Vitalik Buterin takes the wheel again! Countdown to Ethereum's quantum leap: Can the Pectra upgrade maintain the soul of Decentralization?

Author: Cointelegraph

Compiled by: Lawrence, Mars Finance

Why is the Ethereum upgrade important?

The Ethereum upgrade is crucial for scaling, securing, and developing the network without compromising its decentralized foundation.

Ethereum remains a heavyweight in the smart contract platform space, but maintaining its lead means constant innovation. Each upgrade is not just a technical adjustment; it is a high-stakes move aimed at tackling the most challenging issues in the cryptocurrency realm: scalability bottlenecks, soaring Gas fees, cumbersome user registration processes, and the ever-increasing centralization.

In the competition where competitors are shortening trading times and optimizing user experiences, stagnation is not a good strategy. In order to occupy a central position in decentralized finance (DeFi), non-fungible tokens (NFT), and the entire Web3 space, Ethereum must continuously enhance its execution and consensus engine.

Ethereum Development Roadmap - from the upcoming Pectra upgrade to Fusaka and Glamsterdam Ethereum updates - is not just a technical checklist. It is a balancing act: continuously expanding to meet global demands while upholding its decentralized ethos. In many ways, these upgrades are not just upgrades, but the ultimate stress test for the future development of Ethereum.

Did you know? Since 2015, Ethereum has completed 16 major upgrades—from the historic transition to Proof of Stake (PoS) in the 2022 merge, to the early sharding steps of Altair in 2021.

Vitalik Buterin's new focus on Ethereum

Vitalik Buterin's vision for Ethereum has fully shifted towards long-term research, opening new frontiers in scalability, privacy, and decentralization.

In 2024, a major leadership change at the Ethereum Foundation opened a new chapter. Vitalik Buterin stepped back from daily operations to return to his core expertise: planning the future of Ethereum. After shedding the burden of management, Buterin began to delve into some challenging issues: scaling Ethereum for billions of users, embedding privacy protection at the protocol level, and maintaining decentralization in a rapidly centralizing world.

Buterin's main research areas include:

Ethereum Scalability Roadmap: Exploring new execution models to make Ethereum faster and cheaper while not sacrificing security.

Privacy Enhancement: Develop native features such as stealth addresses and private transactions to protect users by default.

Consensus and Execution Redesign: Rethinking how nodes validate and process transactions to prepare for a highly scalable, decentralized Ethereum.

Buterin outlined a vision for an ecosystem that will remain open, trustless, and adaptable to a larger, more complex global landscape.

Did you know? Vitalik first proposed Ethereum in 2013 when he was only 19 years old because he felt that Bitcoin needed a more programmable architecture.

From Merging to Squandering: Ethereum's Six-Phase Vision

The evolution of Ethereum is divided into six conceptual phases—each phase addressing different fundamental challenges in blockchain design.

Merge: Replace PoW with PoS ( to lay the foundation for long-term sustainability and validator-based security.

Surge: Focused on scaling the network through technologies such as aggregation, data availability (e.g., Ethereum Improvement Proposal )EIP( 4844), and PeerDAS (Peer Data Availability Sampling), with a goal of 100,000 transactions per second.

Disaster: Aimed at eliminating miners / maximum extractable value )MEV( and achieving stake decentralization, exploring tools such as listing inclusion and sacred proposer-builder separation )ePBS(.

The Verge: Introducing Verkle Trees and SNARK-based light clients to make Ethereum state access more efficient and achieve stateless block validation.

Clear: Simplify the protocol by trimming historical data (via EIP-4444), eliminate technical debt, and reduce node hardware requirements.

Extravagance: covers everything else, from Ethereum Object Format (EOF) to deep encryption experiments, refining the architecture of Ethereum through long-term improvements.

Ethereum Pectra Upgrade Instructions

The Ethereum Pectra upgrade is expected to take place in May 2025, merging the previous two upgrade tracks and laying the technical foundation for Ethereum's next decade.

Pectra has merged two parallel upgrade tracks: Prague (execution layer) and Electra (consensus layer), integrating more than a dozen Ethereum Improvement Proposals )EIP( into a milestone version. It lays the foundation for the next phase of Ethereum - more secure smart contracts, more powerful wallets, and a smoother staking experience.

Key EIPs and Features:

EIP-2537: BLS12-381 Precompiled - Crucial for zero-knowledge rollups and cryptographic proofs.

