Authors: Zeqing Guo, Jeffrey Hu
Looking back at history, we can easily find that many of the cutting-edge technology discussions in the past Ethereum developer community have ultimately evolved into today's everyday application products, from DEXs, lending, to rollups, DA, all of which are the case. This also contains opportunities for investment layout.
So, at this point in early 2025, what valuable information can we glean from Ethereum's roadmap, the recent DevCon, and the upcoming Pectra upgrade at the beginning of next year? This article attempts to summarize and discuss this.
Ethereum's Roadmap
The Ethereum roadmap has always been an important reference for observing future development directions, including various stages such as The Merge, The Surge, The Scourge, The Verge, The Purge, and The Splurge. Vitalik also published extensively in October to introduce the content of each stage. Among them:
The Merge: The main completion is the execution layer and consensus layer, thus completing the transition from PoW to PoS. However, The Merge also includes some improvements in the consensus protocol, including single-slot finality and lowering the validator threshold.
The Surge: The main discussion focuses on future scalability, improving the underlying technology to better serve rollups. EIP-4844 has gone live, and future key topics include PeerDAS to reduce node pressure and cross-rollup interactions.
The Scourge: Mainly reduces some issues related to MEV, including excessive centralization of builders and MEV value being captured by large LSTs.
The Verge: Includes the transition from Merkle trees to Verkle trees and the snarkification of EVM.
The Purge: Reduces the pressure on Ethereum node data storage and state maintenance by deleting or archiving historical data. It will also clear some technical debt.
The Splurge: Some more cutting-edge improvements, including underlying EVM, account abstraction, and other cryptographic applications (such as VDF).
In the table below, we have extracted the key improvements of these stages, introduced their main effects, and summarized the current progress.
DevCon
In addition to the roadmap, another valuable source of information is the recent Ethereum DevCon conference. The current issues and potential solutions were discussed there.
One of the most striking topics at DevCon may belong to Beam Chain. The community's desire for new development directions for the future can be seen from the slightly sarcastic but inaccurate term 'Ethereum 3.0'. Beam Chain proposed many underlying improvements, including snarkification of the underlying technology and improvements to block generation and staking. However, the roadmap will take about 5 years to complete, so it does not require too much additional attention for now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gjuenkv1zrw
Topics related to rollups remain a hot topic during DevCon. The most discussed issue is the liquidity fragmentation and difficulty of interaction between rollups, which affects user experience; many speeches and panels addressed this issue or related solutions. Additionally, the current technological maturity of L2 was also discussed in the conference, as currently only Optimism and Arbitrum have reached Stage 1 (with permissioned fraud proof), while most other L2 projects remain at Stage 0 (centralized upgrades, no fraud proof, etc.) and need to synchronize with L1 upgrades.
Additionally, during DevCon, there were concentrated discussions on chain abstraction, pre-confirmation, cryptographic applications, future upgrades, and more. In the next section, we will focus on the Pectra upgrade content.
Pectra Upgrade
Recently, attention should be paid to the Ethereum Pectra upgrade expected to be completed in Q1 2025, which will also include multiple related transformations from the underlying to the user end.
EIP-7702: AA
The most relevant to users is EIP-7702, which, based on the design of EIP-3074, further develops EIP-4337, granting all EOA accounts the ability to 'temporarily' convert to smart contract accounts. This can further improve user experience (one signature for multiple transactions, zero gas, etc.), but it may also increase security risks such as signature phishing. At the same time, EIP-7702 is effective for all EOAs, so wallets and other products should also be adapted to respond to this upgrade. Overall, the activation of EIP-7702 will still bring new opportunities for all AA projects. More information can be found in our previous report.
EIP-7691: Increase the number of blobs
The Pectra plan aims to adjust the target number of blobs in each block from 3 to 6 and increase the maximum number of blobs from 6 to 9. Blobs provide cheaper storage space for rollups, and increasing the number of blobs will further reduce the cost of rollups at the expense of increased node operating costs, thereby enhancing Ethereum's DA competitiveness. Therefore, it will further benefit rollup-type projects. At the same time, the adjustments to the target and maximum values will also make gas decrease more rapidly when blobs are unused, while gas will increase more slowly when blobs are full and reach the maximum limit.
EIP-7251: Increase staking limit
Pectra plans to increase the current staking limit from 32 ETH to 2048 ETH. Ethereum staking service providers and whales no longer need to spread their ETH across multiple nodes but can merge and place it in a single node, reducing the number of validators in staking.
Future Opportunities
All the aforementioned technical changes or research discussions may bring about new changes and opportunities. We summarize some of the key opportunities as follows.
Interoperability Between Rollups
Both from the roadmap and many shares at DevCon, it can be seen that the liquidity interoperability and interactivity between Layer 2 (rollups) are the key focus for developers.
Currently, various solutions are already present in the community to address liquidity and interoperability issues between rollups from multiple levels.
Based Rollup: Since many current L2s use their relatively centralized sequencers to implement transaction ordering and then publish them to L1, they cannot achieve interaction quickly and timely. One solution is to implement ordering functionality through L1 to ensure the atomicity of interactions between L2s that utilize this ordering feature.
Shared Sequencer: Apart from based rollups, another implementation approach is for L2s to share a set of sequencers to achieve interaction.
Cross-Chain Intents: In addition to solving problems from the sequencer level, using intents to meet cross-rollup needs is another solution.
Currently, all of the above solutions are being implemented and promoted, such as Spire Labs' Based Stack, which is expected to go live in Q1 2025 for implementing based rollups; Shared sequencer-related Astria, Espresso, and Polygon AggLayer are being launched and iterated; ERC-7683 has started to be used by Unichain, Arbitrum, etc., to solve cross-chain liquidity issues; while Optimism's ERC-7802 can realize SuperchainERC20 to support a unified standard for assets within the superchain ecosystem and facilitate liquidity transfer. These different solutions may compete in the market for a winner in 2025.
Account Abstraction
Since it involves all EOA account addresses, the activation of EIP-7702 will provide new opportunities for AA projects. The combination of EIP-7702 with chain abstraction, intents, and other functions may also build more complex cross-chain or multi-chain interaction capabilities. However, due to the previous lackluster market performance of ERC-4337, the Pectra upgrade may be the last opportunity to validate PMF in the AA track.
Therefore, after the Pectra upgrade in the first quarter of next year, teams that participated earlier in EIP-7702 and were prepared, such as Zerodev, may experience a new wave of growth, the specific effects of which will be revealed soon.
Cryptographic Applications
Whether in the Ethereum roadmap or in discussions at DevCon, cryptographic technologies and applications remain significant topics. Technically, zkEVM and zkVM frameworks are gradually maturing, and ZKP combined with MPC, FHE, etc., may have more possible application combinations. Furthermore, some cutting-edge cryptographic technology discussions at DevCon, such as indistinguishability obfuscation (iO), which is hailed as the crown jewel of cryptography, may also receive more attention.
In terms of applications, cryptographic technologies also have many opportunities at the consumer end. Verification applications such as ZK Email (especially based on Aztec Noir) and zkTLS may see more adoption. Additionally, recent events, such as OFAC's sanctions against Tornado Cash being deemed overreaching, may alleviate some concerns about compliance in privacy applications.
Special thanks to Zhixiong Pan and Yan for reviewing and providing suggestions for this article!
