Recently, the ETH price has approached historical highs, with strong upward momentum and institutional funds accelerating their influx.
In this context, multiple Ethereum ecosystem tokens are frequently announcing good news. In this article, we select 12 Alpha tokens to interpret their latest developments and bullish reasons.
$BMNR Under the leadership of Tom Lee, the U.S. publicly listed company BitMine Immersion (NYSE: BMNR) has hoarded 1.2 million ETH, worth $5.03 billion, becoming the largest holder of ETH globally. Additionally, the company plans to continue buying ETH, aiming to acquire 5% of the global ETH supply and intends to stake its holdings for yield. Therefore, BMNR is undoubtedly a strong vehicle for betting on Ethereum.
BMNR's aggressive coin hoarding strategy has also attracted endorsement from Wall Street shareholders. Cathie Wood's ARK Invest invested approximately $182 million to acquire about 4.77 million shares of Bitmine, with $177 million allocated to purchase Ethereum (ETH); well-known investor Bill Miller also invested in BMNR and compared it to ETHMicroStrategy; Peter Thiel's Founders Fund also disclosed a 9.1% stake.
Benefiting from the rise in ETH prices and the 'hoarding coins' narrative, BMNR's stock price has been continuously strengthening, nearly doubling since August.
$ENA Recently, bullish sentiment has been ignited by Ethena's newly established department StablecoinX, which plans to repurchase $260 million ENA within six weeks, accounting for 8% of the circulating supply, with real cash inflow daily. More importantly, the fee switch mechanism has been approved, meaning that part of the protocol's revenue will be directly distributed to sENA holders in the future. According to Tokenomist's scenario simulation, conservatively estimating, the annual yield for sENA could reach 4%, and in an optimistic scenario, it could exceed 10%.
In addition to internal protocol benefits, in early June, Coinbase announced support for ENA and opened USD trading pairs, being one of the few synthetic stablecoin projects to be listed. Meanwhile, the Ethena ecosystem continues to grow, embedding USDe into more DeFi strategies in collaboration with Pendle, enhancing sticky yields.
In the long term, Ethena is expanding Converge Chain and launching the compliant stablecoin USDtb, gradually building a diversified income system to enhance cyclical resilience.
$PENDLE Recently, Pendle has performed exceptionally well, with its TVL surpassing $9 billion on August 13, setting a new historical record. Its token price once approached $6, with a monthly increase of over 30%, far exceeding the overall market.
The bullish logic is as follows:
1. Boros is online, converting the funding rates of BTC/ETH perpetual contracts into tradable assets, which has attracted 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's launch, it attracted deposits of over $1.85 million worth of BTC and ETH, driving Pendle's TVL to skyrocket.
2. Pendle has deep connections with protocols like Ethena and Aave, launching strategies like PT-USDe, contributing nearly 60% to Pendle's TVL.
3. Since 2025, approximately $41 billion in institutional funds have flowed into DeFi, and Pendle's Citadels compliance program has facilitated institutional fund access, accelerating the rise of TVL.
$UNI As the DEX leader, Uniswap has two major catalysts entering 2025: the official launch of version 4 and the rollout of its exclusive layer two network 'Unichain'.
1. The launch of version 4 allows developers to utilize Hooks to create customized pools and strategies, enhancing the vitality of the protocol. Currently, over 2,500 Hook pools have been deployed, with projects like Bunni and EulerSwap utilizing Hooks achieving over $100 million in cumulative trading volume, bringing new vitality to Uniswap.
2. Uniswap plans to create an exclusive ecosystem through Unichain, which already accounts for over 70% of daily active trading. This not only expands the user base but also diversifies dependency on a single chain, enhancing risk resilience.
$FLUID In early August, Fluid's trading volume briefly surpassed Uniswap, reaching $1.5 billion in a single day, slightly higher than Uniswap's $1.3 billion during the same period. Fluid has significantly improved capital utilization efficiency by converting collateral from the lending pool into trading liquidity through its unique liquidity layer. This model enables Fluid to achieve remarkable trading volume 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 dual purposes'. Users earn interest by depositing ETH or stablecoins in Fluid while these assets are used to provide trading depth, generating additional fee income. More importantly, the Fluid liquidity layer will automatically adjust the share of each asset used for trading based on borrowing utilization, and dynamically increase collateral requirements when funds approach borrowing limits to prevent risks of bank runs and liquidations. This design significantly reduces capital fragmentation and improves the turnover efficiency of unit liquidity.
2. Rapid development: After its launch in 2023, Fluid has developed rapidly, becoming the fastest-growing DEX on Ethereum, achieving a cumulative trading volume of $10 billion in 100 days. It is now set to launch a more efficient 'lightweight' exchange, likely increasing daily trading volumes by $400 to $600 million, with rapid product iteration providing growth opportunities for FLUID token value.
3. Increasing market recognition and potential valuation: As trading volumes rise, the price of $FLUID jumped 14% in early August. Even after this surge, its circulating market cap is around $290 million, significantly lower than Uniswap, representing a relatively undervalued asset with high growth potential.
