Exploring Future Opportunities in the Ethereum Ecosystem from Technical Discussions

Looking back at history, the cutting-edge technology discussions within the Ethereum developer community often evolve into everyday application products, such as DEX, lending, rollups, and DA, among others. This contains opportunities for investment layout. This article will sort out and discuss valuable information from the Ethereum roadmap in early 2025, the recent DevCon, and the upcoming Pectra upgrade, among other technical discussions.

Ethereum Roadmap

The Ethereum roadmap is 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.

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

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

• The Scourge: Aims to reduce MEV-related issues, including excessive concentration of builders and MEV value being captured by large LSTs.

• The Verge: Plans to change the underlying structure from Merkle tree to Verkle tree and implement Snark for EVM.

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

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

DevCon Highlights

The most eye-catching topic is Beam Chain, which is jokingly referred to as "Ethereum 3.0". Beam Chain proposes several underlying improvements, including underlying Snarkification, improved block generation, and staking, among others. However, its roadmap will take about 5 years to complete.

Rollups are still a hot topic, focusing on the issues of liquidity fragmentation and interaction difficulties between rollups. The maturity of L2 technology is also a point of concern; currently, only Optimism and Arbitrum have entered Stage 1 (permissible fraud proof), while most L2 projects are still at Stage 0 (centralized upgrades, no fraud proof, etc.).

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

Pectra Upgrade

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

1. EIP-7702: AA Further develop EIP-4337, granting all EOA accounts the ability to temporarily convert into smart contract accounts, improving user experience but potentially increasing security risks.

2. EIP-7691: Increase the number of blobs The plan is to adjust the target value of the number of block blobs from 3 to 6, increase the maximum value from 6 to 9, reduce rollup costs, and enhance Ethereum's DA competitiveness.

3. EIP-7251: Increase staking limit Increase the current staking limit of 32 ETH to 2048 ETH, allowing large staking service providers and whales to consolidate ETH into fewer nodes.

Future Opportunities

1. Interoperability between Rollups
   • Based rollup: Achieves ordering functionality through L1, ensuring atomicity of interactions between L2s that utilize this ordering functionality.
   • Shared sequencer: L2 shares a group of sequencers to complete interactions.
   • Cross-chain intents: Use intents to meet cross-rollup requirements.

Various solutions such as Based Stack, Astria, Espresso, Polygon AggLayer, ERC-7683, and ERC-7802 are being advanced and may face market competition in 2025.

2. Account Abstraction The activation of EIP-7702 will provide new opportunities for the AA project. Combining chain abstraction and intents may allow for the construction of more complex cross-chain or multi-chain interaction functionalities. After the Pectra upgrade, early participants in EIP-7702, such as Zerodev, may see a new round of growth.

3. Cryptographic Applications

   • Technical Aspects: The zkEVM and zkVM frameworks are becoming increasingly mature, and the combination of ZKP with MPC, FHE, etc. may lead to more application combinations.
   • Application aspect: ZK Email (especially implementations based on Aztec Noir), zkTLS and other verification applications may gain more adoption.
   • Concerns regarding compliance for privacy applications may have decreased due to recent events.

These technological changes and discussions have brought new opportunities to the Ethereum ecosystem, and it is worth closely monitoring its development and practical applications.