Ethereum To Hit $15,000 In 2026 As ‘Wall Street’s Default Chain’: Vivek Raman

Ethereum could reprice to $15,000 in 2026 as traditional finance accelerates into tokenization, stablecoins, and bespoke Layer 2 blockchains built on Ethereum, according to Vivek Raman, CEO and co-founder of Etherealize.

Raman’s core claim is that tokenization is moving from proof-of-concept into scaled product deployment, with Ethereum increasingly serving as the base layer institutions choose when the assets are high value and the operational requirements are strict. He describes tokenization as a business-process upgrade that collapses assets, data, and payments onto shared infrastructure, and he leaned heavily on the idea that once institutions experience the efficiencies, they will not revert.

“Tokenization upgrades entire business processes by digitizing assets, data, and payments onto the same infrastructure,” Raman wrote. “Assets (like stocks, bonds, real estate) and money will be able to move at the speed of the Internet. This is an obvious upgrade to the financial system that should have happened decades ago; public global blockchains like Ethereum enable this today.”

As a near-term datapoint, Raman highlighted SoFi’s reported launch of a bank-issued stablecoin, SoFiUSD, on a “public, permissionless blockchain,” adding that the bank chose Ethereum. He suggested this is the start of a broader wave where investment banks, neobanks, and fintechs explore stablecoin issuance—either solo or via consortium structures—inside a single public-chain ecosystem to maximize network effects.

A major part of Raman’s thesis hinges on the idea that institutions will not converge on a single chain, but will converge on a single interconnected network, Ethereum plus its Layer 2 ecosystem. He argued that L2s provide customization by jurisdiction and customer base while inheriting Ethereum’s security and liquidity, and he described L2 economics as unusually attractive for operators, citing “90+% profit margins” as a reason businesses will want their own chains.

Raman also argued ETH is emerging as an institutional treasury asset alongside bitcoin, describing BTC as “digital gold” and ETH as “digital oil”, a productive store of value tied to ecosystem economic activity.

Those dynamics underpin his 2026 “5x” forecast set: tokenized assets rising to nearly $100 billion (from an estimated $18 billion after growing from ~$6 billion in 2025, with “66%…on Ethereum and its L2s”), stablecoin market cap expanding to $1.5 trillion (from $308 billion), and ETH appreciating 5x to $15,000—an implied $2 trillion market cap in his framing.

At press time, ETH traded at $3,227.