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Written by: YQ, compiled by: Yangz, Techub News
The turn from philosophy to infrastructure
Fundamental shift: In 2015, Ethereum embraced decentralization, censorship resistance, and trustlessness as its ultimate value pursuit (a goal in itself, rooted in cypherpunk ideology).By 2025, these features will instead serve instrumental value (as a means to achieve practical goals such as eliminating counterparty risk, achieving global financial inclusion, and reducing operating costs).This shift is crucial: idealism asks “How decentralized can we make this?”, while pragmatism asks “How decentralized do we need to solve this problem?” The 2025 Devconnect Conference in Buenos Aires revealed that the Ethereum Foundation has decisively chosen to pursue the latter question.
When Ethereum launched in July 2015, its founders articulated a vision rooted in the 1990s cypherpunk movement.Like the 2,000 mathematicians, cryptographers, and software engineers who resisted the government’s attempt to ban encryption, Ethereum’s early community pursued decentralization and censorship resistance as ultimate values.The project will operate as a “world computer” in which smart contracts are executed with mathematical certainty and without corporate or government interference.This philosophical commitment sustained the project through its early years, attracting developers based more on ideological than commercial interests.
Ten years later, at the five-day Devconnect 2025 technology conference in Buenos Aires, a fundamentally different Ethereum emerged.Presentations by Ethereum Foundation researchers and application builders revealed a decisive shift away from the pursuit of abstract protocol perfection and toward pragmatic infrastructure improvements that enable real-world applications.This shift also becomes evident in the activity structure itself.Kicking off Ethereum Day on November 17, Tomasz Stanczak, Hsiao-Wei Wang, Ansgar Dietrichs, Barnabé Monnot, and Vitalik Buterin introduced the Ethereum Foundation’s strategic reorganization in April 2025 around three specific priorities, including scaling the first layer by increasing the gas cap, expanding blob data availability by deploying PeerDAS, and improving user experience through cross-chain interoperability.Specific achievements delivered in 2025 were then detailed: the gas cap doubled from 30 million to 60 million in December (via the Fusaka upgrade), the number of validators exceeded 1.1 million, and $70 billion worth of ETH was staked to secure the network.The following days focused on specific application areas rather than abstract protocol theory.Stani Kulechov explains decentralized credit markets, and Santiago Palladino details the Ethereum interoperability layer.November 19 (Trustless Agent Day) introduced the ERC-8004 Portable Reputation Protocol and the x402 Micropayments Protocol for Autonomous AI Agent Economics.The Privacy Summit and ZK Day sessions demonstrated that zero-knowledge proofs achieve an average block verification speed of less than 10 seconds.Throughout, speakers emphasized solving specific problems for real users, such as cross-chain fragmentation, DeFi privacy needs, institutional settlement needs, and autonomous agent payment infrastructure.
We’ve witnessed Ethereum’s evolution from idealism to pragmatism in five key infrastructure areas, where ultimate philosophical goals have given way to instrumental engineering goals: Layer 1 scaling through incremental optimization rather than architectural revolution, cross-layer interoperability to solve Layer 2 fragmentation, DeFi primitives empowering the $300 trillion credit market, autonomous agent infrastructure for a machine-native economy, and institutional adoption frameworks that prioritize privacy over transparency.
L1 Scaling: Incremental Optimization Replaces Architectural Revolution
Strategic reorganization and 3x annualized target
In their opening speech at Ethereum Day, Ansgar Dietrichs and Barnabé Monnot detailed the Ethereum Foundation’s reorganization in April 2025.This marks a shift from years of research into sharding technology to a pragmatic path that can deliver throughput improvements in the near-term timeframe.Instead of pursuing major architectural changes that could take 5 to 10 years, the foundation is committed to achieving a 3x annual throughput increase through systematic client optimization and targeted protocol adjustments.This approach reflects hard-won lessons about the cost of complexity in distributed systems: coordinating between four independent execution clients (Geth, Nethermind, Besu, Erigon) and five consensus clients (Prysm, Lighthouse, Teku, Nimbus, Lodestar) makes major protocol changes costly both in terms of development time and deployment risk.
