Bankless: The Ethereum upgrade to watch in 2025

Author: Kazu Umemoto, Bankless; Translator: Deng Tong, Golden Finance

Ethereum is a vibrant network, and a world-class developer network helps it stay ahead of the curve.

In 2024, Ethereum made significant progress in its rollup-centric evolution, introducing blob space with the Dencun upgrade, helping L2 reduce transaction costs by 10 to 100 times.

Today, we're taking a look at some of the Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) and Ethereum Request for Comments (ERCs) that I'm looking at this year. Some of these are already planned for the Pectra upgrade, which we covered in full here, while others may be further away but already have some high-profile supporters.

Below, let's take a look at five noteworthy Ethereum upgrades that builders are advocating for.

EIP-3074

Another of the most talked-about improvements included in the Pectra upgrade is EIP-3074. This upgrade provides a simpler, cheaper, and better user experience for anyone interacting with Ethereum. Users will be able to bundle multiple transactions into 1, projects can sponsor users’ transactions and pay their gas fees, and there is now a way to recover your wallet in the event that you lose your private keys.

EIP-7251

Validators with large amounts of ETH will love EIP-7251 because they will now be able to earn additional rewards from any ETH staked above the 32 ETH standard. Previously, any ETH staked above 32 ETH was just sitting there. If a validator wanted to stake, they had to set up a completely different validator node and have the extra 32 ETH. With 7251, they are able to set up a single validator node and stake all of the ETH they hold. Hopefully, this will lead to large institutions running their own validator nodes and becoming more involved in the ecosystem.

The addition of Pectra could also increase the speed of the Ethereum network through validator integration. Projects like Lido can now run fewer validator nodes because they can earn rewards on any ETH staked above a base amount of 32 ETH.

EIP-7002

Pectra Included: Let's say you want to get the rewards of running a validator node, but don't want to deal with all this useless stuff. You can delegate that responsibility to a validator node operator and give them a validator key, which is used to certify and propose blocks. At some point later, you want to withdraw your ETH and do something else with it, but the only way you can withdraw your ETH is to sign a "voluntary exit message" with your validator key. If the operator decides to trick you and not sign the message or the validator key is compromised, someone can hold your ETH for ransom.

With EIP-7002, stakers can withdraw their ETH using just the withdrawal key. This eliminates the risk of a malicious operator not signing an exit message or the validator key being compromised and your ETH being held for ransom.

ERC-7683

Intents have been a hot topic in DeFi over the past few years, and ERC-7683 is a token standard that attempts to address the interoperability issue head-on and define a shared structure for cross-chain intents, "like an order ticket that anyone can create and any solver can implement," reads the ERC website.

The standard was first published in 2024 and was written by Uniswap and Across Protocol. With the continued adoption of ERC-7683, we can see great progress being made in the interoperability space.

ERC-7841

ERC-7841 is a very young token standard that has attracted some attention during the holiday season for its approach to solving interoperability. The standard proposes a low-level message format and API for applications to read and write messages from other chains. 7841 eliminates any kind of chain-specific logic so that applications can be launched across multiple chains seamlessly. There are other EIPs with similar goals, but the continued excitement here shows the strong momentum for interoperability.