Ethereum 2025 Turning Point: From Experimental Network to Global Financial Infrastructure

[Block Rhythm] The year 2025 will be a landmark year for Ethereum. In this year, Ethereum will officially shed its “still in trial phase” label and become the infrastructure that global financial institutions, developers, and AI systems truly rely on.

From a technical perspective, the progress this year has indeed been significant. In just 12 months, Ethereum has completed two major hard forks - Pectra in May and Fusaka in December. Pectra focuses on account abstraction, what does this mean? Simply put, it supports features that ordinary users care about, such as Gas payment delegation, transaction bundling, and passkey signing. Fusaka, on the other hand, has significantly reduced transaction costs through PeerDAS technology, achieving an 8-fold increase in capacity. More notably, Ethereum has also raised the Gas limit three times without requiring a hard fork, indicating that the network is continuously optimizing itself.

The transformation at the regulatory level is also crucial. The US SEC released compliance guidelines for staking, and the SEC chairman publicly stated that “Ethereum is not a security”—how significant is this statement? For crypto assets, this is like receiving a compliance pass. Meanwhile, the US passed the GENIUS Act, establishing the first federal-level regulatory framework for stablecoins. Additionally, the sanctions on Tornado Cash have been lifted, and privacy contracts have received judicial support, which allows the privacy feature to gradually shift from compliance risk to foundational capability building.

The influx of institutional funds is the most intuitive proof. JPMorgan has launched the tokenized money market fund MONY on the Ethereum mainnet; BlackRock's BUIDL fund reached nearly $3 billion at one point; the asset management scale of the Ethereum spot ETF has reached $28.6 billion. Behind these numbers are the tangible actions of traditional finance migrating on-chain. The growth in the stablecoin sector is even more astonishing—total supply has surpassed $300 billion, with an annual trading volume of approximately $46 trillion, of which Ethereum accounts for 54% of the market share.

On the ecology side, Layer 2 networks have fully matured. Platforms such as Base, Arbitrum, and zkSync have implemented tiered fees in US cents, with a total locked value reaching $35.7 billion. Interestingly, the transaction volume of these L2s has surpassed that of the mainnet itself. The DeFi ecosystem is also exploding, with total locked value rising to $93.9 billion, a year-on-year increase of 71%. Uniswap's annual transaction volume has exceeded $1 trillion, and Aave's active lending scale has reached $25 billion, all of which are substantial usage figures.

The integration of AI and Ethereum is starting to take shape. The ERC-8004 standard establishes the identity and asset standards for AI Agents, and the x402 protocol launched by Coinbase supports micropayments between machines, with Ethereum becoming the core settlement layer of the AI economy.

Ten years have passed, and the number of Ethereum developers continues to grow, with offline events emerging around the world. By 2025, Ethereum is no longer a distant “future vision,” but a set of world-class infrastructure that is operating steadily.