Wall Street’s New Favorite? ETH.

PLUS: Circle teams with Mastercard to settle in USDC, and Jupiter launches lending on Solana.

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Cryptopolitan News
August 28, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 10 minutes

🏦 Wall Street can’t get enough ETH: 388K Added in Q2

Ethereum isn’t just retail’s playground anymore, it’s becoming Wall Street’s quiet favorite.

Fresh 13F filings reveal that institutional investors boosted their exposure to spot Ethereum ETFs by more than 388,000 ETH in Q2, with investment advisors now holding nearly 540,000 ETH ($1.35B). That’s almost double the exposure hedge funds hold.

Bloomberg’s James Seyffart, who broke down the filings, put it plainly: advisors are now the dominant force behind ETH ETFs, overtaking hedge funds, brokerages, and private equity.

🥇 The New ETH power players

  • Investment Advisors: 539,757 ETH ($1.35B)

  • Hedge Funds: 274,758 ETH ($687M)

  • Brokerages: 101,058 ETH ($253M)

  • Private Equity: 24,857 ETH ($62M)

  • Holding Companies: 24,238 ETH ($61M)

Meanwhile, trusts, pension funds, and banks actually sold ETH ETF shares, trimming a combined 3,116 ETH.

The biggest headline? Goldman Sachs. The bank alone scooped up 288,294 ETH ($721M) in Q2, including a single-quarter add of 160,072 ETH. Other major holders include Jane Street (76K ETH), Millennium (75K ETH), and Capula (59K ETH).

📚 Quick explainers

  • What’s a 13F? U.S. investment managers with >$100M AUM must file quarterly reports disclosing holdings. It’s a partial look into institutional portfolios.

  • Why ETH, not BTC? Staking yield (3–5%), deflationary supply, and DeFi/RWA use cases make ETH attractive beyond “digital gold.”

  • How much are we missing? Seyffart notes 13F filings cover only ~25% of ETF shares. The rest are held by entities not required to file, often retail traders.

🚀 The bigger picture

This is happening as ETH retests $4,600, up 75% over the past few weeks, and Standard Chartered calls it “undervalued.” The bank’s analysts see ETH finishing 2025 at $7,500 and hitting $25,000 by 2028.

And the timing matters: these filings cover Q2, before the real ETF inflow surge that began in July. That means the actual institutional ETH pile is almost certainly much larger today.

👉 Takeaway: For years, Bitcoin ETFs hogged the spotlight. But the data is clear: Ethereum is winning over Wall Street. From Goldman Sachs to boutique advisors, institutions are stacking ETH, not just for price action, but for yield, utility, and long-term dominance in the next phase of crypto markets.

💳 Market Watch

Stablecoins just took another step out of crypto exchanges and into the financial mainstream.

Circle, the company behind USDC, is teaming up with Mastercard and Finastra to weave stablecoins directly into the pipes of global banking and merchant payments.

On Mastercard’s side, acquirers and merchants across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa will now be able to settle transactions in USDC and Euro Coin. That’s a first for the payments giant, and it means retailers from Dubai to Dublin can get paid instantly instead of waiting days for funds to clear.

Finastra, a financial software behemoth whose systems already process $5 trillion in cross-border payments daily is bringing USDC to its Global PAYplus platform. The move lets banks in 50+ countries settle payments in USDC, even when payment instructions are written in legacy currencies like dollars, euros, or pounds.

In short: banks can adopt stablecoins without tearing up their old infrastructure.

📚 Quick explainers

  • Why it matters for merchants: Faster settlement, lower fees, and less friction than correspondent banking.

  • Why it matters for banks: A plug-and-play way to stay competitive in cross-border payments.

  • Why now: The U.S. GENIUS Act has finally given stablecoins a federal framework, clearing the runway for global adoption.

This isn’t a one-off. Circle has been busy:

📈 Chart our analyst is watching

Jupiter opens lending. Charts jump. Here’s what it means.

Jupiter, the DEX that powers most of Solana’s swaps, just switched on lending. The beta went live with 40 vaults, $16M in deposits, and $2M in incentives. Within hours, JUP popped 6% to nearly $0.50.

But this isn’t just another token pump. It’s Jupiter’s bid to become Solana’s DeFi super-app.

Until now, lending on Solana was Kamino’s game, with over $3B in liquidity. Jupiter is crashing the party with a twist: a new liquidation engine built with Fluid DeFi, designed to let traders loop loans with less risk. It also brings more assets into play from USDC and USDT to wrapped Bitcoin and liquid staking tokens like JitoSOL.

That matters because Solana DeFi itself is booming again: $11B in TVL, $12B in stablecoins, and daily fees rising across the board. By adding lending to its already dominant swap router, Jupiter is locking users deeper into its ecosystem and making JUP more useful than just another governance token.

📚 Quick explainers

  • Vaults: Lending pools where users deposit or borrow crypto.

  • Liquid staking tokens: Staked SOL that keeps earning yield while being tradable, now accepted as collateral.

  • Why it matters: This is Solana’s DeFi maturing. From memes to money markets, the infrastructure is starting to look like a real financial system.

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