EIP-7002: Exit Trigger - Allows validators to exit by executing layer triggers.

EIP-7702: Account Abstraction - Making the behavior of Externally Owned Accounts (EOA) more like smart contracts.

EIP-7840: Blob Scheduling - Preparing for increased data throughput and summary scaling.

EIP-6110, EIP-7685, EIP-7549, etc.: Further execution and improvement of consensus.

These changes collectively introduce EOF, a modular contract structure that simplifies auditing and brings native account abstraction closer to reality, enabling smart accounts, gasless transactions, and a better user experience for mainstream adoption.

The official release date of Pectra Ethereum is set for May 2025, but the release date may be adjusted based on the final testnet results.

Did you know? During peak hours, Ethereum can process over 1 million transactions in a day—future upgrades aim to further enhance this capacity.

What will happen after Pectra: Fusaka and Glamsterdam

Fusaka and Glamsterdam represent the next phase of the Ethereum development roadmap, bringing the scalability and efficiency improvements needed for mass adoption.

Following Pectra, the Ethereum 2025 roadmap continues with two ambitious upgrades:

Fusaka (Osaka-Fulu): Introduced PeerDAS, a groundbreaking technology that will enable Ethereum to handle massive amounts of data without causing blockchain bloat. By sampling small chunks of data instead of downloading full blocks, Fusaka will achieve lighter nodes and higher transaction throughput.

Glamsterdam (Amsterdam – G-Star): The Glamsterdam Ethereum update is still in the early design stage, focusing on gas optimization and protocol-level efficiency improvements. Its core goal is to enhance the operating speed and cost of Ethereum, particularly suitable for complex applications such as Layer-2 Rollups and zero-knowledge )ZK( technology.

Fusaka directly addresses the scalability issue, while Glamsterdam ensures that the network operates efficiently under high load without compromising decentralization. Together, they mark Ethereum's transition from early Layer-2 scaling experiments to a mature, high-throughput, global settlement layer.

The research direction of Buterin's upgrade roadmap.

Buterin's vision for the future of crypto pushes Ethereum into experimental territory, exploring new architectures for execution, consensus, and privacy.

In addition to the immediate upgrade timeline, Vitalik's research is also addressing larger structural issues:

Post-EVM Architecture: Consider adopting modular virtual machines such as RISC-V to replace or evolve the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) to improve performance and flexibility.

Decentralized Expansion: Deepening the future of Ethereum Layer 2 through advances in aggregation-centric scaling and light client verification.

2025 Cryptocurrency Future Plans: Exploring the balance between innovation and decentralization in an environment of increasing regulatory pressure and technological complexity.

These research clues may shape the next generation upgrade of Ethereum beyond Glamsterdam - redefining what decentralized smart contract platforms will look like before 2030.

Did you know? Buterin's latest research explores RISC-V (an open hardware standard), which is expected to become a future alternative to the EVM, making Ethereum more modular and globally verifiable.

The next phase of Ethereum: Achieving global expansion while defending decentralization.

The next phase of Ethereum is to maintain decentralization while expanding its global usage, a balance that is rarely achieved by other chains.

The Ethereum consensus upgrade conducted through Pectra, Fusaka, and Glamsterdam is crucial for the following reasons:

Global availability: Lower fees and faster confirmation times are crucial for millions of users in Ethereum services such as DeFi, NFTs, gaming, and emerging industries.

Layer 2 Collaboration: A more scalable Layer 1 makes Layer 2 aggregation cheaper, faster, and more secure, thereby promoting the development of the Ethereum ecosystem.

Long-term elasticity: Upgrading the execution layer, consensus, and privacy protection now ensures that Ethereum can still resist centralization pressures in the future.

Ultimately, the Ethereum scalability roadmap is not just about larger numbers—it also involves protecting what makes Ethereum different in a world moving towards centralized alternatives.

So, what should you pay attention to?

Buterin's vision for Ethereum points to a future with complete flexibility, deeper privacy, and unstoppable decentralization.

As the release date of Pectra Ethereum (scheduled for May 7) approaches and the upcoming Glamsterdam Ethereum update draws near, Ethereum's innovation engine is running at full speed. With Buterin's vision for the future of cryptocurrency gradually coming into focus, the Ethereum blockchain is not only prepared to survive the next wave of competition but is also gearing up to thrive.

The journey from merging to a fully modular, massively scalable network has just begun.