According to a report by Forbes, in 2024, the total market value of global crypto assets soared to a historic high of $3.8 trillion. Among them, the price of BTC reached a historic peak of $106,490.1 on December 17, 2024, with various Meme Coins dominating the spotlight, becoming the absolute focus of the market alongside the U.S. presidential election. The Ethereum ecosystem also experienced a remarkable year, successfully completing the Dencun upgrade, while ETH achieved a market cap increase of about 48%.
Looking ahead to 2025, what events in the Ethereum ecosystem are worth users' attention?
Pectra Upgrade
The Ethereum Pectra upgrade is expected to be officially activated in the first quarter of 2025, and the Ethereum improvement protocols to be implemented in this round of upgrades include:
EIP-2537: Precompile for BLS12-381 Curve Operations EIP-2935: Provide Historical Block Hashes in State EIP-6110: Provide Validator Deposit on-chain EIP-7002: Assets Triggered by Execution Layer EIP-7549: Move Committee Index Out of Validator Signature EIP-7594: PeerDAS EIP-7685: General Execution Layer Requests EIP-7251: Increase MAX_EFFECTIVE_BALANCE EIP-7702: Set EOA Account Code for a Transaction EIP-7623: Increase Call Data Fees Related to EOF Technical Protocols
As early as November 2023, developers began deploying the Ethereum Pectra upgrade. Initially, in the developers' vision, this was only a minor upgrade that could be completed alongside the Dencun upgrade in March 2024. However, at that time, many technical agreements were not reached, so it was not implemented.
Public information shows that Gaia Regis, co-founder and CEO of Byzantine, has stated that the Pectra upgrade will fundamentally change the way Ethereum's security layer operates.
After the completion of the Pectra upgrade, developers unanimously agreed that the Verkle Transition is the key reform area for the next steps in Ethereum.
What is the Verkle Transition?
The Verkle Transition is a significant reform of Ethereum's state data structure, referring to the plan by developers to transfer all state data from the Merkle Patricia Tree structure to the Verkle structure. This will allow nodes to generate smaller state data proofs, thus improving node efficiency, especially suitable for the operation of lightweight nodes, which can reduce maintenance costs.
DeFi
On December 23, 2024, Uniswap officially announced that its Layer2 solution Unichain is expected to launch its public mainnet in early 2025, which could be a grand opening event for the DeFi field of the Ethereum ecosystem in 2025.
Unichain is an infrastructure focused on decentralized finance (DeFi), built on the OP Stack, and running on Ethereum's Sepolia testnet. Since its launch in October 2024, the Sepolia testnet has processed over 50 million transactions and deployed over 4 million test contracts.
RWA
Decentralized Real World Assets (hereinafter referred to as RWA) will release liquidity, especially in the fields of real estate and carbon credits, and may see new explorations in the field of copyright works.
According to data from RWA.xyz, as of December 24, 2024, RWA has reached a total asset lock-up of approximately $14.9 billion, with over 80,000 asset holders.
Bitwise senior investment strategist Juan Leon pointed out in the latest weekly report released on December 18, 2024, that Ethereum will see a strong rebound in 2025, with the biggest driving force coming from RWA. Relevant data shows that in the current RWA market, RWA on Ethereum accounts for 81%, dominating the market.
Stablecoin
An article published by Forbes on December 23, 2024, pointed out that Stablecoins have become one of the most successful use cases in the field of crypto assets, relying on blockchains such as Ethereum, Solana, and Tron to facilitate cross-chain transactions.
In 2024, the circulating supply of Stablecoins reached 200 billion, and it is expected that the circulating supply will continue to grow in 2025, exceeding 400 billion.
NFT
On December 22, 2024, an article published by the Web3 media platform Cointribune noted that the weekly sales volume of Ethereum-based NFTs reached an astonishing $304 million, a 76% increase compared to the previous week's sales. The sales volume of NFTs on Ethereum accounted for 66% of the total NFT sales that week, particularly with the popularity of some well-known NFT series continuing to rise, such as the Azuki Elements series NFT, which saw sales increase by 226% compared to the previous week.
As 2024 comes to a close, the sudden surge in Ethereum NFT sales seems to signal a potential market revival in 2025. Perhaps, with the joint push of more emerging use cases, media outlets have indicated that ETH is expected to reach a new value high of $15,000 in May 2025, let us look forward to it together!