According to 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 historical peak of $106,490.1 on December 17, 2024, with various Meme Coins taking the spotlight, becoming the absolute focus of the market alongside the U.S. presidential election, while the Ethereum ecosystem also experienced a very exciting year, successfully completing the Dencun upgrade and achieving a market cap increase of approximately 48%.
Looking ahead to 2025, what events in the Ethereum ecosystem should users pay attention to?
Pectra upgrade
The Ethereum Pectra upgrade is expected to be officially activated in the first quarter of 2025. The Ethereum Improvement Proposals to be implemented in this round of upgrades include:
EIP-2537: Precompiled operations for BLS12-381 curve
EIP-2935: Provide historical block hashes in state
EIP-6110: Provide validator deposits on-chain
EIP-7002: Assets triggered by the execution layer
EIP-7549: Move committee index out of the validation 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
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 had not reached consensus, so it was not implemented.
Public information on the network 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 have unanimously agreed that Verkle Transition is the key reform area for Ethereum's next steps.
What is Verkle Transition?
Verkle Transition is a major reform of Ethereum's state data structure, referring to the developers' plan to transfer all state data from the Merkle Patricia Tree structure to the Verkle structure, which will enable nodes to generate smaller state data proofs, thereby improving node efficiency, especially suitable for the operation of lightweight nodes, potentially reducing maintenance costs.
DeFi
On December 23, 2024, Uniswap officially announced that its Layer 2 solution Unichain is expected to launch its public mainnet in early 2025, which may mark a grand opening event for the Ethereum DeFi ecosystem in 2025.
Unichain is an infrastructure focused on Decentralized Finance (DeFi), built on the OP Stack and running on Ethereum's Sepolia test network. 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 lead to new explorations in the field of copyrighted works.
According to data from RWA.xyz, as of December 24, 2024, RWA has reached a total asset lock-up of about $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 welcome a strong rebound in 2025, with the greatest driving force coming from RWA. Relevant data shows that in the current RWA market, Ethereum's RWA 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 like 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 may continue to grow in 2025, exceeding 400 billion.
NFT
On December 22, 2024, an article published by the Web3 media platform Cointribune pointed out that the weekly sales volume of Ethereum-based NFTs reached an astonishing $304 million, a 76% increase compared to the previous week's sales. NFT sales on Ethereum accounted for 66% of the total NFT sales for that week, with the popularity of certain well-known NFT series continuing to rise, such as the Azuki Element series, which saw a 226% increase in sales compared to the previous week.
As 2024 draws to a close, the sudden surge in Ethereum NFT sales seems to signal potential market vitality for 2025. Perhaps, accompanied by the joint promotion of more emerging use cases, some media have pointed out that ETH is expected to reach a new high value of $15,000 in May 2025. Let us look forward to it together!
