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Author: YQ Source: X,@yq_acc Translation: Shan Oppa, Bitcoin Vision
1. Shift from philosophy to infrastructure
Core transformation: In 2015, Ethereum viewed decentralization, censorship resistance, and trustlessness as ultimate values (self-goals stemming from cypherpunk ideology); by 2025, these features became instrumental values (means to achieve practical goals such as eliminating counterparty risk, promoting global financial inclusion, and reducing operating costs).The difference between the two is crucial: idealism asks “How much decentralization can we achieve?”, while pragmatism focuses on “How much decentralization is needed to solve this problem?”.Devconnect Argentina 2025 showed that the Ethereum Foundation has clearly chosen the latter.
When Ethereum launched in July 2015, its founders articulated a vision deeply rooted in the cypherpunk movement of the 1990s.Like 2,000 mathematicians, cryptologists, and software engineers who banded together to resist government attempts to ban encryption, Ethereum’s early community embraced decentralization and censorship resistance as its ultimate pursuits.The project aims to create a “world computer” that allows smart contracts to be executed with mathematical certainty and without corporate or government interference.This philosophical belief sustained the project through its first few years, attracting a large number of developers who were motivated by ideological rather than commercial interests.
Ten years later, at Devconnect Argentina 2025 in Buenos Aires, a five-day technical conference revealed a very different Ethereum.Speeches from Ethereum Foundation researchers and application developers showed that the project has decisively shifted towards pragmatic infrastructure optimization, focusing on empowering practical applications rather than pursuing abstract protocol perfection.This shift is clear from the conference structure itself: November 17 kicked off with “Ethereum Day”, where Tomasz Stanzak, Wang Xiaowei, Ansgar Dietrichs, Barnaby Mono and Vitalik Buterin jointly introduced the Ethereum Foundation’s strategic reorganization for April 2025, establishing three specific priorities: Expanding the Layer network by increasing the gas limit1) Expand data block availability by deploying node data availability sampling (PeerDAS) and improve user experience through cross-chain interoperability.Later, they showed in detail the specific results in 2025: the Fusaka upgrade in December doubled the gas limit from 30 million to 60 million, the number of validators exceeded 1.1 million, and the scale of pledged ETH reached 70 billion US dollars, providing security for the network.The conferences in the following days focused on specific application areas rather than abstract protocol theory: Stany Kulechov focused on the decentralized credit market, and Santiago Palladino elaborated on the Ethereum interoperability layer; the “Trustless Agent Day” on November 19 launched the ERC-8004 Portable Reputation Protocol and the x402 micropayment protocol to lay the foundation for an autonomous AI agent economy; the Privacy Summit and the Zero-Knowledge Proof Day (ZKDay’s conference showed that zero-knowledge proofs have achieved an average block verification time of less than 10 seconds.Throughout the process, the speakers always emphasized solving specific problems for actual users: cross-chain fragmentation, DeFi privacy needs, institutional settlement needs, and autonomous agent payment infrastructure.
We can clearly see Ethereum’s evolution from idealism to pragmatism, and this shift is reflected in five key infrastructure areas – what were once the ultimate philosophical goals have given way to instrumental engineering goals: scaling the first-tier network through incremental optimization rather than architectural revolution, solving layer-two network (L2) fragmentation problems through cross-layer interoperability, empowering the $300 trillion credit market through decentralized financial infrastructure components, building autonomous agent infrastructure for machine-native economies, and institutional adoption frameworks that prioritize privacy over transparency.
