Ether experienced its most challenging first quarter in seven years in terms of price performance. Nonetheless, the Ethereum platform continues to advance, with founder Vitalik Buterin unveiling a new roadmap aimed at enhancing the ecosystem’s security and finality.
Rivals to Ethereum
Platforms that mimic Ethereum’s capabilities while attempting to address its shortcomings are often referred to as “Ethereum killers.”
Speculation about Ethereum’s demise has been so prevalent that a dedicated website was established to chronicle its supposed “deaths,” with the count reaching 133 at the time of writing.
Ethereum faces criticism for overlooking the community’s feedback during the current market cycle.
Overall, Ethereum’s underwhelming market performance, especially in light of Solana’s achievements, could indicate a significant crisis.
Despite its recent tumultuous path and the fact that some users and developers have shown a preference for its competitors, Ether remains the second-largest cryptocurrency after Bitcoin by market capitalization.
In March, Ethereum surpassed its primary competitor, Solana, in trading volume by 22%, reclaiming its status as the leading platform in the DeFi sector for the first time since September 2024. When it comes to Total Value Locked (TVL), Ethereum significantly outstrips Solana.
Moreover, Ethereum supports 53% of the stablecoin market. Thus, even amid a persistent price drop, Ethereum retains its position as the second-biggest cryptocurrency brand after Bitcoin.
The platform still enjoys a robust following among crypto enthusiasts, investors, and industry experts. Buterin remains a leading voice in the crypto community, and the essential point is that the platform continues to progress.
The newly introduced roadmap from March reinforces this trajectory.
Addressing Scalability Challenges
The recent roadmap, released on March 28, outlines the proposed measures to confront one of Ethereum’s most infamous challenges: inadequate scalability. The network has faced several major slowdowns, resulting in performance issues.
A notable instance occurred in December 2017, when the network’s speed was severely affected by the Cryptokitties game, which included in-game ETH transactions. During that time, the transaction volume reached 10% of all Ethereum transactions, causing significant disruptions.
The issues concerning scalability were highlighted in 2017, and as of 2025, Ethereum is still working to resolve this critical challenge, especially as it underpins most of the NFT and stablecoin markets, as well as various other decentralized platforms and tokens built on it.
The Ethereum team has actively sought solutions, with the pivotal shift from a proof-of-work to a proof-of-stake consensus model in 2022 marking a significant milestone.
In addition to improving scalability, the new roadmap also aims to bolster the network’s security.
Understanding the New Roadmap
Buterin has outlined three key directions for Ethereum’s future development:
- Increasing the number of blobs to 72 by 2026
- Aiming for instant secure finality through a 2-of-3 hybrid-proof architecture
- Enhancing aggregation levels
This may be a complex list for those unfamiliar with Ethereum’s framework, so let’s clarify.
The proposed enhancements will involve boosting the number of active roll-ups and blobs. Roll-ups are smart contracts that process transactions off-chain and feed data back to the mainnet, thereby enhancing network speed and reducing transaction fees.
There are three types of roll-ups: optimism (OP), zero-knowledge (ZK), and trusted execution environments (TEE).
Ethereum aims to implement sharding, which divides the network into smaller, more manageable segments. Blobs serve as the Proto-Danksharding objects used for data structuring. Increasing the number of blobs will facilitate better rollup functionality.
According to Buterin, by year-end, the network will be upgraded to the Pectra version (scheduled for May 2025), utilizing six blobs, while the Fusaka version might accommodate up to 72 blobs.
The overarching goal of the new roadmap is to deploy a hybrid-proof architecture that will enhance the speed and integrity of the Ethereum network.
By employing a hybrid model, Ethereum will avoid reliance on a single type of proof. Transactions can be finalized immediately if their state roots are validated by both ZK and TEE rollups. If either ZK or TEE fails to approve a transaction, it will still be validated through OP rollups, albeit with a longer processing time.
According to Buterin, such scenarios should be rare. Most transactions are expected to be finalized instantaneously, checked by two independent roll-ups, one of which (ZK) is entirely trustless.
Buterin concludes:
This gets us to a pragmatic higher level of fast finality and security while getting us to the key stage 2 milestone of full trustlessness in the case where proof systems (OP and ZK) work correctly. It will reduce round-trip times for market makers to 1 hour or even much lower, allowing fees for intent-based cross-L2 bridging to be very low.
In the concluding sections of the roadmap, Buterin emphasized that the development team must intensify efforts on standardized proof aggregation layers to scale across the entire Ethereum ecosystem.
Proof systems grounded in ZK should utilize singular aggregate proofs to lower gas costs. Buterin identified Layer2 applications and zkemail-like wallet recoveries as “the most natural initial use cases” for this approach.
The roadmap has received mixed responses, with some members of the Ethereum community expressing dissatisfaction with its focus on Layer2. Whether the proposed adjustments will prevent Ethereum from declining further remains to be seen.