Summary

There are more than 50 non-crypto companies that have built products and services on Ethereum or Ethereum L2s. These companies range from fashion brands such as Louis Vuitton and Adidas to financial institutions such as Deutsche Bank and PayPal. These products and services notably exclude those related to general market infrastructure such as cryptocurrency trading, custody, auditing, and compliance. Instead, they relate to crypto-specific infrastructure and use cases such as NFTs, RWAs, Web3 developer tooling, and L2s. Among the 20 financial institutions identified as having built crypto-specific infrastructure and applications, 10 are banks and the majority of them are issuing RWAs on Ethereum. This report seeks to highlight the early and leading use cases for Ethereum for traditional companies and institutions.

Introduction

For the purposes of this report, the main sectors of the crypto industry can be broken down into three broad categories:

1. General Infrastructure – Companies that offer products and services related to cryptocurrencies and blockchains that are not unique or exclusive to the crypto sector such as general market infrastructure (i.e. exchanges, market makers, asset management) and general business support (i.e. banking, accounting, consulting, compliance).
2. Crypto-specific Infrastructure – Companies that offer products and services that are unique and exclusive to crypto. For example, this includes companies that participate in mining, staking, and building on-chain oracles and are responsible for infrastructure that is only useful in the context of crypto and blockchains.
3. Crypto Use Cases and Applications – Companies that are building consumer applications that operate, in full or in part, on blockchains. For example, decentralized exchanges automatically execute trades for cryptocurrencies on blockchains without reliance on a third-party intermediary.

Rather than expand an existing suite of applications and services to support cryptocurrencies, traditional companies are moving beyond to innovate new products and services that can only be powered through blockchains. Further, many of these companies, at least 55 of them, are innovating on public blockchains like Ethereum and Ethereum L2s like Polygon, Arbitrum, and Base.

The following is a market map of 55 non-crypto native companies that have either built or are in the process of building crypto-specific infrastructure and applications on Ethereum and Ethereum L2s.

Of the list of 55, at least 23 of them are issuing NFTs on Ethereum or Ethereum L2s.

Though most companies are building directly on Ethereum, at least 17 have experimented or are experimenting across multiple general-purpose blockchains and Layer-2 rollups.

RWAs on Ethereum

One of the most common types of non-crypto company building in the Ethereum ecosystem are financial institutions like banks, asset managers, payment processors, trading platforms, and accounting firms. Among the 20 financial institutions identified as having built crypto-specific infrastructure and applications, 13 are issuing RWAs on Ethereum and Ethereum L2s. The types of RWAs that have been issued on-chain range from money market funds like the Franklin OnChain U.S. Government Money Fund to government bonds issued by the likes of the European Investment Bank.

Ethereum is the blockchain of choice for the issuance of tokenized assets, with almost ten times the total value of RWAs than the next most popular blockchain for RWAs, Stellar. ZKsync is a Layer-2 rollup built on Ethereum that boasts a higher number and total value for RWAs issued on-chain than Stellar. Six out of the top 10 protocols for issuing RWAs are either Ethereum or Ethereum L2s.

The third largest tokenized fund across all blockchains as of February 11, 2025, is Blackrock’s USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund (BUIDL). Launched in March 2024, BUIDL offers investors U.S. dollar yields with the advantages of instantaneous and transparent settlement and interoperability between traditional financial markets and decentralized finance markets. “With tokenization, we’re taking traditional finance investment exposure, and we’re putting it in a crypto native wrapper,” Robert Mitchnick, BlackRock’s head of digital assets, said in March.

Blackrock, the world’s largest asset manager, in partnership with tokenization platform Securitize and American financial services company BNY Mellon first launched BUIDL on Ethereum. Since last March, Blackrock has expanded the fund to five more protocols beyond Ethereum, three of which are Ethereum L2s.

The value of RWAs issued on Ethereum alone has tripled over the past year. According to rwa.xyz, over 160 RWAs are issued on Ethereum and held across 60,000 unique active wallet addresses. These figures do not include stablecoins.

For more information about RWAs and the forces propelling their growth, read this Galaxy Research report.

Though fewer in number, a subset of financial institutions working on RWAs and tokenization are also developing their own stablecoins. Payment processor PayPal first launched its own U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoin, PYUSD, in August 2023 on Ethereum. PayPal has since expanded the issuance of PYUSD to Solana. Trading platform Robinhood, in partnership with a slew of other crypto-native institutions including Galaxy Digital, Kraken, Nuvei, Anchorage, Bullish, and Paxos, also launched its own dollar-pegged stablecoin, USDG, on Ethereum in November 2024.