2. Layer 1 network expansion: incremental optimization rather than revolution
Strategic reorganization and 3x annual growth target
In the opening speech of Ethereum Day, Ansgar Dietrichs and Barnabé Monnot introduced in detail the strategic reorganization of the Ethereum Foundation in April 2025 – this marks the project’s farewell to years of sharding research, turning to achievable throughput improvement solutions, and clarifying short-term time nodes.Instead of pursuing major architectural changes that may take 5 to 10 years to implement, the foundation is committed to achieving a 3x annual increase in throughput through systematic client optimization and targeted protocol adjustments.This decision stems from profound lessons learned in distributed systems: the cost of coordinating four independent execution clients (Geth, Nethermind, Besu, Erigon) and five consensus clients (Prysm, Lighthouse, Teku, Nimbus, Lodestar) is extremely high, and major protocol changes not only require a lot of development time, but also face extremely high deployment risks.
The gas cap expansion strategy runs through the pragmatic expansion era (2025-2026), solving bottleneck problems through incremental optimization rather than architectural revolution.The increase in the gas limit from 30 million to 60 million is achieved through client performance optimization, EIP-7623 call data repricing (high call data ratio of layer 2 network rollup is charged 40 gas per byte, while standard transactions are 16 gas per byte), and EIP-7825 transaction gas limit limit (16.78 million gas per transaction).This process is promoted in three steps: from 30 million to 36 million in February 2025, to 45 million in July, and to 60 million in November. The “Fukasaka” upgrade on December 3 officially set 60 million as the default value.This change, combined with the dedicated data block transactions introduced by the March 2024 Dencun upgrade through EIP-4844, provides Rollup with an independent layer of data availability, while freeing up a layer of network block space for execution.Short-term scaling priorities include enhanced proposer-builder separation (ePBS), block-level access lists (BAL) to support parallel execution, targeted pricing adjustments to match gas costs to actual costs of computation, and reducing slot times to 6 seconds to double the block generation rate.The long-term sustainability plan (2027-2030) focuses on streamlining the consensus mechanism, virtual machine (VM) replacement, binary tree state structure, and protocol simplification, rather than the previously planned Verkle tree scheme (which was abandoned due to quantum computing vulnerabilities in the polynomial commitment scheme).
Client Performance Benchmarks and Engineering Constraints
The performance benchmark of the Fusaka upgrade comes from the Sepolia test network and the main network shadow fork: the Geth client, which accounts for about 60% of the validator share, takes 3.0 seconds to process a full block of 60 million Gas, with a throughput of 20 million Gas/second; Nethermind executes the fastest, only 2.4 seconds (25 million Gas/second); Besu takes 3.3 seconds (18 million Gas/second)seconds); Erigon takes 2.7 seconds to complete block processing (22 million Gas/second).The processing time of all clients is well below the critical threshold of 4 seconds, ensuring that 90% of validators can receive and process blocks within the first quarter of the 12-second slot time, maintaining the consensus safety margin.Network propagation analysis shows that 90% of validators can receive blocks within 0.7 to 1.0 seconds through the gossip protocol, but the remaining 10% of validators may face a delay of 2 to 3 seconds due to geographical differences.These engineering realities dictate that the gas limit must be gradually increased, rather than suddenly and significantly increased, so as not to jeopardize network stability.
The current bottleneck has shifted from raw execution speed to state access patterns, disk I/O, and cumulative state growth: the data shows that for complex transactions, accessing state accounts and storage slots has become a major drain on execution time.Under the setting of 60 million Gas, the annual state growth is about 60GB; if no mitigation measures are taken and the Gas upper limit is raised to 300 million, the annual state growth will reach 300GB, and the state size will reach several TB in a few years.This reality initially motivated Verkle tree research, but advances in quantum computing have forced projects to abandon this approach in favor of pragmatic short-term management strategies (active pruning, state rent economics) while developing quantum-resistant binary tree alternatives for 2027-2030.
