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Neobanks will fuel Ethereum's 2026 growth, says ether.fi CEO

2026/01/04 23:00
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Neobanks will fuel Ethereum's 2026 growth, says ether.fi CEO

Ethereum's next phase will be defined by financial products that feel familiar to everyday users, Mike Silagadze said.

By Margaux Nijkerk|Edited by Nikhilesh De
Jan 4, 2026, 3:00 p.m.
Sandy Peng, Mike Silagadze, Matt Gurbiel speaking at Consensus Hong Kong 2025. (CoinDesk/Personae Digital)

As Ethereum closes out a pivotal institutional year, ether.fi CEO and co-founder Mike Silagadze is already looking ahead to 2026, and he believes the network’s next phase will be defined less by speculation and more by financial products that feel familiar to everyday users, he told CoinDesk in an interview.

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Ether.fi is best known for its restaking platform on Ethereum, but has since expanded its focus toward building crypto-native neobanking products that combine yield, self-custody and onchain financial services. Silagadze will be speaking at CoinDesk's Consensus Hong Kong conference in February 2026

Silagadze described 2025 as a turning point for Ethereum, marked by a wave of institutional onboarding. While staking remains limited within ETFs, Silagadze said other institutional vehicles, like digital asset treasuries (DATs) have moved faster.

“A bunch of them have already started deploying into ether.fi,” he said, calling those early adopters “very much on the bleeding edge.” DATs he added, “certainly had a positive impact on the price” of ether.

Ether was at its lowest point in 2025 at $1,472 in April, while during the height of the DAT trend, ether shot up to $4,832.

Looking ahead, Silagadze said his excitement for 2026 centers on the continued maturation of Ethereum’s financial ecosystem.

"The whole crypto neobank movement… seems to be like a rapidly growing trend, just lots of companies going into space and seeing growth there,” he said.

In Silagadze’s view, neobanks represent one of the clearest paths to sustained adoption, especially as stablecoins become more deeply embedded in global finance. These platforms, he argued, are better positioned than ETFs to expose users to onchain activity and yield.

Ultimately, Silagadze said he believes Ethereum’s success in 2026 will depend on its ability to deliver practical utility at scale.

“I really believe that the adoption is going to come from a lot of these neobank type players,” he said, arguing that more user activity will naturally follow. That means focusing on “more real-world use cases,” from tokenized stocks to accessible banking services, and moving beyond what he sees as an overemphasis on gambling-driven applications.

Read more: How Ether.fi's Mike Silagadze Retained TVL as Restaking Lost Its Luster

Ether.FiConsensus Hong Kong 2026

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Pulling public figures, he finds CoinMarketCap showing roughly 59.6 billion XRP as circulating, while XRPScan reports about 64.7 billion. The divergence prompts what becomes the video’s key methodological point: different sources count “circulating” differently. Related Reading: Analyst Sounds Major XRP Warning: Last Chance To Get In As Accumulation Balloons As he explains it, the higher on-ledger number likely includes balances that aggregators exclude or treat as restricted, most notably Ripple’s programmatic escrow. He highlights that Ripple still “holds a chunk of XRP in escrow, about 35.3 billion XRP locked up across multiple wallets, with a nominal schedule of up to 1 billion released per month and unused portions commonly re-escrowed. Those coins exist and are accounted for on-ledger, but “they aren’t actually sitting on exchanges” and are not immediately available to buyers. In his words, “for all intents and purposes, that escrow stash is effectively off of the market.” From there, the analysis moves from headline “circulating supply” to the subtler concept of effective float. Beyond escrow, he argues that large strategic holders—banks, fintechs, or other whales—may sit on material balances without supplying order books. When you strip out escrow and these non-selling stashes, he says, “the effective circulating supply… is actually way smaller than the 59 or even 64 billion figure.” He cites community estimates in the “20 or 30 billion” range for what might be truly liquid at any given moment, while emphasizing that nobody has a precise number. That effective-float framing underpins the crux of his thesis: a potential supply shock if demand accelerates faster than fresh sell-side supply appears. “Price is a dance between supply and demand,” he says; if institutional or sovereign-scale users suddenly need XRP and “the market finds that there isn’t enough XRP readily available,” order books could thin out and prices could “shoot on up, sometimes violently.” His phrase “circulating supply could collapse overnight” is presented not as a claim that tokens are destroyed or removed from the ledger, but as a market-structure scenario in which available inventory to sell dries up quickly because holders won’t part with it. How Could The XRP Supply Shock Happen? On the demand side, he anchors the hypothetical to tokenization. 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