Ethereum spent 2025 moving through internal change even as its market price trailed expectations. The year brought a leadership reset at the Ethereum Foundation and two major protocol upgrades, Pectra and Fusaka, with the main themes centered on account abstraction, scalability, privacy, and interoperability.
Foundation leadership and structure were overhauled early in the year
At the start of 2025, the Ethereum Foundation faced criticism over direction and leadership. Public calls for “wartime leadership” pushed those debates into concrete action in February. Longtime executive director Aya Miyaguchi moved into the role of president, while Vitalik Buterin said leadership would be restructured. Hsiao-Wei Wang and Tomasz K. Stańczak were named co-executive directors, and Danny Ryan took charge of a new narrative and marketing unit called Etherealize.
During the spring, the Foundation simplified its board and R&D structure, merged some teams, and carried out layoffs to concentrate resources on core protocol work. Those organizational changes were quickly matched by technical execution on mainnet.
Pectra brought EIP-7702, larger validator limits and more blob capacity
Pectra, activated in May as the Prague-Electra merger, introduced several core changes. According to the source material, the upgrade used EIP-7702 to bring account abstraction to mainnet, raised the maximum validator stake cap to 2,048 ETH, and expanded data blob capacity.
In the first week after activation, thousands of new authorization transactions appeared on mainnet, pointing to fast wallet-provider adoption of smart-account flows. Launched at the same time, the “Trillion Dollar Security” program set out to address threat surfaces, protocol risks, and user-experience vulnerabilities as Ethereum pursued the standards expected of global financial infrastructure.
Fusaka shifted attention to Layer-2 throughput and cross-rollup links
By summer, development focus had turned to Fusaka. Vitalik Buterin said the PeerDAS data-availability design at the center of the upgrade would materially increase Layer-2 capacity. The “dAI” initiative was also announced during this period, presenting Ethereum as base infrastructure for AI systems and opening work on decentralized AI applications.
Interoperability work advanced in parallel. As the Layer-2 field became more crowded, Ethereum contributors pushed for a user and developer experience that felt closer to a single blockchain. That effort led to the release of “Interop Layer” frameworks for cross-rollup messaging and developer tooling.
Privacy plans expanded as gas limits rose and the next fork cycle was set
Privacy became a larger focus across the year. The Foundation published an end-to-end roadmap covering private read-write and proof processes, then created a dedicated Privacy Cluster team for that domain. In the fall, the Kohaku proposal outlined how privacy-focused applications could be supported without sacrificing auditability or decentralization.
By the end of November, Ethereum’s block gas limit had been lifted to 60 million. Fusaka was then implemented, and the network moved to a twice-yearly hard fork schedule. Near the close of the year, the next planned 2026 upgrade was named “Hegota,” giving the medium-term roadmap a clearer shape.