Analysis of Ethereum's Development Direction and Future Opportunities

Throughout history, the cutting-edge technology discussions within the Ethereum developer community often evolve into everyday application products, such as DEX, lending, rollup, and DA, among others. This contains opportunities for investment layout. This article will organize and explore valuable information from the early 2025 Ethereum roadmap, the recent DevCon, and the upcoming Pectra upgrade.

Ethereum Roadmap

The Ethereum roadmap has always been an important reference for observing future development directions, including stages such as The Merge, The Surge, The Scourge, The Verge, The Purge, and The Splurge.

• The Merge: Completion of the merger between the execution layer and the consensus layer, achieving the transition from PoW to PoS. It also includes improvements in the consensus protocol, such as single-slot finality and lowering the validator threshold.

• The Surge: Focus on future scalability, improving from the ground up to better serve rollups. EIP-4844 has been launched, with future focuses including PeerDAS to reduce node pressure and cross-rollup interactions.

• The Scourge: Mainly addresses MEV-related issues, including the excessive concentration of builders and the capture of MEV value by large LSTs.

• The Verge: Including the change from Merkle tree to Verkle tree at the base layer and the Snarkification of the EVM.

• The Purge: Reduce the pressure of data storage and state maintenance for Ethereum nodes by deleting or archiving historical data, while also cleaning up some technical debt.

• The Splurge: Some more cutting-edge improvements, including EVM underlayer, account abstraction, and other cryptographic applications ( such as VDF ).

DevCon Highlights

The DevCon conference discussed current issues and possible solutions. Among them, Beam Chain stands out, proposing many underlying improvements, including Snarkification of the underlying layer, improvements to block generation, and staking, etc. However, the roadmap will take about 5 years to complete, so it does not require too much attention for now.

Topics related to Rollup remain popular, especially the liquidity fragmentation and interaction issues between rollups. There is also discussion about the maturity of L2 technology, with only Optimism and Arbitrum entering Stage 1( with permissioned fraud proof ), while most others are still at Stage 0.

In addition, topics such as chain abstraction, pre-confirmation, cryptographic applications, and future upgrades were also discussed in depth.

Pectra Upgrade

The Pectra upgrade expected to be completed in Q1 2025 includes several transformations from the underlying layer to the user end:

1. EIP-7702: AA Grant all EOA accounts the ability to "temporarily" convert to smart contract accounts, improving user experience, but may increase security risks. This brings new opportunities for AA projects.

2. EIP-7691: Increase the number of blobs Adjust the target number of block blobs from 3 to 6, and increase the maximum value from 6 to 9. This is beneficial for rollup projects while optimizing gas fee fluctuations.

3. EIP-7251: Increase staking limit The plan is to increase the current staking limit of 32 ETH to 2048 ETH, reducing the number of validators.

Future Opportunities

1. Interoperability between Rollups
   • Based rollup: Achieves sequencing functionality through L1, ensuring atomicity of interactions between L2.
   • Shared sequencer: L2 Shared Sequencer Group, complete interaction.
   • Cross-chain intents: Use intents to meet cross-rollup needs.

Multiple solutions are being promoted, such as Based Stack, Astria, Espresso, Polygon AggLayer, etc. It is expected that the market will produce winners by 2025.

2. Account Abstraction The activation of EIP-7702 provides new opportunities for AA projects. Combining chain abstraction, intents, etc., more complex cross-chain or multi-chain interaction features may be built. After the Pectra upgrade, early participants in EIP-7702 such as Zerodev may experience growth.

3. Cryptographic Applications

   • Technical aspects: zkEVM and zkVM frameworks are gradually maturing, and ZKP combined with MPC, FHE, etc. may have more application combinations.
   • Application aspect: ZK Email, zkTLS and other verification applications may gain more adoption.
   • Recently, the OFAC's sanctions against Tornado Cash have been deemed overreaching, which may reduce compliance concerns for privacy-related applications.