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Author: Tom Mitchelhill Translated by: Daisy, Mars Finance
Analysts and experts say AI agents, a series of important network upgrades, and improvements in the U.S. regulatory environment are all reasons why Ethereum fans are full of expectations for 2025.
Ethereum supporters say AI agents, major network upgrades, increased institutional interest, and comprehensive regulatory reforms brought about by the crypto-friendly administration of new US President Donald Trump are just reasons to look forward to 2025.
Infinex founder Kain Warwick said in an interview with Cointelegraph that although Ethereum performed slightly in 2024, the asset is like a “compression spring” and is ready for a breakthrough in 2025.
According to TradingView data, ETH (Ether) has risen by 53.5% this year, from $2,350 on January 1 to the current $3,478.
ETH has posted a year-to-date gain of 53.5%. Source: TradingView
Meanwhile, other major crypto assets, including Solana, Cardano and Ripple’s XRP, have risen 92.7%, 57% and 276.5% respectively this year.
“The longer you press it, the more it rebounds. There are a lot of favorable factors, and there are some constraints, but once it breaks through, people will say ‘Oh my God’,” Warwick said.
Source: Kain Warwick
He mentioned some Ethereum improvement proposals (EIPs) and the user experience improvements brought by these upgrades, believing that these are key turning points in the price trends of Ethereum and ETH.
“In 2025, I think we will see improvements in account abstraction, there will be a lot of progress in L2 interoperability, and the user experience between L2 will be greatly improved.”
Ethereum will usher in Pectra upgrade in 2025
One of the main upgrades that Warwick and other Ethereum supporters are eagerly looking forward to is the Pectra upgrade—the next major milestone on the Ethereum roadmap, expected to be launched in early 2025.
Gaia Regis, co-founder and CEO of Restaking platform Byzantine, said the Pectra upgrade will fundamentally change how the Ethereum security layer works.
“Currently, Ethereum staking mainly relies on liquidity. Essentially, many ETH holders want to participate in staking. This is usually a good thing because more nodes mean more decentralization and higher security,” he said.she said.
However, Regis said Ethereum has now reached a huge scale—communication between more than one million Ethereum validators—which starts to slow down the network.
“Pectra solves this problem by increasing the maximum valid balance of validators from 32 ETH to 2,048 ETH, which significantly reduces the number of validators required and reduces the pressure on the network,” Regis said.
“Reduced pressure means faster networks and better experience for Ethereum users.”
In September this year, Ethereum core developers decided to divide the Pectra upgrade into two main packages.The first Pectra package will introduce a total of eight EIPs, the most important of which is EIP-7702, designed to improve the user experience of wallet and chain abstractions.
“This will make pledge cheaper, resulting in more people participating in pledge, thereby reducing pledge rewards over time. Because of this, we are extremely optimistic about restaking. Many people will want to protect others by protecting others.The Internet is to increase their stake rewards.”
Trump’s crypto-friendly SEC will be particularly favorable to ETH
Saul Rejwan, managing partner at Masterkey, crypto venture capital firm, said in an interview with Cointelegraph that Ethereum and more “legal” projects in the crypto industry, especially decentralized finance (DeFi) and decentralized physical infrastructure (DePIN).) will benefit the most under the Trump administration and the more crypto-friendly U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
On December 4, Trump nominated pro-cryptocurrency businessman Paul Atkins, a former SEC commissioner, as the next SEC chairman, while current chairman Gary Gensler plans to resign on January 20.
“In a more favorable regulatory environment, DeFi projects on Ethereum will flourish, and areas like restaking only require a little regulatory push to attract institutional investors,” he said.
“We expect this new leadership to lower barriers to entry, making it easier for early-stage crypto entrepreneurs and resilient companies to innovate and succeed.”
Stablecoins, tokenization and AI intelligent bodies
Matt Houghan, chief investment officer at Bitwise, said Ethereum has three major advantages as it enters 2025 and is expected to explode in the new year.
“Ethereum is at the center of three biggest trends in the crypto industry: the rise of stablecoins, tokenization and AI agents. It has dominated market share in all three areas,” Houghan said.
He added: “I think the excitement in these three areas next year will affect Ethereum, making it the king of counterattacks in 2025. You can already see this in recent strong performance and ETF capital inflows.”
In the past two weeks, Ethereum ETFs have had net inflows of $1.5 billion, becoming one of the largest inflows among eight spot funds, according to Farside Investors.
Ethereum ETFs have witnessed over $1.5 billion in net inflows in the last two trading weeks. Source: Farside Investors
Like Rejwan, Houghan also believes that the new crypto-friendly SEC under Trump is particularly good for Ethereum.
“I’m looking forward to removing the “Damoles Sword” that has hung over the U.S. crypto industry for the past four years. Washington’s new approach will unleash millions of crypto entrepreneurs, many of whom will be on Ethereum and its twoBuilding killer applications on the layer network,” Houghan said.
“We are entering the golden age of crypto, and Ethereum will be one of the main beneficiaries of this boom.”
Overall, Bitwise expects ETH to break through its previous all-time high of $4,878 to reach what he described as a “conservative” forecast high of $7,000.
More Layer 2 networks, restakes and better DApps
Edu Timmers, Ethereum backer and chief marketing officer of crypto firm Keyrock, believes that with the release of new layer two networks such as Abstract and Deutsche Bank projects, this will enhance the widespread use of the Ethereum ecosystem.
Timmers also mentioned that the recent rise of the on-chain perpetual contract protocol Hyperliquid, built on Arbitrum, proved the growth of Ethereum’s on-chain dominance, saying he expects Ethereum and its decentralized application (DApps) ecosystem.Competing with centralized market leaders like Binance will begin in the new year.
“Projects like Hyperliquid will start competing with centralized players like Binance in 2025, rather than decentralized projects like Uniswap,” Timmers said.
In addition, Timmers said Ethereum restaking is another undervalued area worth paying attention to in 2025, saying it will make the network more robust and versatile.
“As the chain starts to move security to the Ethereum mainnet through solutions like EigenLayer, restaking may see a breakthrough.”
