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Written by: Tia, Techub News
The winds are rising, ups and downs, or “crisis is everywhere”…
This year is an extraordinary year for Ethereum.There are climaxes after the approval of US spot ETFs, and there are also crises facing solana competition and various “anti-Ethereum” remarks.In addition to personnel changes, a researcher joined Eigenlayer as a consultant, and later resigned from his position as Eigenlayer to better develop Ethereum.There are also Beam Chain and liquidity fragmentation issues raised at Devcon.All the pieces show this extraordinary year.
Ups and downs of price trends
Judging from the Ethereum price trend chart, we already understand how many ups and downs it has experienced.From more than two thousand dollars at the beginning of the year to more than four thousand dollars in March, back to the beginning of the word, and then rises to more than four thousand dollars again, full of drama and uncertainty.
On January 11, 2024, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) documents showed that the SEC approved 11 spot Bitcoin ETFs to be listed. Taking advantage of the east wind of ETFs and the expectations of Ethereum to approve ETFs, Ethereum soared all the way, in just oneIn more than a month, the price nearly doubled.
On July 23, the US spot Ethereum ETF was launched. Although the trading volume of spot Ethereum ETF was popular after it went online, the trading volume exceeded US$200 million in just 45 minutes.However, since the price increase in the first half of the year already included the expectation of issuing Ethereum ETFs, the US spot Ethereum ETF went online and did not achieve excessive growth.
As there is no sustainable innovation in the industry to support high prices, after Ethereum prices have been running wildly, prices began to fall again in August.Starting from July 30, Ethereum prices began a seven-day decline.From a high of $3366 to a low of $2111.After that, there is a long sideways trading.
Until Trump won the presidential election and sang all the way again, pulling Ethereum from the beginning of 2 characters to a maximum of $4,170.
The declines and rises for seven consecutive days and the double rises and falls like roller coasters reflect the extremely high volatility of the crypto market and also show the emotions, expectations and the impact of external events of market participants.(That’s right. This is crypto?️)
Behind the rise and fall is a series of iron logic that has to be admitted.For example, the sharp rise in expectations of Ethereum ETF listing after the approval of Bitcoin ETF at the beginning of the year, such as the waterfall-like decline returning to the origin caused by the lack of real innovation and lasting market demand in industries; and for example,After Trump took office, he was optimistic about encryption and rose wildly…
Looking back at the price trend of Ethereum, it is not difficult to find that its ups and downs are not only driven by external macro factors, but technological progress often plays an important role in it.From the launch of Ethereum 2.0, to the implementation of Layer2 scalability solutions, to the continuous optimization and update of the Ethereum network, every technological breakthrough has become the focus of the market.However, the gains brought about by these advances are not achieved overnight, but are often concealed by short-term market sentiment.
Beam Chain, Dencun upgrade, Pectra upgrade and other EIPs
Beam Chain
Beam Chain was proposed by Ethereum researcher Justin Drake in Devcon, Thailand.Beam Chain is Justin’s proposal to redesign the Ethereum consensus layer. The proposal is a further upgrade of Beacon Chain. The main goals are related to MEV, lowering the staking threshold, achieving rapid finality, and ZK-based entire consensus layer.This proposal rides on the wind of SNARK’s technological breakthrough, which is equivalent to an upgrade to the old Beacon Chain design 5 years ago.
Dencun Upgrade
The Ethereum Dencun upgrade was launched on March 13, 2024, and the hard fork combines two core improvements: the Deneb consensus layer and the Cancun execution layer update.The highlight of the upgrade is EIP-4844 Proto-danksharding, and Rollup can send transactions, proofs and other data to Layer1 in the form of a blob.Since blobs are temporary storage and access to off-chain data, using blobs will make Rollup much cheaper than the original calldata.But this also caused a sharp drop in Ethereum revenue.
EIP-4844 is a controversial EIP.In the short term, it is indeed the reason for the sharp decline in Ethereum revenue, and it is also one of the main reasons why Ethereum is criticized; but some people also call this EIP a “small step in Sharding and a big step in Ethereum’s expansion.”, in the long run, its specific impact is unknown.
The Dencun upgrade also includes some EIPs that improve Ethereum usage efficiency, such as EIP-7516, EIP-6780, EIP-5656, EIP-1153, etc.See the following table for details on the EIP included in the Dencun upgrade.
Pectra Upgrade
Pectra upgrade combines two separate upgrades: Prague execution layer upgrade and Electra consensus layer upgrade.The Pectra upgrade is an upgrade before the Fusaka upgrade (specially used to implement the Verkle transition).Since Ethereum developers agree that other substantial changes cannot be combined with Verkle, the Pectra upgrade is a series of other changes before implementing the Verkle transition.Verkle transition represents the migration of all Ethereum state data from the Merkle Patricia tree structure to the Verkle structure.This will enable nodes to generate smaller proofs about state data, which can be passed to other nodes more easily, and is a prerequisite for implementing a “stateless client”.
