2025 Ethereum Ecosystem Narrative Outlook: From Pectra Upgrade to NFT Market Renewal

2025 Ethereum Ecosystem Highlights: The Ethereum ecosystem is set for significant developments in 2025, including the Pectra upgrade, Verkle Transition, DeFi innovations, RWA growth, stablecoin expansion, and NFT market renewal.
Pectra Upgrade: Scheduled for Q1 2025, this upgrade includes multiple EIPs (e.g., EIP-2537, EIP-2935, EIP-6110) aimed at enhancing Ethereum's security and efficiency. Developers are already focusing on the next major reform, Verkle Transition, to improve node efficiency and reduce costs.
Verkle Transition: A major shift in Ethereum's state data structure from Merkle Patricia Tree to Verkle, enabling smaller proofs and better performance for lightweight nodes.
DeFi: Uniswap's Layer2 solution, Unichain, is expected to launch its public mainnet in early 2025, marking a key milestone for Ethereum's DeFi sector.
RWA (Real-World Assets): Decentralized RWA, particularly in real estate and carbon credits, is gaining traction, with Ethereum dominating 81% of the RWA market. Total locked assets reached $14.9 billion by late 2024.
Stablecoin: Stablecoins continue to thrive, with circulating supply expected to double from 200 billion in 2024 to over 400 billion in 2025, driven by cross-chain transactions on Ethereum and other blockchains.
NFT Market Renewal: Ethereum NFT sales surged by 76% in late 2024, with popular collections like Azuki seeing a 226% weekly increase. Analysts predict ETH could reach $15,000 by May 2025, fueled by emerging use cases.
Market Outlook: With these developments, Ethereum is poised for a strong rebound in 2025, potentially setting new highs in value and adoption.

According to Forbes, the total market value of global crypto assets soared to a record high of $3.8 trillion in 2024. Among them, the unit price of BTC reached a historical peak of $106,490.1 on December 17, 2024. Various Meme Coins took the lead and became the absolute focus of the market with the progress and conclusion of the US presidential election. The Ethereum ecosystem also experienced a very exciting year. Not only did it successfully complete the Dencun upgrade, but ETH also achieved a market value increase of about 48%.

Looking ahead to 2025, what events in the Ethereum ecosystem are worthy of users' attention?

Pectra Upgrade

The Ethereum Pectra upgrade is expected to be officially activated in the first quarter of 2025. The Ethereum Improvement Protocols to be implemented in this round of upgrades include:

EIP-2537: Precompile for BLS12-381 curve operations
EIP-2935: Provide historical block hashes in the state
EIP-6110: Providing validator deposits on-chain
EIP-7002: Assets that can be triggered by the execution layer
EIP-7549: Move the committee index out of the verification signature
EIP-7594: PeerDAS
EIP-7685: Generic Execution Layer Request
EIP-7251: Increase MAX_EFFECTIVE_BALANCE
EIP-7702: Set EOA account code for a transaction
EIP-7623: Increase call data fees
EOF related technical protocols

As early as November 2023, developers have begun deploying the Ethereum Pectra upgrade. Initially, in the developers' vision, this was just a small upgrade that could be completed at the same time as the Dencun upgrade in March 2024, but at the time there were many technical agreements that did not reach consensus, so it was not implemented.

Public information on the Internet shows that Gaia Regis, co-founder and CEO of Byzantine, once said: The Pectra upgrade will fundamentally change the way Ethereum's security layer operates.

After the Pectra upgrade was completed, developers have unanimously agreed that Verkle Transition is the next key reform area for Ethereum.

What is Verkle Transition?

Verkle Transition is a major reform of Ethereum's state data structure. It means that developers plan to transfer all state data from the Merkle Patricia Tree structure to the Verkle structure. This will be able to generate smaller state data proofs for nodes, thereby improving node efficiency. It is especially suitable for the operation of lightweight nodes and can reduce maintenance costs.

DeFi

On December 23, 2024, Uniswap officially announced that its Layer2 solution Unichain is expected to launch the public mainnet in early 2025. This may be the opening event of the DeFi field of the Ethereum ecosystem in 2025.

Unichain is an infrastructure focused on decentralized finance (DeFi), built on OP Stack and running on Ethereum's Sepolia testnet. Since its launch in October 2024, the Sepolia testnet has processed more than 50 million transactions and deployed more than 4 million test contracts.

RWA

Decentralized real-world assets (RWA) will release liquidity, especially in the fields of real estate and carbon credits, and may lead to new explorations in the field of copyrighted works.

According to RWA.xyz data, as of December 24, 2024, RWA has reached a total asset lock-up of approximately US$14.9 billion and has more than 80,000 asset holders.

Juan Leon, senior investment strategist at Bitwise, pointed out in the latest weekly report released on December 18, 2024: Ethereum will have a strong rebound in 2025, with the biggest driving force coming from RWA. Relevant data shows that in the current RWA market, RWA on Ethereum accounts for 81%, which is in a dominant position.

Stablecoin

An article published by Forbes on December 23, 2024 pointed out: Stablecoin has become one of the most successful use cases in the field of crypto assets, relying on blockchains such as Ethereum, Solana and Tron to facilitate cross-chain transactions.

In 2024, the circulating supply of Stablecoin reached 200 billion, and it is expected that the circulating supply in 2025 may continue to grow and exceed 400 billion.

NFT

On December 22, 2024, an article published by the Web3 media platform cointribune pointed out that the weekly sales of Ethereum-based NFTs reached a staggering US$304 million, an increase of 76% compared with the previous week's sales. NFT sales on Ethereum accounted for 66% of the total NFT sales that week, especially some well-known NFT series continued to increase in popularity, such as the Azuki element series of NFTs, sales increased by 226% compared with the previous week.

As 2024 draws to a close, the sudden rise in Ethereum NFT sales seems to foreshadow the potential for market vitality in 2025. Perhaps, with the joint promotion of more emerging use cases, some media pointed out that ETH is expected to reach a new high of $15,000 in value in May 2025. Let us look forward to it together!