ETH new highs are imminent, what are the "Ethereum" alpha tokens worth paying attention to?

Written by: Biteye Chinese Recently

, the price of ETH has approached its all-time high, with strong upward momentum and an accelerated influx of institutional funds.

In this context, we select 12 alpha tokens to explain their latest progress and bullish reasons.

$BMNR 1/12

under the leadership of Tom Lee, U.S.-listed company BitMine Immersion (NYSE: BMNR) has hoarded 1.2 million ETH, worth $5.03 billion, becoming the world's largest ETH holder. In addition, the company plans to continue buying ETH, aiming to obtain 5% of the global ETH supply, and plans to use its ETH holdings for staking to earn yield. Therefore, BMNR is undoubtedly one of the strong carriers for betting on Ethereum.

BMNR's aggressive hoarding strategy has also attracted endorsements from Wall Street shareholders. Sister Wood's ARK Invest spent about $182 million to acquire about 4.77 million common shares of Bitmine, of which $177 million will be used to buy Ethereum (ETH); Well-known investor Bill Miller also invested in BMNR and compared it to ETHMicroStrategy; Peter Thiel's Founders Fund also disclosed a 9.1% stake.

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

$ENA 2/12

the recent bullish sentiment was detonated by StablecoinX, a new division of Ethena, which plans to repurchase $260 million ENA within 6 weeks, accounting for 8% of the circulating supply, with real money pulling the market every day. More importantly, the fee switch has been approved, and part of the protocol revenue will be directly distributed to sENA holders in the future. According to Tokenomist's scenario simulation, it is conservatively estimated that sENA can reach 4% annualized, and it is even expected to exceed 10% in an optimistic scenario.

In addition to the internal benefits of the protocol, in early June, Coinbase announced its support for ENA and the launch of US dollar trading pairs as one of the few synthetic stablecoin projects listed on the coin. At the same time, the Ethena ecosystem continues to grow, collaborating with yield protocols like Pendle to embed USDe into more DeFi strategies and increase 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 ability to resist cyclical conditions.

$PENDLE 3/12

Pendle's recent performance has been extremely impressive, with TVL exceeding $9 billion on August 13, a record high. Its token price once approached $6, up more than 30% during the month, far outpacing the market.

The positive logic is as follows:

1. Boros was launched, converting BTC/ETH perpetual contract funding rates into tradable assets, attracting a large number of users to participate in a short period of time and becoming the core growth driver of Pendle V3. According to statistics, Boros attracted more than $1.85 million worth of BTC and ETH deposits in the first two days of its launch, driving Pendle's TVL to rise sharply.

2. Pendle is deeply linked with protocols such as Ethena and Aave, and has launched strategies such as PT-USDe, contributing almost 60% of Pendle's TVL.

3. Since 2025, about $41 billion of institutional funds have poured into DeFi, and Pendle's Citadels compliance program has facilitated institutional funds and accelerated TVL climbs.

$UNI on 4/12

, Uniswap has two positive catalysts entering 2025: the official launch of the V4 version and the launch of the exclusive layer-2 network "Unichain".

1. The launch of the V4 version allows developers to use Hooks to create customized pools and strategies, enhancing the vitality of the protocol. Currently, more than 2,500 Hook pools have been deployed, and projects such as Bunni and EulerSwap using Hooks have achieved a cumulative trading volume of over $100 million, bringing new vitality to Uniswap.

2. Uniswap plans to create an exclusive ecosystem through Unichain, which currently accounts for more than 70% of daily active transactions. This not only expands the user base but also diversifies single-chain dependencies, improving risk resistance.

May 12 $FLUID

early August, Fluid's trading volume briefly surpassed Uniswap, reaching $1.5 billion in a single day, slightly higher than Uniswap's $1.3 billion in the same period. Fluid converts lending pool collateral into trading liquidity through an original liquidity layer, greatly improving the efficiency of capital utilization. This model allows Fluid to have an amazing trading volume even with a relatively low TVL.

The positive logic is as follows:

1. Release a large amount of liquidity: Fluid cleverly uses the collateral/debt of the lending pool directly as the liquidity of the trading pair, making the asset "eat two fish". While users earn interest on depositing ETH or stablecoins on Fluid, these assets are used to provide trading depth and earn additional fee income. What's more, the Fluid liquidity layer automatically adjusts the share of each asset for trading based on borrowing utilization, and dynamically increases collateral requirements when funds approach the borrowing limit to prevent runs and liquidation risks. This design significantly reduces capital fragmentation and improves the turnover efficiency of unit liquidity.

2. Rapid development: Fluid has grown rapidly since its launch in 2023, not only becoming the fastest-growing DEX on Ethereum, but also reaching a cumulative transaction volume of $10 billion in 100 days. Now a more efficient "lightweight" exchange is about to be launched, which is expected to increase the daily trading volume by another 4-600 million US dollars, and the rapid iteration of the product provides room for imagination for the value growth of the FLUID token.

3. Market recognition rises, valuation has potential: $FLUID price jumped 14% in a single day in early August as trading volume rose. Even after this round of rise, its circulating market value is around $290 million, which is much lower than Uniswap, and it is a relatively undervalued and high-growth target.

6/12 $LDO

As Ethereum's largest liquid staking protocol, Lido will usher in a new round of development peak in 2025. Currently, Lido's TVL is close to 41 billion, accounting for 26% of the network's DeFi TVL.

