Today is May 6, 2025, and tomorrow is the day of the Ethereum upgrade, a day that many Ethereum holders are looking forward to.

The market has been very quiet in recent months, with retail investors and novices in a wait-and-see state, having no direction for the future after experiencing a significant drop.

Four years ago, we were at the peak of a booming bull market, creating a stark contrast with the present, which has led the market to question the bull market.

For retail investors and novices in the crypto space, there is currently no interest, but this is only true for retail investors, as they judge heroes based on market ups and downs.

No matter how impressive you are, if the price falls, you are garbage in the eyes of retail investors; if it rises, the project team can do no wrong.

However, for seasoned institutions and professional investors, this is the most noteworthy time to pay attention to the market, and the time that interests seasoned investors the most. It's been a year and a half since the favorable news about Bitcoin ETFs and Ethereum ETFs, and after such a long time, another major positive is finally approaching: the Ethereum Prague upgrade on May 7.

First, we need to be clear about why major institutions and professional investors are paying attention to the Prague upgrade.

1. The most important aspect of the Prague upgrade is the optimization of the staking mechanism.

The maximum staking limit for a single validator has been increased from 32 ETH to 2048 ETH, raising it by a full 64 times.

This upgrade significantly reduces operational costs for institutions, attracting more institutions to participate and greatly increasing the security of staking.

The reason the SEC has not approved Ethereum ETF staking for a long time lies here.

Currently, the number of ETFs held by institutions requires about a month to complete staking, and withdrawing takes half a month. For institutions, this is a risk, and they cannot enter and exit freely.

After the Prague upgrade is approved, millions of Ethereum can be completely staked in just one day and withdrawn within half a day.

Therefore, after the Prague upgrade, it also provided the SEC with a reason to approve the staking of Ethereum ETFs, sparking interest from other institutions in purchasing Ethereum ETFs.

Institutions are large funders; as more institutions participate, purchase more, and stake more, the circulation decreases, which speaks for itself for the coin price.

2. Enhanced data availability for Layer 2

Simply put, the optimization reduced the data publishing costs for Layer 2, decreased user transaction fees, lightened the burden on nodes, and increased decentralization, laying the foundation for the future dApp ecosystem and attracting more projects and users.

There are many more upgrades in the Prague upgrade that I won't detail here; I've selected those that are understandable and more core.

With Ethereum's price continuously falling recently, the market almost unanimously believes that Ethereum has collapsed. Therefore, retail investors might not even care about what the Prague upgrade is.

This is also the difference between retail investors and professional investors; retail investors focus on the present, buying whoever is performing well.

Professional investors invest in the future, analyzing and researching from various aspects, finding buy points from the market, and then waiting for value to return.

To put it bluntly, when everyone thinks Bitcoin, Solana, Sui, and some other coins are performing well, it just means they have risen. However, just because you think they are good doesn't mean you will make money if you buy in.

However, for those who have conducted in-depth research on these coins, they have already positioned themselves and are now significantly profiting and starting to cash out.

So when we invest, we must be objective; we cannot judge something as good or bad based on price fluctuations; otherwise, we will always be reacting too late.

It's like Xiaomi with Lei Jun; now everyone thinks Xiaomi is impressive, and recently its stock hit a new high.

However, in previous years, after a surge, it fell again, and many said Xiaomi was trash, but is Xiaomi really trash?

Only if you do not know Xiaomi and do not understand it will you judge it based on its short-term price fluctuations; when it rises, you think the company is impressive, and when it recently fell, you say Xiaomi is going down because of the car fire incident.

The fiercest discussions about good and bad are always from those who do not understand; truly knowledgeable institutions and professional investors will not judge based on short-term market fluctuations.

Only when you fully understand a project's 'financial situation, fundamentals, technical aspects, political environment, and capital situation' can you clearly discern whether it is good or bad. Short-term market conditions and news are intentionally presented to you; only by seeing through phenomena to the essence can you truly seize significant opportunities.