Ethereum's Two-Year Technical Roadmap Revealed: Which Upgrades Will Provide the Strongest Price Support?

Original Author: Haotian, Crypto Researcher

Based on the Ethereum's Future Two-Year Technology Roadmap, sharing several "Technological Breakthroughs" that could potentially provide support for the price direction (E Guard Exclusive):

1) zkEVM Layer1 Integration

Implementation Timeline: Mainnet deployment to be completed from Q4 2025 to Q2 2026;

Technical Goals:

· 99% of blocks validated within 10 seconds;

· 80% reduction in zk-SNARK verification cost;

Significance of Implementation:

· Increased market share of stablecoins such as USDC, USDT on the Ethereum main chain, leading to a corresponding increase in daily Gas consumption, directly driving ETH deflation;

· zkEVM's zero-knowledge proof technology provides compliance and privacy protection for traditional financial institutions, activating potential large-scale institutional DeFi application scenarios;

2) RISC-V New Architecture Execution

Implementation Timeline: Research and development to start in the second half of 2025, phased slow progress from 2026 to 2030;

Technical Goals:

· 3-5x improvement in smart contract execution efficiency;

· 50-70% reduction in Gas cost;

· Open-source instruction set architecture to replace the current EVM, better compatible with modern hardware acceleration technologies;

Significance of Implementation:

· The magnitude improvement in execution performance will spur new application scenarios, such as high-frequency trading, real-time gaming, AI inference, micropayments, and microtransactions;

· Lower Gas costs will reinvigorate microtransaction scenarios, significantly expand user base and usage frequency, creating a positive cycle of ETH demand;

3) Layer1-Layer2 Ecosystem Collaboration

Implementation Timeline: Starting in Q4 2025, continuous optimization from 2026 to 2027;

Technical Goals:

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

· The current decentralized liquidity is around $1.2 trillion TVL, with the total unified liquidity pool TVL surpassing $2 trillion;

· Cross-layer transaction costs have been reduced by 90%, achieving cross-layer confirmation within 10 seconds;

Significance of Achievement:

· DeFi protocols can more efficiently aggregate liquidity across the entire ecosystem (L1+L2), generating a network effect where 1+1>2, significantly improving the capital efficiency and user experience of the entire Ethereum ecosystem;

4) Validator Economic Optimization

Implementation Timeline: Starting in the second half of 2025, in coordination with various technical upgrades, continuous optimization over 2 years;

Technical Goals:

· Gradually reduce the validator's minimum staking threshold from 32 ETH to 16 ETH, and eventually to 1 ETH;

· Increase staking annual rewards from the current 4-6% to 6-8%;

· Simplify validator operation requirements, support light node validation, and increase network decentralization;

Significance of Achievement:

· The reduction in the validator threshold and optimization of the reward model are expected to increase the ETH staking rate from the current approximately 25% to over 40% (locking up around 48 million ETH), further reducing ETH's circulating supply and strengthening deflation expectations;

· The increased staking rewards will enhance the attractiveness of ETH as a "digital bond," providing fundamental support for its valuation;

5) Sharding Technology Revival (ETH 3.0)

Implementation Timeline: Design and development to begin in 2026, with implementation in 2027-2028 or later;

Technical Goals:

· Achieve processing capacity of millions of transactions per second through zkEVM+ and sharding;

· Reduce data availability costs by 99%;

· Distribute blockchain data across multiple shards, with validators only needing to process a portion of the data;

Significance of Achievement:

· The reintroduction of sharding indicates that Ethereum is preparing for the widespread adoption of Web3 in the next decade, and the long-standing vision of the "world computer" will be brought back to the agenda;