Ethereum is coming into dramatic steerage as she forges past realizations to restart her battle to regain her crown atop the crypto area. The Ethereum Foundation has named two new co-executive directors, Tomasz Stańczak and Hsiao-Wei Wang. This decision is intended to deepen leadership at a critical time for the industry. Ethereum’s plans to help better standardize and incentivize increased integration between Layer 2 projects have started taking form. Simultaneously, players are in conversation about redirecting efforts toward strengthening its fundamental base layer.
Ethereum is at the cusp of a great wave of revitalizing challenges, all of which calls for technical upgrades and adaptable community responses. Industry leaders remain hopeful that a series of planned upgrades will spur Ethereum’s resurgence. The community's ability to align its vision with Ethereum's evolving strategy will play a crucial role in determining the network's future.
The Ethereum Foundation took an important step in the right direction when they named Tomasz Stańczak and Hsiao-Wei Wang co-executive directors. With this decision, we hope to continue to bolster their leadership. These leaders will need to continue to guide Ethereum through today’s struggles, with a newly intense focus on scalability and interoperability. Their roles will be to coordinate technical developments, facilitate community alignment, and accelerate the implementation of impactful upgrades.
Ethereum is now more than ever prioritizing interoperability between Layer 1 and Layer 2 solutions. Yet the move to Layer 2 solutions, while greatly expanding capacity, has ironically exacerbated interoperability challenges. Standardizing and incentivizing greater real-time integration of these popular new Layer 2 projects, such as beginning to standardize them through open source platforms. Widespread adoption of such zk-based systems (or zkVMs) might increase Layer 1 capacity a 100 times or more without losing decentralization.
David Hoffman, the co-founder of Bankless, recently made the case for why Ethereum should re-centralize its priorities. He stressed the need to make its base layer better. For Hoffman, Ethereum’s lack of Layer 1 scaling investment has led to the current market situation. He suggested scaling Layer 1 to the max by raising gas limits – a lot.
The upcoming Pectra upgrade, set for May 7, 2025, is one of the most awaited changes on the Ethereum network. It’s set to significantly increase scalability, lower costs per transaction and widen digital wallet capabilities. We hope the successful creation and adoption of Pectra will begin to solve the biggest challenges that our network is facing today.
While Ethereum implements these technical upgrades, we the community, need to upgrade with them. The Ethereum community will need to harmonize its long-term vision with the network’s quickly developing short-term tactical approach. This alignment will be important for success in the community’s long-term vision. Open conversation, collaboration, and a unified vision of the shared goals will be key to making it through this time of transition.
