Analysis of Ethereum Technology Development Trends and 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, rollup, and DA. This contains opportunities for investment layout. In early 2025, we can capture some valuable information from the Ethereum roadmap, recent DevCon, and the upcoming Pectra upgrade discussions.

Ethereum Roadmap Overview

The Ethereum roadmap includes phases such as The Merge, The Surge, The Scourge, The Verge, The Purge, and The Splurge. The focus of each phase is as follows:

• The Merge: Complete the transition from PoW to PoS and improve the consensus protocol.
• The Surge: Improved scalability to better serve rollups. EIP-4844 has been launched, with future focuses including PeerDAS and cross-rollup interactions.
• The Scourge: Reducing MEV-related issues, such as excessive concentration of builders and MEV value being captured by large LSTs.
• The Verge: The underlying structure changes from Merkle tree to Verkle tree, and the EVM is being Snarkified.
• The Purge: Reducing the pressure of node data storage and state maintenance by deleting or archiving historical data.
• The Splurge: EVM underlying improvements, account abstraction, and other cryptographic applications.

DevCon Hot Topics

Recently, the DevCon conference discussed current issues and possible solutions:

1. Beam Chain: Proposes underlying improvements, including Snarkification, improved block generation, and staking, etc. It is expected to take about 5 years to complete.

2. Rollup Related: Discussing the liquidity fragmentation and interaction issues between rollups, as well as the maturity of L2 technologies. Currently, only Optimism and Arbitrum have reached Stage 1.

3. Other topics: chain abstraction, pre-confirmation, cryptographic applications, and future upgrades, etc.

Key Updates of Pectra Upgrade

The Pectra upgrade expected to be completed in Q1 2025 includes:

1. EIP-7702 (AA): Grants EOA accounts the ability to temporarily convert to smart contract accounts, improving user experience.

2. EIP-7691: Increase the number of blobs per block, reduce rollup costs, and enhance Ethereum's DA competitiveness.

3. EIP-7251: Increase the staking limit from 32 Ether to 2048 Ether, reducing the number of validators.

Future Opportunities

1. Interoperability between Rollups

   • Based rollup: Achieve sequencing through L1 to ensure atomicity of L2 interactions.
   • Shared sequencer: L2 shared sequencer.
   • Cross-chain intents: Meet the needs of cross-rollup.

   Related projects: Based Stack from Spire Labs, Astria, Espresso, Polygon AggLayer, ERC-7683 and ERC-7802, etc.

2. Account Abstraction EIP-7702 will provide new opportunities for the AA project, allowing complex cross-chain functionalities to be built by combining chain abstraction and intents. After the Pectra upgrade, early participants like Zerodev may experience growth.

3. Cryptographic Applications

   • Technology: The zkEVM and zkVM frameworks are mature, integrating ZKP with MPC, FHE, and others.
   • Applications: Verification applications such as ZK Email, zkTLS may gain more adoption.
   • Concerns about compliance for privacy applications may lessen.

The technological developments and upgrades in the Ethereum ecosystem will bring new opportunities for developers and investors, which are worth paying close attention to.