BlockBeats News, December 23rd: Ethereum Foundation member renaissancing released the Ethereum 2025 Year-End Summary: 2025 is seen as a watershed moment in Ethereum’s development history. Ethereum has officially shed the label of an “experimental network” and become a global infrastructure relied upon by financial institutions, developers, and AI systems.
At the protocol level, Ethereum completed two major hard forks within a year—Pectra in May and Fusaka in December. Pectra drove the full implementation of account abstraction, supporting gas fee sponsorship, transaction bundling, and passkey signatures; Fusaka significantly reduced costs through PeerDAS, achieving 8x scaling. Meanwhile, Ethereum raised the gas limit three times without a hard fork, demonstrating the network’s ability for continuous self-optimization.
Regulatory and institutional progress became key variables. The U.S. SEC released staking compliance guidelines, with its chair publicly stating that “Ethereum is not a security”; the U.S. passed the GENIUS Act, establishing the first federal-level stablecoin regulatory framework. The Tornado Cash sanctions were lifted, privacy contracts received judicial-level support, and privacy gradually shifted from a compliance risk to foundational capability building.
Institutions fully deployed applications. JPMorgan launched the tokenized money market fund MONY on the Ethereum mainnet; BlackRock’s BUIDL once approached a scale of $30 billion; Ethereum spot ETF assets under management reached $28.6 billion. Total stablecoin supply exceeded $300 billion, with annual trading volume around $46 trillion, and Ethereum captured 54% market share.
In terms of the ecosystem, Layer 2 reached full maturity. Networks like Base, Arbitrum, and zkSync achieved sub-cent fee levels, with total L2 total value locked reaching $35.7 billion, and transaction volume already surpassing the mainnet. DeFi total value locked rose to $93.9 billion, a 71% year-over-year increase; Uniswap annual trading volume exceeded $1 trillion, and Aave’s active lending scale reached $25 billion.
The integration of AI and Ethereum began to materialize. ERC-8004 established standards for AI Agent identity and assets, Coinbase launched the x402 protocol to support machine-to-machine micropayments, and Ethereum is seen as the core settlement layer for the AI economy.
At the ten-year milestone, Ethereum developer numbers continued to grow, with global offline events held in numerous locations. In 2025, Ethereum is no longer a “future vision” but a world-class infrastructure operating stably.
