Major altcoins down 40-57% since early 2025; corporate-blockchain market projected at $60B+ annually by 2030
The most uncomfortable warning for the future of public blockchains came from a friendly source. In a report released May 5, asset manager VanEck — one of the most pro-crypto fund houses on Wall Street — opened with a single line that stood out:
Public chains will be made obsolete if they fail to prove their role in a regulated digital-asset regime.
VanEck Investor Letter (2026-05)
VanEck runs flagship crypto ETFs. When that firm publicly flags a structural threat to Ethereum and Solana, it carries a different weight than a perma-bear thesis from a hedge-fund short book.
The Numbers Speak First
Since the start of 2025, Ethereum has dropped 40% and Solana 57%. Over the same window, MVDAPP — a digital-asset company stock index — fell only 4%. Public-chain tokens and blockchain-company equities are moving in opposite directions.
That's the core observation in the VanEck letter. Blockchain technology is growing — but the beneficiaries are not Ethereum and Solana tokens; they are the financial firms building their own private chains and capturing the spread.
What Is a "Corpchain"?
A Corpchain is an enterprise blockchain. Unlike Ethereum, where anyone can participate, a Corpchain is built and controlled by a single firm — validators are gated, privacy is enforced, and regulatory compliance is built into the protocol.
JPMorgan's Kinexys, Provenance, and Canton are the leading examples. They are already running large-scale repo markets, residential mortgages, and institutional settlements — and earning fees today.
The reasoning for using a Corpchain instead of a public chain is simple. Routing a transaction through Ethereum means paying gas fees to the network. Running it on your own chain captures those fees internally and keeps control. You also don't have to trust anonymous validators with your firm's financial activity.
VanEck projects that corporate blockchains will generate over $60 billion in annual revenue by 2030, split across cross-border payments, collateral and settlement, and asset tokenization at $5-20B per category.
Three Things Are Happening at Once
VanEck identifies three forces driving this shift in parallel.
First, settlement-speed innovation. Traditional T+2 settlement has compressed to under 12 seconds on-chain. More than $1 trillion in margin previously locked at clearinghouses has been freed up as efficient working capital. That alone is the most concrete incentive financial firms have for adopting blockchain.
Second, the GENIUS Act passing. Stablecoins now sit inside a recognized financial-infrastructure framework. Visa is processing roughly $3.5 billion in annual stablecoin payments, and Fiserv is distributing the FIUSD stablecoin to over 10,000 financial institutions. Total stablecoin supply has reached $310 billion globally.
Third, direct Fed-rail connectivity. Payward, Kraken's parent company, was approved for a limited Fed master account through the Kansas City Fed. That allows firms to plug directly into Federal Reserve infrastructure for compliant USD settlement, bypassing traditional deposit banks.
How Should Ethereum and Solana Respond?
VanEck isn't calling public chains dead — it's a conditional warning: prove your value or get displaced.
Ethereum and Solana's strength is decentralization and permissionless innovation. Anyone can build on top. Corpchains are firm-controlled, which makes building new things on top of them difficult. Long-term, the question is where innovation actually originates.
Short-term, though, public chains aren't supplying the regulatory compliance, stability, and governance that institutional finance demands. VanEck argues that if that gap stays open, public chains will fail to absorb institutional financial flows.
VanEck has reweighted its own portfolio accordingly — pulling back on direct token exposure and rotating toward equity in crypto companies building tokenization infrastructure and on-chain payment rails.
