Can ethereum reclaim 2021 highs versus bitcoin? By Investing.com

The important signal here is not the bullish ETH call itself, but the widening gap between on-chain monetization and token price. When a network’s usage and locked value stay elevated while the asset underperforms, it usually means the market is treating the token as a short-duration macro asset instead of a long-duration cash-flow proxy; that disconnect can persist, but it becomes harder to justify if stablecoin and tokenized-asset adoption keep compounding. If the cited adoption path plays out, ETH should re-rate less like a speculative beta coin and more like the reserve asset of a growing financial rail stack.

Second-order beneficiaries are not limited to ETH holders. A larger stablecoin and RWA market increases demand for infrastructure around custody, compliance, cloud, and high-throughput compute, which is where the equities angle becomes interesting: names like SMCI and APP can capture the spend if crypto activity shifts from retail trading to enterprise-grade tokenization and payments. The risk is that regulatory approval of the broader tokenization stack lags adoption expectations, creating a long period where usage grows but fee capture stays muted.

The contrarian view is that the market may already be discounting the narrative that Ethereum is the default winner in stablecoins and RWAs, while underestimating competitive leakage to faster or cheaper chains and to app-layer abstractions that reduce direct ETH capture. In that case, price may not ‘catch up’ as neatly as the fundamental charts imply, because value accrues to applications and middleware rather than the base asset. The key catalyst to watch over the next 3-9 months is whether stablecoin issuance and tokenized RWAs migrate from pilot headlines into recurring transaction growth that can be measured in fee revenue, not just TVL.