The crypto markets are booming, but the most recent wave of enthusiasm isn’t just from small-time traders or dabblers curious about memecoins. Big financial institutions are leaning in. Etherealize, a startup launched in January, hopes to convince Wall Street to dive even further into crypto, and it’s raised $40 million to build out products and infrastructure on Ethereum for financial institutions.
Longtime crypto venture capitalists Electric Capital and Paradigm led the fundraising round. Vitalik Buterin, a cofounder of Ethereum, and the Ethereum Foundation, a nonprofit devoted to developing the protocol, also helped fund Etherealize with an initial grant. The raise was for equity and token warrants, Vivek Raman, CEO and cofounder of Etherealize, told Fortune.
“Now’s the time to really, really mobilize,” Raman said. “I think that we have the best window of first possible adoption that I’ve ever seen.”
Crypto comes to Wall Street
As the Trump administration ushers in a new era of pro-crypto regulation, traditional financial institutions have started to more publicly explore blockchain technology. Big banks are considering launching their own stablecoins, or cryptocurrencies pegged to underlying assets like the U.S. dollar. And asset managers are putting financial products on blockchains like Ethereum or Solana.
“The window is now,” Raman said.
The Etherealize CEO isn’t speaking just as a crypto booster—but as a veteran of traditional finance who’s spent years at Morgan Stanley, UBS, and Deutsche Bank. “There aren’t institutional builders that are willing to go through and walk through all of their processes and pain points,” he said. “I want to do that. I actually think that stuff is fun.”
In August 2024, Raman received a grant from the Ethereum cofounder Buterin and the Ethereum Foundation to talk with a swathe of Wall Street executives about if and how financial institutions wanted to use Ethereum.
“It was market discovery,” he said. “We were going in, making sure the market wanted Ethereum.”
The market spoke, and in early 2025, Raman launched Etherealize, a portmanteau of “Ethereum” and “realize,” along with Danny Ryan, a longtime Ethereum developer and researcher; Grant Hummer, another traditional finance veteran and Ethereum booster; and Zach Obront, an Ethereum security engineer.
“The regulatory pendulum can only swing so far,” Ryan said. In other words, he anticipates that there the permissive regulatory regime under Trump will eventually subside.
That’s why he, Raman, and their 14 employees are focused on onboarding as many Wall Street institutions as possible. Instead of just advocating for Ethereum, they’re building out products and infrastructure that financial institutions can use to streamline what Raman calls “Stone Age technology.”
While the Etherealize CEO declined to give specifics, he said they were focused on tokenizing, or putting in blockchain wrappers, financial assets like mortgages, credit, and other fixed-income products—among other projects.
“They trade over the phone, and they settle using fax machines, and they use wire transfers,” said Raman, in reference Wall Street traders. “If you digitize and put [assets] on a blockchain, it’s a step function of improvement.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com