Ethereum's Future Roadmap Highlights Key Technological Advancements
According to PANews, Ethereum's roadmap for the next two years outlines several technological breakthroughs that could significantly impact its ecosystem and market dynamics.
One of the major developments is the integration of zkEVM Layer 1, expected to be deployed on the mainnet between the fourth quarter of 2025 and the second quarter of 2026. The primary goals include verifying 99% of blocks within 10 seconds and reducing zero-knowledge proof verification costs by 80%. This advancement is anticipated to increase the market share of stablecoins like USDC and USDT on the Ethereum main chain, thereby boosting daily gas consumption and driving ETH deflation. Additionally, zkEVM technology is expected to provide compliance and privacy assurances for traditional financial institutions, potentially activating large-scale DeFi applications.
Another significant initiative is the development of a new RISC-V execution architecture, set to begin in the latter half of 2025 and progress gradually until 2030. This aims to enhance smart contract execution efficiency by 3-5 times and reduce gas costs by 50-70%. The open-source instruction set architecture will replace the current EVM, offering better compatibility with modern hardware acceleration technologies. This improvement could lead to new application scenarios such as high-frequency trading, real-time gaming, AI inference, and microtransactions, while lower gas costs could revitalize small transaction scenarios, expanding the user base and usage frequency.
The roadmap also includes Layer 1-Layer 2 ecosystem collaboration, starting in the fourth quarter of 2025 and continuing through 2027. The goal is to achieve seamless interoperability between Layer 1 and major Layer 2 solutions like Arbitrum, Optimism, and Base. This could unify liquidity pools, increasing total value locked (TVL) from $1,200 billion to over $2,000 billion, and reduce cross-layer transaction costs by 90%, enabling confirmations within 10 seconds.
Validator economic optimization is another focus, beginning in the latter half of 2025 and aligning with other technological upgrades over two years. The minimum staking threshold for validators is expected to decrease from 32 ETH to as low as 1 ETH, while annual staking yields could rise from 4-6% to 6-8%. Simplifying validator operations and supporting light node validation could enhance network decentralization, potentially increasing the ETH staking rate from 25% to over 40%, thereby reducing circulating supply and reinforcing deflationary expectations.
Lastly, the reintroduction of sharding technology, part of Ethereum 3.0, is slated to begin design and development in 2026, with implementation expected between 2027 and 2028 or later. This aims to combine zkEVM and sharding to achieve millions of transactions per second and reduce data availability costs by 99%, preparing Ethereum for large-scale Web3 adoption in the next decade.
