Ethereum has weathered a difficult start to 2025, marking its worst first-quarter price performance in seven years. Despite these tough market conditions, founder Vitalik Buterin has unveiled a comprehensive new roadmap aimed at enhancing Ethereum’s security and drastically improving network finality, in an effort to silence persistent critics.
Ether, the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, has faced continuous competition from rival platforms widely touted by their proponents as “Ethereum killers.” These alternative networks, notably including Solana, seek to improve upon Ethereum’s shortcomings, particularly regarding scalability and transaction costs. The criticisms have become so frequent that a dedicated web resource, Ethereum Obituaries, tracks each declaration of the network’s supposed end, currently noting 133 predicted demises.
Recent community criticism of Ethereum stems from a perception that the network’s management has overlooked developers’ and users’ concerns. Combined with a significant drop in ETH’s market price—down nearly 35% within two months after certain high-profile endorsements—such sentiment could signal deeper issues. Nonetheless, Ethereum still retains an authoritative position: as of March, it surpassed Solana by 22% in trading volume, reclaiming its top spot in decentralized finance (DeFi) for the first time since September 2024. Ethereum also continues to dominate the stablecoin market, with about 53% market share, proving its significant network effect and broad usage despite recent price volatility.
A particularly challenging issue Ethereum has encountered over the years has been scalability. High traffic on the main Ethereum network frequently led to notable congestion, exemplified during the CryptoKitties craze of December 2017 when a single game’s popularity drastically slowed network transactions. Even in 2025, these scaling problems remain fundamental concerns, especially given Ethereum’s central role underpinning NFTs, DeFi tokens, stablecoins, and numerous decentralized applications.
In addressing these long-standing scalability and security concerns, Buterin’s recently published roadmap outlines key strategic goals: increasing network capacity, achieving instant and secure transaction finality, and more efficiently aggregating proofs across Ethereum’s layers.
More specifically, Ethereum’s team plans to significantly ramp up the number of data structures known as “blobs,” which underpin “rollups”—smart contracts designed to move transaction computation off-chain to improve the main network’s efficiency. According to Buterin, while a major protocol upgrade set for May 2025 (named “Pectra”) will initially implement six blobs, future developments (particularly the “Fusaka” upgrade by 2026) aim to expand this up to 72 blobs, drastically enhancing transaction throughput and speeding up finality.
At its core, Buterin’s vision involves deploying a sophisticated hybrid-proof architecture combining multiple roll-up technologies—zero-knowledge (ZK), optimistic (OP), and trusted execution environment (TEE) systems. Transactions will achieve “instant secure finality” when verified by both ZK and TEE methods simultaneously. If either approach fails initial verification, the optimistic rollup route will step in, albeit at a slower rate; however, this slower method is expected to be exceptionally rare.
As Buterin states, this hybrid architecture not only ensures high security and rapid transaction settlement times, but it also dramatically reduces operational costs, benefiting decentralized finance applications, L2 bridging solutions, and other Ethereum-based ecosystems.
Finally, the roadmap identifies the importance of standardizing aggregation layers—specifically zk-based “proof aggregations”—to serve the entire Ethereum ecosystem more cost-effectively. Applications include simplified wallets, robust decentralized identity verification, and secure layer-two ecosystems.
This ambitious roadmap, however promising, has sparked mixed reactions within the Ethereum community. Some critics remain skeptical about relying excessively on Layer-2 solutions and question whether this strategy might fragment the network further. Whether Buterin’s latest plans will overcome Ethereum’s ongoing challenges, regain the confidence of frustrated users, and stave off fierce competition from rival platforms remains to be seen.