$LDO As the largest liquid staking protocol on Ethereum, Lido is set to reach a new peak of development in 2025. Currently, Lido's TVL is close to $41 billion, accounting for 26% of the entire DeFi TVL.
By organizing, it can be found that Lido is digging its moat deeper, with more applications accepting stETH as collateral or payment methods, enhancing its liquidity and demand. For example, lending protocols like Aave now support stETH as collateral for loans, and stable pools like Curve also provide stETH trading pairs, accelerating the integration of stETH into every corner of DeFi.
Against the backdrop of continued interest in Ethereum staking, Lido, as an industry leader, maintains a stable outlook.
$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 maintaining its position as the leader in the lending market.
This year, the stablecoin narrative has exploded, with the supply of Aave's GHO stablecoin increasing from about $146 million to approximately $314 million, rising over 100%, and gradually expanding to networks like Arbitrum and Base. Aave's influence in the stablecoin field is expected to continue to rise.
Moreover, recent collaborations with Aave have been frequent. On one hand, it has initiated the Horizon project to expand RWA channels, while on the other hand, it has partnered with Plasma to launch an institutional incentive fund, aimed at attracting more financial companies to move their businesses to blockchain. This series of initiatives solidifies Aave's position as an institutional-grade DeFi lending gateway.
$CRV Curve's decentralized stablecoin crvUSD celebrates its second anniversary with impressive performance.
As an over-collateralized stablecoin launched by Curve, crvUSD has been widely integrated into various DeFi protocols over two years of development, and can even be used for everyday payments. Thanks to its unique LLAMMA automatic liquidation mechanism, crvUSD has shown 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 drove the annual yield of crvUSD (scrvUSD) close to 8%, with an upward trend.
Despite 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 ENS, IPFS, and other censorship-resistant methods to provide frontend services.
Additionally, 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 Curve ecosystem potentially expanding into RWA.
$SKY As a stablecoin issued by MakerDAO (Sky), USDS is currently ranked fourth in market capitalization, adopting an over-collateralization model where higher-value crypto assets must be locked in before minting. Recently, the GENIUS act prohibited stablecoins from 'directly generating interest', and USDS yields come from collateral assets participating in on-chain staking and liquidity mining, rather than direct payouts, which partially circumvents the act's restrictions. Currently, the annual yield for sUSDS is close to 5%, providing a certain advantage in the U.S. environment of 2.7% inflation.
Currently, mainstream institutions like Coinbase have launched trading for SKY and USDS in July, marking a key step for Maker towards traditional finance.
$SPK Since April, Spark's TVL has surged over 200%, currently around $8.2 billion, ranking eighth among DeFi protocols. This massive influx of funds has directly boosted market confidence in Spark, leading to a rapid rebound in the $SPK price, which has reached new highs.
Looking back at the initial launch of Spark, the hype was quite high, employing a strategy of massive airdrops and simultaneous listings on mainstream exchanges, attracting a large number of users' attention and participation in early trading. The surge in trading volume led to price fluctuations, compounded by major platforms like Binance and Coinbase opening trading simultaneously, injecting significant liquidity into $SPK.
More importantly, Spark is backed by MakerDAO's billions in reserves and a stable synthetic asset system that has been operating for years, making it one of the few projects in DeFi that was 'born with a silver spoon'. Therefore, Spark's products have a high safety margin from the very beginning, providing confidence for institutional and large-capital entries.
Looking ahead, Spark has a relatively complete product matrix that can lay out diversified yield scenarios. Its product line currently includes SparkLend, SparkSavings, SLL, among others, encompassing almost all elements of the DeFi yield loop.
$LINK As the leading oracle, Chainlink recently launched a new Chainlink reserve mechanism, automatically converting service fees paid by enterprises and DApps into LINK and depositing them into an on-chain reserve pool, which has accumulated over $1 million worth of LINK, ensuring a continuous source of revenue in the future, meaning that selling pressure on LINK in the market will decrease. The official stated that the reserves will not be withdrawn for several years, supporting the network's long-term growth, which can be seen as a 'burning' deflationary benefit for LINK.
Furthermore, as of August, Chainlink's network has secured over $93 billion in DeFi value with its oracles, setting a new historical high, including over 83% of Ethereum's on-chain assets, and nearly 100% of assets from new chains like Base.
Chainlink has recently partnered 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 the DeFi and RWA narrative, LINK has a higher chance of rising.
$PENGU Last month, PENGU made a comeback with the NFT+Memecoin narrative, surging over 400% in just 30 days. The main driving force behind this was institutional-level good news, as well-known institution Canary Capital submitted the world's first NFT+token dual-asset ETF application—namely the Canary Spot PENGU ETF, proposing to have 80-95% of the investment portfolio in PENGU tokens and 5-15% in Pudgy Penguins NFTs.
After the news that the SEC officially accepted the ETF application, the market's expectations for the 'Penguin ETF' became optimistic, causing the PENGU token to surge.
