Every financial transaction contains within it an element of trust. Ethereum’s digital trust is allowing vast quantities of assets, capital, and financial transactions to be digitized, unlocking tremendous efficiencies for the global financial system and benefiting everyone from institutions to enterprises to consumers.
As we approach the 10-year anniversary of Ethereum on July 30, Consensys is releasing The Industrialization of Trust, a detailed report outlining the investment case for Ethereum and the new technological category of Trustware. Trustware is infrastructure that industrializes the production of trust, allowing it to be encoded in the form of a digital commodity. Our research and analysis demonstrates how Ethereum has become the dominant blockchain platform, underpinning more than 50% of all non-Bitcoin digital assets, including 60% of stablecoins, 60% of all capital used in decentralized finance, and 80% of all tokenized “real world assets,” like stocks, money market funds, and bonds.
You can download the full report here or read on for a quick look at the limitations of traditional trust, how Trustware and digital trust has emerged to solve those limitations, and the multi-trillion-dollar opportunity ahead for Ethereum.
Ethereum’s Breakthrough: Digital Trust and Trustware
Trustware is the infrastructure that enables an upgrade from analog concepts of trust, like notes and ledgers verified by human agents and auditors, guaranteed by human insurers and regulators, to an equivalent digital concept of trust that can be generated algorithmically.
For centuries, human civilization has relied on various forms of trust infrastructure, from tribal kinship to large institutions like governments, insurance companies, auditors, and legal systems. While these systems enable cooperation and economic growth, they come at an immense cost. Annually, it’s estimated that humanity spends over $9 trillion on trust-related expenses, including insurance ($8.0 trillion), legal systems ($1.0+ trillion), and auditing ($290 billion). This colossal expenditure highlights a fundamental issue: current models of trust don’t scale efficiently for the digital age. They are analog – slower, more expensive, more fragmented than the always-on, largely automated, and rapidly accelerating digital economy that relies on them.
Trustware imbues ordinary data with the essential qualities of trust – validity and finality, in a completely algorithmic process. Validity guarantees that data is consistent and correct, with mathematical certainty. Finality guarantees that it is permanent and cannot be changed except at immense cost. Ethereum allows these properties to be added to data in a scalable way, without continuous human intervention, achieving trust with near-zero marginal cost. In this way, through its powerful public network and breakthrough cryptoeconomic algorithms that generate digital trust, Ethereum is able to make the verification of financial transactions, the world’s largest consumer of trust, radically better in speed, in cost, in safety, and in scale, all at the same time.
The investment case
For years, investors have learned about how ETH was the “second largest cryptocurrency.” It’s true, but it doesn’t say much. Today, they are learning that ETH is the proxy for the explosive growth of stablecoins and other tokenized assets that they are seeing talked about on business channels every day, and maybe already using in their daily lives. They are learning that ETH is what powers the prediction markets they see online and in the news, that ETH powers the new tokenized equities that Robinhood is launching. And with landmark proposed legislation like the GENIUS and CLARITY acts, this wave of innovation is only going to build. Ethereum’s role as the platform that drives the future global economy is gaining more attention every day.
From the beginning, Ethereum has been built for this moment. Ethereum is in a category of one when it comes to safety, security, and resilience. The 10 year anniversary of the genesis block is also a celebration of a 10 year track record unmatched in either digital or traditional asset technology.
Unmatched Economic Security: With $100B+ in staked capital and over 1 million validators, Ethereum creates a formidable defense against attacks.
Robust Network Effects: Ethereum hosts the deepest liquidity, the most developers (2x more than the next closest chain), and the richest ecosystem of applications. The EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) standard dominates smart contract development, and every major stablecoin uses Ethereum as its primary platform.
Proven Adaptability and Continuous Upgrades: Through complex upgrades like The Merge (transition to proof-of-stake with 99.95% energy reduction) and Dencun (cutting rollup fees by 90%), Ethereum has demonstrated resilience and continuous improvement without any downtime over its first decade.
Global Neutrality and Decentralization: Unlike other chains that concentrate power, Ethereum is not controlled by a single company or entity. Its 1 million+ validators operate across 80+ countries, with over 67% of nodes running outside the U.S., proving its antifragility and credible neutrality.
Institutional Validation and Adoption: Global institutions like BlackRock, JPMorgan, Visa, and Franklin Templeton are already leveraging Ethereum for tokenized assets, payments, and private equity access, validating its security model and reliability. Tokenized real-world assets on Ethereum's rails crossed $13 billion, growing at an extraordinary 6.75% a month.
Despite its technical maturity, and progress consolidating the market for digital asset infrastructure, Ethereum is still in the early stages of its economic potential. Total crypto market cap represents only 0.3% of global wealth, and tokenized securities capture a tiny fraction of capital markets. However, increased regulatory clarity, particularly in major economies like the US, is accelerating adoption, shifting from resistance to embracing digital assets. The convergence of artificial intelligence (AI) with blockchain creates unprecedented demand for trustless infrastructure: as AI agents begin transacting at machine speed, they'll need machine trust. Ethereum is the only infrastructure ready for an economy where algorithms need to trust each other.
For institutions, holding Ether (ETH) offers ownership in the foundational infrastructure of the digital economy at a fraction of its terminal value. ETH is spendable to pay for transactions on the network and acts as a store of value, but unlike Bitcoin, ETH also generates cash flow through staking, and like equities, ETH’s value grows as the Ethereum platform gains adoption. It combines properties of commodities, currencies, and capital assets into a unique and compelling asset of its own. And as the Trustware report makes clear, the role of ETH as the economic bandwidth that secures the assets expected to be issued and transacted on platform over the coming years, will drive powerful value accretion.
The trust machine has been built. It runs continuously, improving itself, securing ever more value, attracting ever more users. The question is not whether to believe in Ethereum. The question is whether to believe in the digitization of trust. If so, the investment case for owning a portion of the base layer of the future global economy, writes itself.
To delve deeper into the economics and valuation framework, we encourage you to read the full report: The Industrialization of Trust.