Node data availability sampling and data block expansion for Layer 2 network rollup
The second strategic priority, expanding block availability, directly addresses the needs of Layer 2 network rollups.The current infrastructure supports 3 to 6 data blocks per block (128KB each), providing 384 to 768KB of data capacity per 12-second slot.The node data availability sampling (PeerDAS) deployed in the Fusaka upgrade uses erasure coding technology to expand the number of data blocks to 16 in the short term and is expected to reach 64 in the long term.Each data block is divided into multiple fragments through Reed-Solomon coding, and the complete data can be reconstructed by simply obtaining any 50% of the fragments.Validators do not need to download complete data blocks, but only randomly sample partial fragments, and the network collectively ensures data availability without the need for a single validator to store all data.This sampling method increases the number of data blocks by more than 10 times while reducing the bandwidth requirements of a single validator from O (n) to O (log n).Deployment schedule: Development network testing will be conducted in the third quarter of 2025, test network will be entered in early 2026, and main network activation will be launched after a security review in mid-2026.After node data availability sampling is put into use, Rollup’s data availability will be increased by 10 times, while data block gas costs will be reduced through capacity expansion.
ZK-EVM Validation: From Theory to Production Timeline
Vitalik Buterin’s talk on proxy infrastructure and Ansgar’s protocol update both highlighted groundbreaking progress in zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine (ZK-EVM) proof-of-time.In 2025, multiple zero-knowledge Ethereum virtual machine teams (PSE, Scroll, Polygon, Taiko, zkSync) reduced the average block proof time from 5 to 10 minutes in 2024 to less than 10 seconds, which is a key milestone towards real-time proofs (completed in 12 seconds to fit the slot time).The deployment will be promoted in phases: the first phase will experimentally introduce validity proofs, and some blocks can be verified by zero-knowledge proofs, and verifiers can choose to verify the proofs instead of re-executing them; the second phase will implement a hybrid mode, with key blocks required to submit zero-knowledge proofs, and most blocks will still be executed as usual; the third phase will transition to a mandatory proof mode, and all blocks must be accompanied by zero-knowledge proofs; the fourth phase will implement a complete zero-knowledge Ethereum virtual machine, with stateless clients running without storing state, and supporting mobile nodes and browser nodes with complete security.Actual production deployment timeline is 2027-2030.
3. Cross-layer interoperability: solving layer 2 network fragmentation
fragmentation problem
In his keynote speech on “Ethereum Everywhere”, Santiago Palladino revealed the fundamental contradiction in Ethereum’s Rollup-centered roadmap: although the total throughput of more than 50 Layer 2 has exceeded 100,000 transactions/second, fragmentation has led to serious user experience problems and liquidity fragmentation, which may weaken the value proposition of Ethereum’s unified ecosystem.When users hold assets on Arbitrum, if they want to purchase non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on zkSync, they must make cross-chain transfers through the first-tier network, need to wait for 7 days (optimism rollup’s fraud proof window), and pay a gas fee of $35; liquidity is scattered across various chains, and the transaction prices of the same token on different second-tier networks are different; applications need to be deployed separately on each chain, which disperses developer energy and user groups.
Ethereum interoperability layer: single signature enables multi-chain operations
The Ethereum Interoperability Layer (EIL) is jointly developed by the Arbitrum, Optimism, Polygon, zkSync and Base teams and is based on the ERC-4337 account abstraction to support cross-chain operations through a single signature.The core of its technological innovation is Merkle tree batch authorization: users build a Merkle tree containing operations on multiple chains, and after signing the Merkle root, submit the branches to each target chain; the smart contract account on each chain realizes atomic multi-chain execution by verifying the Merkle certificate corresponding to the signature root, without the need for complex cross-chain messaging protocols.Palladino demonstrated the specific efficiency improvements of this mechanism in the demonstration: a user holding 10,000 USDC on Arbitrum and wanting to purchase an NFT for 5,000 USDC on zkSync only needs to sign a single Merkel root that authorizes Arbitrum deductions and zkSync purchase operations; the cross-chain liquidity provider (XLP) completes instant settlement by providing 5,000 USDC in zkSync in advance, and then withdraws from Arbitrum after the withdrawal delay period.To receive user funds, only a service fee of approximately US$5 (0.1% rate) is charged.For users, the entire transaction takes less than 1 minute, while traditional cross-chain takes more than 7 days and costs up to $35.
