Analysis of Ethereum Technology Development Trends and Future Opportunities

Looking back at the history of the Ethereum developer community, we find that many cutting-edge technology discussions have ultimately evolved into everyday application products, such as DEX, lending, rollup, and DA, etc. This trend also contains opportunities for investment layout. This article will sort out and discuss important information on the Ethereum roadmap for early 2025, the recent DevCon conference, and the upcoming Pectra upgrade.

Ethereum Roadmap Analysis

The Ethereum roadmap has always been an important reference for observing future development directions, including phases such as The Merge, The Surge, The Scourge, The Verge, The Purge, and The Splurge. Recently, the founder of Ethereum has also been actively publishing articles introducing the content of each phase:

• The Merge: Completed the merger of 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: Focuses on future scalability, improving from the ground up to better serve rollups. EIP-4844 is live, with future priorities including PeerDAS to reduce node pressure and cross-rollup interactions.

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

• The Verge: Plans to change the underlying structure from Merkle tree to Verkle tree, and advance the Snarkification of the EVM.

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

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

Key Points of DevCon Conference

Recently, the DevCon conference discussed current issues and potential solutions, with the most eye-catching topic being Beam Chain. Although jokingly referred to as "Ethereum 3.0", this concept proposes many underlying improvements, including underlying Snarkification, improved block generation, and staking, among others. However, completing this roadmap is expected to take about 5 years.

The topic of Rollups remains popular, especially discussions on the issues of liquidity fragmentation and interaction difficulties between rollups. The technical maturity of L2 projects has also become a focal point, with only a few projects reaching advanced stages, while most are still in the early stages.

In addition, topics such as chain abstraction, pre-confirmation, cryptographic applications, and future upgrades were widely discussed at the conference.

Pectra Upgrade Analysis

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

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

2. EIP-7691: The plan is to adjust the target value of blob quantity in each block from 3 to 6, and increase the maximum value from 6 to 9, further reducing rollup costs and enhancing Ethereum's DA competitiveness.

3. EIP-7251: Plans to increase the current staking cap from 32 ETH to 2048 ETH, simplifying operations for large stakers.

Future Opportunities

Based on the above technological changes and discussions, we have summarized several key opportunities:

1. Interoperability between Rollups:

   • Based rollup: Achieve sequencing functionality through L1 to ensure the atomicity of interactions between L2.
   • Shared sequencer: L2 shares a set of sequencers to complete interactions.
   • Cross-chain intents: Use intents to meet cross-rollup needs.

Multiple projects are advancing these solutions, and the market is expected to show results by 2025.

2. Account Abstraction:

The activation of EIP-7702 will provide new opportunities for the AA project. By combining chain abstraction and intents, it may be possible to build more complex cross-chain or multi-chain interaction functionalities. After the Pectra upgrade, teams that participated early in EIP-7702 may gain growth opportunities.

3. Cryptographic Applications:

   • Technical aspects: The zkEVM and zkVM frameworks are gradually maturing, and the combination of ZKP with MPC, FHE, etc. may lead to new application combinations.
   • Application aspect: Verification applications such as ZK Email and zkTLS may gain more adoption.
   • Compliance concerns for privacy applications may be reduced due to recent events.

These technological trends and upgrades will bring new development opportunities to the Ethereum ecosystem, which is worth paying close attention to.