Original Title: "ETH Nearing New High: Which 'Ether-Series' Alpha Tokens Are Worth Watching?"

Original Source: Biteye Chinese

Recently, the price of ETH has approached a historical high, showing strong upward momentum, with institutional funds also pouring in rapidly.

Against this backdrop, multiple Ethereum ecosystem tokens have seen positive developments. In this article, we have selected 12 Alpha tokens to interpret their latest progress and bullish reasons.

1/12 $BMNR

Led by Tom Lee, the publicly listed U.S. company BitMine Immersion (NYSE: BMNR) has accumulated 1.2 million ETH, valued at $50.3 billion, becoming the world's largest ETH holder. Furthermore, the company plans to continue purchasing ETH, targeting 5% of the global ETH supply, and plans to stake the held ETH to earn rewards. Therefore, BMNR is undoubtedly one of the strong vehicles betting on Ethereum.

BMNR's aggressive coin accumulation strategy has also attracted endorsement from Wall Street shareholders. Cathie Wood's ARK Invest has invested around $182 million, acquiring about 4.77 million shares of Bitmine, with $177 million used to purchase Ethereum (ETH); renowned investor Bill Miller has also invested in BMNR, likening it to ETHMicroStrategy; Peter Thiel's Founders Fund has also disclosed a 9.1% stake.

Benefiting from the rise in ETH price and the "coin hoarding" narrative, BMNR's stock price has continued to strengthen recently, nearly doubling since August.

2/12 $ENA

Recently, the bullish sentiment was ignited by Ethena's newly established department StablecoinX, planning to buy back $260 million worth of ENA within 6 weeks, accounting for 8% of the circulation, with daily significant trading volume. More importantly, the fee switch mechanism has been approved, and some protocol revenue will be directly distributed to sENA holders in the future. According to Tokenomist's scenario simulation, the conservative estimate of sENA's APY could reach 4%, and in an optimistic scenario, it may even exceed 10%.

In addition to internal protocol benefits, in early June, Coinbase announced support for ENA and opened a USD trading pair, making it one of the few synthetic stablecoin projects listed. At the same time, the Ethena ecosystem continues to grow, collaborating with yield protocols like Pendle to embed USDe into more DeFi strategies, enhancing sticky yields.

In the long run, Ethena is expanding the Converge Chain, launching the compliant stablecoin USDtb, gradually building a diversified income system, and enhancing its counter-cyclical capabilities.

3/12 $PENDLE

Recently, Pendle has performed remarkably well, with TVL surpassing $9 billion on August 13, hitting a historical high. Its token price once approached $6, with a monthly increase of over 30%, far outperforming the overall market.

The bullish logic is as follows:

1. Boros's launch converted BTC/ETH perpetual contract funding rates, and more into tradable assets, attracting a large number of users in a short period, becoming a core growth driver for Pendle V3. According to statistics, within the first two days of Boros's launch, it attracted over $1.85 million worth of BTC and ETH deposits, leading to a sharp increase in Pendle's TVL.

2. Pendle has deep collaborations with protocols such as Ethena and Aave, launching strategies like PT-USDe, contributing nearly 60% of Pendle's TVL.

3. Since 2025, approximately $41 billion in institutional funds have flowed into DeFi. Pendle's Citadels compliance plan has facilitated institutional funding and accelerated TVL growth.

4/12 $UNI

As a leading DEX, as we enter 2025, Uniswap has two major bullish catalysts: the official launch of V4 and the launch of the dedicated Layer 2 network "Unichain."

1. The launch of V4 allows developers to use Hooks to create customized pools and strategies, enhancing the protocol's longevity. There are already over 2,500 Hook pools deployed, with projects like Bunni and EulerSwap using Hooks achieving a cumulative billion-dollar transaction volume. These innovations have brought new vitality to Uniswap.

2. Uniswap plans to build an exclusive ecosystem through Unichain, which currently accounts for over 70% of daily active trading. This expansion of the user base and diversification of single-chain reliance have increased resistance to risks.

5/12 $FLUID

In early August, Fluid's trading volume briefly surpassed Uniswap, reaching $15 billion in a single day, slightly higher than Uniswap's $13 billion. Through its innovative liquidity layer, Fluid converts lending pool collateral into trading liquidity, significantly improving capital efficiency. This model allows Fluid to achieve astonishing trading volumes even with a relatively low TVL.

The bullish thesis is as follows:

1. Massive Liquidity Release: Fluid ingeniously uses the collateral/debt of the lending pool directly as liquidity for the trading pairs, allowing assets to be used in two ways simultaneously. Users earn interest by depositing ETH or stablecoins into Fluid, while these assets are used to provide trading depth and earn additional fee revenue. More importantly, the Fluid liquidity layer will automatically adjust the share of each asset used for trading based on the lending utilization rate and dynamically increase collateral requirements as funds approach the lending limit to prevent run and liquidation risks. This design significantly reduces asset fragmentation, improves the turnover efficiency of unit liquidity.

2. Rapid Development: Since its launch in 2023, Fluid has developed rapidly, becoming the fastest-growing DEX on Ethereum, achieving a cumulative $100 billion trading volume in just 100 days. It is now about to launch a more efficient "lite" exchange, expected to further increase the daily trading volume to $4-6 billion, providing room for rapid product iteration and value appreciation for the FLUID token.

3. Increasing Market Recognition, Valuation Potential: With the rise in trading volume, $FLUID's price surged 14% in a single day in early August. Even after this rally, its circulating market cap is around $290 million, much lower than Uniswap, making it a relatively undervalued asset with high growth potential.

6/12 $LDO

As Ethereum's largest staking protocol, Lido is poised for a new peak in development in 2025. Currently, Lido's TVL is close to $41 billion, accounting for 26% of the total DeFi TVL.

