Ethereum's Ten Years: From Idealism to Pragmatism

Practicality is paramount, forming the cornerstone of a trillion-dollar economy.

Original text: Ethereum After a Decade: From Idealism to Pragmatism

Author: yq_acc

Compiled by: Plain Language Blockchain

Cover: Photo by Monti Timpanogus on Unsplash

I. From the transformation of philosophical infrastructure

Since its launch in 2015 , Ethereum's vision has been rooted in the cyberpunk movement, with decentralization, censorship resistance, and the consumption of trust as its ultimate values ​​(the goal itself).

However, by 2025 , these metrics had transformed into instrumental value (means to achieve practical goals), such as eliminating counterparty risk, achieving global financial inclusion, and reducing operating costs. The key to this shift lies in the shift from idealism, which asks, "Can we achieve more decentralization?", to pragmatism, which asks, " How much decentralization is needed to solve this problem? "

At the 2025 Devconnect conference in Argentina , the changes were unmistakable. Ethereum Foundation researchers and application builders strategically focused on pragmatic infrastructure improvements aimed at supporting practical application abstractions that strive for perfect protocols.

In April 2025 , the Ethereum Foundation underwent a strategic reorganization, focusing on three specific priorities:

1. Extend Layer 1 by increasing the Gas Limit .
2. Extend the availability of Blob data by configuring PeerDAS .
3. Improve user experience through cross-chain interoperability .

Specifically, the Gas Limit will double from 30 million to 60 million in December 2025 (Fusaka upgrade) ; the number of validators will exceed 1.1 million ; and approximately $70 billion worth of ETH will be staked to protect the network.

II. Layer 1 Scaling: A Revolution in Gradual Optimization of Hardware Architecture

The foundation abandoned its years-long research on sharding and instead set a goal of tripling throughput annually , which it will achieve through unordered client optimizations and ordered protocol tweaks.

Gas Limit Expansion Strategy

Gas limit expansion went through three steps in 2025 , finally settling at 60 million in the Fusaka upgrade in December 2025 .

• 30M to 36M (February 2025)
• 36M to 45M (July 2025)
• 45M to 60M (November 2025)

Client performance benchmark (for a 60 million Gas block):

• Geth (approximately 60% validator market share): 3.0 (20Mgas/second)
• Nethermind (fastest): 2.4 seconds (25Mgas/second)

All implementations are within a critical 4-second threshold, ensuring cognitive safety. This threshold has shifted from raw execution speed to state access patterns and disk I/O . At 60 million Gas, state grows by approximately 60 gigabytes (GB) per year.

PeerDAS and Blob expansion

The second major strategic priority is to expand the availability of Blob data to directly serve Layer 2 (L2) Rollups .

• Currently: Each block supports 3 to 6 blobs (384KB to 768KB).
• PeerDAS (Peer Data Availability Sampling) : Deployed in Fusaka upgrades, it can currently partition data into 16 blobs using Reed-Solomon error correction codes . It can improve rollup data availability by more than 10 times .
• Deployment timeline: Mainnet activation in mid-2026 .

ZK-EVM Proof: From Theory to Production Timeline

Several ZK-EVM teams (such as PSE, Scroll, and Polygon) achieved an average proof time of less than 10 seconds per block in 2025 , a significant breakthrough compared to the 5-10 minutes in 2024.

• Objective: To achieve real-time proof (less than 12 seconds).
• Production deployment timeline: Gradual, with full ZK-EVM expected between 2027 and 2030 .

III. Cross-layer interoperability: Solving L2 garbage disposal

Currently, over 50 Layer 2 chains have achieved aggregate throughput exceeding 100,000 TPS , but fragmentation severely impacts user experience and liquidity. For example, transferring assets from Arbitrum to zkSync to purchase NFTs requires a 7-day Layer 1 bridge and incurs a $35 gas fee.

Ethereum Interoperability Layer (EIL)

EIL was developed collaboratively by teams such as Arbitrum and Optimism. It is based on the ERC-4337 account abstraction and uses Merkle tree batch authorization to achieve single-signature cross-chain operations.

• Efficiency improvement: Reduce the traditional bridging process from 7+ days and $35+ cost to approximately 1 minute per week, at a cost of about $5 (0.1% of the cost).
• Basics: ERC-4337 replaces traditional externally owned accounts with fast smart contract accounts , supporting gas payments and social recovery using ERC-20 tokens . As of November 2025 , the security report showed more than 10 active smart accounts .

Quickly determine finality and 6-second time slot

• Fast confirmation rule (Q1 2026 deployment): Provides 95% determinism within 1-2 blocks (12-24 seconds), consuming 13 minutes of economic finality waiting time.
• Long-term plan: Reduce the time interval from 12 seconds to 6 seconds . Combined with rapid confirmation rules, the effective final confirmation time will be reduced to 6 to 12 seconds throughout the process.

IV. DeFi Infrastructure: A $300 Trillion Credit Opportunity

Stani Kulechov proposed the "financial finance" theory, positioning the decentralized lending market as a $300 trillion global opportunity.

Aave Horizon Protocol

The protocol aims to transform traditional credit (such as local credit history and law enforcement) into assets that can participate in global DeFi liquidity.

