Trillion-Dollar Infrastructure or Still a Playground for Pilots? 3 Questions Ethereum Must Answer
How rollups, real-world assets, and institutional adoption will decide Ethereum’s future
Not long ago, blockchain in finance meant research pilots. Institutions ran small experiments—tokenizing collateral here, testing cross-border payments there. Useful, but still proof-of-concepts. I’m proud to have taken part in some of these early projects, shaping how institutions first approached DeFi.
Today, the stakes are different. Ethereum underpins stablecoins worth hundreds of billions, lending protocols like Aave are breaking records, and real-world asset (RWA) tokenization is moving into the mainstream. The question is no longer whether blockchain can power finance—it’s bigger:
Can Ethereum carry trillions of dollars, or is it still just an emerging tech stack for NFTs, memecoins, and pilots?
At CV Summit in Zug, I had the privilege of moderating a panel with Hillmar, Gelato, Mats, Dune, and Andra. We faced this question head-on. Hillmar and Mats are not only impressive founders from Crypto Valley but also people I deeply admire. And CV Summit itself has become the place where institutions and builders collide—an event that grows every year and sets the tone for where this industry is headed.
The conversations boiled down to three questions that will decide Ethereum’s fate:
Can Rollups Scale Without Breaking Ethereum’s Values?
Can DeFi Handle Real-World Assets at Institutional Standards?
Are Builders Ready to Deliver Faster Than Institutions Demand?
What Is a Rollup (Ethereum Layer 2)?
Ethereum’s base layer (Layer 1) is secure and decentralized—but limited in capacity. That’s where rollups, or Layer 2s (L2s), come in.
A rollup processes transactions off-chain, then posts a compressed proof back to Ethereum. Think of it as moving from single-lane traffic to a multilane highway, with Ethereum still acting as the ultimate court of law.
Rollups let Ethereum scale without compromising security.
Each design—Optimistic, ZK, or Based—makes different compromises around cost, speed, decentralization, and usability.
The Trade-offs of Rollups
Ethereum’s scaling roadmap is promising, but it’s also full of difficult trade-offs:
Optimistic Rollups → Institutions like them because they’re EVM-compatible, cheap and work today. Recently, Kraken launched Ink, its custom L2.
ZK Rollups → Seen as the “holy grail” for scalability and privacy, but generating zero-knowledge proofs at scale is still expensive and far from trivial. ZK Rollups are the endgame, and catching up quickly with the optimistic ones.
Based Rollups → Faster block times, lower gas, and fewer harmful MEV attacks… - not anymore, we are decentralising rollup architecture and breaking all of Ethereum’s rollup improvements.
Each path solves something critical—but none solve everything.
Can Rollups Scale Without Breaking Ethereum’s Values?
My answer is we do sacrifice decentralization here. Most rollups today run on centralized IT infrastructure (sequencer). That’s an acceptable trade-off, institutions want systems that work, but we should be clear about the trade-off. We gain scale and usability, but at the cost of Ethereum’s purest ideals.
Centralised rollups can monitor and sometimes even censor transactions. However, the security and decentralisation of Ethereum guarantee that the transaction once settled can not be revoked, and in the case of many rollups, assets can be withdrawn from a rollup, even if its infrastructure is down.
The benefits of (centralized) rollups are multiple: from lower gas fees, to speed (200ms block time) and fair transaction ordering (MEV-protection)
Privacy and Regulation
Privacy and composability don’t coexist easily. Choose privacy, and you lose DeFi’s open network effects. Choose composability, and you sacrifice privacy. Institutions understand this trade-off and tend to pick pragmatism - higher trading volume and market cap - over ideals.
So is regulation the blocker? Not really. Institutions are ready. The real challenge is whether builders can ship infrastructure at institutional quality: clean deployments, up-to-date documentation, and reliable automation.
DeFi Beyond Hype: Stablecoins, Lending, RWAs
Despite the gaps, Ethereum already hosts the most ambitious financial experiment in history:
Stablecoins anchor global dollar liquidity.
Aave, providing decentralized lending , has all-time high total value locked.
RWAs—from U.S. Treasuries to private credit—are being brought on-chain by players like Ondo and Franklin Templeton.
These are not toys. They are the early foundations of a trillion-dollar stack. But RWAs also raise the bar: reproducibility, risk frameworks, and compliance are non-negotiable. Without them, institutions won’t scale.
Ethereum vs. Solana: Two Philosophies of Scale
The scaling debate isn’t just technical—it’s philosophical.
Ethereum scales horizontally, offloading activity to rollups. This creates flexibility but also fragmentation and new centralization risks.
Solana scales vertically, running everything on a single high-performance chain. No fragmentation, but steep validator requirements.
Both paths have merit. Neither is perfect. In the end, institutions won’t care about ideology; they’ll adopt what works. As Hilmar pointed out, the early institutional adopters chose Ethereum and decided to stay. Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) became a standard for DeFi.
2. Can DeFi Handle Real-World Assets at Institutional Standards?
Yes, Ethereum has already proven it can handle RWAs. Stablecoins alone are evidence of mass adoption at an institutional scale. Projects bringing U.S. Treasuries and credit markets on-chain are pushing this further. On Solana, I’m less convinced—its design choices are bold, but Ethereum has shown it can host serious institutional assets today, and it never went down in its 10-year history.
3. Are Builders Ready to Deliver Faster Than Institutions Demand?
Institutions are ready. Banks want to adopt. Regulators are adapting. The bottleneck isn’t them—it’s us, the builders.
Institutions don’t wait for ideology. They expect software that is stable, secure, documented, and automated at scale. Without that, they will turn to alternatives, whether it’s Solana’s vertical scaling model or private blockchain infrastructure.
Theoretically, Ethereum has everything it needs: a strong developer community, the right roadmap, and proven use cases. But execution lags. Builders move slower than institutions demand, and that’s the gap we need to close if Ethereum is to truly host trillions.
Conclusions
Institutions are moving faster than most builders expect. Regulators aren’t the main barrier. The bottleneck is whether we can deliver infrastructure that matches institutional standards—and outperforms traditional systems in speed, efficiency, and security.
So, is Ethereum ready for a trillion dollars? The blueprint is already there, but not every rollup and DeFi protocol is there yet. Stablecoins, lending, and RWAs are no longer experiments; they’re the starting point. The only question left is whether builders can rise to meet the institutions already waiting at the gate.
And that’s why CV Summit matters. It’s where the industry stops talking about pilots and starts asking the trillion-dollar questions.