Through consolidation, it can be seen that Lido is deepening its moat, with more and more applications accepting stETH as collateral or payment, enhancing its liquidity and demand. For example, lending protocols like Aave have supported stETH as a collateral asset, stable pools like Curve have provided stETH trading pairs, and stETH is rapidly integrating into various corners of DeFi.

Against the backdrop of the ongoing Ethereum staking trend, Lido, as an industry leader, still has a bright outlook.

7/12 $AAVE

As of now, Aave's TVL has risen to approximately $38.9 billion, nearly doubling from the beginning of the year, accounting for nearly a quarter of the total DeFi TVL, firmly establishing itself as the leader in the lending market.

With the stablecoin narrative gaining momentum this year, the supply of stablecoins on Aave's GHO has grown from around $146 million to about $314 million, a growth of over 100%, and has expanded to networks like Arbitrum and Base. Aave's influence in the stablecoin field is expected to continue to rise.

Moreover, there have been frequent collaboration announcements involving Aave recently. On one hand, the launch of the Horizon project to expand the RWA channel, and on the other hand, a partnership with Plasma to introduce an institutional incentive fund aimed at attracting more financial firms to move their businesses to the blockchain. This series of initiatives has solidified Aave's position as an institutional-grade DeFi lending gateway.

8/12 $CRV

Curve's decentralized stablecoin, crvUSD, celebrated its two-year anniversary with impressive performance.

As an overcollateralized stablecoin launched by Curve, crvUSD has been widely integrated into major DeFi protocols over the two years and is even usable for day-to-day payments. Thanks to its unique LLAMMA auto-liquidation mechanism, crvUSD has demonstrated excellent resilience in market fluctuations, maintaining a 1:1 peg while maximally protecting collateral value. In the first half of this year, the rise in DeFi rates drove the savings rate of crvUSD (scrvUSD) to nearly 8% on an annualized basis, showing an upward trend.

Although there have been security concerns, after experiencing events like DNS hijacking attacks, the Curve team promptly migrated to a new domain and advocated for the use of censorship-resistant methods such as ENS, IPFS to provide front-end services.

Additionally, Curve founder Michael Egorov is developing a brand-new yield protocol called "Yield Basis," aiming to provide sustainable yields for on-chain BTC, ETH, potentially expanding the Curve ecosystem to RWAs.

9/12 $SKY

As the stablecoin issued by MakerDAO (Sky), USDS currently ranks fourth in market capitalization, adopting an overcollateralization model where higher-value crypto assets must be locked in before minting. Recently, the GENIUS Act banned stablecoins from "direct interest-bearing," so USDS's returns come from collateral assets participating in on-chain staking and liquidity mining, rather than direct interest payments, which somewhat circumvents regulatory constraints. The current sUSDS annualized yield is close to 5%, providing a certain advantage in an environment with a 2.7% inflation rate in the US.

Currently, mainstream institutions like Coinbase have listed SKY and USDS for trading in July, marking a significant step for Maker towards entering traditional finance.

10/12 $SPK

Since April, Spark's TVL has surged by over 200%, with the current TVL at around $8.2 billion, ranking it eighth among DeFi protocols. Such a substantial influx of funds has directly boosted the market's confidence in Spark, leading to a rapid price rebound for $SPK and a new all-time high.

Looking back, when Spark first started trading, it was quite popular. It adopted a strategy of large-scale airdrop + simultaneous listing on major exchanges, attracting a large number of users to pay attention and participate in early trading. The surge in trading volume brought price volatility, and with top platforms like Binance and Coinbase opening trading at the same time, it injected significant liquidity into $SPK.

More importantly, Spark is backed by MakerDAO's multi-billion-dollar reserve fund and a stable synthetic asset system that has been running for years, making it one of the few projects in the DeFi field born with a "silver spoon." Therefore, from the beginning, Spark's product had a high security margin, providing confidence assurance for institutional and large-scale funds to enter.

Looking ahead, Spark has a relatively complete product matrix and can layout diversified revenue scenarios. The current product line includes SparkLend, SparkSavings, SLL, etc., almost covering all elements of the DeFi revenue loop.

11/12 $LINK

As a leader in oracles, Chainlink recently launched a new Chainlink Reserve mechanism, automatically converting service fees paid by enterprises and DApps into LINK and depositing them into an on-chain reserve pool. It has accumulated LINK worth over 1 million dollars, ensuring a continuous future income source, which means the LINK selling pressure in the market will decrease. The official statement indicates that the reserve will not be withdrawn for years, used to support the network's long-term growth, which can be seen as a "burn" deflationary benefit for LINK.

In addition, as of August, the Chainlink network's oracles have secured over $930 billion in DeFi value, reaching a historical high, which includes over 83% of Ethereum's on-chain assets as well as nearly 100% of assets on new chains like Base, ensuring their security.

Recently, Chainlink also partnered with ICE, the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, to seamlessly bring its foreign exchange and precious metals data onto the chain. Looking ahead, with oracle services deeply integrating into the DeFi and RWA narratives, LINK has a greater chance of rising.

12/12 $PENGU

Last month, PENGU made a comeback with an NFT+Memecoin narrative and surged over 400% in just 30 days. The driving force behind this was primarily institutional-level good news, as the renowned institution Canary Capital submitted the world's first NFT+token dual-asset ETF application — the Canary Spot PENGU ETF. The proposed portfolio will consist of 80-95% PENGU tokens and 5-15% Pudgy Penguins NFT.

After the SEC formally accepted the ETF application, the market's expectations for the "Penguin ETF" became more optimistic, and the PENGU token subsequently surged.

Risk Warning: The above analysis is for reference only and does not constitute investment advice.

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