Account abstraction as a base
ERC-4337 provides the foundation for an Ethereum interoperability layer 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, while smart contract accounts can implement arbitrary verification logic, including verifying Merkle proofs that authorize multiple operations simultaneously.This feature has existed in theory since Ethereum launched, but ERC-4337 standardized the implementation and built the alternative mempool infrastructure needed for production deployments.The Nov. 18 conference revealed significant commitments from mainstream wallets: MetaMask, Argent, and Safe have all deployed smart account infrastructure, with Safe reporting more than 100,000 active accounts as of November 2025.Improvements in user experience are not limited to cross-chain operations, but also include support for paying gas fees in ERC-20 tokens through payment agents, social recovery mechanisms, and programmable consumption limits.
Fast finality with 6 second slot time
In his speech on improving the service quality of Ethereum as the “confirmation engine” of the entire ecosystem, Barnabé Monnot emphasized two key indicators: block confirmation time (currently an average of 12 seconds) and finality time (currently 13 minutes).Fast confirmation rules will be deployed in Q1 2026, providing 95% finality within 1 to 2 blocks (12 to 24 seconds) without having to wait 13 minutes for economic finality.This weaker security assumption (probabilistic finality rather than economic finality) applies to a variety of scenarios: Layer 2 networks can make faster use of confirmed layer 1 network states (lookahead-based rollups will benefit), cross-chain bridge protocols can enable faster cross-chain messaging, and centralized exchanges can shorten deposit and withdrawal latencies.Long-term plans include reducing slot time from 12 seconds to 6 seconds, doubling the network block generation rate.The current client performance (it takes 2.4 to 3.3 seconds to process a 60 million Gas block) shows that if the client continues to be optimized, a 6-second slot time will be feasible when the upper limit of Gas is increased to 100 million and above.The 6 second slot time combined with fast confirmation rules will enable effective finality of 6 to 12 seconds to compete with centralized payment networks.
4. Decentralized Financial Infrastructure: US$300 Trillion Credit Opportunities
Stani Kulechov’s Renaissance Finance Theory
In his keynote speech on “New Architecture of Credit”, Stani Kulechov compared the history of financial innovation during the Renaissance with the basic components of modern decentralized finance, and proposed that the decentralized credit market is expected to unlock US$300 trillion in global capital flow opportunities.In Florence in 1252, the gold florin became the first widely trusted base currency, with standardized weight and predictable purity, laying the foundation for credit expansion across Europe; today’s decentralized finance achieves similar functions through stablecoins (USDC, DAI, USDT, etc., providing $150 billion in on-chain liquidity).The Merchant Intelligence Network in Venice collects commercial information from ports in the Mediterranean, which is functionally equivalent to oracle infrastructure (Chainlink provides price feeds and off-chain data verification); merchant networks such as the Hanseatic League build a liquidity layer that connects local markets, similar to automated market makers (Uniswap, Curve, etc. support instant currency exchange across fund pools); the Commanda Contract in the Renaissance allowed passive investors to fund merchant navigation trade and agree on profit sharing, which was the predecessor of smart contracts -Automatically allocate capital based on programmed conditions.
Kulechov’s core argument is that the $300 trillion global credit market remains untouched by decentralized finance because traditional credit relies on local information (borrower reputation, legal enforcement strength, collateral assessment) that cannot be directly mapped on-chain.His proposed solution is the Aave Horizon protocol, which tokenizes local credit for participation in global decentralized financial liquidity.Local credit analysts evaluate borrowers through traditional methods (credit history, cash flow analysis, collateral evaluation), and then package the loans into tokenized layered products for on-chain transactions; decentralized financial liquidity providers purchase these layered products and obtain revenue from the local credit market, while the protocol handles compliance, collections, and default management.Kulechov deliberately chose Argentina as both the conference venue and case study: Argentina’s credit market suffers from extreme inefficiencies – credit card annualized interest rates exceed 100%, mortgages are difficult to obtain despite the value of real estate, and capital controls hinder cross-border investment; local companies with strong cash flows cannot access growth capital at reasonable rates, while institutional investors seek emerging market yields.The Aave Horizon Buenos Aires pilot project, announced during the Devconnect conference, targets this gap, tokenizing Argentinian SME receivables and offering them to global decentralized finance investors at an annualized yield of 15% to 25% (attractive for investors, transformative for borrowers accustomed to 100%+ financing costs).
