Discussion on the Development of Ethereum Technology and Future Opportunities

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, etc. This trend contains opportunities for investment planning. In early 2025, we can capture some valuable information from the Ethereum roadmap, recent DevCon conference, and the upcoming Pectra upgrade, among other technical discussions.

Ethereum Roadmap Analysis

The Ethereum roadmap has always been an important reference for observing the future development direction, including stages such as The Merge, The Surge, The Scourge, The Verge, The Purge, and The Splurge. Recently, the founder of Ethereum has been intensively posting to introduce the content of each stage:

• The Merge: 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: Focused 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: Dedicated to reducing issues related to MEV, including excessive centralization 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 implement Snarkification of the EVM.

• The Purge: Reducing the 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 underlying, account abstraction, and other cryptographic applications (such as VDF).

Key Points of DevCon Conference

The recent Ethereum DevCon conference discussed current issues and possible solutions:

1. Beam Chain has attracted widespread attention and proposed several underlying improvements, including underlying Snarkification, improved block generation, and staking, among others. However, its complete implementation will take about 5 years.

2. Topics related to Rollups remain popular, mainly focusing on the issues of liquidity fragmentation and interaction difficulties between rollups. Currently, only a few projects have reached a relatively high level of technical maturity.

3. Other hot topics include chain abstraction, pre-confirmation, cryptographic applications, and future upgrades.

Pectra Upgrade Analysis

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

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

2. EIP-7691: Plans to increase the target value of blob quantity per block from 3 to 6, and the maximum value from 6 to 9, which is beneficial for the development of rollup projects.

3. EIP-7251: Proposes to raise the staking limit from 32 Ether to 2048 Ether, simplifying operations for large staking service providers and whales.

Future Opportunities

Based on the above technological changes and discussions, the following areas may contain significant opportunities:

1. Interoperability between Rollups:
   • Based rollup: Achieves sequencing functionality through L1, ensuring the atomicity of interactions between L2.
   • Shared sequencer: L2 shared sequencer group for interaction.
   • Cross-chain intents: Utilize intents to meet cross-rollup needs.

Multiple solutions are being advanced, such as Based Stack, Astria, Espresso, and Polygon AggLayer, and it is expected that market competition will become more intense in 2025.

2. Account Abstraction: The implementation of EIP-7702 will bring new opportunities for the AA project. By combining chain abstraction and intents, it may be possible to construct more complex cross-chain or multi-chain interaction features. After the Pectra upgrade, teams that participated early in EIP-7702 may gain a growth advantage.

3. Cryptographic Applications:

   • Technical aspects: The zkEVM and zkVM frameworks are becoming increasingly mature, and the combination of ZKP with MPC, FHE, and other technologies may bring more application possibilities.
   • Application aspects: Verification applications such as ZK Email and zkTLS may gain more adoption. Recent OFAC-related events may reduce concerns about the compliance of privacy applications.

The development of these areas will bring new opportunities and challenges to the Ethereum ecosystem, which is worth paying close attention to.