The bull run is back, can the Ethereum Pectra upgrade turn the tide?

The Pectra upgrade and RISC-V proposal aim to enhance scalability, drop costs, and maintain security and compatibility.

Original Title: 《Ethereum's Path Forward》

Written by: @YashasEdu

Compiled by: zhouzhou, BlockBeats

Editor’s note: Ethereum is facing fierce competition from new public chains like Solana, with prices not reaching new highs and activity declining. The Pectra upgrade and RISC-V proposal aim to enhance scalability, drop costs, and maintain security and compatibility. Meanwhile, Solana is rising rapidly with high efficiency and low costs, challenging Ethereum's position.

The following is the original content (the original content has been organized for better readability):

Ethereum's price has not yet reached a new high in 2025, and the ETH/BTC exchange rate has dropped to its lowest point in five years (0.02). Competitive narratives such as L2 and re-staking have not effectively enhanced its value. Meanwhile, transaction fees have also fallen to their lowest level since 2020, with an average of only $0.36 per transaction.

As the number of @solana users surges (with daily active users reaching 3.25 million, compared to Ethereum's 410,000), its daily transaction volume also far surpasses that of Ethereum (35.99 million transactions vs 1.13 million transactions), many people are starting to wonder: how will this second-largest global link progress?

Two major upgrades that could reshape the future of Ethereum.

1. Upcoming Pectra Upgrade

2. Vitalik proposed to replace the existing EVM with RISC-V technology.

Pectra upgrade (expected to go live on May 7, 2025)

The Pectra upgrade integrates two updates that were originally meant to be separate (the execution layer's "Prague" and the consensus layer's "Electra") into a comprehensive upgrade, which includes a total of 11 EIPs, aimed at improving the scalability, efficiency, and security of Ethereum.

Three Core Improvements of Pectra

1. Greater scalability

• Introduce PeerDAS and Verkle Trees technology to greatly enhance transaction processing capability.
• Optimize data storage, drop node operating costs
• Hash tree technology accelerates network synchronization speed

2. Lower transaction costs

• Network congestion slows down, Gas fees are expected to drop significantly.
• EIP-7702 implements account abstraction, allowing users to pay Gas with stablecoins instead of only ETH.
• Batch trading and customizable security features enhance the wallet experience.

3. A more完善的质押机制

• EIP-7251 increases the maximum staking limit for each validator from 32 ETH to 2048 ETH, facilitating institutional participation and drop in operational costs.
• EIP-6110 moves the handling of validators' staking to the execution layer, reducing the activation time for validators by approximately 48 hours.

RISC-V Proposal (Long-term Change?)

Vitalik recently proposed a more radical idea: replacing the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) with RISC-V technology, which will fundamentally change the way Ethereum runs smart contracts.

What is RISC-V?

RISC-V is an open-source instruction set architecture (simply put, it is a language that tells the processor how to execute commands).

Unlike the Ethereum-exclusive EVM, the advantage of RISC-V is:

• Completely open source and free
• Has been widely used in mainstream computing hardware
• More suitable for complex calculations
• More friendly to zero-knowledge proof (zk) technology

Why Replace EVM?

1. Performance has significantly improved:

• RISC-V is expected to increase execution efficiency by 100 times.
• Transaction fees have significantly dropped.
• Private transactions and cross-chain functionality will become more feasible.

2. Better support for ZK technology:

The current zkEVM system must first convert EVM instructions into RISC-V, and then generate zero-knowledge proofs, which imposes a computational burden of 100 to 1000 times.

Native support for RISC-V will skip this conversion step.

For example, the zkVM (SP1) from @SuccinctLabs can directly run smart contracts using RISC-V.

Summary: In the current situation where the popularity of L2 narratives and restaking has failed to boost ETH's performance, the Pectra upgrade and the RISC-V initiative may be key points for a new "breakthrough" for Ethereum. The former is a practical update for short-term efficiency improvement and cost reduction, while the latter represents a long-term revolution in the underlying structure of smart contracts.

3. Continuity of Developers:

• Developers can still use Solidity or Vyper to write smart contracts.
• These languages only need to use RISC-V as a new backend target
• User experience will hardly have any noticeable changes.

4. Implementation Timeline:

This is not a change that will be implemented immediately. Vitalik's proposal represents a long-term vision, which is expected to:

• Gradual implementation, taking about 2-3 years
• Retain the old system (EVM interpreter) during the transition period
• Ultimately enabling Ethereum to compete with efficient chains like Solana and Monad.

What does this mean for the future of Ethereum?

Ethereum is facing a survival challenge: while maintaining its leading position as the primary smart contract platform, it must address the performance bottlenecks that emerging blockchains have successfully overcome.

The Pectra upgrade addresses the urgent issues of staking, transaction costs, and user experience, while the RISC-V proposal focuses on the fundamental execution architecture of Ethereum, aiming to provide a technological foundation to compete with faster public chains, while maintaining its security and decentralization advantages.

For users, these changes ultimately mean

• Faster transaction processing speed
• Lower fees
• More possibilities for new applications (such as on-chain AI, privacy features)
• Achieve better scalability without compromising security.

By advancing a performance enhancement plan while maintaining compatibility with existing applications, Ethereum is attempting to evolve without abandoning its core principles and ecosystem.

But whether these changes are enough to maintain its market position in the face of faster-growing competitors remains to be seen.

If it's not Ethereum, then who could it be? The latest data shows that the competitive landscape is undergoing significant changes. Although the top ten DeFi protocols still operate on Ethereum, we have also seen warning signs that its leading advantage is weakening.

Projects like @jito_sol and @JupiterExchange are rapidly developing on other chains, while @convergeonchain (Ethena's RWA public chain) has completely left the Ethereum ecosystem. These dynamics indicate that Ethereum's leading position is not set in stone, raising a key question.

What technological breakthroughs does Ethereum need in the future to maintain its competitiveness?

According to data from @nansen_ai, Solana has recently surpassed Ethereum in total staked market value (which is an important milestone for the SOL ecosystem), indicating that institutional confidence in Solana's staking infrastructure is rapidly increasing.

At the same time, Solana outperformed all other public chains in terms of revenue in the first quarter of 2025 while still maintaining extremely low transaction fees. This combination of "high revenue + low user cost" demonstrates Solana's efficient economic model.

These advancements undoubtedly place greater pressure on Ethereum's technical roadmap. Although the Pectra upgrade and the potential RISC-V transformation aim to address Ethereum's scalability and cost issues, Solana continues to gain market attention and share with its existing architecture.