The gas limit increase strategy will be promoted in the “Pragmatic Expansion Era” (2025-2026), and bottlenecks will be solved through incremental optimization rather than architectural revolution.The increase from 30 million to 60 million is achieved through client performance optimization and EIP-7623 call data repricing (the proposal charges 40 gas per byte for L2 Rollup with a higher call data ratio, compared to 16 gas per byte for standard transactions) and EIP-7825 transaction gas cap limit (16.78 million per transaction).The entire process is carried out in three steps: 30 million to 36 million (February 2025), 36 million to 45 million (July 2025), 45 million to 60 million (November 2025), and the default value was officially set to 60 million in the Fusaka upgrade on December 3.
This change, combined with the EIP-4844 dedicated Blob transactions introduced with the Dencun upgrade in March 2024, provides Rollup with an independent layer of data availability while freeing up block space for L1 execution.Recent expansions focus on: enhanced proposer-builder separation (ePBS), block-level access lists (BAL) to support parallel execution, targeted repricing to match gas costs to actual compute costs, and 6-second block intervals that double block rates.The longer-term sustainability plan (2027-2030) focuses on streamlining the consensus mechanism, virtual machine replacement, binary tree state structure, and protocol simplification, rather than the previously planned Verkle tree solution (which was abandoned due to quantum computing vulnerabilities in the polynomial commitment scheme).
Client Performance Benchmarks and Engineering Constraints
The Fusaka upgrade has achieved accurate benchmark data on the Sepolia testnet and mainnet shadow fork.A Geth client serving about 60% of the validator set takes 3.0 seconds to process a block with a full 60 million Gas, which is a throughput of 20 million Gas per second.Nethermind performed the fastest at 2.4 seconds (25 million gas per second), while Besu required 3.3 seconds (18 million gas per second), and Erigon completed block processing in 2.7 seconds (22 million gas per second).All implementations perform well below the critical threshold of 4 seconds, which ensures that 90% of validators receive and process blocks within the first quarter of the 12-second slot, thereby maintaining a consensus safety margin.Network propagation analysis shows that 90% of validators receive blocks within 0.7 to 1.0 seconds via the Gossip protocol, but the remaining 10% sometimes experience delays of 2 to 3 seconds due to geographic location differences.These engineering realities encourage conservative, incremental increases in gas caps rather than sudden jumps that could jeopardize network stability.
Currently, the bottleneck has shifted from raw execution speed to state access patterns, disk I/O, and cumulative state growth.Measurements show that for complex transactions, accessing state accounts and storage slots now dominate execution times.At the 60 million Gas cap, the annual growth rate of state data is approximately 60 GB.If scaled to 300 million Gas without mitigation, annual growth would reach 300 GB and state sizes would reach multiple terabytes within a few years.This reality was what originally motivated Verkle tree research, but advances in quantum computing have forced this approach to be abandoned in favor of pragmatic near-term management strategies (aggressive state pruning, state renting economics) while developing quantum-resistant binary tree alternatives for the 2027-2030 period.
PeerDAS and Blob extensions for L2 Rollup
The second strategic priority is to expand blob data availability, directly targeting the needs of L2 Rollup.The current infrastructure supports 3 to 6 blobs per block (128 kilobytes each), providing a capacity of 384 to 768 kilobytes per 12-second slot.PeerDAS (Peer-to-Peer Data Availability Sampling) deployed through the Fusaka upgrade is able to scale to 16 blobs in the short term, and potentially 64 blobs in the long term, using the mathematics of erasure coding.
Each blob is split into multiple data fragments using Reed-Solomon encoding, allowing complete data to be reconstructed from any 50% fragment.Validators download random subsets rather than complete blobs, and the network works collectively to ensure data availability without any single validator storing the entire content.This sampling method can scale the number of blobs by 10x or more while reducing the bandwidth required per validator from O(n) to O(log n).
Deployment schedule: Development network testing in the third quarter of 2025, test network in early 2026, and main network activation in mid-2026 (subject to security review).Once put into operation, PeerDAS can increase rollup data availability by 10 times while reducing blob gas prices by expanding capacity.
ZK-EVM Proof: Theory to Production Timeline
Vitalik Buterin’s discussion of proxy infrastructure and Ansgar’s protocol updates both highlight major breakthroughs in zero-knowledge Ethereum virtual machine proof times.Multiple ZK-EVM teams achieved proof times for average blocks below 10 seconds in 2025, a significant improvement from 5 to 10 minutes in 2024.This marks a key step in Ethereum’s path to achieving real-time proofs (sub-12 seconds to match slot times).