Through sorting, it can be seen that Lido is digging deeper into its moat, and more and more applications accept stETH as collateral or a means of payment, increasing its liquidity and demand. For example, lending protocols such as Aave have supported stETH as a collateral asset, and stable pools such as Curve also offer stETH trading pairs, and stETH is accelerating its integration into all corners of DeFi.

Against the backdrop of Ethereum staking continuing to heat up, Lido's prospects as an industry leader remain solid.

of $AAVE 7/12

Aave's TVL has climbed to approximately $38.9 billion, nearly doubling from the beginning of the year, accounting for nearly a quarter of the entire DeFi TVL, ranking first in the lending market.

The stablecoin narrative has exploded this year, with the GHO stablecoin supply launched by Aave increasing from about $146 million to about $314 million, an increase of more than 100%, and gradually expanding to networks such as Arbitrum and Base.

Moreover, news of Aave cooperation has been frequent recently. On the one hand, the Horizon project was launched to expand RWA channels, and on the other hand, it cooperated with Plasma to launch an institutional incentive fund, with the aim of attracting more financial companies to move their business to the blockchain. This series of initiatives solidifies Aave's position as an institutional-grade DeFi lending gateway.

On 8/12, $CRV

Curve's decentralized stablecoin crvUSD celebrated its second anniversary, and its performance was very impressive.

As an overcollateralized stablecoin launched by Curve, crvUSD has been widely integrated into major DeFi protocols after two years of development and can even be used for daily payments. Thanks to the unique LLAMMA automatic liquidation mechanism, crvUSD exhibits excellent resilience against market fluctuations, maintaining a 1:1 peg while maximizing the protection of collateral value. In the first half of the year, rising DeFi interest rates drove savings crvUSD (scrvUSD) annualized yields close to 8% and trended upward.

Despite security concerns, after experiencing incidents such as DNS hijacking attacks, the Curve team quickly migrated to the new domain name and advocated for the use of censorship-resistant methods such as ENS and IPFS to provide front-end services.

In addition, Curve founder Michael Egorov is developing a new yield protocol "Yield Basis", aiming to provide sustainable yields for BTC and ETH on the chain, and the Curve ecosystem has the potential to open up to RWAs.

As a stablecoin issued by MakerDAO (Sky) $SKY 9/12

, USDS currently ranks fourth in market capitalization, adopting an overcollateralized model and must lock up higher-value crypto assets before minting. Some time ago, the GENIUS Act prohibited stablecoins from "paying dividends directly", and USDS income came from collateral assets participating in on-chain staking and liquidity mining instead of direct dividends, which avoided the restrictions of the bill. The current annualized return of sUSDS is close to 5%, which has a certain advantage in the US 2.7% inflation environment

Currently, mainstream institutions such as Coinbase have launched SKY and USDS trading in July, which also marks a key step towards traditional finance for Maker.

10/12 $SPK

Spark TVL has surged by more than 200% since April, and currently has a TVL of about $8.2 billion, ranking eighth among DeFi protocols. Such a large incremental injection of funds directly boosted market confidence in Spark, and the $SPK price quickly rebounded and reached new highs.

Looking back at the initial opening of Spark, the popularity was quite high, using the strategy of large-scale airdrop + simultaneous listing on mainstream exchanges, attracting a large number of users to pay attention and participate in early trading, and the sudden increase in trading volume brought about spread fluctuations, coupled with the simultaneous opening of trading on leading platforms such as Binance and Coinbase, injecting considerable liquidity into $SPK.

More importantly, Spark is backed by MakerDAO's billions of dollars in reserves and a synthetic asset system that has been running steadily for many years, making it one of the few projects in the DeFi field that has been "born with a golden spoon in its mouth". As a result, Spark products have a high margin of safety from the start, providing confidence in the entry of institutional and large funds.

Looking ahead, Spark has a relatively complete product matrix that can lay out diversified income scenarios. The current product line covers SparkLend, SparkSavings, SLL, etc., covering almost all elements of the DeFi income closed loop.

11/12 $LINK

As an oracle leader, Chainlink recently launched a new Chainlink reserve mechanism, which automatically converts service fees paid by enterprises and DApps into LINK and deposits them into the on-chain reserve pool, accumulating more than $1 million worth of LINK. Officials stated that the reserves will not be withdrawn for several years to support the long-term growth of the network, which can be regarded as a deflationary benefit for LINK's "burning".

In addition, as of August, the Chainlink network's oracles have secured more than $93 billion in DeFi value, a record high, including more than 83% of Ethereum's on-chain assets, and almost 100% of assets on new chains like Base.

Chainlink also recently partnered with NYSE's parent company, ICE, to seamlessly bring its forex and precious metals data on-chain. Looking ahead, LINK has a greater chance of rising as oracle services become more integrated into DeFi and RWA narratives.

12/12 $PENGU

Last month, PENGU made a comeback with the NFT+Memecoin narrative, skyrocketing by over 400% in just 30 days. The driving factors behind this are mainly institutional-level positives, with Canary Capital, a well-known institution, submitting an application for the world's first dual-asset ETF for NFT+ tokens - the Canary Spot PENGU ETF, with 80-95% PENGU tokens and 5-15% Pudgy Penguins NFTs in the proposed portfolio.

SEC officially accepted the ETF application, the market's expectations for the "Penguin ETF" became optimistic, and the PENGU token immediately soared.