The following is a guest post from Rostyslav Bortman, Founder at Ethereum Ukraine.
Let’s face it: although 2024 was a year of technological success for Ethereum, it was also a year of financial disappointment.
On the one hand, Dencun was finally deployed, and activity on Layer 2 networks in the ecosystem skyrocketed 4 times.
On the other, Ethereum began to lag behind Solana in terms of the number of developers, and ETH’s dynamics did not meet investors’ expectations.
Nevertheless, Ethereum’s technological structure ensures strong expectations for its growth. Today, we already have all the tools to create more convenient and efficient solutions. It is their implementation that remains a challenge.
In this article, we take a look at the main changes that Ethereum will face in 2025 and how new technological concepts and a growing focus on real-world applications can finally make the protocol truly user-friendly for the masses.
Native Interoperability in L2 Clusters
Today, most projects operating on multiple rollups have to rely on bridges (such as Across) or custom solutions to interact between networks. There is no full-fledged native interoperability yet – everything is tied to separate protocols that manually stitch the ecosystem together.
However, by 2025, I expect that native interoperability will appear at least within certain L2 clusters (superchain, elastic chain, aggregation layer). This means that transactions and data will be able to move between different rollups quickly and reliably without bridges, centralised 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 built-in interoperability will form a new narrative in Layer 2 and attract more resources to this topic, as well as draw more attention.
And breakthrough products only emerge from developers’ energy. New standards for interoperability between rollups can be the key to better decentralised applications and true Web3 innovation.
EIP-7702: A New Level of UX and Security in Ethereum
If you follow the development of Ethereum, you have definitely heard about EIP-7702, one of the most significant proposals for improving UX and account security. In fact, it is an evolution of EIP-4337, but with native integration right 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. In simple terms, they will be able to actually turn into AA wallets (Account Abstraction, EIP-4337). This opens up a lot of new opportunities:
- Transaction batching – say goodbye to dozens of approves and multi-step DeFi operations, everything can be done within a single transaction.
- Paying for gas in USDC – now you don’t have to keep ETH just for commissions.
- Advanced security solutions such as multi-factor authentication, social account recovery, and other use cases will become standard.
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.
Time to build dApps
Everyone sees it, but it’s time to finally act. The Ethereum community has been focusing on the infrastructure layer for too long, losing ground in what really matters to a user – applications. While Ethereum has been busy discussing modularity and new L2 architectures, strong alternatives have emerged in the realm of real products.
It’s time to shift attention to the development of decentralised applications that streamline tangible utility. Projects such as Warpcast, Farcade Games, Fileverse, Polymarket, and others demonstrate how to build convenient services on the blockchain. And, of course, we cannot ignore AI agents that will become an important element of the ecosystem.
This trend will be the main focus of our new hackathon, which we are running in Kyiv with Zero1 Labs and IdeaSoft on board. It will be entirely dedicated to the development and implementation of AI agents in the blockchain ecosystem.
However, there is another “but”. Applications must conceive 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 have assets on Base and need to conduct a transaction on Arbitrum, you will face 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 some memecoin),
- if it is not an altVM that generally lives by its own rules.
For decentralised applications to become widespread, they need to function not just conveniently, but invisibly to the user. This is exactly what the Ethereum ecosystem lacks 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 think about whether they have ETH or USDC stored on L2.
Yes, native interoperability is important, but the main thing is that it is no longer the future, but a reality: most of the necessary tools to create such an experience already exist.
Despite this, we still do not see radical changes in UX, and Web3 is still inconvenient for the mass user. I hope that 2025 will be the moment when this situation finally starts to change.
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