Ethereum 2025 Annual Summary: From "Experimental Network" to Global Infrastructure

On December 23, a member of the Ethereum Foundation, renaissancing, released the Ethereum Year-End Summary for 2025: 2025 is seen as a watershed moment in the history of Ethereum's development. Ethereum officially shed the label of “experimental network” and became a global infrastructure actually relied upon by financial institutions, developers, and AI systems. At the protocol level, Ethereum completed two major hard forks within a year—Pectra in May and Fusaka in December. Pectra promoted the full implementation of account abstraction, supporting gas payment, transaction bundling, and passkey signing; Fusaka significantly reduced costs through PeerDAS, achieving 8x scalability. Meanwhile, Ethereum raised the gas limit three times without hard forks, demonstrating the network's continuous self-optimization capability. Regulatory and institutional progress became key variables. The U.S. SEC issued staking compliance guidelines and the chairman publicly stated, “Ethereum is not a security”; the U.S. passed the GENIUS Act, establishing the first federal-level stablecoin regulatory framework. The sanctions on Tornado Cash were lifted, and privacy contracts received judicial support, gradually shifting privacy from compliance risk to foundational capability building. Institutions fully implemented applications. JPMorgan launched the tokenized money market fund MONY on the Ethereum mainnet; BlackRock's BUIDL scale once approached $3 billion; Ethereum's spot ETF assets under management reached $28.6 billion. The total supply of stablecoins exceeded $300 billion, with an annual trading volume of about $46 trillion, giving Ethereum a 54% market share. In terms of ecology, Layer 2 matured comprehensively. Networks like Base, Arbitrum, and zkSync achieved sub-cent transaction fees, with a total L2 lock-up value reaching $35.7 billion, and trading volume surpassed that of the mainnet. The total locked value in DeFi rose to $93.9 billion, an increase of 71% year-on-year; Uniswap's annual trading volume exceeded $1 trillion, and Aave's active lending scale reached $25 billion. The integration of AI and Ethereum began to take shape. ERC-8004 established identity and asset standards for AI Agents, and CEX launched the x402 protocol to support micropayments between machines, positioning Ethereum as the core settlement layer of the AI economy. At the ten-year milestone, the number of Ethereum developers continued to grow, with global offline events taking place in multiple locations. In 2025, Ethereum is no longer a “vision for the future” but a set of world-class infrastructure that is operating stably.