• Mechanism: Local credit analysts assess borrowers and budget loans into tokenized batches , which are then traded on-chain. DeFi liquidity providers purchase these batches, thereby saving on yields from the local credit market.
• Argentina is committed to tokenizing Argentine receivables and offering them to global DeFi investors at an annual interest rate of 15% to 25% .

Atomic settlement and focus composition

Ethereum's atomic settlement is completed in 12 seconds , with a cost of less than $5 on Layer 2. Compared to traditional financial T+1/T+2 settlement, it represents a 99.9% improvement in both time and cost.

• Traditional settlement involves 20 manual steps and has a failure rate of 5% to 10% .
• Atomic composability: Enables financial products that are impossible in traditional systems, such as those across botnets .

Privacy infrastructure and scope visibility

Privacy has become a major obstacle to institutional adoption. Organizations need “segmented visibility” : different stakeholders can view different subsets of data based on their roles and permissions.

• Technical solution: Use tree layer 2 chains such as Aztec , zero-knowledge proofs to achieve key disclosure, and multi-party computation .
• Current status: BlackRock's BUIDL fund reached $500 million in assets in November 2025, but requires permissioned access and off-chain reporting to maintain privacy.
• Projected: Local privacy features expected to be deployed in production in 2026 will unlock more institutional deployments, potentially reaching $100 billion in tokenized assets by 2027 .

V. Self-operated agency economy: ERC-8004 and x402

Agents Day proposed a complete infrastructure for the AI ​​agent economy .

ERC-8004: Portable and Convenient Infrastructure

• Functionality: Extends the ERC-721 standard, providing a unique TokenID for each agent and a portable supplement to accumulating performance metrics (task count, success rate, etc.).
• Mechanism: The on-chain storage structure provides load support , while the off-chain infrastructure indexes complete performance data, requiring Merkle proofs to verify performance claims.

x402: Authentication with Payment Shift

• Problem: Autonomous agents struggle to handle the manual interactive authentication required for traditional API access (such as CAPTCHA and key management).
• Solution: Replace authentication with payment . Agents can access resources simply by paying a specified amount of cryptocurrency.
• Process: The server responds with an HTTP 402 (Payment required) response, including payment details. After the payment is processed, the transaction hash is used as proof of payment to re-request the resource.

VI. Institutional Adoption: Counterparty Risk and Cryptoeconomic Security

Wall Street is actively advocating for decentralization, seeing it as a solution to counterparty risk , operational inefficiencies, and regulatory burdens.

The economic security of $70 billion ETH

Ethereum's atomics eliminate counterparty dependence by eliminating legal constraints through settlement cryptography .

• Cost/Time Improvements: Tier 2 costs less than $5 , has a similar failure rate, and performs atomic execution in 12 seconds , reducing fund lock-up time by 99.99% compared to T+2 settlement.
• Economic security: The approximately $70 billion worth of staked ETH provides economic security . An attack would not only require compromised code but also the acquisition of 51% of the staked assets , which is costly and economically unreasonable.

Achieving 100% uptime through client diversity

Ethereum ensures its infrastructure never stops running through client diversity .

• Architecture: Four independent load balancing clients (Geth, Nethermind, Besu, Erigon) and five negotiation clients (Prysm, Lighthouse, etc.).
• Reliability record: Since its merger in September 2022 , Ethereum has maintained 100% uptime , a record that surpasses that of traditional financial standard markets.

VII. From Idealism to Pragmatism: What Changes Have Occurred?

This transformation is the ultimate goal of the philosophical change in tools and means :

• Decentralization: Measurable security attributes based on abstract principles (client diversity, geographic distribution, economic analysis).
• Anti-censorship: The game-theoretic approach of shifting public opinion (including inclusion in the list, separation of proposers and builders) is economically unfeasible.
• Gaining trust means quantifying security assumptions (how much collateral is needed to restore finality) and providing cryptographic proofs .

This pragmatic shift is reflected in the technical content, which emphasizes performance benchmarks (20-25M Gas/second), deployment timelines (Fusaka Q4 2025), and user experience improvements (EIL 1-minute cross-chain).

VIII. Conclusion: Infrastructure Prepared for Applications

At the 2025 Devconnect conference in Argentina , the Ethereum Foundation demonstrated its decisive shift towards application infrastructure . The technical demonstrations focused on solving specific problems and had clear timelines.

• Cross-chain liquidity fragmentation: EIL is scheduled for deployment in mid-2026 .
• DeFi privacy requirements: ZK-Rollup crypto state is expected to go into production in 2026-2027 .
• Proxy payment infrastructure: x402 and ERC-8004 will be launched in the first quarter of 2026 .
• Throughput capacity: PeerDAS in Fusaka upgrade.

The strategy reflects valuable lessons learned over decades: protocol reforms tend to be so profound, while application-layer innovations (DeFi Summer, NFTs) can create enormous value on existing infrastructure.

Looking to the future, this pragmatic infrastructure will:

• The throughput of natural gas is expected to reach 300 million tons by 2028 .
• Privacy-protected smart contracts will be implemented in 2026-2027 .
• Seamless cross-chain operations will be achieved through EIL by mid-2026 .
• Maintain institutional-grade reliability (100% uptime).

Ethereum has moved from philosophical purity to a deployable solution, replacing abstract decentralization with measurable security properties and preparing the infrastructure to support trillions of dollars in economic activity .

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