The Pectra upgrade is initially scheduled to be activated on the main network in early 2025.Among them, the more important one is account abstraction EIP-7702, whose main function is to expand the smart account function to EOA.
EIP-7702 is an improvement of EIP-3074 and was proposed in May 2024.And EIP-3074 is the first attempt by the community to begin exploring the expansion of smart account capabilities to EOA.Unlike ERC-4337 (by introducing a smart contract called EntryPoint, which makes the smart contract behave like a user’s account), if ERC-4337 does not need to change the execution layer or consensus layer to implement account abstraction,EIP-3074 needs to be implemented for implementation.It mainly extends the smart account function EOA by introducing two opcodes – AUTH and AUTHCALL.
EIP-7702 is a step further for EIP-3074.Unlike the EIP-3074’s opcode implements EOA’s smart account model, with EIP-7702, EOA can now store an address called a “delegate indicator” that points to a smart contract.When a transaction is sent to EOA, it can execute the code at this specified address just like it does with its own code, similar to how “delegated calls” work in a smart contract.
While bringing smart account capabilities to EOA, EIP-7702 addresses many of the concerns raised by EIP-3074, provides full compatibility with ERC-4337 and a clear upgrade path, and plans to be incorporated into the Pectra upgrade.
Since the Pectra upgrade will focus on Verkle Tree, EIP-7702 may be the last EIP for account abstract related upgrades, since after this, there may not be another 2-year window to contain account abstract related upgrades.
So far, other code changes about Pectra mainly include improving the experience of users and smart contract developers.A more detailed introduction to Pectra upgrade can be foundThis article.
Other EIPs
Not all EIPs that passed the review need to be upgraded after a hard fork before they can be used. Ethereum has also passed some major process/standard EIPs this year, such as the cross-chain intent standard ERC-7683 and the account abstract standard ERC-4337, etc. (ERC is a subset of EIP), and such changes rely more on the community’s recognition of the EIP, that is, whether the community is willing to accept or actively implement it.Some EIPs that need to be used after a hard fork upgrade can also be accepted by users, DApps, etc. before they can achieve universal adoption.
Interoperability: Cross-chain/Rollup standard
With the Ethereum Rollup-centered roadmap and the growing variety of Layer1s, on-chain liquidity is split and the composability of one of the biggest advantages on-chain is gradually lost with the situation of separatism.
There are two gradients of interoperability that need to be solved: one is how to achieve rapid, low-cost and secure cross-chain assets, and the second is how to achieve synchronous composability.
At present, there are many protocols that can implement the problem of the first gradient.Protocols like Across have greatly improved cross-chain speed and have very low handling fees.Due to its intent-based architecture, the security issues of users’ cross-chain have also been completely transferred to the solver.At present, some related proposals on cross-chain/Rollup are mainly committed to solving some preliminary standard issues.
Synchronous composability is subsequently transferred by Based Rollup.The specific proposals about cross-chain/Rollup are as follows:
ERC-7683
ERC-7683 is a cross-chain standard for intent proposed by Across and Uniswap, through which all intent interoperable orders can share the solver network.
ERC-7683 combined with ERC-3668 and ERC-3770 will bring a preliminary interoperability experience to L2.ERC-7683 creates a unified framework for cross-chain intentions, which can be accessed by all solvers; EIP-3370 adds identification tags to the blockchain address, clarifying the specific blockchain network to which the address belongs, so as to avoid users sending money toIn the wrong network; ERC-3668 CCIP Read has completed off-chain verification well, which provides a security mechanism to obtain off-chain data without additional trust assumptions, and will effectively and automatically support lightweight L2 blockchain-compatibleClient without any additional configuration required for wallet.
RIP-7755 (L2 calling standard)
RIP-7755 is the L2 call standard, and the POC was launched by the Base research team on October 17 to achieve seamless cross-chain interoperability between different Ethereum Layer2 networks, especially mainstream Layer 2 networks such as Optimism and Arbitrum.The proof of concept of RIP-7755 is suitable for blockchains that comply with EIP-4788 standards and is currently able to verify the status of the OP Stack chain and Arbitrum.
summary
The above is an overall review of the major events Ethereum experienced in 2024.Of course, Ethereum 2024’s journey is much more than that.It also includes the dispute with Solana, criticism of unclear positioning and centralization, large institutions began to hold Ethereum spot ETFs (Michigan Pension Fund disclosed holdings of more than $10 million Ethereum spot ETFs), and large institutions on EthereumLaunching tokenized products (UBS launches tokenized money market fund uMINT in Singapore, Wall Street giant Guggenheim tokenized $20 million commercial paper on Ethereum), and V Shenlian after facing crisisPost 6 articles about Ethereum Roadmap, AMA answers are conducted on Ethereum Research Reddit, etc…
And the final thing points to an open question. Where is the future?
