Written by: Biteye Chinese
Recently, the price of ETH has approached historical highs, with strong upward momentum and institutional funds accelerating their inflow.
Against this backdrop, multiple Ethereum ecosystem tokens have frequently announced positive news. In this article, we select 12 Alpha tokens to interpret their latest developments and bullish reasons.
1/12 $BMNR
Under the leadership of Tom Lee, the US-listed company BitMine Immersion (NYSE: BMNR) has accumulated 1.2 million ETH, worth $5.03 billion, making it the largest holder of ETH in the world. Furthermore, the company plans to continue buying ETH, aiming to acquire 5% of the global ETH supply, and plans to use the ETH it holds for staking to earn returns. Therefore, BMNR is undoubtedly one of the strong vehicles for betting on Ethereum.
BMNR's aggressive coin-hoarding strategy has also attracted endorsements from Wall Street shareholders. Cathie Wood's ARK Invest invested about $182 million to acquire approximately 4.77 million shares of Bitmine's common stock, of which $177 million will be used to purchase Ethereum (ETH); notable investor Bill Miller has also invested in BMNR, likening it to ETHMicroStrategy; Peter Thiel's Founders Fund has disclosed a 9.1% stake.
Benefiting from the rise in ETH prices and the 'coin-holding' narrative, BMNR's stock price has been consistently strong, nearly doubling since August.
2/12 $ENA
Recently, bullish sentiment has been ignited by Ethena's newly established department, StablecoinX, which plans to repurchase $260 million in ENA within six weeks, accounting for 8% of the circulation, injecting real cash into the market every day. More importantly, the fee switch mechanism has been approved, and a portion of future protocol revenues will be directly distributed to sENA holders. According to Tokenomist's scenario simulation, conservatively estimating, sENA's annualized yield could also reach 4%, and in an optimistic scenario, it may even exceed 10%.
In addition to the benefits within the protocol, at the beginning of June, Coinbase announced support for ENA and launched a USD trading pair, making it one of the few synthetic stablecoin projects to be listed. Meanwhile, the Ethena ecosystem continues to grow, with collaborations with yield protocols like Pendle embedding USDe into more DeFi strategies, enhancing yield stickiness.
In the long run, Ethena is expanding the Converge Chain and launching the compliant stablecoin USDtb, gradually building a diversified income system to enhance its cyclical resilience.
3/12 $PENDLE
Recently, Pendle has performed exceptionally well, with its TVL breaking through $9 billion on August 13, setting a new historical high. Its token price once approached $6, with a monthly increase of over 30%, far exceeding the broader market.
The bullish logic is as follows:
1. Boros has gone live, converting BTC/ETH perpetual contract funding rates and other metrics into tradable assets, attracting a large number of users in a short time, becoming a core growth driver for Pendle V3. Statistics show that in the first two days after Boros launched, it attracted deposits exceeding $1.85 million in equivalent BTC and ETH, driving Pendle's TVL sharply upward.
2. Pendle is deeply linked with protocols like Ethena and Aave, launching strategies like PT-USDe, which contributes nearly 60% of Pendle's TVL.
3. Since 2025, approximately $41 billion in institutional funds has flowed into DeFi, and Pendle's Citadels compliance program has facilitated the entry of institutional funds, accelerating the rise of TVL.
4/12 $UNI
As the leading DEX, entering 2025, Uniswap has two major catalysts: the official launch of version V4 and the launch of a dedicated second-layer network 'Unichain.'
1. The launch of version V4 allows developers to use Hooks to create customized pools and strategies, enhancing the protocol's vitality. Currently, more than 2,500 Hook pools have been deployed, and projects utilizing Hooks, such as Bunni and EulerSwap, have achieved cumulative trading volumes exceeding $100 million, bringing new vitality to Uniswap.
2. Uniswap plans to create a dedicated ecosystem through Unichain, which has already accounted for over 70% of daily active trading. This not only expands the user base but also diversifies single-chain dependency, enhancing risk resistance.
5/12 $FLUID
At the beginning of August, Fluid's trading volume briefly surpassed Uniswap, with a single-day volume of $1.5 billion, slightly higher than Uniswap's $1.3 billion during the same period. Fluid significantly improved capital utilization efficiency by creatively converting collateral from lending pools into trading liquidity. This model allows Fluid to achieve impressive trading volumes even with relatively low TVL.
The bullish logic is as follows:
1. Release a large amount of liquidity: Fluid cleverly uses the collateral/debt of the lending pool directly as liquidity for trading pairs, allowing assets to serve 'two purposes.' Users can earn interest by depositing ETH or stablecoins into Fluid while these assets are used to provide trading depth, generating additional fee income. More importantly, Fluid's liquidity layer automatically adjusts the proportion of each asset used for trading based on lending utilization rates and dynamically increases collateral requirements when funds approach lending limits to guard against risks of runs and liquidations. This design significantly reduces capital fragmentation and improves turnover efficiency of unit liquidity.
2. Rapid development: Fluid has developed rapidly since its launch in 2023, becoming the fastest-growing DEX on Ethereum, achieving a cumulative trading volume of $10 billion in just 100 days. It is now about to launch a more efficient 'lightweight' exchange, expected to further increase daily trading volumes by $400-600 million, with quick product iterations providing potential for the growth of FLUID token value.
3. Increasing market recognition and potential valuation: As trading volumes rise, the price of $FLUID surged 14% in early August. Even after this round of increase, its circulating market cap is around $290 million, far below Uniswap, representing a relatively undervalued yet high-growth asset.
