Ethereum is trading back near record territory. ETH has moved above $4,700, leaving it roughly 4% below its all-time high, while Bybit has released a new research paper titled Ethereum at 10: A Decade of Disruption and the Road Ahead. The report reviews Ethereum’s first decade and sets out a forward-looking vision to 2035, at a time when institutional demand and market momentum are both strengthening.
From PoW to PoS, Ethereum’s role keeps expanding
According to Bybit, Ethereum’s shift from Proof-of-Work to Proof-of-Stake marked a foundational turning point for the network. That transition helped reinforce Ethereum’s position as core infrastructure for DeFi, NFTs, and tokenized real-world assets. The report says the network currently secures hundreds of billions of dollars in value and processes millions of daily transactions, underlining its importance across on-chain markets.
Scaling, modular design, and resilience headline the roadmap
Looking ahead, Bybit expects Ethereum’s next phase to center on scalability, efficiency, and security. Major themes include the use of sharding and layer-2 rollups to push the ecosystem toward millions of transactions per second, along with a leaner modular architecture and stronger resistance to future quantum-related threats. In that model, Ethereum would increasingly function as a settlement and security base layer, while more application activity shifts to L2 networks.
ETH may evolve into a benchmark yield asset
The report also argues that ETH is developing beyond a simple crypto asset into one with yield-bearing characteristics. Through staking rewards, ETH could play a larger role in setting benchmark rates across DeFi. Bybit further points to activity from institutions such as BlackRock, Visa, and Deutsche Bank in tokenization and enterprise blockchain infrastructure as evidence of growing institutional adoption.
By 2035, the exchange projects Ethereum could become a highly scaled and secure settlement layer capable of supporting trillions of dollars in annual on-chain activity, while maintaining a stable or even deflationary supply profile for ETH. With price momentum intact and institutional inflows rising, traders are now watching whether Ethereum can break to a new all-time high in the near term.