Ethereum 2025 Year in Review: From "Experimental Network" to Global Infrastructure

BlockBeats News, December 23. A member of the Ethereum Foundation, renaissancing, released the Ethereum 2025 Year-End Review: 2025 was seen as a watershed moment in Ethereum's development history. Ethereum officially shed the label of an "experimental network" and became a global infrastructure relied upon by financial institutions, developers, and AI systems.

At the protocol level, Ethereum underwent two major hard forks within a year—Pectra in May and Fusaka in December. Pectra drove the comprehensive implementation of account abstraction, supporting Gas abstraction, transaction bundling, and EIP-3541 Passphrase Secret Sign. Fusaka significantly reduced costs through PeerDAS, achieving an 8x increase in throughput. Additionally, Ethereum adjusted the Gas limit three times without a hard fork, demonstrating the network's continuous self-improvement capability.

Regulatory and institutional progress became key factors. The U.S. SEC issued staking compliance guidelines and publicly stated by its chairman that "Ethereum is not a security." The U.S. passed the GENIUS Act, establishing the first federal stablecoin regulatory framework. Sanctions on Tornado Cash were lifted, privacy contracts received judicial support, and privacy gradually shifted from compliance risks to foundational capability building.

Institutional applications became widespread. JPMorgan Chase launched the tokenized money market fund MONY on the Ethereum mainnet, BlackRock's BUIDL scale reached nearly $30 billion, and Ethereum spot ETF assets under management reached $286 billion. The total stablecoin supply surpassed $3 trillion, with an annual trading volume of approximately $46 trillion, and Ethereum held a 54% market share.

In terms of the ecosystem, Layer 2 fully matured. Networks such as Base, Arbitrum, and zkSync implemented sub-ethereal tiered fees, with a total L2 locked value of $357 billion, surpassing on-chain transactions. The total DeFi locked value rose to $939 billion, a 71% year-on-year increase; Uniswap's annual trading volume exceeded $1 trillion, and Aave's active loan volume reached $250 billion.

The integration of AI and Ethereum began to take shape. ERC-8004 established the AI Agent's identity and asset standards, Coinbase introduced the x402 protocol to support machine-to-machine micropayments, and Ethereum was seen as the core settlement layer of the AI economy.

On its tenth-anniversary milestone, the number of Ethereum developers continued to grow, and global offline events were held in many locations. In 2025, Ethereum moved beyond being a "future vision" to being a stable and operational world-class infrastructure.