Ethereum’s Rise: Understanding the Growing Treasury Companies and Staking Revolution

As crypto adoption grows and the industry sees more regulatory clarity, more digital assets trading products are being made available to investors.

Now Last week, crochures launched Ripple and Salon to leverage ETS here at the New York Stock Exchange.

Meanwhile yesterday, Coinbase launching crypto perpetual style features trading.

At the same time, the The tokenization market is booming as expected this year with a surge to $24 billion in the first half.

Novel assets such as artwork collectibles, real estate, and more are now on the chain.

Well, joining me here at the New York Stock Exchange to weigh in is Evan Weis, COO of Alluvial.

Well, thank you so much for joining me.

Thank you so much for having me, Remy.

Well, here we are in the second half of 2025 and what a first half it's been.

So here we are with more regulatory clarity.

There are a few hiccups last week in DC, but we're here.

So first and foremost, are you surprised to hear about the growing Ethereum treasury company?

I think it makes a ton of logical sense.

Obviously we're seeing so much mainstream adoption and a lot of discussion around Ethereum, especially as the Genesis Act went into law on Friday, and about 70% of all stable coins are built on top of Ethereum.

Additionally, as we're seeing, you know, some really exciting developments around on chain equities with companies like Robin Hood also bringing these on Ethereum, I think now is the perfect time for Ethereum to becoming mainstream individualssels through these companies.

These treasury companies, yeah, and when we take a look at the charts for the major crypto majors, then we are looking at Bitcoin up a little over 25% while it has recovered and is up about 40% year to date.

But yesterday we heard from FEC chair Paul Atkins, and he had an interesting statement where he said Ethereum is not a security and securities laws will not apply.

So what does this actually mean?

I think it's really just, you know, him clarifying what I think most people in the industry already knew, which was ET is a commodity.

It's not a security.

This was actually a key part of the SEC launching the Ethereum ETFs last summer was that ruling that the Eth would be treated as a commodity.

And so I think this is just a kind of icing on the cake and really cements Ethereum as an institutional grade commodity that is really going to be now brought to mainstream investors and for viewers out there who are watching. at the nation's airport gates right now, they may be thinking, wow, we're looking at Bitcoin as well as ET and even Alts higher as well.

So as we pay attention to this, we're seeing a lot of products coming out there.

So can you first and foremost explain what staking is and what staking ETF actually will do?

Yeah, so the really powerful part about. it doesn't need one party to approve transactions, and so you actually have a network of computers that do that.

Our first way to do this was what was called proof of work, where you would have electricity, computers, real estate, and you would put those resources into producing new blocks and validating transactions.

Ethereum moved to a new staking mechanism called proof of stake, which has now become the dominant staking mechanism where users actually can put their tokens up almost as collateral.

Lock them, confirm transactions, and if they do that correctly, they actually earn additional rewards so you can think about it as yield.

And so this has become a major lock unlock.

When I started working on this in 2019, there was about a $50 million of stakeable assets.

Today in 2025 we have about $700 billion.

So you can see the growth of this market.

It's really amazing.

I think it's showing the technology shift and really that proof of stake will be kind of the landmark consensus mechanism moving forward.

Yeah, and speaking of 2019, I understand that you have been involved in a nonprofit alliance called POSA.

So tell us about this work right now and given how far we've come since then, what regulatory clarity are you specifically paying attention to?

Yes, POSA was founded in 2019 as a consortium of industry staking partners that really wanted to work together to create regulatory clarity.

I've been very focused. on tax and and securities laws and so we worked with 30 of the largest staking companies last year to create a framework for how staking could be offered as not a security.

Obviously we saw the SEC's guidance a few months ago that clarified that it was very much in line with the research and and and we had the research we had done to bring that issue to the forefront.

Additionally, we're very focused on a lot of these tax issues, one which is going to be key to unlocking.

Ethereum ETF staking for Grantor trusts, which right now has kind of become the major hang up and why those ETFs have not started staking yet.

And finally, before I let you go, earlier this year there is focus on Petra when it comes to E, but in this ecosystem based on some of the conversations that you're having with stakeholders, what is key as we head into the second half of 2025?

I think we're going to see a lot more Ethereum treasury momentum.

You know, these treasury companies are bringing Ethereum staking to mainstream investors.

Additionally, they're able to use those staked assets as collateral and to bring them on chain.

A lot of them are doing that with liquid staking tokens, which is what we do with the liquid Collective and part of why we've seen, you know, almost 3x growth over the past two months.

And so I think that That we're going to see is a lot more utility of staked and utilizing liquid staking tokens to really bring returns that can be close to 10+% in these treasury companies, which is something very differentiated when you think about the Bitcoin treasuries.

Well, this is an exciting space to watch, so thank you so much for joining me and thank you for weighing in.

My pleasure.