According to Forbes, the total market value of global crypto assets will soar to a record high of $3.8 trillion in 2024. Among them, the unit price of BTC hit a historical peak of US$106,490.1 on December 17, 2024. Various Meme Coins took the lead. With the progress and conclusion of the US presidential election, they became the absolute focus of the market, and the Ethereum ecosystem has also experienced extraordinary changes. It has been a wonderful year. Not only has the Dencun upgrade been successfully completed, but ETH has also achieved an increase in market value of approximately 48%.

Looking forward to 2025, what events in the Ethereum ecosystem are worthy of users' attention?

Pectra upgrade

Ethereum Pectra upgrade is expected to be officially activated in the first quarter of 2025 , the improved Ethereum protocols that will be implemented in this round of upgrades include:

EIP-2537: Precompiling for BLS12-381 curve operations

EIP-2935: Providing historical block hashes in state

EIP-6110: Providing validator deposits on-chain

EIP-7549: Move committee index out of verification signature< /p>

EIP-7594: PeerDAS

EIP-7685: Generic execution layer request

EIP-7251: Add MAX_EFFECTIVE_BALANCE

EIP-7702: Set EOA account code for a transaction

EIP-7623: Increase the call data fee

EOF-related technical protocols

As early as November 2023, developers have begun to deploy the Ethereum Pectra upgrade. Initially, in the developers' imagination , this is just a small upgrade that can be completed at the same time as the Dencun upgrade in March 2024, but there were many technical agreements that were not agreed upon at that time, so it was not implemented.

Online public information shows that Byzantine co-founder and CEO Gaia Regis once said: The Pectra upgrade will fundamentally change the way the Ethereum security layer operates.

After the Pectra upgrade is completed, developers have agreed that Verkle Transition is the next key reform area of ​​Ethereum.

What is Verkle Transition?< /p>

Verkle Transition is a major reform of the Ethereum state data structure. It refers to the developer's plan to transfer all state data from the Merkle Patricia Tree structure to the Verkle structure, which will be able to generate Smaller state data proves, thereby improving node efficiency, especially suitable for the operation of lightweight nodes, which can reduce maintenance costs

DeFi

2024 On December 23, Uniswap officially announced that its Layer 2 solution Unichain is expected to be launched on the public mainnet in early 2025, which may be the opening event of the Ethereum ecological DeFi field in 2025.

Unichain is an infrastructure focused on decentralized finance (DeFi), built on OP Stack and running on Ethereum's Sepolia Testnet. Since its launch in October 2024, the Sepolia testnet has processed more than 50 million transactions and deployed more than 4 million test contracts.

RWA.

Decentralized real-world assets (hereinafter referred to as RWA) will release liquidity, especially in the fields of real estate and carbon credits, and may lead to 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 lockup of approximately US$14.9 billion, with more than 80,000 asset holder.

Bitwise senior investment strategist Juan Leon pointed out in the latest weekly report released on December 18, 2024: Ethereum will usher in a strong rebound in 2025, among which The biggest driving force comes from RWA. Relevant data shows that in the current RWA market, RWA on Ethereum accounts for 81%, which is in a dominant position.

Stablecoin

An article published by Forbes on December 23, 2024 stated: Stablecoin has become one of the most successful use cases in the crypto-asset space, relying on blockchains such as Ethereum, Solana, and Tron to facilitate cross-chain transactions.

In 2024, the circulating supply of Stablecoin will reach 200 billion, and it is expected that the circulating supply may continue to grow in 2025, exceeding 400 billion.

NFT

On December 22, 2024, a post published by the Web3 media platform cointribune. An article pointed out: The weekly sales volume of NFTs based on Ethereum reached an astonishing US$304 million, an increase of 76% compared with the sales volume of the previous week. The sales volume of NFTs on Ethereum accounted for 10% of the NFT sales that week. 66% of total sales, especially the popularity of some well-known NFT series continues to increase, such as the Azuki element series of NFTs, sales increased by 226% compared to the previous week.

As 2024 draws to a close, the sudden rise in Ethereum NFT sales seems to indicate possible market vitality in 2025. Perhaps, with the joint promotion of more emerging use cases, some media pointed out: ETH is expected to touch theWith a new high value of US$15,000, let’s look forward to it together!