Atomic settlement and programmable composability
The presentation adopted by Danny Ryan’s agency emphasized that blockchain infrastructure enables revolutionary improvements in operational efficiency through encrypted settlement rather than legal enforcement.In traditional finance, the settlement cycle for stock transactions is T+1 (1 working day), for corporate bonds it is T+2, and for private equity transactions it takes 90 to 180 days; each settlement involves multiple intermediaries (transfer agents, custodians, clearinghouses, payment processors), of which corporate bond transactions require about 20 manual steps, and 5% to 10% of transactions fail due to reconciliation errors.Ethereum simplifies this process into atomic execution: the smart contract receives the assets of both parties at the same time, and either completes the exchange immediately or rolls back the entire transaction.On a Layer 2 network, settlement can be completed in 12 seconds and costs less than $5, a 99.9% reduction in time and cost.More importantly, atomic composability makes financial products impossible in traditional systems a reality: Morpho’s presentation demonstrated cross-collateral lending – an institutional client deposits $100 million in tokenized U.S. Treasury bonds and can instantly borrow 90 million USDC. The loan terms are automatically adjusted based on the Treasury yield, and programmatic liquidation will be triggered if the collateral ratio falls below the safety threshold.The entire process eliminates the need for legal contracts, credit checks, and settlement delays.
Privacy Infrastructure and Limited Visibility
The Nov. 19 Privacy Summit made it clear that privacy has replaced regulatory concerns as the primary barrier to institutional adoption.Europe’s Markets in Crypto-Assets Act (MiCA) provides a clear regulatory framework, and the approval of Bitcoin and Ethereum exchange-traded funds (ETFs) in the United States shows that regulators have recognized cryptocurrencies as an asset class, but privacy infrastructure development has lagged.Institutions need what speakers called “limited visibility”: different stakeholders see different subsets of data based on roles and permissions — fund managers need to see full holdings to make allocation decisions, regulators need to verify compliance but not access strategic trading information, clients only need to see their own positions but not others, and the public should only see aggregated metrics such as total assets under management.These requirements cannot be met by the full transparency of a public blockchain, where all information is visible to everyone.The proposed technical solution combines multiple encryption technologies: private layer-2 networks such as Aztec encrypt state by default, with decryption keys assigned according to access policies defined in smart contracts; zero-knowledge proofs enable selective disclosure – proving to regulators that customer identity verification (KYC) has been completed without revealing identity information, or proving that transactions comply with approved limits without exposing actual positions and counterparties; multi-party computation allows for collaborative analysis without any participating party having access to the original input data of others.BlackRock’s BUIDL fund, which has $500 million in assets as of November 2025, operates on Ethereum but is required to maintain privacy through authorized access and off-chain reporting.This fund structure reflects both the market demand for blockchain settlement (atomized, programmable, available 24×7) and the shortcomings of current privacy infrastructure.The speech showed that native privacy features will be put into production in 2026, which is expected to promote larger-scale institutional deployment, and the scale of tokenized assets may reach $100 billion by 2027.
