Ethereum’s five major upgrades in 2025, in which directions will they be optimized?

Original title:Ethereum Upgrades to Watch in 2025

Original author: Kazu Umemoto, Bankless

Original compilation: How is your husband, Odaily Planet Daily

In 2024, Ethereum introduced the blob space through the Dencun upgrade, which made significant progress in the development direction centered on Rollup and helped L2 reduce transaction costs by 10 times to 100 times.

What Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) and Ethereum Requests for Comments (ERCs) are worth keeping an eye on in 2025?

This article will take stock of five noteworthy Ethereum upgrades. Some of them are confirmed to be online in the Pectra upgrade, while others will take a longer time to be implemented, but have attracted the attention of some well-known supporters.

EIP-3074

One improvement that has attracted much attention in the Pectra upgrade is EIP-3074. Users can merge multiple transactions into one, and projects can fund user transactions and pay their gas fees. A new method has also been added to restore the wallet if the user loses their private key.

EIP-3074 introduces new Ethereum opcodes. The system will allow EOA users to authorize smart contracts to perform actions on their behalf within a single transaction, while retaining the security and control of not permanently transferring private keys.

These new opcodes implement the following user-friendly utilities:

· Transaction batching – Batch multiple transactions (such as multiple token transfers) into a single operation.

· Sponsored Transactions – The ability to have transactions paid for by a third party opens up new ways for applications to pay gas for their users.

· Conditional transactions – Complex transaction structures where multiple steps can be linked and enable conditional execution, such as a transaction that only executes when certain conditions are met, without the need for separate transactions for each step.

· Meta transactions - the ability to sign transactions that can be submitted by another party, e.g. signing transactions offline or from other interfaces, without requiring ETH as gas.

· Delegated Security – By allowing trusted callers to manage transactions, users can benefit from advanced security models, such as those involving multi-signature setups.

EIP-3074 is the next major step in the future development of the Ethereum account model. This is a short-term fix before the rise of ERC-4337, but its user experience (UX) level improvement is significant.

EIP-7251

For validators holding large amounts of ETH, EIP-7251 is undoubtedly a proposal with higher value. It allows validators to receive rewards for additional staking in addition to the standard staking limit of 32 ETH. Until then, any staked amount above 32 ETH is idle. If a validator wants to stake additional ETH, they must set up a new verification node and invest an additional 32 ETH. With EIP-7251, validators can use a single verification node to stake all their ETH holdings.

This improvement is expected to attract large institutions to run their own validator nodes and further participate in the Ethereum ecosystem.

In addition, this proposal, as part of the Pectra upgrade, may also increase the speed of the Ethereum network through the integration of verification nodes. For example, projects like Lido can reduce the number of validator nodes they run and can earn rewards on top of a base staking limit of 32 ETH.

EIP-7002

As part of the Pectra upgrade, EIP-7002 addresses some significant risk issues in validator node operations.

For example, if you want to get rewards for running a validator node, but don't want to deal with the complex operations, you can delegate this task to the validator operator and hand them the validation key (the validation key is used for validation and proposal block). However, when you want to withdraw ETH, you must use the verification key to sign a "voluntary exit message" to complete the operation. If the operator deliberately makes things difficult and does not sign this message, or the verification key is leaked, your ETH may be maliciously detained or even extorted.

EIP-7002 provides a solution that allows stakers to withdraw ETH simply by extracting the keys. This improvement eliminates the risk of malicious operators rejecting exit messages and reduces the possibility of ETH being seized if verification keys are leaked.

ERC-7683

In the past few years, Intents have been one of the hotly discussed topics in DeFi. ERC-7683 is a token standard designed to directly address cross-chain interoperability issues and define a shared structure for cross-chain intent. This standard "is like an order ticket that anyone can create and any solver can fulfill."

ERC-7683 was first proposed in 2024 and co-drafted by Uniswap and Across Protocol. ERC-7683 aims to standardize Intents, bringing multiple benefits to the Ethereum ecosystem:

· Unify Ethereum: Establish common standards for cross-chain operations across L2 and sidechains, supporting Ethereum’s goal of being a leading decentralized application platform.

· Achieve interoperability: Standardize order and settlement interfaces to achieve seamless cross-chain execution.

· Eliminate fragmentation: Provide a common framework to coordinate different systems to achieve smoother cross-chain operations.

· Enhance user experience: Provide users with simplified, intuitive, and frictionless cross-chain interactions.

· Improve liquidity: Allow DApps to access the cross-chain shared filling network, providing deeper liquidity.

· Speed ​​up transactions: Reduce failure rates and speed up transaction times by promoting competition among fillers.

· Drive innovation: Change the cross-chain landscape by promoting collaboration and encouraging innovative solutions on Ethereum.

ERC-7841

ERC-7841 is a novel token standard that proposes a low-level message format and API for applications to send messages to and receive messages from other chains.

1.ERC-7841 abstracts chain-specific logic from applications, meaning the same application can be deployed on multiple chains without changing the way it sends/receives messages.

2.ERC-7841 is a modular foundation that specifies only the information needed to route messages between applications. This allows the flexibility for specific message types (such as those for bridges or intents) to be built on top of a single interface, rather than per message type.

3.ERC-7841 is compatible with synchronous messaging protocols (such as CIRC) and asynchronous messaging protocols (such as most existing protocols and CIRC).

While there are other EIPs with similar goals at their core, the continued buzz around ERC-7841 demonstrates the strong momentum in the interoperability space.