Can Ethereum be “rescued” in 2025?

Lu Xun never said: "No matter what sins you committed in your previous life, holding Ethereum has paid off all the sins." This round of Ethereum Holders never expected that Ethereum would be so lagging, and once ranked last among mainstream projects. However, it is too early to draw a conclusion now. The big market does not seem to be over. If Bitcoin adoption has just begun, then Crypto and Web3 as a whole are in the early stages. In 2025, can Ethereum still be "rescued"? What "events" and "breakthroughs" are worth looking forward to?

01 Inflow of spot ETFs

At present, the Ethereum spot ETF has been approved for listing on the US stock market for some time. Compared with the Bitcoin spot ETF, there is a certain gap in the speed and volume of capital inflow. However, in addition to the fact that Ethereum does not have the same "out-of-circle" and broad consensus as Bitcoin, there is another very important reason. Compared with the staking and other returns brought by directly holding Ethereum itself, the spot ETF that has no additional returns and needs to pay management fees and other expenses has no advantages.
However, the good news coming in 2025 is that people from relevant financial institutions are actively promoting the listing of Ethereum spot ETFs that allow additional returns from collateralized operations. There is still sufficient motivation to promote this matter, because financial giants are the main stakeholders in the "hot" trading demand for crypto asset spot ETFs. The pledged Ethereum spot ETF not only has potential demand, but also has a friendly regulatory environment brought about by Trump's coming to power, making it easier to get approval.

02Ethereum Strategic Reserve

The current Bitcoin strategic reserve being promoted by the United States is one of the main driving forces of the Bitcoin and crypto markets. It should be noted that in addition to gold, oil is also an important strategic reserve asset of the United States . Therefore, "digital gold" Bitcoin has certain feasibility and significance as a strategic reserve. At the same time, Ethereum, once known as "digital oil", also has the hope of being listed as a strategic reserve asset.
Compared with Bitcoin, in fact, the Trump family WLFI project supported by Trump is an ecological project deployed on the Ethereum mainnet. Its main business is based on the support brought by Ethereum DeFi ecology AAVE and Chainlink. At the same time, the project treasury has gradually begun to reserve a large amount of ETH and Ethereum ecological project tokens, and recently a large amount of WBTC has been exchanged for ETH. According to the analysis of the 7 multi-signature wallets in the treasury of the project, some wallet addresses are already "old guns" on the Ethereum DeFi ecological chain. Therefore, the project team has a high degree of understanding of Ethereum and its ecology, and the operation is relatively professional.
Given that the team behind Trump took the lead in launching projects that adopted the Ethereum ecosystem, we can assume that they have a high degree of recognition for the subsequent development of Ethereum and its ecosystem, and support for the development of high-tech industries such as Web3 , which is also in line with Trump’s “America First” concept. Therefore, it is very likely that Ethereum will be mentioned as a strategic reserve asset in 2025.

03 Ethereum's next big upgrade

Due to the unsatisfactory performance of Ethereum, its next major upgrade named "Pectra" has not received much attention. It is reported that 10 EIP improvement protocols have been added to the upgrade plan, mainly involving user experience and support optimization for Layer2. The main highlights are as follows:
1) Optimization of account abstraction <br/>This upgrade will optimize the user experience of the wallet, so that ordinary wallet addresses can also have the complex functions and flexible operations of "contract wallets", such as "gas payment, social recovery, multi-signature", etc. These optimizations will further lower the user's usage threshold. When users use Web3 applications, they can have the same operating experience as Web2 applications. Lay the foundation for the large-scale adoption of Web3 applications in the future.
2) Layer2 support optimization <br/>Provide more data space (blobs) for Layer 2 solutions to improve Ethereum's scalability. Re-evaluate and adjust the cost of calldata, and optimize block throughput and storage. Simply put, it is to expand the Layer data space and optimize the cost, so that the supported Layer2 capacity is large and the cost is lower.
3) Improve the security and flexibility of validators <br/>Optimize the voting processing, withdrawal and other operations of the validator to improve security and efficiency, and increase the staking limit of 32ETH, which is equivalent to merging the running verification nodes, reducing the operation and maintenance pressure and improving efficiency, while also alleviating the pressure of point-to-point messaging and data storage between a large number of node networks.
In short, Ethereum's Pectra upgrade will provide support for an Ethereum ecosystem with a more user-friendly experience, higher scalability, and a more stable node network at the underlying technical level.

04Eco -application explosion and technological progress

At this stage, more and more major institutions such as the Trump family's DeFi project, Sony's Layer2, and Deutsche Bank's Layer2 are building Web3 applications and infrastructure solutions on Ethereum, and the Ethereum ecosystem is the first choice.
The Ethereum ecosystem is mature, rich, diverse and leading in terms of technical resource reserves, development history, development team support, on-chain capital volume, client security and wallet user experience. Similarly, in the next stage of the big market in 2025, whether it is the strong recovery of DeFi or the popularity of tracks such as AI Agent, Ethereum as the underlying infrastructure will benefit greatly from the adoption of these ecological applications and the prosperity of on-chain activities, including but not limited to the inflow of funds, the consumption of Gas, the deflation of Token supply, etc.
With the launch of Unichain, the OP super chain family has joined a heavyweight player. The cross-chain liquidity of Layer2 is expected to make progress in 2025. By then, combined with the upgrade and optimization support of Ethereum itself, the potential energy formed by major Layer2 groups will combine to form unprecedented competitive pressure on some high-performance new public chains.
In the past, some people always said that Ethereum's Layer2 was a failure, sucking blood from the main network without bringing any benefits to the main network, but recently we have also seen the prosperity of Layer2. Data from ultra sound money shows that Layer2's Blob fee has become one of the largest gas burners on the Ethereum main network, which also shows the success of the Layer2 expansion plan.

L2Beat's real-time statistical data chart also shows that the funds flowing into Layer2 exceed 55 billion US dollars. Calculated by transaction volume, the total expansion is more than 2,500% of the original main network.

For large companies and institutions outside the circle such as Sony and Deutsche Bank, Layer2 is an excellent entry point for Web3 business. It does not require a lot of technical reserves and resource investment to start, and it natively receives support from the Ethereum ecological community. Therefore, under the successful leadership of these institutions, the real institutional adoption wave of Layer2 will soon come.

05 Summary

In fact, many people know that the advantages of Ethereum and its ecosystem are quite obvious, but they did not expect that the current size of Ethereum can no longer be quickly driven by funds like in the first two rounds of market. Obviously, this is not an easy task. Just like the size of Bitcoin, it has been able to rise rapidly due to the large inflow of institutional funds from spot ETFs and the strong expectations of US strategic reserve assets. However, compared with Bitcoin, Ethereum has the additional support of technological upgrades and the development of the Web3 ecosystem. There are still many highlights in 2025. Let's wait and see.