However, growing institutional interest has not clearly translated into ETH market performance, a disconnect that has frustrated many investors. Raman attributes that gap largely to time.
“Sales cycles for institutions are especially long,” he said. “The pipelines are in place. We just haven’t seen all the assets on chain yet.”
He said his view is that Ethereum is currently in a transition phase where the infrastructure has already been largely built, but the scale of adoption has not yet been fully reflected in the asset itself. As more tokenized assets migrate to the chain, he believes the market will eventually reevaluate ETH’s role as an asset that secures the network.
“When you look back at the headlines, it will be: the Internet moment of the global financial system happened on Ethereum,” he said.
Raman also rejected criticism surrounding the Ethereum Foundation, which has faced scrutiny over leadership changes and its changing role in the ecosystem. He maintains that the foundation’s willingness to step back is a feature, not a flaw.
“The substratum of the financial system cannot have a party that controls it,” he stated. “The network is universal. The pieces are all already there. Let’s deliver them.”
Instead of acting as a central coordinator, Raman believes the foundation should focus on maintaining Ethereum’s core values (security, censorship resistance, privacy, and open standards) while continuing to work on long-term priorities such as zero-knowledge technology and quantum resistance.