The total circulating supply of stablecoins on Ethereum has increased by 70% over the past year. These stablecoins range in collateral mix and design type, but the vast majority are dollar-pegged instruments that hold high-quality liquid assets (HQLA) as collateral. Ethereum commands over 50% of the total stablecoin market share as of February 11, 2025.

Stablecoins are poised to double in total supply and exceed $400bn in 2025, according to Galaxy Research. One catalyst to accelerate the launch of new stablecoins backed by traditional finance partnerships this year is Stripe’s 2024 $1bn acquisition of Bridge, a stablecoin payment platform. About the acquisition, CEO of Stripe Patrick Collison said, “Stablecoins are room-temperature superconductors for financial services. Thanks to stablecoins, businesses around the world will benefit from significant speed, coverage, and cost improvements in the coming years.”

In the U.S., another catalyst for RWA and stablecoin adoption is the regulatory environment. Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) Commissioner Hester Peirce released a statement on Tuesday, Feb. 4, 2025, outlining specific priorities and topics the Commission is likely to address relating to the digital assets industry, and the ninth item on her list emphasized the modernization of traditional finance through tokenization. “The Task Force also plans to work on the intersection of crypto and clearing agency and transfer agent rules. We will continue to work with market participants interested in tokenizing securities or otherwise using blockchain technology to modernize traditional financial markets,” the statement reads.

RWAs and stablecoins are crypto-native use cases rapidly finding product market fit among traditional financial institutions. As the general-purpose blockchain with the highest level of decentralization, the widest reach for crypto-native users, and the longest track record for network uptime, Ethereum is the gateway that many institutions are using to incubate and launch finance-focused crypto services and products.

Scalable Blockchain Infrastructure

Albeit the gateway for utilizing cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology for many financial institutions and non-crypto companies, Ethereum is not the protocol where new use cases for blockchains can scale. Compared to blockchains like Solana, Ethereum is less performant with slower block times and higher transaction fees. Rather than sacrifice the network’s resilience and security, byproducts of the network’s decentralization, for speed, Ethereum protocol developers have committed to making Ethereum the hub for Layer-2 rollups. Rollups are the blockchain infrastructure that can inherit Ethereum’s security and scale to millions of new users. For more information about rollup technology, read this Galaxy Research report.

Non-crypto companies are not only advancing use cases for crypto like tokenization on Ethereum but investing in the infrastructure needed to support these use cases to a wider audience than crypto native users. Germany’s largest bank, Deutsche Bank, is developing a new rollup on Ethereum in partnership with Matter Labs, the team that built the ZKSync rollup. Codenamed Project DAMA 2, the rollup is one piece of a broader initiative to explore the use cases of public blockchains for global finance spearheaded by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) and 24 other financial institutions around the world.

The main motivation for Deutsche Bank’s L2 is to create a blockchain infrastructure that is scalable, auditable, transparent, and interoperable with regulated platforms and financial services. “Institutions looking to build onchain are coming to ZKsync for the ability to build in Web3 without compromise. ZKsync offers institutions with a customizable architecture to build tailored solutions that enable privacy, scalability, and interoperability with other private and public blockchains,” said Alex Gluchowski, co-inventor of ZKsync, about the motivation for Deutsche Bank’s L2.

Financial institutions like Deutsche Bank are developing scalable blockchain infrastructure that is also customizable and compliant with regional regulations on Ethereum. However, the appeal of scalable and customizable blockchain infrastructure goes beyond just financial use cases.

Japanese conglomerate Sony recently launched their own rollup using the OP tech stack on Ethereum. Their motivation for creating and operating their own general-purpose rollup is to support a broader ecosystem of gaming, finance, and entertainment apps. About Sony’s L2, Soneium, Jun Watanabe, Chairman of Sony Block Solutions Labs, said, “I think the development of a comprehensive Web3 solution based on blockchain is very significant to the Sony Group, which has developed a wide variety of businesses under its purpose of ‘Fill the world with emotion, through the power of creativity and technology.’”

Since Soneium’s launch, the protocol has faced backlash for Sony’s oversight of on chain activity, particularly memecoin launches that have resulted in restrictions on token transfers and blacklisted addresses. Though the incident has raised questions about the level of control enterprises should have over rollups they build atop permissionless infrastructure like Ethereum, it also highlights the commitment from one of the largest conglomerates in the world to find out the answers to these questions. Sony, through the launch of Soneium, is investing in new digital experiences and applications on and through the launch of a rollup on Ethereum and this speaks volumes to the potential value of Ethereum block space and scalable blockchain infrastructure built on top of it.

