What valuable insights can we extract from Ethereum’s roadmap, the recent DevCon, and the upcoming Pectra upgrade in early 2025?

Looking back, it’s evident that many cutting-edge discussions within the Ethereum developer community have ultimately shaped today’s mainstream applications. From DEXs and lending protocols to rollups and DA solutions, these innovations were once nascent ideas in forums and conferences. Naturally, these advancements also present investment opportunities.

As we approach early 2025, what valuable insights can we uncover from Ethereum’s roadmap, recent DevCon discussions, and the anticipated Pectra upgrade? This article aims to analyze and explore these developments.

Ethereum’s Roadmap

Ethereum’s roadmap has long served as a critical reference for predicting future trends, encompassing milestones like The Merge, The Surge, The Scourge, The Verge, The Purge, and The Splurge. In October, Vitalik Buterin published a series of posts elaborating on these phases. Key highlights include:

The Merge: Marked by the transition from PoW to PoS through integrating the execution and consensus layers. This phase also includes advancements in consensus mechanisms, such as single-slot finality and reduced validator thresholds.
The Surge: Focuses on scalability improvements, particularly foundational enhancements for rollups. While EIP-4844 has been implemented, future developments like PeerDAS (reducing node pressure) and cross-rollup interoperability remain priorities.
The Scourge: Aim to address MEV-related issues, such as over-centralization of builders and MEV value capture by dominant LSTs.
The Verge: Involves transitioning from Merkle trees to Verkle trees and introducing SNARKs to the EVM.
The Purge: Reduces Ethereum's node storage and state maintenance burden by archiving or deleting historical data while addressing technical debt.
The Splurge: Encompasses forward-looking improvements, such as EVM enhancements, account abstraction, and cryptographic applications (e.g., VDFs).

Below is a summary of key improvements across these phases, their impacts, and current progress.

DevCon

Beyond the roadmap, another valuable source of insights comes from the recent Ethereum DevCon conference, where current challenges and potential solutions were actively discussed.

One of the most striking topics at DevCon was the Beam Chain. Often jokingly referred to as “Ethereum 3.0”—a term that, while playful, isn’t entirely accurate—it reflects the community’s eagerness for new advancements. Beam Chain proposes several foundational improvements, including integrating SNARKs into the core infrastructure, optimizing block production, and enhancing staking mechanisms. However, the roadmap for Beam Chain is estimated to take around five years to complete, meaning it doesn’t require significant attention in the immediate term.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gjuenkv1zrw

Rollups remained a hot topic throughout DevCon, with the most-discussed issues centring on fragmented liquidity and poor interoperability between rollups, which significantly impacted user experience. Numerous talks and panels addressed these challenges and explored potential solutions. Additionally, the technical maturity of Layer 2 (L2) solutions was a key topic. Currently, only Optimism and Arbitrum have reached Stage 1 (permissioned fraud proofs), while most other L2 projects remain at Stage 0 (centralized upgrades and no fraud proofs). Progress here is closely tied to upgrades on Layer 1 (L1).

Other areas of focus during DevCon included chain abstraction, pre-confirmation, cryptographic applications, and future upgrades. In the following section, we’ll dive deeper into the upcoming Pectra upgrade.

Pectra upgrade

One of the most significant developments on the horizon is the Pectra upgrade, expected to be completed in Q1 2025. This upgrade includes various improvements from the foundational layer to user-facing features.

EIP-7702: Account Abstraction (AA)

The most user-centric change is EIP-7702, which builds on the design principles of EIP-3074 and advances EIP-4337. It enables all externally owned accounts (EOAs) to temporarily act as smart contract accounts, offering improved user experiences such as batch transactions with a single signature and zero gas fees. However, this flexibility introduces potential security risks, such as increased susceptibility to phishing attacks. Since EIP-7702 applies universally to all EOAs, wallets and related products must adapt to this upgrade. On balance, EIP-7702 creates new opportunities for AA-focused projects. For more details, refer to our previous report.

