Why Wall Street can use Ethereum without betting on ETH
Summary
Vitalik Buterin argued that ETH’s monetary value should be judged beyond fee burns, linking demand for ETH to assets issued natively on Ethereum and its potential use as collateral. BlackRock’s BUIDL fund illustrates an alternative: eligible institutions can use yield-bearing fund tokens as trading margin through arrangements involving OKX and Standard Chartered. BUIDL represents a permissioned claim on cash, Treasury bills and repurchase agreements, rather than ETH. The arrangements show that tokenized finance can make dollar-denominated assets useful collateral, but published details provide no usage figures, so they do not prove ETH is being displaced or quantify any price effect.
