Analysis of Ethereum Technology Development and Future Opportunities

Looking back at the history of the Ethereum developer community, many cutting-edge technology discussions have ultimately evolved into everyday application products, such as DEX, lending, rollups, and DA, etc. This evolutionary process also contains opportunities for investment layout. This article will sort out and explore valuable information that may be captured from technical discussions on the Ethereum roadmap, the recent DevCon conference, and the upcoming Pectra upgrade.

Ethereum Roadmap Analysis

The Ethereum roadmap is an important reference for observing future development directions, including stages such as The Merge, The Surge, The Scourge, The Verge, The Purge, and The Splurge. The key content of each stage is as follows:

• The Merge: Completion of the merger between the execution layer and the consensus layer, achieving the transition from PoW to PoS. This includes improvements to the consensus protocol, single-slot finality, and lowering the validator threshold, among others.

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

• The Scourge: Aims to address MEV-related issues, including excessive concentration of builders and the capture of MEV value by large LSTs.

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

• The Purge: Reduce the data storage and state maintenance pressure on Ethereum nodes by deleting or archiving historical data, while also cleaning up technical debt.

• The Splurge: Involves more cutting-edge improvements, including EVM underlying optimization, account abstraction, and cryptographic applications such as VDF.

Highlights of the DevCon Conference

Recently, the DevCon conference discussed current issues and potential solutions, with the most notable topic being Beam Chain. Although it is jokingly referred to as "Ethereum 3.0", this concept proposes multiple underlying improvements, including underlying Snarkification, optimized block generation, and staking. However, the completion of the roadmap is expected to take about 5 years.

Topics related to Rollup remain a hot topic at DevCon, primarily focusing on issues such as liquidity fragmentation and interaction difficulties between rollups. In addition, the maturity of L2 technology, chain abstraction, pre-confirmation, cryptographic applications, and future upgrades have also been widely discussed.

Pectra Upgrade Highlights

The Pectra upgrade expected to be completed in the first quarter of 2025 includes several transformations from the underlying level to the user end:

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

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

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

Future Opportunities

Based on the aforementioned technological changes and research discussions, the following areas may nurture new opportunities:

1. Interoperability between Rollups:
   • Based rollup: Achieve ordering functionality through L1 to ensure the atomicity of interactions between L2.
   • Shared sequencer: L2 Shared Sequencer Group enables interaction.
   • Cross-chain intents: Utilize intents to meet cross-rollup requirements.

Multiple solutions such as Based Stack, Astria, Espresso, Polygon AggLayer, etc. are being promoted, and a winner is expected to emerge in the market by 2025.

2. Account Abstraction: The activation of EIP-7702 will bring new opportunities to the AA project. Combining chain abstraction and intents may allow for the construction of more complex cross-chain or multi-chain interaction features. After the Pectra upgrade, early teams involved in EIP-7702, such as Zerodev, may experience a new round of growth.

3. Cryptographic Applications:

   • Technical aspects: The zkEVM and zkVM frameworks are gradually maturing, and the combination of ZKP with MPC, FHE, etc., may yield more application combinations.
   • Application aspect: Verification applications such as ZK Email, zkTLS may gain more adoption.
   • Compliance concerns for privacy applications may decrease due to recent events such as the OFAC's sanctions against Tornado Cash being deemed overreach.

These technological advancements and innovations in the Ethereum ecosystem create new opportunities for developers, investors, and users. With the implementation of these improvements, we can expect to see a surge of more efficient, secure, and user-friendly decentralized applications and services.