#以太坊未来可不可期？

1. The wrongly killed crypto blue chips
On May 1, 2025, the price of Ethereum (ETH) rebounded strongly after briefly dipping to $1,760, with an intraday volatility of 12%. On the same day, whale addresses on the blockchain increased their holdings by over 400,000 ETH. Behind this resurgence is an astonishing fact revealed in the latest report from Fidelity Digital Assets: the MVRV-Z Score (Market Value to Realized Value Ratio) of ETH has fallen to -0.18, entering the "severely undervalued" range, while the number of active addresses in its Layer 2 ecosystem has exceeded 13.6 million, reaching an all-time high. The severe dislocation between technology and the market is driving this battle for the crown of public chains to a climax.
2. Technological Revolution:
L1 Awakening and L2 Resonance The counterattack script of Ethereum begins with two groundbreaking technological breakthroughs: EIP-9698: L1's desperate counterattack The EIP-9698 proposal put forward by senior researcher Dankrad Feist plans to increase the Gas limit from 36 million to 3.6 billion over four years, causing Layer 1's theoretical TPS to soar to 2000, directly crushing Solana's daily performance. This "highway widening surgery" is divided into two phases: • 2025-2026: Gas limit increased 10 times to 360 million, single block transaction capacity jumps from 180 to 6000; • 2027-2028: Gas limit increased again by 10 times to achieve 2000 transactions per second, while reducing hard fork risks through a client voting mechanism. If the proposal is implemented, the transaction cost of the Ethereum mainnet will plummet by 90%, significantly lowering the development threshold for high-frequency DApps, directly challenging the performance hegemony of rising stars like Solana and Aptos.
Layer 2 Ecosystem Explosion When the market focuses on mainnet upgrades, Ethereum's Layer 2 network has quietly built an "invisible empire":
• User scale: The top Layer 2 solutions such as Arbitrum and Optimism have surpassed 5.8 million active addresses weekly, accounting for 58% of the total DeFi trading volume on the entire chain;
• Capital siphoning: Institutions like BlackRock and Fidelity are laying out tokenized funds (RWA) through Layer 2, with monthly locked amount increasing by 37% to $48 billion;
• Technological Integration: Uniswap V4 launched on the Base network, achieving a hybrid architecture of "L2 liquidity aggregation + mainnet settlement", reducing trading slippage to 0.05%. This revolution of "L1 and L2 co-evolution" is breaking the "impossible triangle" of blockchain - Fidelity's report estimates that the comprehensive TPS of the Ethereum ecosystem has reached 8500, far exceeding Solana's 3200.
3. Value Reassessment:
Three major indicators reveal bottom signals The market's pessimistic expectations for Ethereum create a dramatic divergence from the positive signals in on-chain data:
Extremely undervalued valuation metrics
• MVRV-Z Score: A historical low of -0.18, equal to the eve of the DeFi explosion in 2020, indicating a 98% probability of being at the cycle bottom;
• NUPL (Net Unrealized Profit and Loss): The zero value reflects that investors have entered the "surrender phase", similar to the characteristics of the end of the 2018 bear market;
• ETH/BTC exchange rate: a five-year low of 0.017, but Layer 2 adoption has surpassed the Bitcoin ecosystem by 3.2 times, creating a strong value divergence. Institutional undercurrents are surging.
• ETF Layout: BlackRock's Ethereum Spot ETF holdings have surpassed 1.2 million coins, an increase of 80% compared to three months ago;
• Staking Lockup: The proportion of ETH staked on the Beacon Chain has risen to 35%, with annualized returns from protocols like Lido reaching 5.8%, attracting a continuous inflow of risk-averse funds;
• Derivatives Signal: CME Ethereum futures open interest has surpassed $8.2 billion, with call options accounting for 63%, the highest since 2023.
Ecological Value Capture
• Gas fee black hole ends: After the implementation of EIP-9698, the mainnet Gas fee is expected to drop to $0.001, with user retention increasing to 92%;
• Developer Migration Trend: The market share of the Solidity language has rebounded to 68%, an increase of 23 percentage points from the low in 2024;
• Compliance Breakthrough: The Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission has approved the Ethereum Staking ETF, opening a $120 billion traditional asset management investment channel.
4. Path to Counterattack:
The triple resonance of technology, capital, and regulation. The revival of Ethereum is by no means a coincidence, but rather the result of multiple forces acting together:
Technological paradigm shift
• Pectra Upgrade: The hard fork scheduled for May 7 will double the Blob capacity to 6, paving the way for EIP-9698;
• RISC-V Revolution: The new virtual machine architecture proposed by Vitalik enhances the execution efficiency of smart contracts by a hundred times and reduces ZK proof costs by 80%;
• Quantum Resistance: The Ethereum Foundation has collaborated with IBM to develop a quantum-resistant signature algorithm, expected to complete mainnet deployment by 2026. Capital structure transformation
• Institutional rebalancing: Grayscale ETHE fund discount rate narrowed to -3%, with BlackRock's IBETH seeing a net inflow of $420 million in a week; • Stablecoin migration: 75% of reserves of mainstream stablecoins such as USDC and DAI have moved to Layer 2, with average daily settlement volume exceeding $12 billion;
• Accelerated Deflation: After the implementation of EIP-9698, the annual destruction of ETH is expected to increase to 4 million coins, and the circulating supply will enter a period of negative growth. A ray of hope for regulatory breakthroughs.
• Shift in US policy: The SEC may ease the classification of ETH as a security due to pressure from the Trump administration, and the tax-exempt policy for staking income enters the legislative process;
• The Rise of Hong Kong as a Hub: The launch of the digital Hong Kong dollar (e-HKD) and Ethereum cross-chain protocol enables atomic swaps between offshore RMB and ETH;
• Global Standard Output: The IMF adopts Ethereum smart contracts as the RWA issuance framework, and 46 central banks start the ETH cross-border settlement pilot.