Written by: imToken
According to a report by Forbes, in 2024, the total market value of global crypto assets surged 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 taking the lead, becoming the absolute focus in the market accompanied by the U.S. presidential election process and conclusion, while the Ethereum ecosystem also had a very exciting year, successfully completing the Dencun upgrade, and ETH achieved a market value 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. 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 the state
EIP-6110: Provide validator deposits on-chain
EIP-7002: Assets that can be triggered by the execution layer
EIP-7549: Move committee index out of validation signatures
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
Technical protocols related to EOF
As early as November 2023, developers had already begun deploying the Ethereum Pectra upgrade. Initially, in the developers' vision, this was just a small upgrade that could be completed alongside the Dencun upgrade in March 2024, but at that time, many technical protocols did not reach consensus, so it was not implemented.
Public information on the internet shows that Gaia Regis, co-founder and CEO of Byzantine, has stated: The Pectra upgrade will fundamentally change the way the Ethereum security layer operates.
After the Pectra upgrade is completed, developers have unanimously agreed that the Verkle Transition is the next key reform area for Ethereum.
What is the Verkle Transition?
The Verkle Transition is a significant reform of Ethereum's state data structure, referring to developers' plans to transfer all state data from the Merkle Patricia Tree structure to the Verkle structure, which will allow nodes to generate smaller state data proofs, thereby increasing node efficiency, particularly suitable for the operation of lightweight nodes, and can reduce maintenance costs.
DeFi
On December 23, 2024, Uniswap officially announced that its Layer2 solution Unichain is expected to go live on the public mainnet in early 2025, which may be a grand event for the Ethereum ecosystem's DeFi field 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 domain of copyrighted works.
According to data from RWA.xyz, as of December 24, 2024, RWA has reached a total locked asset amount of approximately $14.9 billion, with over 80,000 asset holders.
Juan Leon, a senior investment strategist at Bitwise, pointed out in the latest weekly report released on December 18, 2024, that Ethereum will experience a strong rebound in 2025, with the biggest driving force coming from RWA. Relevant data shows that currently, 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 crypto asset field, 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 to continue growing in 2025, surpassing 400 billion.
NFT
On December 22, 2024, the Web3 media platform cointribune published an article stating that the weekly sales volume of Ethereum-based NFTs reached an astonishing $304 million, a 76% increase compared to the previous week, and sales of NFTs on Ethereum accounted for 66% of the total NFT sales that week, especially some well-known NFT series continued to gain popularity, such as the Azuki element series NFTs, which saw a 226% increase in sales compared to the previous week.
As 2024 draws to a close, the sudden increase in Ethereum NFT sales seems to indicate potential market vitality for 2025. Perhaps, alongside more emerging use cases driving this forward, some media have pointed out: ETH is expected to reach a new value high of $15,000 in May 2025. Let's look forward to it together!