The deployment will follow a progressive path: the first phase experimentally introduces validity proofs, allowing validators to choose to verify ZK proofs instead of re-executing some blocks; the second phase implements a hybrid mode, where key blocks require ZK proofs while most blocks continue to execute normally; the third phase transitions to proof-enforcement mode, where all blocks must have ZK proofs; the fourth phase implements full ZK-EVM, where stateless clients can run without storing state, making mobile and browser nodes fully secure.As for implementation time, i.e. production deployment, it is expected to be completed between 2027-2030.
Cross-layer interoperability: solving L2 fragmentation
fragmentation problem
In his “Ethereum Everywhere” speech, Santiago Palladino revealed the fundamental contradictions in Ethereum’s development roadmap with Rollup as its core.Although over 50 L2s achieved a combined throughput of over 100,000 transactions per second, fragmentation created severe user experience issues and liquidity fragmentation, which threatened the value proposition of the unified Ethereum ecosystem.A user holding assets on Arbitrum cannot purchase NFTs on zkSync without bridging funds via L1, which requires a 7-day waiting period (the fraud-proof window for optimistic rollup) and a $35 gas fee.Liquidity is fragmented between different chains, and the same token has different transaction prices on different L2s.Applications must be deployed on each chain separately, which distracts developers’ energy and user base.
Ethereum interoperability layer: single signature enables multi-chain operations
The Ethereum Interoperability Layer (EIL) was developed by the Arbitrum, Optimism, Polygon, zkSync and Base teams and is built on the ERC-4337 account abstraction to enable cross-chain operations through a single signature.Its technological innovation lies in Merkle tree batch licensing.The user builds an operation tree across multiple chains, signs the Merkle tree root, and commits branches to each target chain.Smart contract accounts on each chain verify Merkle proofs against signed tree roots, enabling atomic multi-chain execution without complex cross-chain messaging protocols.
The mechanism Palladino demonstrated at the conference demonstrated concrete efficiency gains: a user holding 10,000 USDC on Arbitrum who wanted to use 5,000 USDC to purchase an NFT on zkSync would only need to sign a single Merkle root, authorizing both the deduction on Arbitrum and the purchase on zkSync.The cross-chain liquidity provider (XLP) “pre-runs” settlement by immediately providing 5,000 USDC on zkSync, and then claims the user’s funds from Arbitrum after the withdrawal delay period has expired.XLP charges about $5 (0.1%) for this service, and from a user perspective, transactions are completed in 1 minute, compared to more than 7 days and a $35 fee for traditional bridging methods.
Based on account abstraction
ERC-4337 implements EIL by replacing externally owned accounts (controlled by ECDSA private keys) with programmable smart contract accounts.Traditional Ethereum addresses can only authorize one operation per signature.Smart contract accounts can implement arbitrary verification logic, including verifying Merkle proofs that can authorize multiple operations simultaneously.This capability has existed in theory since the inception of Ethereum, but ERC-4337 standardized its implementation and created the alternative mempool infrastructure necessary for production deployments.
The November 18 meeting revealed the promise of major wallets: MetaMask, Argent, and Safe have all deployed smart account infrastructure, with Safe reporting over 100,000 active accounts as of November 2025.In addition, user experience improvements are not limited to cross-chain operations, but also include the use of ERC-20 tokens to pay gas fees (via the payment manager), social recovery mechanisms, and programmable spending limits.
Fast finality with 6 second slot
In his speech on improving the service quality of Ethereum as the “confirmation engine” of the entire ecosystem, Barnabé Monnot emphasized two indicators: inclusion time (currently an average of 12 seconds) and final confirmation time (currently 13 minutes).Rapid confirmation rules, to be deployed in Q1 2026, will provide 95% certainty within 1 to 2 blocks (12 to 24 seconds) without having to wait 13 minutes for final economic confirmation.This looser security assumption (based on probabilities rather than economic finality) is sufficient for many use cases: L2 can use confirmed L1 state faster (Base Rollup benefits from this), cross-chain bridge protocols can enable faster cross-chain messaging, and centralized exchanges can reduce deposit and withdrawal delays.
Long-term plans include reducing slot time from 12 seconds to 6 seconds, effectively doubling the network’s block production rate.Current client performance (it takes 2.4 to 3.3 seconds to process a 60 million Gas block) shows that a 6-second slot is feasible if the Gas limit is increased to 100 million or higher and the client continues to be optimized.When the 6-second slot is combined with the fast confirmation rule, effective final confirmation will be achieved in 6 to 12 seconds, making it comparable to centralized payment networks.
