Tom Lee, founder of Fundstrat Global Advisors, posted on X on July 2, explicitly praising the Ethereum Foundation for its careful handling of financial infrastructure, economics, and the role of neutral blockchains in policy markets. He noted that the EF is moving beyond pure tech development to simultaneously build financial rails.
Ethereum Foundation Pivots to Finance and Policy Dual Track
In his tweet, Lee highlighted that governments and policymakers are increasingly treating financial infrastructure, economics, and neutral blockchains like Ethereum as core topics. He singled out two key areas: on-chain financial infrastructure — clearing, settlement, and liquidity channels — and the economics of neutral blockchain as a public utility, where trust in decentralized infrastructure is being built by policymakers.
This suggests Ethereum's ecosystem is shifting from a purely tech-driven approach to a dual strategy combining finance and policy. Market data backs up this thesis.
Institutional Money Flows Into ETH
Around the time of Lee's post, institutional flows into Ethereum intensified. On July 1, BlackRock transferred 20,598 ETH (worth about $32.39 million) and 3,625 BTC to Coinbase, with expectations of further transfers. On July 2, on-chain data showed a whale opening a 20x leveraged long position on 22,000 ETH, valued at $35.37 million.
These moves align with Lee's 'financial infrastructure' logic — institutions are no longer just holding tokens but using Ethereum's on-chain facilities for capital deployment and trading. BlackRock's transfer and the whale's high-leverage long both point to the maturity of Ethereum's settlement layer.