Ethereum 2025 Annual Review: From Experimental Network to Transformation into Global Financial Infrastructure

[Coin World] In 2025, Ethereum completed its transformation from a “Testnet” to a “Financial Infrastructure” identification. Many industry insiders refer to this as a watershed moment in Ethereum's development history—this year, it shed its experimental label and became a globally recognized underlying network relied upon by financial institutions, developer teams, and AI systems.

Two Major Upgrades at the Protocol Layer

From a technical perspective, Ethereum completed two hard forks in just 12 months. The Pectra upgrade in May introduced comprehensive support for account abstraction. What does this mean? Simply put, features like gas payment on behalf, transaction packaging, and key signing, which were previously only available to large users, are now open to everyone.

With the Fusaka upgrade in December, things took another step forward. Through PeerDAS technology, network costs have significantly decreased, achieving an 8-fold expansion capacity. Furthermore, Ethereum has adjusted the Gas limit three times without a hard fork—what does this indicate? It indicates that the network has the ability to continuously self-optimize and is no longer in a state of passive maintenance.

Turning Point for Regulation and Institutions

Several significant events have occurred on the regulatory front. The U.S. SEC not only released compliance guidelines for staking, but its chairman also publicly stated that “Ethereum is not a security”—this statement sounds simple, but it has great significance for building confidence in the entire ecosystem. At the same time, the U.S. has passed the GENIUS Act, establishing a regulatory framework for stablecoins at the federal level for the first time.

There have also been breakthroughs in the privacy sector. The sanctions on Tornado Cash have been lifted, which means that privacy contracts have received judicial support—privacy has transformed from a compliance risk into a core capability of the infrastructure.

Scale of Institutional Application Implementation

JPMorgan has launched the tokenized money market fund MONY on the Ethereum mainnet; BlackRock's BUIDL product once approached $3 billion in scale; the asset scale of spot ETFs has reached $28.6 billion. What do these numbers reflect? It shows that traditional finance is beginning to treat Ethereum as a true settlement layer.

Stablecoin data is more intuitive: the total supply has exceeded $300 billion, with an annual transaction volume of approximately $46 trillion, of which Ethereum accounts for 54% market share. This is not just a number; it indicates that Ethereum is becoming the actual bearer of the global settlement network.

Complete Maturity of Layer 2

Base, Arbitrum, and zkSync have implemented a tiered fee structure for the Asian American market. Their total locked value has reached $35.7 billion, and trading volume has surpassed that of the Ethereum mainnet itself — this is a milestone event.

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 surpassed 1 trillion USD, and Aave's active lending scale has reached 25 billion USD. These leading applications are not only growing but are also accelerating in growth.

The Integration of AI and Ethereum

The ERC-8004 standard establishes the identity and asset standards for AI Agents, while the x402 protocol launched by Coinbase supports micropayments between machines—this means that AI systems can independently complete transactions and value transfers on Ethereum. Increasingly, there are voices suggesting that Ethereum is becoming the core settlement layer of the AI economy.

Sustained Vitality of the Ecosystem

The number of Ethereum developers continues to grow, with offline events taking place in many locations around the world. At the milestone of its tenth anniversary, this ecosystem has neither stagnated nor overexpanded, but rather shows a steady development trend.

Looking back at 2025, Ethereum is no longer a “future vision” or “ideal blueprint”; it has become a set of globally scaled infrastructure that is operating stably. Every dimension, from technology to regulation, from institutions to ecology, is validating this conclusion.