According to Forbes' report, the global crypto asset market capitalization soared to a historic high of $3.8 trillion in 2024. Among them, the BTC unit price reached a historical peak of $106,490.1 on December 17, 2024, and various Meme Coins became the absolute focus of the market, accompanied by the US presidential election. The Ethereum ecosystem also experienced a very exciting year, not only successfully completing the Dencun upgrade, but also achieving a market capitalization increase of about 48%.
Looking ahead to 2025, what events in the Ethereum ecosystem are worth users' attention?
Pectra Upgrade
The Ethereum Pectra Upgrade is expected to be officially activated in the first quarter of 2025. The Ethereum Improvement Protocols (EIPs) to be implemented in this round of upgrades include:
EIP-2537: Precompile for BLS12-381 curve operations
EIP-2935: Provide historical block hashes in the state
EIP-6110: Provide validator deposits on-chain
EIP-7002: Asset triggered by the execution layer
EIP-7549: Remove committee index from the verification signature
EIP-7594: PeerDAS
EIP-7685: Generic execution layer requests
EIP-7251: Increase MAX_EFFECTIVE_BALANCE
EIP-7702: Set EOA account code for a transaction
EIP-7623: Increase call data gas cost
EOF-related technical protocols
As early as November 2023, developers have already started deploying the Ethereum Pectra Upgrade. Initially, in the developers' conception, this was just a small-scale upgrade that could be completed simultaneously with the Dencun Upgrade in March 2024, but at the time there was no consensus on many technical protocols, so it was not implemented.
Public information on the network shows that Gaia Regis, the co-founder and CEO of Byzantine, once stated: The Pectra Upgrade will fundamentally change the way the Ethereum security layer operates.
After the Pectra Upgrade is completed, developers have unanimously agreed that the Verkle Transition is the focus of the next reform in Ethereum.
What is the Verkle Transition?
The Verkle Transition is a major reform of the Ethereum state data structure, which refers to the developers' plan to migrate all state data from the Merkle Patricia Tree structure to the Verkle structure. This will enable nodes to generate smaller state data proofs, thereby improving node efficiency, especially suitable for the operation of lightweight nodes, and reducing maintenance costs.
DeFi
On December 23, 2024, Uniswap officially announced that its Layer2 solution Unichain is expected to go live on the public mainnet in early 2025, which may be the grand opening event for the Ethereum ecosystem's DeFi field in 2025.
Unichain is a decentralized finance (DeFi) infrastructure built on the OP Stack and running on the Ethereum Sepolia testnet. Since its launch in October 2024, the Sepolia testnet has processed over 50 million transactions and deployed over 4 million test contracts.
RWA
Decentralized real-world assets (RWA) will unlock liquidity, especially in the application of real estate and carbon credits, and may also see new explorations in the field of copyrighted works.
According to data from RWA.xyz, as of December 24, 2024, RWA has reached a total asset lock-up of about $14.9 billion, with more than 80,000 asset holders.
In the latest weekly report released on December 18, 2024, Bitwise senior investment strategist Juan Leon pointed out: Ethereum will see a strong rebound in 2025, with the biggest driver being RWA. Relevant data shows that on the current RWA market, Ethereum-based RWA accounts for 81%, taking a dominant position.
Stablecoin
A Forbes article published on December 23, 2024 pointed out: Stablecoin has become one of the most successful use cases in the crypto asset field, leveraging blockchains such as Ethereum, Solana, and TRON to facilitate cross-chain transactions.
In 2024, the circulating supply of Stablecoins reached 200 billion, and it is expected that the circulating supply in 2025 may continue to grow, exceeding 400 billion.
Non-Fungible Token (NFT)
On December 22, 2024, a article published by the Web3 media platform cointribune. stated that the weekly sales volume of Ethereum-based NFTs reached a staggering $304 million, an increase of 76% compared to the previous week. Ethereum-based NFT sales accounted for 66% of the total NFT sales volume that week, especially some well-known NFT series such as the Azuki Element series, whose sales volume increased by 226% compared to the previous week.
As the year 2024 draws to a close, the sudden surge in Ethereum NFT sales seems to foreshadow the market vitality that may be gained in 2025. Perhaps, accompanied by the joint drive of more emerging use cases, the media has pointed out that ETH may reach a new high of $15,000 in value in May 2025. Let's look forward to it together!