5. Autonomous agent economy: ERC-8004 and x402
Portable reputation infrastructure
“Agent Day” on November 19 showcased the complete infrastructure of an AI agent economy, with the core assumption that agents will become major economic players within the next decade.This shift in design from human-centric to agent-native is reflected in two complementary protocols: ERC-8004 for agent identity and reputation, and x402 for machine-native payments.ERC-8004 extends the ERC-721 non-fungible token standard by adding reputation tracking capabilities: each agent gets a unique token ID, cumulative performance metrics (number of tasks, base point success rate, total transaction value, and Merkle roots with detailed proof of performance stored on IPFS or Arweave).On-chain reputation is portable across platforms, solving the fragmentation problem of traditional service markets where reputation is limited to a single platform (Upwork’s reputation cannot be transferred to Fiverr).The technical specification defines on-chain and off-chain components to balance verifiability and storage costs: the on-chain contract stores a compact reputation vector (number of tasks as uint256, success rate base points, total value as uint256, Merkle root of performance proof); the off-chain infrastructure indexes complete performance data.If an agent claims to have achieved a 95% success rate among 1,000 tasks, it must provide a Merkle proof linked to a verifiable task completion record (cryptographic signature of the task initiator, timestamp, result description) to prevent inflated reputation through false claims.
x402: Payment instead of authentication
The x402 protocol solves the problem of unsupervised authentication of autonomous agents.Traditional API access requires developers to manually register accounts, complete the OAuth process, and manage API keys, all of which assume human interaction.Autonomous agents cannot complete CAPTCHA challenges or securely store long-term keys without introducing centralized key management (defeating the original intent of decentralization).x402’s solution is to replace authentication with payment: if an agent wants to access a resource, it only needs to pay a specified amount of cryptocurrency.The protocol process is simple and clear: the agent requests resources, and the server returns a 402 (Payment Required) HTTP status code, including payment details (amount, token type, usually USDC, payment address, unique random number to prevent replay attacks); the agent constructs a transaction, transfers the specified amount to the payment address, and submits it to the Ethereum second-layer network for quick confirmation (Arbitrum or BaseProvide sub-second finality), and then re-initiate the request with the transaction hash as proof of payment; after the server verifies the transaction on the chain (the amount matches the requirements, the payment address is correct, and the random number is not used), it provides the required resources to the agent.
6. Institutional Adoption: Counterparty Risk and Cryptoeconomic Security
Wall Street’s demand for decentralization
Danny Ryan’s speech on institutional adoption of Ethereum on November 17 upended conventional wisdom about blockchain’s value proposition.Rather than arguing that institutions are reluctantly tolerating decentralization in order to reap the benefits of blockchain, Ryan points to evidence that Wall Street is actively pursuing decentralization as a solution to counterparty risk, operational inefficiencies and regulatory burdens.This view stems from the Ethereum Foundation’s institutional docking work over the past year, marking a major restructuring of Ethereum’s market positioning.Financial institutions analyze all systems from a counterparty risk perspective: who might default, commit fraud or disappear, and what is the probability and size of losses.Traditional finance mitigates this risk through legal contracts, insurance, and regulatory oversight, but each layer of mitigation introduces new counterparty dependencies—trades cleared through the Depository and Clearing Corporation (DTCC) rely on its solvency and operating capabilities, credit default swaps rely on the insurance company’s ability to pay, and escrow arrangements rely on the integrity of the escrow agent.Ethereum’s atomic settlement eliminates these dependencies by being enforced cryptographically rather than legally: smart contracts simultaneously verify that both parties have provided the agreed upon assets, then execute the exchange, rolling back the transaction if either party is unable to fulfill its obligations.The counterparty is essentially the code itself, verifiable by anyone.The economic security provided by $70 billion of staked ETH to the network cannot be easily replicated – to undermine consensus, it is not only necessary to attack the code, but also to obtain 51% of the pledged assets. Considering the slash penalty mechanism and the need to maintain the value of the pledged assets, this behavior is extremely costly and economically irrational.
