What valuable information can we capture from Ethereum’s 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 at history, it is not difficult to find that many of the frontend technical discussions in the Ethereum developer community have eventually evolved into everyday applications, from DEX and lending to rollups and DA. This naturally presents investment opportunities.
So, at the beginning of 2025, what valuable information can we capture from Ethereum’s roadmap, recent DevCon, and the upcoming Pectra upgrade? This article attempts to provide an overview and analysis.
Ethereum’s 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 posted frequent articles in October to introduce the content of each stage. Among them:
The Merge: The main focus is on the execution layer and the consensus layer, completing the transition from PoW to PoS. The Merge also includes some improvements in consensus protocols, including single-slot finality and lowering the threshold for validators.
The Surge: The main discussion focuses on future scalability improvements at the underlying level to better serve rollups. EIP-4844 has been implemented, and future focuses include PeerDAS to reduce node pressure and cross-rollup interaction.
The Scourge: The main focus is on addressing some MEV-related issues, including excessive concentration of builders and MEV value being captured by large LST.
The Verge: This includes the transition of the underlying layer from Merkle tree to Verkle tree and the Snarkification of EVM.
The Purge: This stage aims to reduce the pressure of Ethereum node data storage and state maintenance by deleting or archiving historical data. It also involves clearing some technical debt.
The Splurge: This stage focuses on frontend improvements, including EVM underlying improvements, account abstraction, and other cryptographic applications (such as VDF).
The table below summarizes the key improvements of these stages, their main effects, and 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 notable topics at DevCon may be the Beam Chain. The humorous but not entirely accurate term “Ethereum 3.0” shows the community’s desire for future development. Beam Chain proposes various underlying improvements, including Snarkification of the underlying layer, improved block generation, and staking. However, since it will take about 5 years to complete the roadmap, it does not require too much additional attention at the moment.
Rollup-related topics were also hotly discussed during DevCon. The most discussed issue was the liquidity fragmentation and lack of interactivity between rollups, which affects user experience. Many speeches and panels addressed this issue or related solutions.
Additionally, the technical maturity of L2 was also discussed at the conference because currently, only Optimism and Arbitrum have entered Stage 1 (with permissioned fraud proof), while most other L2 projects are still at Stage 0 (centralized upgrades without fraud proof), requiring synchronization with L1 upgrades.
During DevCon, there were also concentrated discussions on chain abstraction, pre-confirmation, cryptographic applications, and future upgrades. The next section will focus on introducing the Pectra upgrade.
Pectra Upgrade
The recent focus is on the Ethereum Pectra upgrade, which is expected to be completed in Q1 2025. It will include various improvements from the underlying layer to the user end.
EIP-7702: AA
The most relevant to users is EIP-7702, which further develops EIP-4337 based on the design foundation of EIP-3074, giving all EOA accounts the ability to temporarily become smart contract accounts. This can further improve user experience (multiple transactions with one signature, 0 gas, etc.), but it may also increase security risks such as signature phishing. EIP-7702 will be effective for all EOA accounts, so wallets and other products should also be modified to adapt to this upgrade. Overall, the activation of EIP-7702 will bring new opportunities to all AA projects. More information can be found in our previous report.
EIP-7691: Increase blob quantity
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 for rollups, and increasing the number of blobs will further reduce the cost of rollups and enhance Ethereum’s DA competitiveness at the cost of increased node execution costs. Therefore, it will benefit rollup projects. At the same time, adjusting the target and maximum values will make gas decrease more quickly when blobs are unused and gas increase more slowly when blobs are fully loaded to the maximum limit.
EIP-7251: Increase staking limit
The Pectra plan aims to increase the current staking limit of 32 ETH to 2048 ETH. Ethereum staking service providers and whales will no longer need to distribute their ETH across multiple nodes but can consolidate them in a single node, reducing the number of validators in staking.
Future Opportunities
All the changes and research discussions mentioned above may bring new changes and opportunities. We summarize some of the key opportunities as follows.
Interoperability between Rollups
Whether from the roadmap or the many discussions at DevCon, the interoperability between Layer 2 (rollups) and their liquidity interchangeability and interactivity are the main concerns for developers.
Currently, there are different solutions being developed from various perspectives to solve the liquidity and interoperability issues between rollups.
Based rollup: Many L2s currently use their relatively centralized sequencers to implement transaction sequencing and then publish them to L1, which hinders quick and real-time interactions. One solution is to use L1 to implement sequencing functionality to ensure 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 achieve interactivity.
Cross-chain intents: Apart from solving the problem at the sequencer level, using intents to meet the cross-rollup needs is another solution.
Currently, these solutions are being implemented. For example, Spire Labs proposed Based Stack to implement based rollup, which is expected to go live in Q1 2025. Astria, Espresso, and Polygon AggLayer related to shared sequencers are gradually going live and iterating. ERC-7683 has been adopted by Unichain, Arbitrum, and others to solve cross-rollup liquidity issues. Optimism’s ERC-7802 enables the implementation of SuperchainERC20 to support unified standards and liquidity transfer within the superchain ecosystem. These different solutions may compete for dominance 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 account addresses. EIP-7702, combined with chain abstraction, intents, and other features, may also build more complex cross-chain or multi-chain interactive functions. However, due to the lukewarm performance of ERC-4337 in the market, the Pectra upgrade may be the last opportunity to validate PMF for AA projects.
Therefore, teams that participate in EIP-7702 early and are prepared, such as Zerodev, may experience a new wave of growth after the Pectra upgrade. The specific effects will soon become apparent.
Cryptographic Applications
In both the Ethereum roadmap and DevCon discussions, cryptography-related technologies and applications are still major topics. In terms of technology, zkEVM and zkVM frameworks are gradually maturing, and there may be more possibilities for combining ZKP with MPC, FHE, and other technologies. Additionally, some frontend cryptographic technologies discussed during DevCon, such as the highly regarded iO (indistinguishability obfuscation), may 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’s sanctions against Tornado Cash being deemed unauthorized may dispel some concerns about compliance for privacy applications.
Special thanks to Zhixiong Pan and Yan for their review and suggestions on this article.