#EthereumFuture

Ethereum’s upgrades and future trajectory are shaping it into a blockchain powerhouse as of April 25, 2025. The journey began with The Merge (September 2022), shifting from Proof-of-Work to Proof-of-Stake, slashing energy use by 99.95% and enabling staking with 3–5% APY for validators holding 32 ETH. This laid the groundwork for scalability. The Surge focuses on scaling, introducing sharding to split the network into 64+ partitions for parallel processing, targeting over 100,000 transactions per second (TPS), complemented by Layer-2 solutions like Arbitrum and Optimism, which now handle 80% of DeFi activity with TVL exceeding $50 billion. The Verge enhances user experience via account abstraction (EIP-4337), simplifying wallet interactions. The upcoming Pectra hard fork (2025) will implement EIP-7702, optimizing data availability, cutting gas fees, and refining staking, boosting dApp adoption. Future phases, The Purge and The Splurge, will streamline code and finalize sharding, respectively, ensuring long-term efficiency and scalability. With ETH at $3,500 and predictions of $5,000 by year-end, driven by institutional ETF adoption and a thriving NFT/DeFi ecosystem, Ethereum faces competition from Solana but retains dominance due to its first-mover advantage and robust developer community.