6/12 $LDO
As the largest liquid staking protocol on Ethereum, Lido is迎来 a new round of development peak in 2025. Currently, Lido's TVL is close to $41 billion, accounting for 26% of the entire DeFi TVL.
Through organization, it can be observed that Lido is deepening its competitive moat, with more and more applications accepting stETH as collateral or means of payment, thereby enhancing its liquidity and demand. For example, lending protocols like Aave now support stETH as collateral loan assets, while stable pools like Curve offer stETH trading pairs, accelerating its integration into all corners of DeFi.
Against the backdrop of rising Ethereum staking, Lido, as an industry leader, still has a robust outlook.
7/12 $AAVE
As of now, Aave's TVL has risen to approximately $38.9 billion, nearly doubling since the beginning of the year, accounting for almost a quarter of the entire DeFi TVL, firmly holding the top position in the lending market.
This year, the stablecoin narrative has exploded, with Aave's GHO stablecoin supply increasing from approximately $146 million to around $314 million, an increase of over 100%, and expanding to networks like Arbitrum and Base, giving Aave increasing influence in the stablecoin field.
Moreover, there have been frequent news of collaborations with Aave recently. On one hand, it has initiated the Horizon project to expand RWA channels, and on the other hand, it is partnering with Plasma to launch an institutional incentive fund aimed at attracting more financial companies to transition their businesses to the blockchain. This series of initiatives solidifies Aave's position as the entry point for institutional-level DeFi lending.
8/12 $CRV
The decentralized stablecoin crvUSD launched by Curve celebrates its second anniversary with impressive performance.
As an over-collateralized stablecoin launched by Curve, crvUSD has been widely integrated into various DeFi protocols after two years of development and can even be used for daily payments. Thanks to the unique LLAMMA automatic liquidation mechanism, crvUSD demonstrates excellent resilience during market fluctuations, maintaining a 1:1 peg while maximizing the protection of collateral value. In the first half of this year, rising DeFi interest rates pushed the annualized yield of saving crvUSD (scrvUSD) close to 8%, with an upward trend.
Although there are concerns about security, after experiencing events like DNS hijacking attacks, the Curve team quickly migrated to a new domain and advocated for the use of censorship-resistant measures such as ENS and IPFS to provide front-end services.
In addition, Curve founder Michael Egorov is developing a new yield protocol called 'Yield Basis,' aimed at providing sustainable yields for on-chain BTC and ETH, with the potential for the Curve ecosystem to expand into RWA.
9/12 $SKY
As a stablecoin issued by MakerDAO (Sky), USDS currently ranks fourth in market capitalization, adopting an over-collateralization model, where higher-value crypto assets must be locked up before minting. Recently, the GENIUS Act prohibited stablecoins from 'directly paying interest,' and USDS yields come from the collateral assets participating in on-chain staking and liquidity mining, rather than direct payouts, which helps to sidestep the restrictions of the act. Currently, the annualized yield of sUSDS is close to 5%, providing a certain advantage in the context of the US's 2.7% inflation rate.
Currently, mainstream institutions like Coinbase have launched SKY and USDS trading in July, marking a key step for Maker towards traditional finance.
10/12 $SPK
Since April, Spark's TVL has surged over 200%, currently around $8.2 billion, ranking eighth among DeFi protocols. Such a massive influx of capital directly boosts market confidence in Spark, leading to a rapid rebound in the price of $SPK, which has reached new highs.
Looking back at the initial launch of Spark, the heat was quite high, employing a large-scale airdrop and simultaneous listing on mainstream exchanges strategy, attracting a large number of users' attention and early trading participation, with trading volumes surging, leading to price fluctuations, along with trading enabled on major platforms like Binance and Coinbase, injecting considerable liquidity into $SPK.
More importantly, Spark is backed by MakerDAO's billions of dollars in reserves and a synthetic asset system that has operated stably for years, making it one of the few projects in the DeFi field that was 'born with a silver spoon.' Therefore, Spark products have a high security margin from the start, providing a confidence guarantee for institutional and large-cap funds to enter.
Looking ahead, Spark has a well-rounded product matrix that can lay out diversified yield scenarios. Currently, the product line includes SparkLend, SparkSavings, SLL, etc., covering almost all elements of the DeFi yield closed loop.
11/12 $LINK
As the leading oracle, Chainlink recently launched a new Chainlink reserve mechanism that automatically converts service fees paid by enterprises and DApps into LINK and deposits it into an on-chain reserve pool, accumulating over $1 million worth of LINK, ensuring a continuous stream of income in the future, which means that selling pressure on LINK in the market will decrease. The official statement indicates that the reserves will not be extracted for several years, supporting the network's long-term growth, which can be seen as a 'burning' deflationary benefit for LINK.
In addition, as of August, Chainlink's network has secured over $93 billion in DeFi value with its oracles, a new historical high, including over 83% of Ethereum's on-chain assets and nearly 100% of assets on new chains like Base.
Chainlink recently reached a partnership with ICE, the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, to seamlessly integrate its foreign exchange and precious metals data on-chain. Looking ahead, as oracle services are deeply integrated into DeFi and RWA narratives, LINK has a greater chance of appreciating.
12/12 $PENGU
Last month, PENGU made a comeback with the NFT+Memecoin narrative, surging more than 400% in just 30 days. The driving factor behind this was mainly institutional-level benefits, as the well-known institution Canary Capital submitted the world's first NFT+token dual-asset ETF application—the Canary Spot PENGU ETF, which intends to have 80-95% of its proposed portfolio in PENGU tokens and 5-15% in Pudgy Penguins NFTs.
After the news that the SEC officially accepted the ETF application, market expectations for the 'Penguin ETF' turned optimistic, and the PENGU token surged.
