Ethereum has been at a crossroad for the past couple of years.

The mounting criticism has led to a change in leadership at the foundation, and hopefully, a broader review aimed at increasing transparency and involvement, as well as a focus on value capture at the L1 level.

Before, it was hard to meet an executive director speaking in multiple panels at an Ethereum conference. This week, it has been a pleasure seeing @tkstanczak speaking at as many events and panels as possible.

It is genuinely refreshing and hopefully a sign of what’s to come.

So… what’s the Ethereum vision for the future?

And how can we make sure it’s executed well?

This article provides a summary of the Ethereal vision.

The Goals

To have a structured vision, one has to start with goals.

For Ethereum, the primary goals are as follows:

• Bringing the crypto ethos back, how to preserve privacy and trustlessness.

This is not (only) about onboarding new users. But it’s about making sure they can take advantage of these values and ethos and build accordingly.

Build, yes, but with purpose and values.

Ensure Ethereum remains the most secure and resilient blockchain infrastructure.

This ties in with a post by Vitalik, regarding the “trillion dollar security”.

This is part of a broader debate on security:

• How can we improve the security of Ethereum?

• How can this be adequately communicated to users?

• How to make sure this is leveraged by both institutions and users?

And most important of all:

How do we ensure that all technological developments continue to uphold the core ethos and values of Ethereum? There are no shortcuts and compromises.

Lately, many have accused Ethereum of being a bit distant from builders.

However, looks like that’s about to change.

In fact, we can expect the Ethereum Foundation to adopt on a slightly more active approach, with a new treasury policy. According to Thomas, this will be leveraged to find a way to look at productive and long-lasting DEFI protocols and allocate funds strategically to them, moving from a passive approach to a guided one.

This is only one of a series of challenges that are poised to have a long-lasting impact on the long-term future of Ethereum, including:

• Regulatory clarity
• AI adoption
• Privacy concerns

Among these, one key aspect and a primary recent trend has been increased institutional adoption.

The future vision of Ethereum is to tackle various sectors and areas as modular components, making them open-source and removing intermediaries.

In turn, these modules will ensure a smooth transition from Web2 to Web3, removing friction for institutions.

Imagine health agencies of different countries being able to open and contribute to health repositories. All of this is ensured by chain interactions on ETH, which guarantee the safety and verifiability of these solutions.

The final objective? Allowing users to trade all the world’s assets onchain.

The Challenges

However, to achieve this Ethereum needs to solve some of the main challenges and confusing elements for its users.

For this reason, a strong part of the future focus will be placed on solving some of the main challenges of privacy and identity onchain, and facing the threat of AI by making ETH a trusted layer for AI execution.

Credibly neutral.

Global.

And private and secure by design.

All of this will lead to a pluralistic environment, creating a social structure that enables collaboration among different participants, with the ultimate objective of making Ethereum an anti-fragile network.

To truly resist centralization, it is essential to ensure participation from all around the world and to incorporate multiple voices and approaches in building a truly global network.

This will allow ETH to listen to what matters and empower plurality and diversity

It is also incredibly refreshing to hear about the L1-L2 tensions, with EF making it clear there is no antagonism between them.

On the contrary, ETH will have a more active guidance on how to make sure these L2s achieve Stage 2, protecting users thanks to ETH as a base layer underneath.

Last but not least, we’ve seen the emergence of real-time blockchains such as MegaETH and other fast networks such as Monad and Hyperliquid.

This raises questions of interoperability and integrations:

• How to make sure they connect with the Ethereum main net?

• How to build 25ms block time blockchains inheriting the security parameters of ETH?

As a consequence, there is a need to introduce new tooling to verify at what levels new challenges can be identified and to ensure clients can integrate with these networks.

This opens up a new space of creativity in client development.

All ETH client teams agreed to 45m then 60m gas per block, with the objective to reach 100 by the end of the year or Q1 next year.

An internal reorganization will facilitate this, with modular teams working on common objectives:

• Scaling l1
• Scaling blobs
• Improving ux
• Improving interoperability

You heard it right: scaling the L1 (a previously neglected area) is among these objectives.

Can we actually say it?

Bullish on ETH, I personally welcome this awakening and hope to see this progressing further.

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