Ethereum
Ethereum could rise toward $5,000 within roughly a year, according to Arthur Hayes, who argues that Robinhood’s decision to use Ethereum as the security layer for its blockchain could encourage other large financial institutions to build on the network.
Hayes, co-founder of BitMEX and chief investment officer at Maelstrom, made the prediction at EastPoint: Seoul 2026. He said Robinhood’s choice has created a new narrative for Ethereum by providing a major financial platform as a reference point for other companies evaluating blockchain infrastructure.
Ether was trading around $2,650 when Hayes made the remarks. Reaching $5,000 from that level would require a gain of approximately 89%, making the target dependent on broader institutional adoption rather than Robinhood’s blockchain alone.
Robinhood Chain provides a concrete example of that institutional use case. The network launched its public mainnet on July 1 as an Ethereum Layer 2 built using Arbitrum technology, with a focus on financial services and tokenized real-world assets such as equities, ETFs and private assets.
The network uses Ethereum blobs for data availability and ETH as its native gas token. Its canonical bridge connects the Layer 2 with Ethereum, while withdrawals to Ethereum follow the standard Arbitrum challenge period. Robinhood also launched the network with integrations involving infrastructure providers including Alchemy, BitGo and Chainlink, while Uniswap deployed a dedicated automated market maker.
Early activity provided additional evidence of demand for ETH within the network. Bridged Ether exceeded $70 million during the first week after launch, while Token Terminal data cited in the source showed 194,000 daily active users and 46,748 ETH held by Robinhood Chain before total value locked surpassed $100 million.
Network activity subsequently expanded. By August, Robinhood Chain had recorded nearly $9 billion in cumulative decentralized exchange volume. Uniswap founder Hayden Adams also said most transactions were denominated in ETH, describing Ether as the network’s base trading pair, highest-volume asset and gas token.
Ethereum is also receiving support from exchange-traded fund demand. U.S. spot Ether ETFs recorded $689.8 million in net inflows across the five trading sessions from September 21 through September 25, extending the positive flow streak to five sessions.
BlackRock’s ETHA accounted for $326.2 million of those inflows, while Fidelity’s FETH attracted $174.1 million and BlackRock’s staking-focused ETHB received another $47.5 million. The weekly inflows reversed approximately $140.6 million in outflows recorded during the previous week.
Staking provides another source of reduced immediately liquid ETH supply. Validator Queue data on September 28 showed approximately 1.61 million ETH waiting to enter staking, compared with about 161,000 ETH waiting to exit. Around 43.5 million ETH was already staked, representing 35.66% of supply, with 889,387 active validators.
From a market perspective, however, Ethereum still faces a significant technical hurdle before Hayes’ target becomes relevant. ETH rallied from around $2,400 in mid-September and briefly approached $2,800 before retreating below $2,700. On September 23, the token reached an intraday high near $2,789 before falling to approximately $2,648.
The $2,800 area therefore remains an important near-term barrier. A sustained move above that region could put $3,000 back into focus, but ETH would still need to gain roughly another 40% from that level to reach Hayes’ $5,000 target.
The institutional-adoption thesis also faces a broader question: how much economic activity generated by financial applications on Layer 2 networks ultimately accrues to Ethereum itself. Robinhood Chain generated roughly $4.5 million in transaction fees on September 3 while spending an estimated $398 to post data and proofs to Ethereum, according to data cited in the source.
Bitquery counted 597 million transactions on Robinhood Chain through September 3 and approximately $23 million in cumulative fees, while ETH remained the network’s native gas token.
That distinction matters for Hayes’ thesis. Robinhood’s use of Ethereum infrastructure provides evidence of institutional adoption, but the path from greater Layer 2 activity to a substantially higher ETH valuation depends on how that activity translates into demand for Ethereum’s underlying infrastructure and asset.
The key factors to watch are therefore Ethereum’s ability to reclaim the $2,800 area, continued ETF inflows, staking demand and the extent to which Robinhood and other financial institutions expand their use of Ethereum-based infrastructure. Those developments would provide further evidence for, or against, the institutional-adoption case underlying Hayes’ $5,000 projection.
