Author: Rick, Research Analyst at Messari; Translator: Jinse Finance
With 2026 fast approaching, the relationship between Ethereum's price and fundamentals is clearer than at any time since the NFT craze.
As of December 16, 2025, the price of Ethereum fell below $3,000. Considering the MVRV metric and its dominance among tokenized assets, ETH appears to offer a constructive long-term investment opportunity for allocators.
The MVRV Z-score is used to assess whether ETH is overvalued or undervalued relative to its fair value. This metric compares market capitalization (i.e., spot price multiplied by circulating supply) with realized value (i.e., the total capital flowing into ETH). Its formal definition is: the MVRV Z-score equals the difference between market capitalization and realized market capitalization, divided by the standard deviation of market capitalization (calculated cumulatively from the earliest available data point).
During the NFT boom of 2021-2022, ETH's MVRV Z-score surged to nearly 6, indicating extreme market frenzy. Since the Ethereum Merge, this metric has reverted to its mean, currently fluctuating primarily between 0 and 2—0 representing undervaluation, 1 close to fair value, and 2 leaning towards overvaluation. On May 7, 2025, when Ethereum's major technical upgrade Pectra launched, ETH was priced at approximately $1,800, with an MVRV Z-score of around -0.1. As the price subsequently reached new all-time highs, MVRV gradually climbed to nearly 2. Following the Fusaka upgrade on December 3, 2025, ETH was trading at approximately $3,189, with an MVRV Z-score of 0.47, indicating continued undervaluation at significantly higher price levels, suggesting a similar post-upgrade market structure, but with a more robust fundamental positioning.
On-chain data further reinforces the bullish logic for Ethereum . In the asset tokenization space, Ethereum is the core settlement layer . According to data from RWA.xyz (excluding stablecoins), Ethereum holds $11.9 billion in total tokenized value locked, accounting for 65.9% of the market share. While other base layers and rollups have developed, their scale is far smaller. As institutions migrate government bonds, credit, and other real-world assets to crypto channels to improve capital efficiency and reduce operating costs, Ethereum's liquidity, tool ecosystem, and compliance-oriented infrastructure are continuously deepening its competitive advantage.
The undervaluation signal indicated by the MVRV Z-score, the positive price performance following the upgrade, and its increasing dominance among tokenized assets all point in the same direction. However, this still only reveals a small part of the bullish narrative for Ethereum. As spot ETFs channel regulated funds into ETH and digital asset treasuries (DATs) continue to accumulate ETH supply, the free float in the market is gradually tightening, and prices are becoming increasingly sensitive to marginal demand. For allocators seeking exposure to real economic throughput and scalable smart contracts, ETH at current prices is more of an opportunity to build core positions for 2026 than a risk at the end of the cycle.
