Vitalik speaks out: Ethereum 2025 roadmap and new competitive landscape for public chains

Vitalik recently released an important directive, emphasizing the need to adhere to the principles of supply economics. In the face of fierce competition from other public chains, the Ethereum ecosystem needs to enhance confidence in a development path centered around infrastructure, as well as confidence in its unique culture. He stated that Ethereum will continue to steadfastly promote a modular (Sharding) approach, with plans to implement the Pectra and Fulu Osaka mainnet upgrade key projects in 2025. At the same time, Ethereum will also make breakthrough progress in key areas such as account abstraction, cross-layer interoperability, Blob market mechanisms, data availability sampling mainnet applications, and mainnet block statelessness.

In the new year, all participants in the Ethereum ecosystem are required to be user-centric and promote the large-scale application of Web3. The focus will be on developing new high-performance virtual machine chains and attracting users from other ecosystems through innovative incentive mechanisms to solidify Ethereum's position as a global computing platform and the financial settlement layer of Web3.

However, Vitalik's statement also reflects his unique philosophical perspective: he is passionate about the abstract ideals of decentralization and infrastructure, but seems to have a reserved attitude towards the actual user base that embraces these ideals and utilizes decentralized infrastructure—such as DeFi enthusiasts, speculators, and cryptocurrency traders.

At the same time, certain emerging public chain ecosystems have performed exceptionally well recently, with their single-chain 24-hour transaction volume at one point exceeding that of the entire Ethereum ecosystem. The ecological wallets of these emerging public chains have also outperformed mainstream wallets in the Ethereum ecosystem in terms of downloads on application store rankings. More notably, these emerging public chains have won the favor of a large number of Generation Z/00s users and developers, with many even beginning to view Ethereum as an outdated technology.

In the face of these structural challenges from the user level, Vitalik's proposed solution is to continue to vigorously develop production and infrastructure. The motivation behind this strategy seems not solely to maintain the fundamental interests of the Ethereum ecosystem, but rather out of concern for the transfer of power.

Whether this strategy will be effective remains to be seen. Although all parties deny the existence of a so-called public chain war, it is widely believed in the industry that the competition between public chains will inevitably become the main theme of the industry by 2025. The market and user mindshare battle between different virtual machine camps will bring new investment opportunities to the market.

According to the pricing of the BTC options market on a certain options trading platform, a large W-shaped oscillation structure may appear in 2025. In such an environment of tight liquidity and low market risk appetite, certain emerging public chains may surpass Ethereum at some point during the spring or autumn market trends. If this event occurs, it will greatly change the psychological structure of the market, and Ethereum may face an important turning point.