The future path of Ethereum

Written by: Yashas Naik

Compiled by: Block unicorn

Foreword

Ethereum faces significant challenges in 2025:

Its price has not reached a new high.

The ETH/BTC trading pair has fallen to a five-year low (0.02).

L2 and competitive narratives like re-staking failed to enhance its value.

At the same time, transaction fees have dropped to their lowest level since 2020, averaging only $0.36 per transaction.

In contrast, Solana has 3.25 million daily active users (compared to Ethereum’s 410,000), with a daily transaction volume of 35.99 million (Ethereum’s 1.13 million). Many people are starting to think about what the future direction of this second-largest blockchain will be?

Two major developments may reshape the future of Ethereum:

Upcoming Pectra Upgrade

V proposes to replace EVM with RISC-V technology.

Pectra Upgrade (to be launched on May 7, 2025)

The Pectra upgrade merges the originally two independent updates (the execution layer Prague and the consensus layer Electra) into a comprehensive improvement. Including 11 EIPs, Pectra aims to enhance scalability, efficiency, and security.

Key improvements of Pectra

1. Stronger scalability

PeerDAS and Verkle Trees technology will enhance transaction processing capacity.

Optimized data storage will reduce node operating costs.

Hash tree technology will accelerate network synchronization speed.

2. Lower transaction costs

Reducing network congestion will significantly lower gas fees.

EIP-7702 enables account abstraction, allowing users to pay gas fees using stablecoins instead of ETH.

Batch trading and customized security features will enhance wallet functionality.

3. Enhanced Staking

EIP-7251 increases the maximum staking amount for each validator from 32 ETH to 2048 ETH.

This improvement reduces the operating costs for large participants while maintaining penalties for violations.

EIP-6110 moves the handling of validator deposits to the execution layer, shortening the validator activation time by approximately 48 hours.

RISC-V Proposal (Long-term Solution?)

V God recently proposed to replace the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) with RISC-V technology. This change will fundamentally alter the way Ethereum executes smart contracts.

What is RISC-V?

RISC-V is an open-source instruction set architecture. (Essentially, it is a computer language that tells the processor how to execute commands.)

Unlike the EVM designed specifically for Ethereum, RISC-V is:

Open source and free to use

has been widely adopted in the field of computing

Handle complex calculations more efficiently.

More suitable for zero-knowledge proof technology

Why replace EVM?

1. Performance Improvement

RISC-V is expected to improve Ethereum’s execution efficiency by 100 times.

Transaction fees will be significantly reduced.

Complex operations such as privacy trading and cross-chain functionality will become more practical.

2. Zero-Knowledge Proof Compatibility

The current zkEVM system must convert EVM instructions to RISC-V in order to generate proofs.

This conversion will incur a computational overhead of 100 to 1000 times.

Native RISC-V support will eliminate this conversion step.

zkVMs like @SuccinctLabs SP1 can run smart contracts directly.

3. Developer Continuity

Developers can still use Solidity or Vyper to write smart contracts.

These languages only need to add RISC-V as the backend target.

The user experience will be slightly changed.

4. Implementation Timeline

This change does not take effect immediately. Vitalik’s proposal represents a long-term vision, which is:

Gradual implementation, requires 2-3 years

Retain the old system (EVM interpreter) during the transition period.

Ultimately enabling Ethereum to compete with efficient chains like Solana and Monad.

What does this mean for the future of Ethereum?

Ethereum is facing a life-and-death challenge of how to maintain its leading position as the primary smart contract platform while addressing the performance limitations that new blockchains have already resolved.

The Pectra upgrade addresses urgent issues related to staking, trading costs, and user experience. The RISC-V proposal addresses the fundamental execution architecture of Ethereum, which may lay the technical foundation for it to compete with faster blockchains while maintaining security and decentralization advantages.

For users, these changes ultimately mean:

Faster transaction processing speed

Lower fees

New application possibilities (such as on-chain AI, privacy features)

Achieve better scalability without sacrificing security.

By maintaining compatibility with existing applications while planning for better performance improvements, Ethereum seeks to evolve without abandoning its core principles or ecosystem. Whether these changes will be enough to sustain its market position and fend off rapidly growing competitors remains to be seen.

If not Ethereum, then who?

Recent data shows that there has been a significant change in the competitive landscape. Although the top ten DeFi protocols are still running on Ethereum, we have seen warning signs that its advantages are fading.

Projects like Jito and Jupiter are gaining attention in other areas, while Converge (Ethena’s RWA chain) has completely exited the ecosystem. These changes indicate that Ethereum’s leading position is not secure, raising an important question:

What new technological breakthroughs does Ethereum need to maintain its competitiveness in the future?

According to Nansen, Solana has recently surpassed Ethereum in total staked market capitalization (an important milestone for the SOL ecosystem), indicating that institutional confidence in Solana’s staking infrastructure is increasing.

Meanwhile, Solana’s revenue performance in the first quarter of 2025 surpassed all other chains while maintaining extremely low transaction fees. The combination of high revenue and low user costs demonstrates Solana’s efficient economic model.

These developments have added extra pressure to Ethereum’s technical roadmap. As Pectra and the potential RISC-V transition aim to address Ethereum’s scalability and cost issues, Solana continues to attract market attention with its existing architecture.