What valuable information can we capture from the Ethereum roadmap, recent DevCon, and the upcoming Pectra upgrade in early next year? This article is sourced from an article by HashKey Capital and compiled by PANews.
Looking back, it is not difficult to find that many frontend technical discussions in the Ethereum developer community have evolved into current everyday applications, from DEX, lending, to rollup and DA. This naturally presents investment opportunities.
So, at this time in early 2025, what valuable information can we capture from the Ethereum roadmap, recent DevCon, and the upcoming Pectra upgrade? This article attempts to sort and discuss these topics.
Ethereum Roadmap
The Ethereum roadmap has always been an important reference for observing future development directions, including various stages such as The Merge, The Surge, The Scourge, The Verge, The Purge, and The Splurge. Vitalik has also extensively discussed the content of each stage in October. Among them:
The Merge: The main focus is on completing the execution layer and consensus layer, thus completing the transition from PoW to PoS. However, The Merge also includes some improvements in consensus protocols, such as single-phase finality and lowering the threshold for validators.
The Surge: The main discussion focuses on future scalability improvements to better serve rollup at the underlying level. EIP-4844 has already been launched, and future key contents include PeerDAS that reduces node pressure and cross-rollup interactions.
The Scourge: The main goal is to address some issues related to MEV, including excessive concentration of builders and the capture of MEV value by large LST.
The Verge: This includes changing the underlying structure from Merkle tree to Verkle tree and Snarkification of the EVM.
The Purge: This reduces the storage and state maintenance pressure on Ethereum nodes by deleting or archiving historical data. At the same time, it will also clean up some technical debts.
The Splurge: This involves frontend improvements, including the underlying EVM, account abstraction, and other cryptographic applications (such as VDF).
We have summarized the key improvements of these stages in the following table, introduced their main effects, and sorted the current progress.
DevCon
In addition to the roadmap, another valuable source of information is the recent Ethereum DevCon conference. It discussed current issues and possible solutions.
One of the most eye-catching topics at DevCon may be the Beam Chain. The community’s desire for new future development directions can be seen from the somewhat playful but inaccurate term “Ethereum 3.0”. The Beam Chain proposes many underlying improvements, including snarkification, block generation, and staking. However, the roadmap is expected to take about 5 years to complete, so it does not require too much additional attention at the moment.
Rollup-related topics remain a hot topic during DevCon. The most discussed issue is the liquidity fragmentation and lack of interaction between rollups, which affects user experience. Many speeches and panels discussed this issue and related solutions.
In addition, the maturity of Layer 2 technology was also discussed at the conference because currently only Optimism and Arbitrum have entered Stage 1 (licensed fraud proof), while most other L2 projects are still at Stage 0 (centralized upgrades, no fraud proof, etc.), and need to be synchronized with L1 upgrades.
In addition, there were concentrated discussions on chain abstraction, pre-confirmation, cryptographic applications, and future upgrades during DevCon. We will focus on introducing the Pectra upgrade in the next section.
Pectra Upgrade
The recent focus is on the Ethereum Pectra upgrade, which is expected to be completed in Q1 2025 and includes various related transformations from the underlying to the user end.
EIP-7702: AA
The most relevant to users is EIP-7702, which further develops EIP-4337 based on the design of EIP-3074, giving all EOA accounts the ability to temporarily become smart contract accounts. This can further improve the user experience (multi-signature transactions, 0 gas, etc.), but it may also increase security risks such as phishing attacks. At the same time, EIP-7702 applies to all EOA accounts, so wallet products and other related products should also be modified to adapt to this upgrade. Overall, the activation of EIP-7702 will bring new opportunities to all AA projects. For more information, please refer to our previous report.
EIP-7691: Increase the number of blobs
The Pectra plan aims to increase the target number of blobs per block from 3 to 6, and the maximum number of blobs from 6 to 9. Blobs provide cheaper storage space for rollups, and increasing the number of blobs will further reduce the cost of rollups and enhance Ethereum’s DA competitiveness at the expense of increasing node execution costs. Therefore, this will further benefit rollup projects. At the same time, the adjustment of the target and maximum values will also make the gas decrease more quickly when blobs are not in use, and the gas increase slower when the blobs are fully loaded.
EIP-7251: Increase the staking limit
The Pectra plan aims to increase the current 32 ETH staking limit to 2048 ETH. Ethereum staking service providers and whales no longer need to distribute their ETH among multiple nodes, but can consolidate them in one node, reducing the number of validators in staking.
Future Opportunities
All the above-mentioned changes or research discussions in technology may bring new changes and opportunities. We summarize some of the key opportunities as follows.
Interoperability between rollups
Regardless of the roadmap or the many discussions at DevCon, interoperability and liquidity between Layer 2 (rollup) solutions are the key focuses for developers.
Currently, there are different solutions being developed from various aspects to address the liquidity and interoperability issues between rollups.
Based rollup: Many L2 solutions currently use their relatively centralized sequencer for transaction sequencing and then publish it to L1, which hinders quick and real-time interaction. One solution is to implement sequencing functionality on L1 to ensure the atomicity of interactions between L2s that use this sequencing functionality.
Shared sequencer: In addition to based rollup, another approach is for L2s to share a set of sequencers to facilitate interaction.
Cross-chain intents: In addition to solving the problem from the sequencer level, using intents to meet the needs of cross-rollup transactions is another solution.
Currently, these solutions are being implemented. For example, Spire Labs is proposing Based Stack to implement based rollup, which is expected to be launched in Q1 2025. Shared sequencer-related projects such as Astria, Espresso, and Polygon AggLayer are being launched and iterated. ERC-7683 is being used by Unichain, Arbitrum, and others to solve cross-chain liquidity issues. Optimism has introduced ERC-7802, which can support SuperchainERC20 to standardize and transfer assets within the superchain ecosystem. These different solutions may compete in the market in 2025.
Account abstraction
The activation of EIP-7702 will provide a new opportunity for AA projects as it involves all EOA accounts. EIP-7702, combined with chain abstraction and intents, may also build more complex cross-chain or multi-chain interaction functions. However, as ERC-4337 has not performed well in the market, the Pectra upgrade may be the last opportunity to validate PMF in the AA sector.
Therefore, teams that participate early in EIP-7702 and are prepared, such as Zerodev, may experience a new wave of growth after the Pectra upgrade. The specific effects will be revealed soon.
Cryptographic applications
Cryptographic technologies and applications are still major topics in both the Ethereum roadmap and DevCon discussions. In terms of technology, zkEVM and zkVM frameworks are gradually maturing, and ZKP combined with MPC and FHE may have more application possibilities. In addition, some frontend cryptographic technology discussions during DevCon, such as the highly regarded indistinguishable obfuscation (iO), may also receive more attention.
In terms of applications, there will be many opportunities for cryptographic technologies in consumer applications. This includes verification applications such as ZK Email (especially implementations based on Aztec Noir) and zkTLS. Additionally, recent events such as OFAC sanctioning Tornado Cash for alleged unauthorized activities may alleviate some compliance concerns regarding privacy applications.
Special thanks to Zhixiong Pan and Yan for their review and suggestions on this article!