Written by: Mu Mu
Lu Xun never said: “No matter what sins you have done in your previous life, holding Ethereum will be paid off.” This round of Ethereum holders never expected that Ethereum would be so stretched, and once at the bottom of the mainstream project, but it is too early to make a conclusion, the big market does not seem to be over, if the adoption of Bitcoin has just begun, then Crypto and Web3 as a whole are in the early stages. In 2025, will Ethereum still be “rescued”? What are the “events” and “breakthroughs” worth looking forward to?
Inflow of spot ETF
At this stage, the Ethereum spot ETF has been approved for listing in the U.S. stock market for a while, and there is a certain gap in the speed and volume of capital inflow compared with the Bitcoin spot ETF, but in addition to the fact that Ethereum is not as “out of the circle” and broad consensus as Bitcoin, another important reason is that compared with the pledge and other benefits brought by directly holding Ethereum itself, spot ETFs that have no additional income and need to pay management fees and other fees do not have any advantages.
However, the good news is that by 2025, relevant financial institutions are actively promoting the listing of Ethereum spot ETFs that allow additional income from pledging operations. The driving force behind this is strong, as financial giants are the main beneficiaries of the “hot” trading demand for cryptocurrency spot ETFs. Pledging Ethereum spot ETFs not only have potential demand, but also have a higher chance of approval due to the friendly regulatory environment brought about by Trump’s inauguration.
Ethereum Strategic Reserve
The Bitcoin strategic reserve that is currently being promoted in the United States is one of the main drivers of the Bitcoin and crypto market. You must know that in addition to gold, there is also oil among the important strategic reserve assets of the United States, so the “digital gold” Bitcoin has a certain feasibility and significance as a strategic reserve, and Ethereum, which was once known as “digital oil”, is also expected to be listed as a strategic reserve asset.
Compared with Bitcoin, in fact, the Trump family WLFI project supported by Trump, as an ecological project deployed on the Ethereum mainnet, its main business is based on the support brought by the Ethereum DeFi ecosystem AAVE and Chainlink, and the project’s treasury has begun to reserve a large amount of ETH and Ethereum ecological project Token, and recently exchanged a large amount of WBTC for ETH. According to the analysis of the 7 multisig wallets in the project’s vault, it is found that some wallet addresses are already “veterans” on the Ethereum DeFi ecological chain, so the project team has a high degree of understanding of Ethereum and its ecology, and the operation is relatively professional.
Given that the team behind Trump first launched the adoption project of the Ethereum ecosystem, we can consider its high degree of recognition for the subsequent development of Ethereum and its ecosystem, supporting the development of high-tech industries such as Web3, which also conforms to the ‘America First’ concept proposed by Trump. Therefore, the possibility of Ethereum being mentioned as a strategic reserve asset in 2025 is not low.
Ethereum’s next big upgrade
Due to the unsatisfactory performance of Ethereum, its next major upgrade called “Pectra” has not received much attention, and it is reported that 10 EIP improvement protocols have been added to the upgrade plan, mainly related to user experience and Layer 2 support optimization, the main highlights are as follows:
- Optimization of account abstraction
This upgrade will optimize the user experience of the wallet, enabling ordinary wallet addresses to have the complex functionality and flexible operations of ‘contract wallets,’ such as ‘gas fee payment, social recovery, multi-signature,’ and so on. These optimizations will further reduce the user’s learning curve, allowing them to have the same operational experience as Web2 applications when using Web3 applications. This lays the foundation for the widespread adoption of Web3 applications in the future.
- Layer 2 support optimization
Provide more data space (blob) for Layer 2 solution, and improve the scalability of Ethereum. Re-evaluate and adjust the cost of calldata to optimize block throughput and storage. In simple terms, it is to expand the data space and optimize the cost for Layer, making the supported Layer2 capacity equal and the cost lower.
- Enhancing the security and flexibility of validators
Optimize the voting processing, withdrawal, and other operations of the validators to improve security and efficiency, while increasing the staking limit of 32ETH, which is equivalent to merging the running validation nodes, reducing the operational pressure, improving efficiency, and also reducing the peer-to-peer message transmission and data storage pressure between a large number of node networks.
In short, Ethereum’s Pectra upgrade will bring support to the Ethereum ecosystem that is more user-friendly in terms of technology, with higher scalability and a more stable node network.
Explosion of ecological applications and technological progress
At this stage, more and more major institutions such as the Trump family’s DeFi project, Sony’s Layer2, and Deutsche Bank’s Layer2 are building Web3 applications and infrastructure solutions on Ethereum. The Ethereum ecosystem is the preferred choice.
The Ethereum ecosystem is mature, diverse, and leading in terms of technical resource reserves, development history, development team support, on-chain fund size, client security, and wallet user experience. Similarly, in the next stage of the big bull market in 2025, whether it is the strong recovery of DeFi or the popularity of other fields such as AI Agent, Ethereum as the underlying infrastructure will greatly benefit from the adoption of these ecosystem applications and the prosperity of on-chain activities, including but not limited to capital inflows, gas consumption, token supply deflation, etc.
With the launch of Unichain, OP Super Chain Family has added another heavyweight player. Cross-chain liquidity on Layer2 is expected to make progress in 2025. By then, combined with the upgrade and optimization support of Ethereum itself, the potential energy formed by various Layer2 groups will combine to exert unprecedented competitive pressure on some high-performance new public chains.
In the past, there were always people who said that Ethereum’s Layer 2 was a failure, sucking the mainnet and not bringing any benefits to the mainnet, but we have also seen the prosperity of Layer 2 in recent times. Data from ultra sound money shows that Layer 2’s blob fees have become one of the largest gas burners on the Ethereum mainnet, which also shows the success of the Layer 2 scaling scheme.
L2Beat’s real-time statistics chart also shows that Layer 2 has inflowed more than $55 billion, with a total expansion rate of more than 2,500% of the original single mainnet in terms of trading volume.
For major companies and institutions outside the circle, such as Sony and Deutsche Bank, Layer2 is an excellent entry point for Web3 business, which can be launched without a large amount of technical reserves and resource investment. It can native gain support from the Ethereum ecosystem community. Therefore, under the successful leadership of these institutions, the real institutional adoption trend of Layer2 will soon come.
Summary
Actually, many people are well aware of the advantages of Ethereum and its ecosystem, but they did not expect that the scale of Ethereum today is no longer easily driven by capital like the previous two rounds of market trends. Obviously, this is not an easy task, just like the scale of Bitcoin, it was able to quickly rise due to the influx of a large amount of institutional funds from spot ETFs and the super expectations of US strategic reserve assets. However, compared to Bitcoin, Ethereum still has the additional support of technological upgrades and the development of the Web3 ecosystem. There are still many highlights in 2025, so let’s wait and see.
