Can Ethereum still be "rescued" in 2025?

Lu Xun never said: "No matter what sins you have committed in your previous life, holding Ethereum will be considered as repayment." This round of Ethereum holders never expected that Ethereum would be such a drag, and it was once at the bottom of the mainstream projects. , but it is too early to draw a conclusion, and the big market does not seem to be over. If the adoption of Bitcoin has just begun, then Crypto and Web3 as a whole are in their early stages. In 2025, can Ethereum still be "rescued"? What “events” and “breakthroughs” are worth looking forward to?

01Inflow of spot ETFs

At this stage, the Ethereum spot ETF has been approved for listing on the US stock market for some time. Compared with the Bitcoin spot ETF, there is a certain gap in the speed and volume of capital inflows. However, except for Ethereum, it does not have the "out of the circle" and broad consensus as Bitcoin. In addition to the height of Ethereum, another very important reason is that compared with the pledge and other benefits brought by directly holding Ethereum itself, spot ETFs that have no additional benefits and need to pay management fees and other expenses have no advantages.
However, the good news coming in 2025 is that people from relevant financial institutions are actively promoting the listing of Ethereum spot ETFs that allow additional returns from staking operations. There is still sufficient motivation to promote this matter, because financial giants are the main stakeholders in the "hot" trading demand for crypto-asset spot ETFs. There is not only potential demand for pledged Ethereum spot ETFs, but also the friendly atmosphere brought about by Trump's coming to power. The regulatory environment makes it easier to obtain approval.

02 Ethereum strategic reserve

The current Bitcoin strategic reserve being promoted by the United States is one of the main driving forces of the Bitcoin and crypto markets. You must know that among the important strategic reserve assets of the United States, in addition to gold, there is also oil. Therefore, "digital gold" Bitcoin has certain feasibility and significance as a strategic reserve. At the same time, Ethereum, which was once called "digital oil", is also expected to be included in the list. Reserve assets for strategic purposes.
Compared with Bitcoin, in fact, the Trump family WLFI project supported by Trump is an ecological project deployed on the Ethereum main network. Its main business is based on the support brought by the Ethereum DeFi ecosystem AAVE and Chainlink. At the same time, the project treasury is more It has successively begun to reserve a large amount of ETH and Ethereum ecological project Tokens, and recently it has exchanged a large amount of WBTC for ETH. According to the analysis of 7 multi-signature wallets in the project's treasury, it was found that some wallet addresses are already "veterans" in the Ethereum DeFi ecological chain. Therefore, the project team has a high degree of understanding of Ethereum and its ecology, and its operations are relatively professional.
Given that the team behind Trump took the lead in launching the adoption project of the Ethereum ecosystem, we can believe that it has a high degree of recognition of the subsequent development of Ethereum and its ecosystem, and supports the development of high-tech industries such as Web3 , which is also in line with Trump's proposal "America First" philosophy. Therefore, the possibility of Ethereum being mentioned as a strategic reserve asset in 2025 is not low.

03The next big upgrade of Ethereum

Due to the unsatisfactory performance of Ethereum, its next major upgrade called "Pectra" has not received much attention. It is reported that 10 EIP improvement protocols have been added to this upgrade plan, mainly involving user experience and feedback. Layer2 support optimization, the main highlights are as follows:
1) Optimization of account abstraction <br>This upgrade will optimize the wallet experience so that ordinary wallet addresses can also have complex functions and flexible operations of "contract wallets", such as "gas payment, social recovery, multiple Signature" and so on, these optimizations will further reduce the user's threshold for use. When users use Web3 applications, they can achieve the same operating experience as Web2 applications. Lay the foundation for the large-scale adoption of Web3 applications in the future.
2) Layer 2 support optimization <br>Provide more data space (blob) for Layer 2 solutions and improve the expansion capabilities of Ethereum. Re- evaluate and adjust the cost of calldata to optimize block throughput and storage. To put it simply, it is to expand the Layer data space and optimize the cost, so that the supported Layer 2 capacity is large and the cost is lower.
3) Improve the security and flexibility of verifiers <br>Optimize the voting processing, extraction and other operations of verifiers to improve security and efficiency, and at the same time increase the pledge limit of 32ETH, which is equivalent to merging running verification nodes and reducing operation costs. While improving efficiency, it also reduces the pressure on point-to-point messaging and data storage between a large number of node networks.
In short, Ethereum’s Pectra upgrade will bring support at the bottom of the technology to the Ethereum ecosystem with a more user-friendly experience, higher scalability, and a more stable node network.

04 Ecological application explosion and technological progress

At this stage, more and more major institutions such as the Trump family's DeFi project, Sony's Layer 2, and Deutsche Bank's Layer 2 are building Web3 applications and infrastructure solutions on Ethereum, and the Ethereum ecosystem is the first choice.
The Ethereum ecosystem is mature, rich, diverse and leading in terms of technical resource reserves, development history, development team support, on-chain capital volume, client security and wallet user experience. By the same token, in the next stage of the big market in 2025, whether it is the strong recovery of DeFi or the popularity of tracks such as AI Agent, Ethereum as the underlying infrastructure will grow due to the adoption of these ecological applications and the prosperity of on-chain activities. Benefits include but are not limited to capital inflow, Gas consumption, deflation of Token supply, etc.
With the launch of Unichain, the OP super chain family has added a heavyweight player. Layer 2 cross-chain liquidity is expected to make progress in 2025. By then, combined with the upgrade and optimization support of Ethereum itself, the potential formed by major Layer 2 groups will Combined, they form unprecedented competitive pressure on some high-performance new public chains.
In the past, some people always said that Layer 2 of Ethereum was a failure, sucking blood from the main network and not bringing any benefits to the main network, but in recent times we have also seen the prosperity of Layer 2. Data from ultra sound money shows that Layer 2’s Blob fees have become one of the largest gas burners on the Ethereum main network, which also illustrates the success of Layer 2’s expansion plan.

L2Beat's real-time statistical data chart also shows that the inflow of funds from Layer 2 exceeds 55 billion US dollars. Calculated based on transaction volume, the total expansion rate is more than 2,500% of the original main network.

For large companies and institutions outside the circle such as Sony and Deutsche Bank, Layer 2 is an excellent entry point for Web3 business. It can be started without a large amount of technical reserves and resource investment. It is natively supported by the Ethereum ecological community, so in Led by the success of these institutions, the real institutional adoption wave of Layer 2 will soon come.

05 Summary

In fact, many people know that the advantages of Ethereum and its ecology in all aspects are quite obvious, but they did not expect that the scale of Ethereum today can no longer be raised as quickly as the funds in the first two rounds of market conditions. Obviously this is not an easy thing, as the Bitcoin-level volume, the large inflow of institutional funds to obtain spot ETFs, and the strong expectations of U.S. strategic reserve assets have allowed it to rise rapidly. However, compared to Bitcoin, Ethereum has additional support from technical upgrades and Web3 ecological development. There is still a lot to see in 2025. Let’s wait and see.