Gaming on Ethereum L2s

NFTs are the leading use case for traditional companies, primarily luxury fashion brands like Louis Vuitton and Coach, as well as luxury car manufacturers like Porsche and Lamborghini. Most of the NFTs issued by these companies were minted between 2021 and 2023, during the peak of the NFT boom. Given the decline in NFT floor prices over the past few years, many are no longer actively issuing NFTs on Ethereum and Ethereum L2s in 2025.

The handful of companies that are still actively issuing NFTs on Ethereum in 2025 are doing so in the context of game development and almost exclusively on Ethereum L2s, as opposed to Ethereum.

In July 2024, video gaming giant Atari deployed two of its classic arcade games, “Asteroids” and “Breakout”, on top of Base, the optimistic rollup on Ethereum operated by Coinbase. Until the end of August 2024, gamers could earn rewards on Base, mint exclusive Atari NFTs, and redeem physical merchandise. A few months after Atari’s foray into on-chain gaming, in October 2024, Lamborghini announced a collaboration with Web3 gaming company Animoca Brands to launch a digital collectible platform called FastForWorld.

FastForWorld enables gamers to buy, sell, and drive Lamborghini cars in a range of games developed by Animoca Brands including Torque Drift 2, REVV Racing, the Motorverse Hub, and FastForWorld’s proprietary experience. The partnership was described in a press release as “Lamborghini’s first interoperable blockchain-based implementation of their iconic vehicles in gaming.”

Caption: FastForWorld Lamborghini cars.
Source: Lamborghini

It was later unveiled that in-game assets for FastForWorld would be minted on Base. The first version of the platform was launched on November 7, 2024, and remains under active development, with additional expansions to the FastForWorld platform expected to be announced in 2025.

Most recently, on January 7, 2025, one of the top five conglomerates in South Korea, Lotte Group, announced a deeper partnership with the Arbitrum Foundation and Offchain Labs to build out the “Caliverse”, Lotte’s metaverse gaming platform, on Ethereum rollup Arbitrum. The Caliverse, which is already live, allows users to shop, attend virtual concerts, and play games on its platform. “Together with the most trusted blockchain Arbitrum, we are excited to take our first steps into the world of blockchain with Lotte Caliverse, where we will leverage Lotte’s successful history in retail to offer exceptional products and services to over 40 million people,” said Kima Kim, CEO of Caliverse, about the partnership with Arbitrum. During the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2025 in Las Vegas, USA, the Caliverse team announced plans to launch virtual reality and 3D film features on its platform in the first half of 2025.

Caption: Caliverse Tomorrowland Digital Music Adventures
Source: Caliverse.io

What is most notable about the ongoing investment and development of NFTs by non-crypto-native companies like Atari, Lamborghini, and Lotte’s Caliverse is that they are being developed in the context of a larger on-chain gaming application. Blockchain-based games can require frequent on-chain transactions, which can also result in expensive fees and network congestion. For this reason, these companies are building their games on Ethereum L2s to take advantage of the scaling benefits of Ethereum’s rollup-centric architecture.

“Arbitrum’s blockchain is the ideal home ground for Caliverse thanks to industry-leading 250ms block times that can enable seamless virtual world and gaming use cases,” said Steven Goldfeder, the co-founder and CEO of Offchain Labs.

Conclusion

NFTs and RWAs are the leading use cases for Ethereum among non-crypto native companies and institutions. Among the companies issuing NFTs in the Ethereum ecosystem, the ones that are the most active in 2025 are issuing NFTs in the context of on-chain gaming applications built on Ethereum L2s. This highlights how the scalability gains from L2s are helping to support crypto-native use cases that require frequent on-chain interactions like gaming among major retail brands and corporations. Ethereum’s commitment to scaling its infrastructure through rollups also offers opportunities for early adopters of the tech in traditional finance and other industry sectors to spearhead non-speculative use cases for crypto by creating customizable and compliant infrastructure for these use cases. Finally, Ethereum remains the go-to blockchain for issuing RWAs and stablecoins among traditional finance companies. Key partnerships and acquisitions established in 2024 are expected to result in new strides of adoption for stablecoins in 2025. To read more about expected trends in crypto adoption among banks and stablecoins in 2025, read this Galaxy Research report.

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