While the market is still debating whether Bitcoin can hold above $120,000, Ethereum (ETH) is visibly transforming from digital silver to an on-chain financial operating system.
On August 15, ETH's price fluctuated around $4,538, the number of active addresses on-chain exceeded 12 million, and the daily trading volume reached $77.6 billion; behind this data is a revolution that is reconstructing the global financial order.
Technological upgrades ignite a performance revolution; Ethereum's just-completed Pectra upgrade merging Prague and Electra can be seen as a moon landing plan for digital infrastructure.
Account abstraction makes it possible for users to pay Gas fees with USDC, completely saying goodbye to the nightmare of private key management.
Sharding technology reduces Layer 2 transaction costs by 80%, with TPS exceeding 100,000 transactions per second, and the daily average trading volume reaching 12 million transactions, officially surpassing the Visa network.
Verkle Tree technology compresses the storage requirements for full nodes from 786GB to 200GB, allowing ordinary smartphones to run verification nodes.
This means that the cross-shard perpetual contract trading time for the DeFi protocol dYdX V4 is reduced to 0.5 seconds, with Q2 2025 trading volume reaching $1.8 trillion, while the total locked value (TVL) of Layer 2 solutions like Arbitrum has surpassed $17.15 billion, accounting for 22% of the entire Ethereum ecosystem.
Institutional whales reshape the market landscape; BlackRock's every move is a 'wind vane' for the crypto market. As of August 14, its holdings of ETH through the Ethereum spot ETF (ETHA) have exceeded 3 million coins, valued at $11.36 billion, accounting for 2.46% of the circulation. More surprisingly, BlackRock's weekly increase of ETH is four times that of Bitcoin, sending a strong signal that institutions are viewing ETH as a composite of on-chain government bonds + digital gold.
Meanwhile, Standard Chartered Bank has raised its target price for ETH by the end of 2025 to $7,500 (originally $4,000) and predicts it will reach $25,000 by 2028. This prediction is not unfounded.
The expansion dividend of stablecoins, after the U.S. (GENIUS Act) clarifies the regulatory framework for stablecoins, 50% of stablecoin issuance chooses Ethereum.
The deflationary mechanism strengthens, after the EIP-1559 upgrade, the annual inflation rate of ETH drops to -0.5%, with the burning amount continuously exceeding the new issuance.
The technical indicators are sending a lethal bullish signal; from a trading perspective, ETH is at a once-in-a-decade explosive critical point.
Key resistance level broken: $4,300 is the 'psychological Maginot line' formed at the peak of the 2022 bull market, and after breaking through, the target points directly to the historical high of $4,878.
On-chain data resonates, with long-term holders (LTH) accounting for 67% of holdings, market selling pressure has dropped to a historical low, and the exchange's ETH balance has fallen below 15 million coins, reaching a new low since 2017.
Sentiment indicators are off the charts, the altcoin season index rises to 73, with a threshold of 75 indicating an altcoin-dominated cycle, funds are clearly rotating from Bitcoin to ETH, and the open interest (OI) in the options market exceeds $20 billion, with call options accounting for 62%.
At this crossroads where risk and opportunity coexist, despite a bright outlook, the market still needs to be wary of two major black swan events.
The Damocles sword of the Federal Reserve, August CPI data shows core inflation rebounded by 0.28% month-on-month; if interest rates are raised in November, it could trigger a short-term liquidity crisis.
Solana's dimensional reduction impact, Solana's Firedancer client pushes TPS to the million level, with its on-chain meme coin trading volume accounting for 68% of the entire network, the loss of young user groups may shake ETH's 'narrative foundation.'
But from another perspective, risk itself is a catalyst for opportunity. If ETH can hold above $4,500 before the ETH Shenzhen Developer Conference on August 23, Vitalik Buterin's proposed 'AI + Blockchain' integration plan may ignite the next narrative climax.
Once it breaks the historical high of $4,878, according to the Parabolic SAR indicator, the price may soar to $6,500 within 3 months.
This time, ETH is rewriting history. When BlackRock's 3 million ETH resonates with the wisdom of global developers, and when the network after the Pectra upgrade starts to carry trillion-dollar-level real-world assets (RWA), Ethereum is no longer the 'younger brother' that needs to rely on Bitcoin. It is becoming the world's first sovereign decentralized finance—where every transaction challenges centralized dominance, and every ETH is a cornerstone of digital civilization.
Now, I want to ask you
Do you think ETH will break $7,500 by the end of 2025?
Are you more optimistic about Ethereum's technological revolution or Solana's user growth?
In the face of possible interest rate hikes by the Federal Reserve, would you choose to buy on dips or temporarily wait and see?
If you are still confused in the cryptocurrency world and don’t know how to operate, click on my avatar to follow me! This round of the bull market will see more hundredfold coins; guessing is not as good as seizing the opportunity.