Analysis of Ethereum's Technical Roadmap and Future Opportunities

Looking back at history, the cutting-edge technology discussions within the Ethereum developer community often evolve into everyday application products, such as DEX, lending, rollups, and DA, etc. In early 2025, by analyzing the Ethereum roadmap, the recent DevCon conference, and the upcoming Pectra upgrade discussions, we can capture some valuable insights.

Ethereum Roadmap Analysis

The Ethereum roadmap is an important reference for observing the future development direction, including phases such as The Merge, The Surge, The Scourge, The Verge, The Purge, and The Splurge.

• The Merge: The merger of the execution layer and the consensus layer, achieving the transition from PoW to PoS. It also includes improvements to the consensus protocol, such as single-slot finality and lowering the validator threshold.

• The Surge: Focus on future scalability, improving from the ground up to support rollups. EIP-4844 is now live, with future priorities including PeerDAS and cross-rollup interactions.

• The Scourge: Aims to reduce MEV-related issues, including builder centralization and the capture of MEV value by large LSTs.

• The Verge: Including the change of the underlying from Merkle trees to Verkle trees and the Snarkification of the EVM.

• The Purge: Reduce the pressure on node data storage and state maintenance by deleting or archiving historical data, while also cleaning up technical debt.

• The Splurge: Involves more cutting-edge improvements, including EVM underlying, account abstraction, and other cryptographic applications (such as VDF).

Focus of the DevCon Conference

The DevCon conference discussed current issues and possible solutions:

1. Beam Chain: Dubbed "Ethereum 3.0", it proposes several underlying improvements, including underlying Snarkification, improved block generation, and staking, among others. It is expected to take about 5 years to complete.

2. Topics related to Rollup:

   • Discuss the fragmentation of liquidity and interaction issues between rollups.
   • L2 Technology Maturity: Currently, only Optimism and Arbitrum have entered Stage 1 (permissioned fraud proof), while most L2 projects are still in Stage 0.

3. Other hot topics: chain abstraction, pre-confirmation, cryptographic applications, and future upgrades.

Pectra Upgrade Highlights

The Pectra upgrade expected to be completed in Q1 2025 includes several transformations:

1. EIP-7702 (AA): Grants all EOA accounts the ability to temporarily convert to smart contract accounts, improving user experience, but may increase security risks.

2. EIP-7691: Increase the target value of blob count per block from 3 to 6, and the maximum value from 6 to 9, reducing rollup costs and enhancing Ethereum's DA competitiveness.

3. EIP-7251: Increase the staking limit from 32 Ether to 2048 Ether, simplifying operations for large staking service providers and whales.

Future Opportunities

1. Interoperability between Rollups:

   • Based rollup: Implementing the sequencing function through L1
   • Shared sequencer: L2 Shared Sequencer Group
   • Cross-chain intents: meet cross-rollup requirements

   Related projects: Based Stack, Astria, Espresso, Polygon AggLayer, ERC-7683, ERC-7802, etc.

2. Account Abstraction:

   • EIP-7702 will bring new opportunities for the AA project
   • Combining chain abstraction and intents may build more complex cross-chain or multi-chain interaction features.
   • The Pectra upgrade may be a key opportunity for AA track to validate PMF.

3. Cryptographic Applications:

   • Technology: zkEVM and zkVM frameworks are mature, ZKP combined with MPC, FHE, etc.
   • Applications: Verification applications such as ZK Email and zkTLS may gain more adoption.
   • Concerns about compliance for privacy applications may decrease

These technological changes and research discussions will bring new development opportunities to the Ethereum ecosystem, which are worth continuous attention.