Ethereum Ecosystem Outlook: From Pectra Upgrade to NFT Market Renewal

According to Forbes, in 2024, the total market value of global crypto assets soared to a record high of 3.8 trillion US dollars. Among them, the unit price of BTC hit a historical peak of 106,490.1 US dollars on December 17, 2024. Various Meme Coins took the lead and became the absolute focus of the market with the progress and conclusion of the US presidential election. The Ethereum ecosystem also experienced a very exciting year. Not only did it successfully complete the Dencun upgrade, but ETH also achieved a market value increase of about 48%.

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

Pectra Upgrade

The Ethereum Pectra upgrade is expected to be officially activated in the first quarter of 2025. The Ethereum improvement protocols to be implemented in this round of upgrades include:

• EIP-2537: Precompile for BLS12-381 curve operations

• EIP-2935: Provide historical block hashes in the state

• EIP-6110: Provide validator deposits on the chain

• EIP-7002: Assets that can be triggered by the execution layer

• EIP-7549: Committee index Remove verification signature

• EIP-7594: PeerDAS

• EIP-7685: General execution layer request

• EIP-7251: Increase MAX_EFFECTIVE_BALANCE

• EIP-7702: Set EOA account code for a transaction

• EIP-7623: Increase call data fees

• EOF-related technical protocols

As early as November 2023, developers have begun deploying the Ethereum Pectra upgrade. Initially, in the developers' vision, this was just a small upgrade that could be completed at the same time as the Dencun upgrade in March 2024, but at that time there were many technical agreements that did not reach consensus, so it was not implemented.

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

After the Pectra upgrade was completed, developers have unanimously agreed that Verkle Transition is the next key reform area for Ethereum.

What is Verkle Transition?

Verkle Transition is a major reform of Ethereum's state data structure, which means that developers 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 proofs for nodes, thereby improving node efficiency, especially suitable for the operation of lightweight nodes, and reducing maintenance costs.

DeFi

On December 23, 2024, Uniswap officially announced that its Layer2 solution Unichain is expected to be launched on the public mainnet in early 2025, which may be the opening event of the Ethereum ecosystem 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 over 50 million transactions and deployed over 4 million test contracts.

RWA

Decentralized Real World Assets (hereinafter referred to as RWA) will unlock 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 RWA.xyz, as of December 24, 2024, RWA has reached a total asset lock-up of approximately $14.9 billion and has more than 80,000 asset holders.

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, with the biggest driving force coming 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 pointed out that Stablecoin has become one of the most successful use cases in the field of crypto assets, relying on blockchains such as Ethereum, Solana and Tron to facilitate cross-chain transactions.

In 2024, the circulating supply of Stablecoin reached 200 billion, and it is expected that the circulating supply in 2025 may continue to grow to more than 400 billion.

NFT 

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

As 2024 draws to a close, the sudden increase in Ethereum NFT sales seems to indicate that the market may be revitalized in 2025. Perhaps, with the joint promotion of more emerging use cases, some media pointed out that ETH is expected to reach a new high of $15,000 in May 2025. Let us look forward to it together!