The claim that institutions are “adopting blockchain” deserves more skepticism than it usually gets. Yes, institutions are adopting it, but almost entirely in the safest, least disruptive ways possible. Their interest is not transformation; it’s about optimization. Efficiency, cost reduction, better reconciliation. That pattern should feel familiar. The Internet didn’t reinvent institutions either, it only made them run faster and cheaper. New "Internet companies" emerged and became more interesting and dominant. Real innovation doesn’t come from institutions porting existing workflows onto new rails. It comes from environments willing to rethink those workflows in the first place. That’s why Ethereum matters. It remains the only global blockchain with a credible, sustained innovation ethos, one that is explicitly oriented toward enabling things that simply were not possible before, rather than repeating the same activities with marginal gains in speed or cost. And even here, we’re still early. DeFi, RWAs, stablecoins, NFTs, and DAOs are not the end state. These are the opening act. Five years from now, we’ll look back on these primitives as the visible tip of a much larger iceberg: early implementations of Ethereum-based trust, coordination, and economic mechanisms whose real impact is only beginning to take shape. The mistake is to judge Ethereum by today’s use cases rather than by the class of capabilities it is steadily enabling.