DeFi Infrastructure: A $300 Trillion Credit Opportunity
Stani Kulechov’s Thesis on Renaissance Finance
In his speech “The New Architecture of Credit,” Stani Kulechov drew historical analogies between Renaissance financial innovation and modern DeFi primitives, positioning the decentralized credit market as a $300 trillion opportunity aimed at unlocking global capital flows.In Florence in 1252, the florin, with its standardized weight and predictable purity, became the first widely trusted base currency, allowing credit to expand across Europe.DeFi replicates this function with stablecoins (USDC, DAI, USDT provide $150 billion in on-chain liquidity at the base layer); Venice’s business intelligence network collects business information from ports across the Mediterranean and is functionally equivalent to oracle infrastructure (Chainlink provides price feeds and off-chain data verification); business networks such as the Hanseatic League create liquidity layers that connect local markets, similar to automated market makers (Uniswap, CurveRealizing instant token exchange across capital pools); the Renaissance Comenda contract allowed passive investors to fund merchant ship voyages and agree on profit sharing, which was the predecessor of smart contracts that automatically allocate capital based on programmed conditions.
Kulechov’s core argument is that the $300 trillion global credit market remains out of reach for DeFi because traditional credit relies on local information (borrower reputation, legal enforcement, collateral assessment) that cannot be directly put on-chain.His proposed solution – the Aave Horizon protocol – tokenizes local credit for global DeFi liquidity participation.Local credit analysts evaluate borrowers using traditional methods (credit history, cash flow analysis, collateral assessment) and then package the loans into tokenized graded products for on-chain transactions.DeFi liquidity providers purchase these graded products and earn revenue from local credit markets, while the protocol handles compliance, collections, and default management.
Kulechov deliberately chose Argentina, the venue for the conference, as a case study.Argentina’s credit markets display extreme inefficiencies: credit card APRs exceed 100%, availability of mortgages is limited despite the value of real estate, and capital controls impede cross-border investment.Furthermore, while institutional investors seek emerging market yields, local businesses with strong cash flows are unable to access growth capital at reasonable rates.The Aave Horizon Buenos Aires pilot project, announced during Devconnect, aims to fill this gap by tokenizing Argentinian SME receivables and making them available to global DeFi investors at annualized interest rates of 15% to 25% (a rate that is attractive to investors and transformative for borrowers accustomed to 100%+ costs).
Atomic Settlement and Programmable Combination
In his presentation on institutional adoption, Danny Ryan highlighted the operational improvements that blockchain infrastructure brings through cryptographic settlement, rather than legal enforcement.In traditional finance, stock trades settle on T+1 (one business day), corporate bonds settle on T+2, and private equity trades take 90 to 180 days.Each settlement involves multiple intermediaries (transfer agent, custodian, clearinghouse, payment processor), corporate bond transactions require approximately 20 manual steps, and 5% to 10% of transactions fail if reconciliation errors occur.Ethereum simplifies this to atomic execution: a smart contract receives assets from both sides of the transaction and either completes the exchange immediately or rolls back the entire transaction.On L2, settlement can be completed in 12 seconds at a cost of less than $5, which represents a 99.9% improvement in both time and cost metrics.
More importantly, atomic combinations enable financial products that are not possible in traditional systems.Morpho’s presentation showcased cross-mortgage products.When an institutional client deposits $100 million worth of tokenized U.S. Treasuries and immediately lends out $90 million in USDC, the loan terms automatically adjust based on the Treasury yield, and programmatic liquidation is automatically performed if the collateral ratio falls below a safe threshold.The entire process requires no legal contracts, no credit checks, and no settlement delays.
Privacy Infrastructure and Scaled Visibility
The Nov. 19 Privacy Summit made it clear that privacy has become a major barrier to institutional adoption, eclipsing regulatory issues in importance.Europe’s MiCA provides a clear regulatory framework.The approval of Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs in the United States is also evidence that regulators have recognized cryptocurrencies as an asset class.However, the development of privacy infrastructure lags behind regulatory clarity.
What organizations need is what speakers called “scoped visibility”: different stakeholders seeing different subsets of data based on their roles and permissions.Fund managers must see the complete holdings to make asset allocation decisions.Regulators must be able to verify compliance without obtaining strategic transaction information.Clients must be able to view their own positions and not others’.The public should only see aggregated metrics such as total assets under management.The transparency of the public chain, which makes all information visible to everyone, cannot meet these requirements.
