Eterna's Insights - December 2025

Wall Street’s Wealth Platforms Broaden Crypto Access

Bank of America announced that starting January, its advisors will be allowed to recommend bitcoin investments, making four U.S. spot bitcoin ETFs available across Merrill, Bank of America Private Bank, and Merrill Edge. The move aligns BofA with peers like Morgan Stanley, whose CIO suggested a similar 1-4% bitcoin allocation earlier during the fall. The same day, Vanguard quietly opened its platform to third-party crypto ETFs and mutual funds, covering bitcoin, ether, XRP, and Solana, a notable shift from its long-standing public skepticism toward crypto products. Meanwhile, Charles Schwab confirmed plans to launch spot bitcoin and ether trading by mid-2026.

These moves mark a clear inflection point in U.S. wealth-management distribution. Three of the four major wirehouses - BofA, Morgan Stanley, and Wells Fargo Advisors - have now lifted restrictions on crypto exposure, leaving UBS as the last major holdout. The driver is less ideological conversion than client demand and competitive pressure, helped by improved ETF market infrastructure, deeper liquidity, and clearer SEC processes. With BofA (~$2T AUM) and Vanguard (~$11T AUM) alone representing a ~$13T distribution channel, even a conservative 1% allocation could translate into ~$130B of incremental demand - more than doubling cumulative inflows into U.S. spot crypto ETFs to date. As access widens, bitcoin is likely just the entry point, with ether and select altcoins following, bringing potentially stickier, more institutional capital into the market.

Ethereum’s Fusaka Upgrade: Advancing the Scaling Roadmap

In early December, Ethereum rolled out its latest network upgrade, Fusaka. Rather than introducing flashy new features, the upgrade focuses on making Ethereum scale more smoothly as activity continues to move to layer-2 networks. Fusaka increases the amount of data that rollups can post to Ethereum and raises the network’s overall transaction capacity, all while keeping it easier for individuals and institutions to run nodes. In simple terms, Ethereum can now handle more activity at lower cost without becoming harder to participate in.

The practical impact is lower and more stable fees for users of rollups, better performance during busy periods, and a cleaner experience for developers. Fusaka also improves usability by enabling modern login methods like passkeys and biometrics, reducing reliance on seed phrases. From an investment perspective, this reinforces Ethereum’s strategy of positioning L1 as the trusted settlement and data layer, while letting most transactions happen elsewhere. While fees per transaction may decline, the upgrade increases the odds that more applications, stablecoins, and tokenized assets choose Ethereum as their home - supporting long-term network usage and relevance as competition from faster, cheaper chains continues to grow.

Solana’s Breakpoint: Momentum Builds in Abu Dhabi

Solana’s annual Breakpoint conference took place in mid-December in Abu Dhabi, bringing together one of the largest groups of builders, founders, and investors the ecosystem has hosted to date. The team attended the event, engaging with core developers and ecosystem participants across the main conference and surrounding events. Early announcements underscored the breadth of activity on the network: State Street and Galaxy Digital outlined plans for a tokenized money market fund on Solana with instant withdrawals via PayPal’s PYUSD, while Solana-native teams introduced upgrades across trading infrastructure, derivatives, and validator performance. Coinbase also announced plans to expand support for Solana tokens within its consumer app.

Beyond individual announcements, discussions throughout the week reflected a maturing ecosystem. Conversations increasingly centered on improving market structure, expanding institutional use cases such as tokenization and payments, and supporting higher-quality onchain financial activity. Solana continues to differentiate itself through a high-performance, single-layer architecture that appeals to teams building latency-sensitive applications. The developments and dialogue at Breakpoint point to an ecosystem focused on strengthening its foundations and broadening real-world adoption as it enters its next phase of growth.

Uniswap Activates Fee Switch and Burns 100M UNI

In late December, Uniswap governance approved the Unification proposal by a wide margin, activating the protocol’s long-discussed fee switch and formalizing a new operating structure for the DAO. The proposal builds on Uniswap’s Wyoming DUNA legal framework, unifies Uniswap Labs and the Uniswap Foundation under shared leadership, and allocates a 20M UNI annual growth budget to Labs. It also authorized a retroactive burn of 100M UNI from the treasury to account for years in which the protocol did not capture fees.

Following the vote, Uniswap executed the full 100M UNI burn (c.$570M at current prices) and began burning UNI via the newly activated fee mechanism. Going forward, a portion of trading fees is now routed toward UNI burns, directly linking protocol usage to token supply reduction. While total swap fees paid by users remain unchanged, part of the fee previously earned by liquidity providers is now captured by the protocol, introducing a new phase of economic alignment whose longer-term impact on liquidity and volumes will become clearer over time.