Tom Lee Welcomes New Ethereum NPO: Why Biggest ETH Treasuries Back This Alliance

Against the backdrop of Ethereum’s five-year stagnation and market gloom, the former leadership of the commercial arm of the Ethereum Foundation announced the creation of an independent nonprofit organization, Ethereum Institutional. The project will become a single “front office” for the direct integration of the network and its L2 solutions into the infrastructure of global business.

The initiative was strongly supported by Fundstrat co-founder Tom Lee, who noted that major capital had long lacked a clear and authoritative negotiator. It is Lee’s public endorsement that sheds light on why the largest $ETH treasuries decided to unite around this new structure.

Inside the new pro-Ethereum Wall Street coalition

The core team of Ethereum Institutional consists of industry veterans David Walsh, Marius Smith, and Matthew Dawson, the former head of corporate outreach at the Ethereum Foundation. The Foundation itself officially blessed the launch, saying it expects the new team to deliver a breakthrough in its work with Wall Street.

However, behind the educational facade lies hard pragmatism and a direct answer to the question of why market leaders are so actively financing this alliance. Over the past five years, the price of Ethereum has effectively gone nowhere, hovering around $1,609, which has hit large investors hard.

The anchor sponsors of the new structure, Bitmine (BMNR) and Sharplink (SBET), control a giant stack of 6.56 million $ETH tokens, or about 5.4% of the total market supply. In this context, the launch of the initiative looks like a logical attempt to protect multibillion-dollar reserves.

The main intrigue of the project is its enormous potential for behind-the-scenes influence at the highest levels, which is exactly why the treasuries took this step. One of the architects of the alliance is Joseph Chalom, CEO of Sharplink.

Before that, he led digital asset strategy at BlackRock and personally launched the first spot crypto ETFs and the tokenized BUIDL fund. Alongside him and Tom Lee stands Ethereum co-founder Joseph Lubin.

The emergence of a structure with this kind of background explains why the largest treasuries have bet on this alliance. It is an elegant attempt by the whales of the industry to use Wall Street connections to softly but confidently secure Ethereum’s status as the main base layer of the global financial system.