Author: Kazu Umemoto, Bankless; Translated by: Deng Tong, Golden Finance
Ethereum is a vibrant network with a world-class developer network helping it stay ahead of the curve.
In 2024, Ethereum made significant progress in its rollup-centric evolution, introducing blob space through the Dencun upgrade, helping L2 reduce transaction costs by 10 to 100 times.
Today, we’re taking a look at some of the Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) and Ethereum Requests for Comments (ERCs) that I think are worth watching this year. Some of these are already planned for the Pectra upgrade, which we covered in full here, while others may be further away but already have some high-profile backers.
Below, let’s take a look at five notable Ethereum upgrades advocated by builders.
EIP-3074
Another of the most talked about improvements included in the Pectra upgrade is EIP-3074. This upgrade provides a simpler, cheaper, and better user experience for anyone interacting with Ethereum. Users will be able to bundle multiple transactions into 1, projects can sponsor users' transactions and pay their gas fees, and there is now a way to recover your wallet in the event that you lose your private keys.
EIP-7251
Validators with large amounts of ETH will love EIP-7251 because they will now be able to earn additional rewards from any ETH staked above the standard 32 ETH. Previously, any ETH staked above 32 ETH was just sitting there. If a validator wanted to stake, they had to set up a completely different validator node and have an extra 32 ETH. With 7251, they are able to set up a single validator node and stake all of the ETH they hold. Hopefully, this will lead to large institutions running their own validator nodes and becoming more involved in the ecosystem.
The addition of Pectra can also increase the speed of the Ethereum network through validator integration. Projects like Lido can now run fewer validator nodes because they can receive rewards on any ETH staked above the base amount of 32 ETH.
EIP-7002
Pectra includes: Let's say you want to get the rewards of running a validator node, but don't want to deal with all this useless stuff. You can delegate that responsibility to a validator node operator and provide them with a validator key, which is used to certify and propose blocks. At some point later, you want to withdraw your ETH and do something else with it, but the only way you can withdraw your ETH is to sign a "voluntary exit message" with your validator key. If the operator decides to trick you and not sign the message or the validator key is compromised, someone can hold your ETH for ransom.
With EIP-7002, stakers can withdraw their ETH using only a withdrawal key. This eliminates the risk of a malicious operator not signing an exit message or a validator key being compromised and your ETH being held ransom.
ERC-7683
Intents have been a hot topic in DeFi over the past few years, and ERC-7683 is a token standard that attempts to address the interoperability problem head-on and define a shared structure for cross-chain intents, "like an order ticket that anyone can create and any solver can implement," the ERC website states.
The standard was first published in 2024 and was written by Uniswap and Across Protocol. As ERC-7683 continues to be adopted, we can see great progress being made in the interoperability space.
ERC-7841
ERC-7841 is a very young token standard that has attracted some attention over the holiday season for its approach to interoperability. The standard proposes a low-level message format and API for applications to read and write messages from other chains. 7841 eliminates any kind of chain-specific logic so that applications can launch across multiple chains seamlessly. There are other EIPs with similar goals, but the continued excitement here shows how much momentum there is for interoperability.
