According to a report by PANews, Ethereum has outlined a series of significant technological advancements shaping its development strategy for the next two years, with profound implications for its ecosystem and market dynamics. A key milestone is the planned deployment of the zkEVM Layer 1 mainnet between the fourth quarter of 2025 and the second quarter of 2026. This upgrade aims to verify 99% of blocks within 10 seconds while reducing zero-knowledge proof verification costs by up to 80%. By enhancing efficiency and privacy, zkEVM is expected to facilitate greater adoption of stablecoins like USDC and USDT on the Ethereum main chain, driving increased daily gas consumption and reducing ETH supply, which in turn should contribute to greater price stability. Additionally, zkEVM will provide traditional financial institutions with assurances regarding privacy and regulatory compliance, thereby fostering the expansion of large-scale decentralized finance (DeFi) applications.
Another pivotal development is the introduction of the RISC-V execution architecture, scheduled to commence in the second half of 2025 and reach completion by 2030. This transition aims to boost smart contract performance by a factor of three to five and decrease gas fees by 50 to 70 percent. The open-source instruction set will replace the existing Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) and offer improved compatibility with hardware acceleration technologies. This evolution is expected to enable new use cases such as high-frequency trading, real-time gaming, AI inference, and microtransactions, thereby broadening Ethereum’s functional scope.
Collaboration between Ethereum’s Layer 1 and Layer 2 solutions will continue from late 2025 through 2027, targeting full interoperability with prominent Layer 2 platforms like Arbitrum, Optimism, and Base. This integration is projected to unify liquidity pools, elevating total value locked (TVL) from $1.2 trillion to over $2 trillion. Cross-layer transaction costs are anticipated to fall by 90%, with confirmation times compressed to approximately 10 seconds, enhancing user experience and network throughput.
Economic reforms for validators are also planned within this timeframe, potentially lowering the minimum staking requirement from 32 ETH to 1 ETH and increasing annual returns from 4-6% to between 6-8%. These measures aim to promote greater network decentralization while reducing ETH circulation, thereby exerting upward pressure on its value.
Finally, the reintroduction of sharding technology under the Ethereum 3.0 roadmap is expected to begin in 2026, with implementation extending into 2027-2028 or later. By combining zkEVM and sharding, Ethereum aspires to achieve transaction processing capacities in the hundreds of thousands per second and reduce data availability costs by 99%. This strategic advancement is designed to prepare Ethereum for widespread Web3 adoption throughout the coming decade.
Source: binance