Ryan’s data quantifies improvements in operational metrics: traditional corporate bond settlement has back-office costs of $50 to $200 per trade, and 5% to 10% of trades fail due to reconciliation errors; Ethereum Layer 2 network settlement costs are less than $5 and has zero failure rate (deterministic execution).T+2 settlement reduces capital lock-up time by 99.99% compared to 12-second atomic execution – an opportunity cost savings of approximately $20,000 at a 5% annual return on a $100M trade.In addition to cost savings, atomic composability enables risk management not possible in traditional systems: flash loans for liquidation eliminate capital requirements for liquidators, cross-collateralized positions across multiple protocols can be updated atomically, and programmable circuit breakers pause activity when risk parameters exceed thresholds.
Achieve 100% availability with client diversity
Thomas Stanczak’s Ecosystem Update highlights the need for always-on infrastructure in a trillion-dollar market.Ethereum achieves this through client diversity rather than redundancy: four independent execution clients (Geth based on Go, Nethermind based on C#, Besu based on Java, Erigon based on Go) and five consensus clients, ensuring that vulnerabilities in a single implementation can affect at most 60% of validators (current Geth market share).The network continues to function on a small number of clients while developers fix the affected code.This architecture is in stark contrast to traditional exchanges, which despite having complex redundant systems have experienced frequent outages: the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) was outage for 226 minutes in 2015, the Tokyo Stock Exchange suspended trading for an entire day due to hardware failures in 2020, and Robinhood experienced multiple outages during high volatility in 2021.Since the “merger” in September 2022, Ethereum has maintained 100% availability, processing over 1 million transactions per day without interruption.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.
7. From idealism to pragmatism: What has changed?
Ethereum’s founding vision in 2015 contrasts with its 2025 direction, revealing a fundamental philosophical shift in the community’s understanding of decentralization, censorship resistance, and minimum trust assumptions.The original white paper emphasized these properties as intrinsically valuable end goals, rooted in the cypherpunk tradition—the idea that cryptography empowers human freedom rather than commercial profit.By 2025, in the strategic planning of the Ethereum Foundation, these features have become instrumental goals rather than ultimate goals: the value of censorship resistance lies in empowering global financial inclusion for 1.4 billion unbanked people and preventing single points of failure in systemically important infrastructure; the value of trustworthy neutrality lies in allowing competitors to coexist on shared infrastructure, creating network effects that cannot be achieved by proprietary platforms; the value of the minimum trust assumption lies in reducing counterparty risks and operational dependencies that cause costs and failures in traditional finance.
This shift from idealism to pragmatism was evident throughout the technical content of Devconnect 2025 in both subtle and explicit ways: presentations highlighted performance benchmarks (client throughput of 20-25 million Gas/second), deployment timelines (Fukasaka upgrade in Q4 2025, Lump Sadam upgrade in 2026) and user experience improvements (1-minute cross-chain transfers via the Ethereum interoperability layer, 12seconds to confirm) rather than a philosophical abstraction about decentralization.The doubling of 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 specific level of decentralization (although this is achieved through client optimization rather than increased hardware requirements, this becomes a constraint to be met rather than an optimization goal).The importance of privacy infrastructure is that institutions cannot adopt it without qualified visibility that meets regulatory and competitive requirements, rather than as an abstract civil liberties (although this benefit still exists as a positive externality).The second-layer network ecosystem most clearly embodies this pragmatic turn: pure idealism would reject the second-layer network, arguing that it introduces additional trust assumptions (orderer availability, data availability guarantees, fraud proof submission windows); while pragmatism embraces the second-layer network, seeing it as the only feasible path to achieve expansion while maintaining the security characteristics of the first-layer network. The Ethereum Foundation actively coordinates ecosystem development through infrastructure such as the Ethereum interoperability layer and node data availability sampling.