In this regard, the proposed technical solution uses a variety of cryptographic techniques in layers.Private L2s such as Aztec encrypt state by default, and decryption keys are distributed based on access policies defined in the smart contract.Zero-knowledge proofs enable selective disclosure: proving to regulators that KYC checks have been passed without revealing identity, or proving that transactions remained within approved limits without exposing actual positions and counterparties.Multi-party computation allows parties to perform collaborative analysis without knowledge of the other parties’ raw input data.
BlackRock’s BUIDL fund ($500 million in assets as of November 2025) runs on Ethereum but requires privacy to be maintained through permissioned access and off-chain reporting.The fund’s structure both demonstrates the market’s need for blockchain settlement (atomic, programmable, available 24/7) and exposes the shortcomings of current privacy infrastructure.Multiple speeches indicated that native privacy features entering production environments in 2026 will unleash larger-scale institutional deployment, and the scale of tokenized assets may reach $100 billion by 2027.
Autonomous Agent Economies: ERC-8004 and x402
Portable reputation infrastructure
“Agents Day” on November 19 showcased the complete infrastructure for an AI agent economy, based on the assumption that agents will become major economic players within the next decade.The shift from human-centric to agent-native design becomes evident in two complementary protocols, including ERC-8004 for agent identity and reputation, and x402 for machine-native payments.ERC-8004 extends the ERC-721 non-fungible token standard with reputation tracking capabilities.
Each agent is given a unique token ID that is used to accumulate performance metrics: number of tasks, success rate in basis points, total transaction value, and a Merkle root of detailed performance proofs stored on IPFS or Arweave.As a result, on-chain reputation is portable across platforms, solving the problem of fragmented reputation islands that plague traditional service platforms (such as Upwork’s reputation that cannot be transferred to Fiverr).
The technical specification defines on-chain and off-chain components to balance verifiability with storage costs.On-chain, the contract stores a compact reputation vector (number of tasks uint256, success rate in base points, total value uint256, Merkle root for performance proof).Off-chain infrastructure indexes complete performance data.An agent claiming a 95% success rate out of 1000 tasks must provide a Merkle proof linked to a verifiable record of task completion (cryptographic signature from task requester, timestamp, description of results), thus preventing reputation inflation through false claims.
x402: Payment instead of authentication
The x402 protocol is designed to solve the authentication problem for autonomous agents running without supervision.Traditional API access requires developers to manually register accounts, handle the OAuth process, and manage API keys, all of which preset human interaction.Autonomous agents cannot complete CAPTCHA verification, nor can they securely store long-term keys without introducing centralized key management (which would defeat the original purpose of decentralization).
x402’s solution is to replace authentication with payment: to access a resource, the agent only has to pay a specified amount of cryptocurrency.The protocol flow is very straightforward: the agent requests the resource and the server returns HTTP status code 402 (Payment Required) with payment details (amount, token type usually USDC, recipient address, unique nonce to prevent replay attacks).The proxy constructs a transaction that transfers the requested amount to the receiving address, submits it to an Ethereum L2 (such as Arbitrum or Base, which provides sub-second final confirmation) for fast confirmation, and then retries the request carrying the transaction hash as proof of payment.The server verifies the transaction on-chain, checking that the amount meets requirements, that the recipient address is correct, and that the nonce has not been used before, and then provides the requested resource.
Institutional Adoption: Counterparty Risk and Cryptoeconomic Security
Wall Street’s demand for decentralization
Danny Ryan’s Nov. 17 speech on institutional adoption of Ethereum upended conventional wisdom about blockchain’s value proposition.Ryan provides evidence that Wall Street is not reluctantly tolerating decentralization in order to reap the benefits of blockchain, but is actively demanding decentralization as a solution to counterparty risk, operational inefficiencies, and regulatory burdens.This argument is based on the results of a year of institutional interaction with the Ethereum Foundation’s institutional development team, and represents a major restructuring of Ethereum’s market positioning.
Financial institutions analyze each system through the lens of counterparty risk: who might fail, cheat, or disappear, and the probability and extent of losses.Traditional finance reduces this risk through legal contracts, insurance, and regulatory oversight.Each layer of mitigation introduces its own counterparty dependencies: trades settled through DTCC depend on the solvency and operating capabilities of DTCC; credit default swaps depend on the ability of insurance companies to pay; and escrow arrangements depend on the integrity of the escrow agent.
