The following is a guest post from Rostyslav Bortman, founder of Ethereum Ukraine.
Let’s be real: if 2024 was a year of technological success for Ethereum, it was also a year of financial disappointment.
On the one hand, Dencun has finally been deployed, and activity on the Layer 2 networks of the ecosystem skyrocketed 4 times.
On the other hand, Ethereum began to lag behind Solana in terms of the number of developers, and the dynamics of ETH did not meet investors’ expectations.
Nevertheless, Ethereum’s technological structure guarantees high expectations for its growth. Today, we already have all the tools to create more practical and efficient solutions. It is their implementation that remains a challenge.
In this article, we look at the main changes Ethereum will face in 2025 and how new technological concepts and increasing focus on real-world applications can finally make the protocol more efficient. really user-friendly for the general public.
Native interoperability in L2 clusters
Today, most projects running on multiple rollups must rely on bridges (such as Across) or custom solutions to interact between networks. There is no in its own right native interoperability again – everything is tied to separate protocols that manually assemble the ecosystem.
However, by 2025 I expect that native interoperability will appear at least in some L2 clusters (superchain, elastic chain, aggregation layer). This means that transactions and data will be able to flow between different accumulations quickly and reliably, without bridges, centralized oracles or intermediaries.
Indeed, Vitalik Buterin believes that the main problem remains the lack of unified cross-chain standards that would be accepted by most rollups. But even without this, the fact of the emergence of integrated interoperability will form a new story in layer 2 and attract more resources to this topic, as well as attract more attention.
And revolutionary products only emerge from the energy of developers. New standards for interoperability between stacks can be the key to better decentralized applications and true Web3 innovation.
EIP-7702: A new level of user experience and security in Ethereum
If you follow the development of Ethereum, you have certainly heard of EIP-7702one of the most important proposals to improve UX and account security. In fact, it is a evolution of EIP-4337but with native integration directly at the protocol layer.
What does this mean in practice? EOA accounts (traditional wallets such as MetaMask) will be able to execute arbitrary code within a transaction. Simply put, they will actually be able to transform into AA Wallets (Account Abstraction, EIP-4337). This opens up many new opportunities:
- Consolidation of transactions – say goodbye to dozens of approvals and multi-step DeFi operations, everything can be done in a single transaction.
- Pay for gas in USDC – now you no longer have to hold ETH just for commissions.
- Advanced security solutions such as multi-factor authentication, social account recovery and other use cases will become the norm.
Thus, Ethereum will become more convenient and accessible, removing restrictions for billions of users. If this proposal is implemented, it will be a real revolution in Web3 UX and security.
It’s time to create dApps
Everyone sees it, but it’s time to finally act. The Ethereum community has focused on the infrastructure layer for too long, losing ground on what really matters to a user – applications. While Ethereum has been busy discussing modularity and new L2 architectures, solid alternatives have emerged in the area of real products.
It’s time to call attention to the development of decentralized applications that streamline tangible utility. Projects such as Warp Casting, Farcade games, Fileverse, Polymarketand others demonstrate how to build practical services on the blockchain. And of course we can’t ignore AI Agents it will become an important part of the ecosystem.
This trend will be the focus of our new hackathon, which we are organizing in kyiv with Zero1 Labs and IdeaSoft. It will be entirely dedicated to the development and implementation of AI agents in the blockchain ecosystem.
However, there is another “but”. Applications must design all the technical complexities of modular Ethereum for a user. This has been one of the biggest challenges for the ecosystem in recent years. Today, if you own assets on Base and need to transact on Arbitrum, you will encounter difficulties. Yes, Across and other blockchain protocols partially solve this problem, but only under certain conditions:
- if the amount is not too large,
- if the solvers have enough liquidity (i.e. the token is popular, not a memecoin),
- if it’s not an altVM that generally lives by its own rules.
For decentralized applications to become widespreadthey must not only work convenientlybut invisibly to the user. This is exactly what the Ethereum ecosystem is missing today, and this is where the future lies.
What do I expect in 2025?
Applications that will completely hide the technical complexity of the UX and allow users to not wonder if they have ETH or USDC stored on L2.
Yes, native interoperability is importantbut the main thing is that it is no longer the future, but a reality: most of the tools necessary to create such an experience already exists.
Despite this, we are still not seeing radical changes in UX, and Web3 remains impractical for mass users. I hope that 2025 will be the time when this situation finally begins to change.