Some critics have interpreted this shift as an abandonment of Ethereum’s original vision, pointing to validator centralization (Lido controls 29% of staked assets), maximum extractable value (MEV) extraction centralization (95% of blocks are generated through five relays), and application layer compromises (most decentralized finance front-ends use centralized RPC providers Infura or Alchemy).A more accurate assessment is that the vision has matured from abstract principles to concrete implementations with measurable properties: decentralization is now reflected in metrics of client diversity (Geth’s market share fell to 60% from 95% in 2021), validator geography (more than 60 countries operate validators) and economic analysis of centralization vectors (the delegation-agent problem caused by Lido’s liquidity staking derivatives), rather than simply counting the number of nodes; censorship resistance through the inclusion of lists and proposers -Game theory mechanisms such as builder separation are implemented to make censorship economically unfeasible, rather than relying solely on social consensus; trustlessness means quantifying security assumptions (how much pledged assets need to be corrupted to destroy finality), providing users with cryptographic proof of state validity, and designing systems where the cost of verification is lower than the cost of trust, rather than resorting to philosophical arguments that treat decentralization as an intrinsic good.
8. Conclusion: Application-Ready Infrastructure
The 2025 Devconnect Conference in Argentina showed that the Ethereum Foundation has decisively shifted towards application infrastructure construction rather than protocol research itself.The five-day technical speech focused on solving specific problems with a clear timetable: deploying the Ethereum interoperability layer in mid-2026 to solve cross-chain liquidity fragmentation; launching a zero-knowledge rollup encryption state in 2026-2027 to meet the privacy needs of decentralized finance; launching x402 and ERC-8004 in the first quarter of 2026 to empower agency payment infrastructure; meeting institutional settlement needs through privacy functions and throughput expansion; December 2025On March 3, node data availability sampling was deployed in the “Fukasaka” upgrade to expand data block availability; manage state growth through pragmatic optimization (client pruning, witness compression), while developing quantum-resistant binary tree alternatives for the 2027-2030 sustainability era.Each solution targets deployable improvements and sets measurable success criteria, rather than pursuing theoretical breakthroughs with uncertain timelines.
This approach stems from profound lessons learned in ten years of operation: In the early days, Ethereum pursued ambitious protocol changes that consumed several years of research and engineering resources – sharding technology occupied a large amount of resources from 2016 to 2020, and finally turned to a roadmap with Rollup as the core; Verkle tree research continued from 2018 to 2025, and was abandoned due to quantum vulnerabilities; the proof-of-stake mechanism was developed from 2014 until “merged” in September 2022Just landed.These efforts have been technically successful (or revealed fundamental limitations) but have taken off more slowly than expected, while application-layer innovations such as the decentralized finance boom in 2020 and the adoption of non-fungible tokens in 2021 have shown that existing infrastructure can already create significant value through well-designed smart contracts.Current strategies upend this prioritization: protocol changes such as enhanced proposer-builder separation and block-level access lists serve specific application needs (parallel execution, maximum extractable value mitigation) rather than theoretical improvements; privacy features target institutional needs (qualified visibility required for compliance) rather than abstract privacy rights; cross-chain infrastructure addresses user experience issues (liquidity fragmentation across 50+ layer 2 networks) rather than pursuing architectural integrity.The decision to abandon Verkle trees, despite investing years of resources, exemplifies this pragmatic turn: Rather than deploying quantum-fragile infrastructure that may need to be replaced within a decade, it is better to cut the losses now.
Going forward, this pragmatic foundation sets the stage for mainstream adoption of Ethereum — as long as applications built on top of this infrastructure create real value for users.Achieving 300 million gas throughput by 2028, the launch of production-grade privacy-preserving smart contracts in 2026-2027, seamless cross-chain operations through the Ethereum interoperability layer in mid-2026, and institutional-grade reliability with 100% availability since September 2022 combine to form 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 chains (which may offer different trade-offs), and most crucially – whether applications based on this infrastructure solve real problems for users, rather than problems of interest to engineers.But from an infrastructure perspective alone, Ethereum’s decade-long evolution from idealism to pragmatism has created a platform ready to host significant economic activity—it trades philosophical purity for deployable solutions, abstract decentralization for measurable security features, and revolutionary ambition for incremental compound progress.