Ethereum’s atomic settlement eliminates these dependencies through cryptographic rather than legal enforcement.Smart contracts simultaneously verify that both parties have provided the agreed upon assets and execute the exchange, or roll back the transaction if one party is unable to fulfill its obligations.The counterparty is the code itself, which anyone can verify.The $70 billion in staked ETH that secures the network represents economic security that cannot be easily replicated.Breaking consensus would require not only attacking the code but also gaining 51% of the stake, which is an expensive and economically irrational action given the slashing penalty and the need to maintain the value of the stake.
Ryan’s data quantifies improvements in operational metrics.Traditional corporate bond settlement involves back-office costs of $50 to $200 per trade, a failure rate of 5% to 10%, and manual reconciliation.Ethereum’s settlement cost on L2 is less than $5, with zero failure rate (deterministic execution).T+2 settlement reduces capital occupancy time by 99.99% compared to 12-second atomic execution.On a $100 million deal, at a 5% annual return, this is an opportunity cost savings of about $20,000.
In addition to cost savings, atomic portfolios enable risk management not possible in traditional systems: flash loans for liquidations that eliminate liquidators’ capital requirements, cross-collateral positions across multiple protocols enabling atomic updates, and programmable circuit breakers that automatically halt activity when risk parameters exceed thresholds.
Achieve 100% uptime with client diversity
Tomasz Stanczak’s ecological update highlights that trillion-dollar markets require infrastructure that never stops running.Ethereum achieves this through client diversity rather than redundancy.Four independent execution clients (Geth in Go, Nethermind in C#, Besu in Java, Erigon in Go) and five consensus clients (Prysm, Lighthouse, Teku, Nimbus, Lodestar) ensure that vulnerabilities in a single implementation can affect at most 60% of validators (Geth’s current market share).While developers patch the affected code, the network can continue to function on a small number of clients.
This architecture contrasts with traditional exchanges, which, despite having sophisticated redundant designs, still experience periodic outages.The New York Stock Exchange was disrupted for 226 minutes in 2015.The Tokyo Stock Exchange suspended trading for a full day in 2020 due to a hardware failure.Robinhood experienced multiple outages during 2021’s high volatility.Ethereum, on the other hand, has maintained 100% uptime since its merger in September 2022, processing more than 1 million transactions per day without ever being interrupted.For institutions considering blockchain infrastructure, this record of reliability exceeds traditional financial market standards while maintaining the decentralized nature of eliminating single points of failure.
From idealism to pragmatism: what has changed
The contrast between Ethereum’s founding vision in 2015 and where it is headed in 2025 reveals a fundamental philosophical shift in the community’s assumptions about decentralization, censorship resistance, and minimal trust.The original white paper viewed these properties as ultimate goals to be pursued for their intrinsic value, rooted in the cypherpunk tradition (crypto technology is designed to achieve human freedom, not commercial profit).By 2025, these same features serve instrumental rather than ultimate goals in the Ethereum Foundation’s strategic plan.Censorship resistance is important because it enables global financial inclusion for the 1.4 billion unbanked people and prevents single points of failure in systemically important infrastructure. Trusted neutrality is important because it allows competitors to coexist on shared infrastructure, creating network effects that proprietary platforms cannot achieve. Minimized trust assumptions are important because they reduce the counterparty risk and operational dependencies that create costs and failures in traditional finance.
This shift from idealism to pragmatism runs through the technical content of Devconnect 2025, in both subtle and explicit ways.The speech emphasized performance benchmarks (client 20-25 million Gas throughput per second), deployment schedules (Fusaka 2025 Q4, Lump Sadam 2026) and user experience improvements (1-minute cross-chain transfers via EIL, 12-second confirmations) rather than philosophical abstractions about decentralization.Increasing the gas cap from 30 million to 60 million is of interest because it doubles throughput and supports more complex applications, not because it maintains a certain level of decentralization (it does, but it does so through client optimization rather than increased hardware requirements, which now becomes a constraint to be met rather than a goal to optimize for).Privacy infrastructure matters because institutions adopt the scoped visibility needed to meet regulatory and competitive requirements, not as an abstract civil liberties (although this benefit remains as a positive externality).
