereum and Ethereum L2. Types of RWA issued on the chain include government bonds issued by money market funds (such as Franklin OnChain U.S. Government Monetary Fund) and the European Investment Bank.
Ethereum is the preferred blockchain for issuing tokenized assets, and its total RWA value is almost ten times that of Stellar, the next most popular RWA blockchain. ZKsync is a Layer-2 summary built on Ethereum, and the number and total value of RWAs released on the chain are higher than Stellar. Six of the top 10 protocols issuing RWA are Ethereum or Ethereum L2.
As of February 11, 2025, the third largest tokenized fund in all blockchains is BlackRock’s Dollar Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund (BUIDL). Launched in March 2024, BUIDL provides investors with U.S. dollar returns and has the advantages of instant transparent settlement and interoperability between traditional financial markets and decentralized financial markets. Robert Mitchnick, head of digital assets at BlackRock, said in March: “Through tokenization, we expose traditional financial investment risks to the native packaging of cryptocurrencies.”
BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, partnered with tokenization platform Securitize and U.S. financial services company Bank of New York Mellon to launch BUIDL for the first time on Ethereum. Since March last year, BlackRock has expanded the fund to five additional protocols outside Ethereum, three of which are Ethereum L2.
The value of RWA released on Ethereum alone has tripled in the past year. According to rwa.xyz, more than 160 RWAs are issued on Ethereum and stored in 60,000 unique active wallet addresses. These numbers do not include stablecoins.
Although the number is small, a subset of financial institutions committed to RWA and tokenization are also developing their own stablecoins. Payment processor PayPal first launched its own dollar-pegged stablecoin PYUSD on Ethereum in August 2023. Since then, PayPal has expanded the scope of PYUSD distribution to Solana. Trading platform Robinhood, in partnership with many other crypto-native institutions such as Galaxy Digital, Kraken, Nuvei, Anchorage, Bullish and Paxos, also launched its own dollar-pegged stablecoin USDG on Ethereum in November 2024.
The total circulation supply of stablecoins on Ethereum has increased by 70% over the past year. These stablecoins vary in collateral combinations and design types, but the vast majority are dollar-pegged instruments that hold high-quality liquid assets (HQLA) as collateral. As of February 11, 2025, Ethereum accounted for more than 50% of the total stablecoin market.
Data from Galaxy Research shows that by 2025, the total supply of stablecoins will double to more than $400 billion. This year, a catalyst to accelerate the launch of new stablecoins backed by traditional financial partners is Stripe’s $1 billion acquisition of stablecoin payment platform Bridge in 2024. Regarding the acquisition, Stripe CEO Patrick Collison said: “Stabiloins are room-temperature superconductor for financial services. Thanks to stablecoins, global companies will benefit from significant improvements in speed, coverage and costs in the coming years.”
In the United States, another catalyst promoting the adoption of RWA and stablecoins is the regulatory environment. U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Commissioner Hester Peirce issued a statement on Tuesday, February 4, 2025, outlining specific priorities and themes related to the digital asset industry that the committee may address, with item nine on her list emphasizing the modernization of traditional finance through tokenization. “The working group also plans to study the intersection of cryptocurrencies with clearing house and transfer agent rules. “We will continue to work with market participants interested in tokenizing securities or otherwise using blockchain technology to modernize traditional financial markets,” the statement read.
RWA and stablecoins are native use cases for cryptocurrencies, and they are quickly finding product-market fit among traditional financial institutions. As the universal blockchain with the highest degree of decentralization, the widest coverage of native cryptocurrency users, and the longest network uptime, Ethereum is a portal used by many institutions to incubate and launch finance-focused cryptocurrency services and products.
Scalable blockchain infrastructure
Although Ethereum is a gateway for many financial institutions and non-crypto companies to leverage cryptocurrency and blockchain technology, it is not a protocol that new use cases of blockchain can extend. Compared with blockchains such as Solana, Ethereum has poor performance, slower block-out time, and higher transaction costs. Ethereum protocol developers are committed to making Ethereum the center of Layer 2 aggregation, rather than sacrificing network resilience and security for speed (a by-product of network decentralization). Huihui is a blockchain infrastructure that can inherit Ethereum’s security and expand to millions of new users.
Non-crypto companies are not only advancing crypto use cases (such as tokenization) on Ethereum, but are also investing in the infrastructure needed to support these use cases and give their audience a broader than crypto native users. Deutsche Bank, Germany’s largest bank, is working with Matter Labs, the team that built the ZKSync aggregation, to develop a new aggregation on Ethereum. Rollup, code-named Project DAMA2, is part of a broader initiative led by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) and 24 other financial institutions around the world to explore use cases for public blockchain in global finance.
Deutsche Bank L2 ‘s main motivation is to create a blockchain infrastructure that is scalable, auditable, transparent and interoperable with regulated platforms and financial services. “Organizations that want to build on-chain are choosing ZKSync to gain the ability to build in Web3 without compromise. ZKSync provides organizations with a customizable architecture to build customized solutions that achieve privacy, scalability and interoperability with other private and public blockchains,”said Alex Gluchowski, co-inventor of ZKSync, of Deutsche Bank L2 ‘s motivations.
