Healthy alternative to the Ethereum Foundation? Buterin-backed Etherealize raised $40 million

On Sep. 2, 2025, the Ethereum Foundation announced yet another sale of 10,000 ETH at roughly $43,000,000. The next day after this announcement, another organization busy in driving Ethereum adoption, Etherealize, announced it raised $40,000,000. The money will be used to materialize Etherealize’s plan to tokenize Wall Street using Ethereum. Will EF have a competitor in Etherealize?

What is Etherealize?

Etherealize promotes itself as a business development arm of Ethereum. Etherealize was founded in January 2025 with a grant from Vitalik Buterin and the Ethereum Foundation. The company CEO and co-founder is a Wall Street veteran, Vivek Raman. 

Etherealize’s main goal is to widen Ethereum adoption through attracting institutional money. The company provides educational content on Ethereum. Another occupation of Etherealize is building apps on the Ethereum blockchain. All of these are mainly aimed at institutional adoption of Ethereum. The company emphasizes Ethereum’s role as a reserve currency in the digital asset economy and a “digital oil.”

In several months, Etherealize made connections with the Securities and Exchange Commission, White House Crypto Council, and U.S. Treasury. As the startup raised $40 million donated by Paradigm, Electric Capital, and others, it will move to a new mission: “merging Wall Street with Ethereum.” The company is planning to tokenize several multi-trillion asset classes and provide them with infrastructure via Ethereum. Another goal is providing Wall Street with settlement applications and “bringing utility to tokenized assets.” On top of it, Etherealize will be focusing on maintaining a privacy environment for tokenized assets. The latter goal will be achieved via building a zero-knowledge settlement infrastructure.

Is Etherealize an Ethereum Foundation competitor?

From the very beginning, Etherealize posed itself not as a competitor of the Ethereum Foundation but rather as a company that helps the Foundation widen Ethereum’s outreach. As Etherealize put it in the introductory post on X:

“…navigating regulation, staying decentralized, and doing cutting-edge [research and development] to future-proof Ethereum

The [Ethereum Foundation] cannot – and should not – do it all

We’re here to help.”

The help was truly needed in early 2025. The public trust in the Ethereum Foundation and Ethereum itself had severely eroded by that time. The foundation was created in 2014 by Buterin, Jeffrey Wilcke, and Gavin Wood. Lately, the EF has been under fire due to the constant sales of ETH it holds. These sales decrease the ETH price, causing pain to the Ethereum community itself and making people angry. The recent 10,000 ETH sale announcement drew similar criticisms. More than that, the organization is criticized for decisions made behind closed doors.

Additionally, the community is angered by the fact that EF doesn’t use Ethereum to get money. Rather, it just sells ETH on the open market, plaguing the asset’s price. The foundation uses cash from these sales for grants, development, and research. Not every Ethereum supporter believes these researches are really needed. 

One of the signs of Ethereum’s decline was the triumph of Solana as the primary blockchain for memecoins. Between Dec. 8, 2024, and Apr. 8, 2025, ETH lost over 60% of its price, going from $4,000 to below $1,500. In May, it enjoyed a powerful gain while staying pretty volatile. Those were side organizations, not directly connected with Ethereum, that “saved” the famous blockchain.

ETH summer 2025 rally

Ether’s curse was defeated in the summer of 2025. It brought Ethereum to new highs and made it kind of “cool again.” Over half of all stablecoin trading volume is processed via Ethereum. The GENIUS Act’s likely passage encouraged big investors to hurry and occupy front seats before the bill was signed, as it was the right moment to invest in ETH while it’s still relatively cheap. Ether ETFs’ inflows began to grow, quickly outpacing Bitcoin ETFs.

Ethereum treasury companies, Bitmine Immersion Technologies, and SharpLink Gaming, became the first to buy billions worth of ETH in just a few months. Instead of competing with Strategy, they decided to become the leaders of Ethereum treasury companies. As Bitmine’s Tom Lee said, in the crypto treasury company sector, “scale is critical,” so he decided to go full on Ether. Soon, Bitmine became the leading Ethereum treasury. Lee aims to acquire up to 5% of the Ethereum market cap. As of September 4, the company owns over $1.86 million in ETH, which is over 1.5% of the Ether total supply.

At the end of August, FT reported that the European Central Bank is considering Ethereum as the basis for the digital Euro. Around the same time, the Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell “hinted” at possible rate cuts in September. These two news items moved the ETH price higher. Now, when another strong independent entity backs EF’s activity, Ethereum may get a powerful boost.