EIP-7691: Increasing Blob Count

The Pectra upgrade plans to raise the target blob count per block from 3 to 6 and the maximum blob count from 6 to 9. Blobs provide cost-effective storage for rollups, and increasing their number will reduce rollup costs while enhancing Ethereum’s data availability (DA) competitiveness. This comes at the expense of higher node operating costs. The adjustment to target and maximum values also optimizes gas pricing dynamics: gas prices will decrease faster when blobs are underutilized and rise more gradually when blobs are at full capacity. This change is particularly advantageous for rollup-related projects.

EIP-7251: Raising Staking Limits

Pectra also aims to raise the current staking cap from 32 ETH to 2048 ETH. This change allows staking service providers and whales to consolidate their ETH into fewer validator nodes, reducing the overall number of validators while streamlining staking operations.

These upgrades represent a significant leap forward for Ethereum, enhancing its scalability, user experience, and economic efficiency while creating new opportunities for developers and projects.

Future Opportunities

The aforementioned technological changes and ongoing discussions may unlock new possibilities and opportunities. Below, we summarize some of the most notable ones:

Interoperability Between Rollups

Both Ethereum’s roadmap and numerous DevCon presentations emphasize that liquidity interoperability and seamless interactions between Layer 2 (L2) rollups are critical areas of focus for developers.

Various solutions are being proposed within the community to address rollup liquidity and interoperability challenges at multiple levels:

• Based Rollups: Currently, many L2s rely on their centralized sequencers to order transactions before publishing them to L1, which limits timely interactions between rollups. One solution involves leveraging L1 to handle sequencing, ensuring atomic interactions between L2s using this sequencing mechanism.
• Shared Sequencers: Another approach is for multiple L2s to share a common set of sequencers, facilitating interoperability.
• Cross-Rollup Intents: Beyond sequencing, cross-rollup intents provide another pathway for meeting inter-rollup demands.

Currently, the aforementioned solutions are steadily advancing toward implementation: Spire Labs plans to launch the Based Stack for base rollups in Q1 2025. Shared sequencer solutions, including Astria, Espresso, and Polygon AggLayer, are rolling out and undergoing iterations. ERC-7683 is being adopted by projects like Unichain and Arbitrum to address cross-chain liquidity challenges. Optimism has introduced ERC-7802, enabling SuperchainERC20 to standardize assets and facilitate liquidity transfers within the superchain ecosystem. These diverse solutions are expected to compete in the market throughout 2025, with potential leaders emerging as the year progresses.

Account Abstraction (AA)

The activation of EIP-7702, which impacts all externally owned accounts (EOAs), represents a significant opportunity for AA-focused projects. Coupled with chain abstraction and intents, EIP-7702 could enable more advanced cross-chain and multi-chain functionalities. However, given the lukewarm market reception of ERC-4337, the Pectra upgrade might serve as the final test of the product-market fit (PMF) for the AA ecosystem.

Teams that are early adopters of EIP-7702 and well-prepared for the upgrade—such as Zerodev—could experience a new wave of growth following the Pectra upgrade in Q1 2025. The results should soon become evident.

Applications of Cryptography

Cryptography remains a prominent theme in both Ethereum’s roadmap and DevCon discussions.

In technical advancements: Technologies like zkEVM and zkVM are maturing, while ZKP (Zero-Knowledge Proofs) combined with MPC (Multi-Party Computation) and FHE (Fully Homomorphic Encryption) may unlock new application scenarios.

Cutting-edge cryptographic innovations, such as indistinguishability obfuscation (iO)—dubbed the “crown jewel of cryptography”—gained significant attention during DevCon.

In consumer applications: Cryptographic advancements also present opportunities on the consumer-facing side. Applications such as ZK Email (notably implementations based on Aztec Noir) and zkTLS for verification are likely to see increased adoption. Additionally, recent developments, such as the recognition of OFAC’s sanction against Tornado Cash as overreach, may alleviate concerns about the regulatory risks of privacy-focused applications, encouraging broader adoption.

Special thanks to Zhixiong Pan and Yan for their review and suggestions on this article!

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