What price supports does Ethereum have in the next two years?

Author: Haotian

Based on Ethereum's technical roadmap for the next two years, share some "technological breakthroughs" that may support prices (Special to E Guard):

1) zkEVM layer1 integration

Implementation timeline: Mainnet deployment completed in Q4 2025-Q2 2026;

Technical goals:

• 99% of blocks are verified within 10 seconds;

• Zero-knowledge proof verification cost reduced by 80%;

Significance of realization:

• The market share of stablecoins such as USDC and USDT on the Ethereum main chain will further expand, and the daily Gas consumption will increase accordingly, which will directly promote ETH deflation;

• zkEVM zero-knowledge proof technology provides compliance and privacy protection for traditional financial institutions, and large-scale DeFi application scenarios of institutions are expected to be activated;

 2) RISC-V executes a new architecture

Implementation timeline: Research and development will begin in the second half of 2025, and will be slowly promoted in stages from 2026 to 2030;

Technical goals:

• Smart contract execution efficiency will be increased by 3-5 times;

• Gas cost reduction 50-70%;

• Open source instruction set architecture replaces the current EVM and is more compatible with modern hardware acceleration technology;

Realization significance:

• The magnitude of the execution performance will give rise to new application scenarios, such as: high-frequency trading, real-time games, AI reasoning, small payments, micro transactions, etc.;

• Lower Gas costs will reactivate small transaction scenarios, significantly expand the user base and frequency of use, and form a positive cycle of ETH demand;

3) Layer1-Layer2 ecological synergy

Implementation timeline: Starting in Q4 2025, 2026-2027 Continuous optimization over the years;

Technical goals:

• Achieve seamless interoperability between L1 and major L2 (Arbitrum, Optimism, Base, etc.);

• Currently, the decentralized liquidity is about 120 billion TVL, and the unified liquidity pool TVL exceeds 200 billion US dollars;

• Cross-layer transaction costs are reduced by 90%, and cross-layer confirmation is achieved within 10 seconds;

Realization significance:

• The DeFi protocol can more efficiently aggregate the liquidity of the entire ecosystem (L1+L2), generating 1+1>2

4) Validator economic optimization

Implementation timeline: Starting from the second half of 2025, synchronized optimization with various technical upgrades will be carried out for 2 years;

Technical goals:

• The minimum staking threshold for validators will be gradually reduced from 32 ETH to 16 ETH, and even to 1ETH in the end;

• The annualized rate of return on staking will be increased from the current 4-6% to 6-8%;

Simplify the threshold for validator operation, support light node verification, and improve the degree of network decentralization;

5) Sharding technology returns (ETH 3.0)

Implementation timeline: Design and development will begin in 2026, and will be realized in 2027-2028 or later;

Technical goals:

• Combined with zkEVM+ sharding, millions of transactions per second can be processed;

• Data availability costs are reduced by 99%;

• Blockchain data is distributed to multiple shards, and validators only need to process part of the data;

Implementation significance:

• The reintroduction of sharding shows that Ethereum is preparing for the large-scale adoption of Web3 in the next decade, and the long-cherished wish of "world computer" will be re-promoted;