L2 ecology illustrates this pragmatic turn most clearly.Pure idealists would reject L2 schemes, arguing that they introduce additional trust assumptions (orderer liveness, data availability guarantees, fraud-proof submission windows), thereby compromising decentralization.Pragmatism embraces them as the only viable path to scaling while maintaining L1 security, and the Ethereum Foundation is actively coordinating the entire ecosystem through infrastructure such as EIL and PeerDAS.
Some critics interpret this shift as an abandonment of Ethereum’s original vision, pointing to issues with validator centralization (Lido controls 29% of staking shares), MEV withdrawal centralization (95% of blocks are built through five relays), and application layer compromises (most DeFi frontends use centralized RPC providers Infura or Alchemy).A more accurate assessment recognizes that the vision has matured from abstract principles into concrete implementations with measurable attributes.Decentralization now means client diversity metrics (Geth accounts for 60%, down from 95% in 2021), validator geography (more than 60 countries run validators), and economic analysis of centralization vectors (the principal-agent problem created by Lido’s liquid staking derivatives), not just the number of nodes.Censorship resistance means employing game theory mechanisms like inclusion lists and proposer-builder separation that make censorship economically unfeasible, rather than relying solely on social consensus.Being trustless means quantifying security assumptions (how much staked share is required to reverse finality), providing users with cryptographic proofs of state validity, and designing systems where the cost of verification is lower than the cost of trust, rather than resorting to philosophical arguments for decentralization itself as an intrinsic value.
Conclusion: The infrastructure is in place, waiting for applications to take off
Devconnect Argentina 2025 demonstrates that the Ethereum Foundation has made a decisive shift toward centering on application infrastructure rather than protocol research as an end in itself.The five-day technical presentation focused on solving specific problems and gave a clear timeline: solving cross-chain liquidity fragmentation with EIL deployed in mid-2026; addressing DeFi privacy needs with zkRollup cryptostate entering production in 2026; enabling proxy payment infrastructure with x402 and ERC-8004 launched in Q1 2026; addressing institutional settlement needs with privacy features and throughput scaling;PeerDAS in upgrade (December 3, 2025) expands blob data availability; manages state growth with pragmatic optimizations (client state pruning, witness data compression) while developing quantum-resistant binary tree alternatives for the 2027-2030 sustainability era.Each solution targets deployable improvements with measurable success criteria, rather than theoretical progress over an indefinite period of time.
This approach reflects hard-won lessons learned over the past decade of operations: Early Ethereum pursued ambitious protocol changes that consumed years of research and engineering time: sharding lasted from 2016 to 2020, before moving to a Rollup-centric roadmap; Verkle trees lasted from 2018 to 2025, before being eventually abandoned due to quantum computing vulnerabilities; and proof-of-stake lasted from 2014 to 2022 untilThe “merger” will not be completed until September 2022.These efforts have been technically successful (or revealed fundamental limitations) but have been slower to deliver than expected, while application-layer innovations like DeFi Summer 2020 and NFT adoption in 2021 show that with careful smart contract design, tremendous value can be created on top of existing infrastructure.The current strategy reverses this order of priorities.
Protocol changes like ePBS and BAL serve specific application needs (parallel execution, MEV mitigation) rather than theoretical improvements per se.Privacy capabilities target institutional needs (scoped visibility to meet compliance) rather than abstract privacy rights.Cross-chain infrastructure solves user experience problems (more than 50 L2 liquidity splits) rather than achieving architectural completeness.The willingness to abandon Verkle trees despite years of investment reflects this pragmatic shift: It is better to terminate a design with quantum computing vulnerabilities in time to avoid losses than to deploy it and need to replace the infrastructure within a decade.
Going forward, this pragmatic foundation will prepare Ethereum for mainstream adoption if applications built on this infrastructure can create significant value for users.The combination of 300 million gas throughput by 2028, privacy-preserving smart contracts in production by 2026-2027, seamless cross-chain operations via EIL by mid-2026, and institutional-grade reliability (100% uptime since September 2022) creates an infrastructure capable of supporting trillions of dollars of economic activity.Whether this potential is realized depends on factors beyond the control of the Ethereum Foundation: regulatory evolution in major jurisdictions, competitive dynamics with other public chains that offer different trade-offs, and, most critically, whether the applications built on this infrastructure solve problems that users actually face, rather than problems that engineers find interesting.But from a purely infrastructure perspective, a decade of evolution from idealism to pragmatism has created a platform ready for serious economic activity.It trades philosophical purity for deployable solutions, abstract decentralization for measurable security properties, and revolutionary ambition for incremental compound growth.
