BlockBeats Message, on December 23, Ethereum Foundation member renaissancing released the Ethereum 2025 Year-End Summary: 2025 is seen as a watershed moment in the history of Ethereum's development. Ethereum officially sheds the label of 'experimental network' and becomes a global infrastructure that financial institutions, developers, and AI systems rely on.
At the protocol level, Ethereum completed two major hard forks within a year—Pectra in May and Fusaka in December. Pectra promoted the full implementation of account abstraction, supporting Gas payment, transaction bundling, and key signature; Fusaka significantly reduced costs through PeerDAS, achieving 8 times scalability. Meanwhile, Ethereum raised the Gas limit three times without hard forks, showing the network's ability for continuous self-optimization.
Regulatory and institutional progress has become key variables. The US SEC has issued staking compliance guidelines, and the chairman publicly stated that 'Ethereum is not a security'; the US has passed the GENIUS Act, establishing the first federal-level stablecoin regulatory framework. The sanctions on Tornado Cash have been lifted, and privacy contracts have gained judicial support, with privacy gradually shifting from compliance risk to basic capability building.
The institution has fully implemented applications. JPMorgan has launched the tokenized money market fund MONY on the Ethereum mainnet; BlackRock's BUIDL scale once approached 3 billion USD; the asset management scale of Ethereum spot ETFs reached 28.6 billion USD. The total supply of stablecoins has exceeded 300 billion USD, with an annual trading volume of approximately 46 trillion USD, and Ethereum occupies 54% of the market share.
In terms of ecology, Layer 2 has fully matured. Networks like Base, Arbitrum, and zkSync have implemented sub-cent transaction fees, with a total L2 locked value reaching 35.7 billion USD, and transaction volume has surpassed that of the mainnet. The total locked value in DeFi has risen to 93.9 billion USD, a year-on-year increase of 71%; Uniswap's annual trading volume has exceeded 1 trillion USD, and Aave's active lending scale has reached 25 billion USD.
The integration of AI and Ethereum has begun to take shape. ERC-8004 establishes the identity and asset standards for AI Agents, Coinbase has launched the x402 protocol to support micro-payments between machines, and Ethereum is seen as the core settlement layer of the AI economy.
At the ten-year milestone, the number of Ethereum developers continues to grow, with global offline events spread across many locations. By 2025, Ethereum will no longer be a 'future vision', but a set of world-class infrastructure that is operating stably.
