Ethereum: Reloaded
10 years into it’s development, what’s next?
Background
I’ve been closely following the Ethereum blockchain since its inception in 2013. Ethereum quickly became a fascinating rabbit hole—one that merged innovation in decentralized systems with complex social and economic incentives. While my expertise doesn’t lie in protocol design, my background in game theory based economic-incentives gave me a unique perspective on Ethereum’s approach to coordination, participation, and value creation.
Now, over a decade later, I’m reflecting on the key lessons learned throughout Ethereum’s journey—from its early ideals to the present-day protocol advancements—and exploring what the future might hold for the network and its long-term vision.
-
Ethereum has undergone major protocol improvements, including its major transition to Proof of Stake and v2.0. Yet, key areas—scalability, staking, and user experience—remain onging areas of focus for the Ethereum development community.
-
The next mainnet upgrade, Pectra, is scheduled for release on May 7, 2025.
Following successful dry runs on the Hoodi testnet on April 3, development has been greenlit for the upgrade’s deployment.
Ethereum’s Tenets
The Ethereum Whitepaper introduced a Turing-complete language to power smart contracts and decentralized applications.
Ten years later, has Ethereum achieve it’s vision?
Protocol Growth
Today, I see the Ethereum protocol as increasingly robust. The introduction of EIP standards has played a vital role in driving consistent improvements—particularly around protocols and their use cases—making smart contract development and execution far more dependable across the ecosystem.
Still, despite this progress, core challenges remain. Gas efficiency, limited contract upgradability, and a fragmented user experience continue to pose meaningful technical hurdles.
Smart Contracts Today
Smart contracts have grown increasingly refined and reliable over time. Standards like ERC-777 and ERC-1155 have been instrumental in establishing consistent guidelines—particularly around token behavior—helping to make contract development more predictable and interoperable across the Ethereum ecosystem.
Key challenges persist—including scalability bottlenecks, high gas fees, and composability constraints—that continue to hinder Ethereum’s broader growth and adoption.
Decentralization / EVM
With any complex system, Ethereum has accumulated technical debt over time, and I’ve seen firsthand how it’s slowed progress in key areas.
One thing that stands out is just how long it took to move from a monolithic architecture to a truly modular design with clearly defined standards. In the white paper, modularity meant keeping the base protocol simple and allowing developers to build complexity through smart contracts. That vision played out well at the application layer—we saw real innovation in DeFi, NFTs, and DAOs.
Under the hood, core components like consensus, execution, and data availability remained tightly coupled and monolithic for years.
I’ve also run into the limitations of the EVM firsthand—and in retrospect, a simpler and more predictable gas model early on could have significantly improved Ethereum’s scalability and developer experience today.
Application Adoption
Ethereum has made incremental progress, driven by open collaboration, shared values, and social trust.
Decentralized application adoption has largely fallen short of its early promise.
Progress — Genesis Block & Beyond
When I shift the lens from Ethereum’s mainnet launch in 2015 to where it stands today, the growth in adoption is undeniable. The initial vision of a decentralized, general-purpose blockchain has evolved into a global infrastructure powering everything from DeFi and NFTs to real-world asset tokenization and enterprise solutions. The widespread adoption of Ethereum standards—like ERC-20 and ERC-721—has been foundational to this progress.
That said, several long-standing challenges still remain. Gas fees are still high during periods of congestion, transaction throughput is limited without Layer 2s limiting scalability for consumer applications, and the overall developer and user experience remains complex. Much of this ties back to the technical debt accumulated over the years—legacy design decisions in the EVM, monolithic architecture, and a fragmented scaling ecosystem.
While Ethereum has made great strides, there’s still work ahead to make it scalable, accessible, and seamless for today’s users.
Daily Transactions
Transaction volume has grown steadily since Ethereum’s genesis block and peaked during the NFT boom. In recent years, however, growth has plateaued despite ongoing protocol upgrades.
Had scalability been addressed earlier, I believe we’d have seen much higher throughput driven by broader adoption across decentralized applications.
Deployed Smart Contracts
In 2024, 70% of EVM smart contract deployments are happening on Optimism’s Layer-2 solution. Ethereum’s scaling approach through Layer-2 significantly reduces contract execution costs, enhancing the user experience.
Layer 2 essentially makes Ethereum faster and cheaper by handling most activity off the main network, reducing congestion and gas fees for users.
Gas Fees
Gas fees continue to be a fundamental challenge in the Ethereum protocol, driven by supply-demand dynamics and the EVM’s transaction prioritization. However, recent EIP upgrades (such as EIP-1159 and EIP-4844) have helped reduce average gas prices during periods of low network activity.
Gas fees remain prohibitively high during times of congestion
Network Usage
Gas usage on Ethereum is driven by active addresses and other gas transactions, which constitute the majority of network activity. I suspect complex operations (such as smart contract calls and token swaps) can overlap or appear in both categories, and thus incur greater overall gas consumption
NFTs account for only a small share of total transaction volume, and in recent months, activity on decentralized exchanges has significantly declined.
Interestingly, NFTs also represent just a minor fraction of overall gas usage on the protocol.
Transactions-per-Second
Ethereum currently handles around 10–15 TPS, which just isn’t enough to support modern applications running fully on-chain. In its current state, I believe the protocol cannot meet the demands of real-world usage.
As a result, mainstream adoption is slow, and most Layer-2 solutions are forced to rely on Ethereum only for periodic settlement—adding complexity and degrading the overall user experience.
I see EIP-4844 and the future implementation of sharding as mission critical. These upgrades have the potential to push throughput into the 100,000+ TPS range and unlock Ethereum’s realized utility.
Decentralized Apps
Ethereum’s push for dApp adoption has largely failed, and a big reason for that is limited TPS.
Since 2025, on-chain activity has been dominated by gaming and DeFi, while NFT usage has sharply declined following the end of the hype cycle. Despite nascent infrastructure and developer momentum, meaningful, sustained consumer adoption remains limited.
The Future Ahead
The Pectra release is a major step forward for Ethereum. It combines the Prague and Electra upgrades, focusing on three key areas: scalability, staking efficiency, and user experience.
What stands out to me most is EIP-7702, which introduces account abstraction—finally making wallets more flexible by enabling smart contract-like behavior for user accounts. On the staking side, EIP-7251 raises the validator limit from 32 to 2,048 ETH, which should help reduce network load. And with improvements to Layer-2 data handling, like EIP-7691, Ethereum is clearly doubling down on rollups to scale effectively.
The development team is actively addressing real-world usability while building a stronger foundation for the future.
Things we can check off
✔ Smart Contracts & EVM
✔ Tokenization Standards (ie. ERC-20, ERC-721 and ERC-1155)
✔ Transition towards Proof-of-Stake / Eth2.0 (I brought popcorn!)
✔ v1 of proto-danksharding (addressing scalability)
What’s next
Scalability, gas fees, and modularity (execution & consensus layers) remain key areas where Ethereum still needs improvement.
Developing an open-source protocol at this scale is a massive challenge (and hard!) —but what makes Ethereum remarkable is that it’s driven by a passionate, global community of developers.
Right now, transaction throughput still falls short of what’s needed for mass adoption. But if teams can reflect on past progress and continue to build with greater speed and alignment, Ethereum has a shot at fulfilling its core tenets and long-term vision.
People will build on Ethereum, but only if the foundation is solid and scalability is solved.
