Analysis of the Development Trends and Potential Opportunities of Ethereum Technology

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, among others. This process contains opportunities for investment layout. This article will sort through and discuss valuable information from the Ethereum roadmap for early 2025, the recent DevCon, and the upcoming Pectra upgrade and other technical discussions.

Ethereum Roadmap Analysis

The Ethereum roadmap includes multiple phases and is of significant reference value for future development directions:

1. The Merge: The integration 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.

2. The Surge: Focus on future scalability, improving from the ground up to better serve rollups. EIP-4844 has been launched, with future key points including PeerDAS to reduce node pressure and cross-rollup interactions.

3. The Scourge: Dedicated to reducing MEV-related issues, including the excessive concentration of builders and the capture of MEV value by large LSTs.

4. The Verge: Plans to change the underlying structure from Merkle tree to Verkle tree and implement Snarkification of EVM.

5. The Purge: By deleting or archiving historical data, reduce the data storage and state maintenance pressure on Ethereum nodes while cleaning up technical debt.

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

DevCon Hot Topics

Recently, the DevCon conference discussed current issues and possible solutions:

1. Beam Chain: Proposes multiple underlying improvements, including underlying Snarkification, improved block generation, and staking, etc. It is expected to take about 5 years to complete.

2. Related to Rollup: Discuss the issues of liquidity fragmentation and interaction difficulties between rollups. Currently, Optimism and Arbitrum have entered Stage 1 (permissioned fraud proof), while most other L2 projects are still in Stage 0 (centralized upgrades, no fraud proof).

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

Key Upgrades of Pectra

The Pectra upgrade expected to be completed in the first quarter of 2025 includes multiple transformations:

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

2. EIP-7691: Increase the number of blobs per block from 3 to 6, and the maximum value from 6 to 9, which is beneficial for rollup projects.

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

Future Opportunities

Based on the aforementioned technological changes and discussions, the following areas may give rise to new opportunities:

1. Interoperability between Rollups:
   • Based rollup: Achieve ordering functionality through L1 to ensure interaction atomicity.
   • Shared sequencer: L2 shared sequencer group enables interaction.
   • Cross-chain intents: Use intents to meet cross-rollup needs.

Relevant projects such as Spire Labs' Based Stack, Astria, Espresso, Polygon AggLayer, etc. are underway.

2. Account Abstraction: The activation of EIP-7702 will bring new opportunities for the AA project. By combining chain abstraction and intents, it may be possible to build more complex cross-chain or multi-chain interaction functionalities. After the Pectra upgrade, early participants in EIP-7702, such as Zerodev, may experience growth.

3. Cryptographic Applications:

   • Technical aspects: The zkEVM and zkVM frameworks are becoming mature, and the combination of ZKP with MPC, FHE, and other technologies is expected to produce new applications.
   • Application aspects: ZK Email (based on Aztec Noir), zkTLS and other verification applications may gain more adoption.
   • Concerns regarding compliance for privacy applications may be alleviated.

The development of these areas will bring new opportunities and challenges to the Ethereum ecosystem, warranting continuous attention and in-depth research.