Finding Future Opportunities from the Development of Ethereum Technology

Looking back, cutting-edge technology discussions in the Ethereum developer community have often evolved into everyday application products, such as DEX, lending, rollup, and DA, among others. This trend also implies opportunities for investment layouts. So, at the beginning of 2025, what valuable information can we capture from the Ethereum roadmap, DevCon conference, and the upcoming Pectra upgrade discussions? Let's sort and discuss together.

Ethereum's Roadmap

The Ethereum roadmap has always been an important reference for observing the future development direction, including phases such as The Merge, The Surge, The Scourge, The Verge, The Purge, and The Splurge. These phases cover various aspects including the transition from PoW to PoS, scalability improvements, MEV problem solving, underlying data structure optimization, node pressure reduction, and the application of cutting-edge technologies.

The following are the main content and progress of each stage:

• The Merge: The merging of the execution layer and the consensus layer has been completed, achieving the transition from PoW to PoS.
• The Surge: Focused on scalability improvements, EIP-4844 has been launched, with future priorities including PeerDAS and cross-rollup interactions.
• The Scourge: Committed to reducing MEV-related issues, including builder centralization and MEV value distribution.
• The Verge: Plans to change the underlying data structure from Merkle tree to Verkle tree and promote the Snarkification of EVM.
• The Purge: Reduce node storage and maintenance pressure through data cleansing and archiving.
• The Splurge: Involves improvements to the EVM layer, account abstraction, and cutting-edge cryptographic applications.

Highlights of the DevCon Conference

The recent Ethereum DevCon conference discussed the current challenges and possible solutions. Among them, the concept of Beam Chain attracted widespread attention and was jokingly referred to as "Ethereum 3.0". Beam Chain proposes several underlying improvements, including Snarkification, block generation, and optimization of staking mechanisms, but full implementation is expected to take about 5 years.

The topic related to Rollups remains a hotspot, mainly focusing on solving issues such as the fragmentation of liquidity across rollups and difficulties in interaction. The conference also discussed the technical maturity of L2 projects, with currently only a few projects reaching a higher stage.

In addition, topics such as chain abstraction, pre-confirmation, cryptographic applications, and future upgrades have also been thoroughly discussed.

Pectra Upgrade Highlights

The Pectra upgrade, expected to be completed in the first quarter of 2025, will bring several important changes:

1. EIP-7702 (AA): Grants all EOA accounts the ability to temporarily convert to smart contract accounts, improving user experience, but may increase security risks.

2. EIP-7691: The plan is to increase the target value of blob count per block from 3 to 6, and raise the maximum value from 6 to 9, further reducing rollup costs.

3. EIP-7251: Proposal to raise the staking limit from 32 Ether to 2048 Ether, simplifying operations for large stakers.

Future Opportunities

Based on the aforementioned technological changes and discussions, we can foresee the following potential areas of opportunity:

Interoperability between Rollups

Developers are highly concerned about the liquidity interoperability and interactivity issues between Layer 2 (rollups). Currently, there are three main solutions:

1. Based rollup: Achieve transaction sequencing through L1, ensuring the atomicity of interactions between L2s that utilize this sequencing function.
2. Shared sequencer: Multiple L2s share a group of sequencers to achieve interaction.
3. Cross-chain intents: Use intents to meet cross-rollup needs.

These solutions are actively being promoted, including projects like Spire Labs' Based Stack, Astria, Espresso, and Polygon AggLayer. At the same time, standards such as ERC-7683 and ERC-7802 are also exploring solutions to cross-chain liquidity issues. 2025 may witness market competition for these solutions.

Account Abstraction

The implementation of EIP-7702 will bring new opportunities for the AA project. With features such as chain abstraction and intents, it may lead to the emergence of more complex cross-chain or multi-chain interaction applications. Considering the previous market performance of ERC-4337, the Pectra upgrade could be a key moment for validating market fit in the AA track.

Cryptographic Applications

Cryptographic technologies and applications remain an important topic in the Ethereum ecosystem. On the technical side, zkEVM and zkVM frameworks are maturing, and the combination of ZKP with MPC, FHE, and other technologies may lead to more innovative applications. Cutting-edge cryptographic technologies such as indistinguishability obfuscation (iO) may also gain more attention.

At the application level, verification applications such as ZK Email (especially the implementation based on Aztec Noir) and zkTLS may see wider adoption. In addition, the recent incident where OFAC's sanctions against Tornado Cash were deemed overreach may reduce concerns about the compliance of privacy applications.

These technological developments and market changes provide new opportunities for participants in the Ethereum ecosystem, which are worth close attention and in-depth research.