Financial institutions such as Deutsche Bank are developing scalable blockchain infrastructure that can also be customized and comply with Ethereum’s regional regulations. However, the appeal of scalable and customizable blockchain infrastructure is not limited to financial use cases.
Japanese conglomerate Sony recently launched its own rollover on Ethereum using the OP technology stack. Their motivation to create and operate their own universal rollup was to support the broader ecosystem of gaming, finance and entertainment applications. Regarding Sony’s L2 Soneium, Jun Watanabe, chairman of Sony’s Blockchain Solutions Laboratory, said: “I think developing a comprehensive Blockchain-based Web3 solution is very important to the Sony Group, which has carried out various businesses under the tenet of ‘making the world emotional through the power of creativity and technology.’
Since Soneium’s launch, the agreement has faced strong opposition due to Sony’s oversight of on-chain activity, particularly the release of memecoin, which led to restrictions on token transfers and blacklist addresses. While the incident has raised questions about what degree of control companies should have over rollup they build on permission-free infrastructure such as Ethereum, it has also highlighted the commitment of one of the world’s largest conglomerates to find answers to these questions. Sony is investing in new digital experiences and applications on Ethereum by launching Soneium, and by launching Rollup on Ethereum, which speaks volumes about the potential value of the Ethereum blockchain space and the scalable blockchain infrastructure built on it.
Play games on Ethereum L2
NFT is the main use case for traditional companies, mainly luxury fashion brands such as Louis Vuitton and Coach, and luxury carmakers such as Porsche and Lamborghini. Most of the NFTs issued by these companies were forged between 2021 and 2023, at the peak of the NFT craze. Given the decline in NFT floor prices in the past few years, many companies will no longer actively release NFTs on Ethereum and Ethereum L2 in 2025.
The few companies that are still actively releasing NFTs on Ethereum in 2025 are doing so in the context of game development, and almost entirely on Ethereum L2, rather than Ethereum.
In July 2024, video game giant Atari deployed two classic arcade games,”Asteroids” and “Breakout”, on top of the Ethereum Optimistic Summary Base operated by Coinbase. By the end of August 2024, gamers will be able to earn rewards, cast exclusive Atari NFT and redeem physical goods on Base. A few months after Atari moved into on-chain games, in October 2024, Lamborghini announced a partnership with Web3 game company Animoca Brands to launch a digital collectibles platform called FastForWorld.
FastForWorld enables gamers to buy, sell and drive Lamborghini cars in a range of games developed by Animoca Brands, including Torque Drift 2, REVV Racing, Motorverse Hub and exclusive experiences from FastForWorld. The press release described the collaboration as “the first time Lamborghini has achieved interoperability of its iconic vehicles based on blockchain in a game.”
It was later revealed that FastForWorld’s in-game assets would be minted on Base. The first version of the platform was launched on November 7, 2024 and is still under active development, with additional extensions to the FastForWorld platform expected to be announced in 2025.
Recently, on January 7, 2025, Lotte Group, one of South Korea’s top five corporate groups, announced that it has established a deeper partnership with the Arbitrum Foundation and Offchain Labs to build Lotte’s meta-universe game platform “Caliverse” on the Ethereum Summary Arbitrum. Caliverse, already launched, allows users to shop, participate in virtual concerts and play games on its platform. “Together with the most trustworthy blockchain Arbitrum, we are excited to take the first steps in the blockchain world with Lotte Caliverse, and we will leverage Lotte’s successful history in the retail industry to provide superior products and services to more than 40 million people,” Caliverse CEO Kima Kim said of the collaboration with Arbitrum. During the 2025 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, USA, the Caliverse team announced plans to launch virtual reality and 3D movie capabilities on its platform in the first half of 2025.
Most notably, non-crypto-native companies such as Atari, Lamborghini and Lotte’s Caliverse are continuing to invest in and develop NFTs, which are developed in the context of larger on-chain gaming applications. Blockchain-based games may require frequent on-chain transactions, which can also lead to expensive fees and network congestion. For this reason, these companies are building their games on Ethereum L2 to take advantage of Ethereum’s aggregation-centric architecture.
Steven Goldfeder, co-founder and CEO of Offchain Labs, said: “Arbitrum’s blockchain is the ideal home for Caliverse, thanks to its industry-leading 250-millisecond block time that enables seamless virtual worlds and game use cases.”
conclusion
NFT and RWA are the main use cases for Ethereum among non-cryptographically native companies and institutions. Among the companies publishing NFTs in the Ethereum ecosystem, the most active company in 2025 will publish NFTs in on-chain game applications built on Ethereum L2. This highlights how the scalability benefits of L2 can help support crypto-native use cases that require frequent on-chain interactions, such as games between major retail brands and companies. Ethereum is committed to expanding its infrastructure through Rollup, which also provides early adopters of the technology in traditional finance and other industry areas with the opportunity to lead the way in non-speculative use cases of encryption by creating customizable and compliant infrastructure for these use cases. Finally, Ethereum remains the preferred blockchain for traditional financial companies to issue RWAs and stablecoins. It is expected that key partnerships and acquisitions established in 2024 will drive new progress in the adoption of stablecoins in 2025.
