Ethereum in 2025 Becomes Global Infrastructure, Vitalik on Decentralization vs UX, L2BEAT on Trustless EIL, EIP-7702 Adoption

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The latest news we'll cover:

Ethereum in 2025: From Experiment to World Infrastructure
Vitalik Buterin on Usability vs Decentralization Tradeoffs
L2BEAT - EIL Shows Trustless Ethereum Interoperability Is Possible
New Data Shows Rapid Growth in EIP-7702 Accounts Using ERC-4337

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Ethereum in 2025: From Experiment to World Infrastructure

A comprehensive X post by @renaissancing_ reviewed Ethereum’s 2025 milestones, positioning the network as fully deployed infrastructure rather than a speculative system.

Ethereum was described as having completed its transition from an experimental protocol into a global financial and technological infrastructure in 2025, marking ten years since its original whitepaper and crowdfunding launch.

The post highlights that Ethereum underwent two major hard forks within seven months: Pectra in May and Fusaka in December. Both upgrades required coordinated action across node operators, validators, and client teams while securing hundreds of billions of dollars in value.

After Fusaka activated, a bug in the Prysm client caused some validators to fall out of sync, but the network continued producing blocks through other clients including Lighthouse, Teku, Nimbus, Grandine, and Lodestar, demonstrating operational resilience through client diversity.

Pectra introduced account abstraction features across wallets, including transaction batching, gas sponsorship, and passkey authentication, enabling devices’ secure enclaves to sign transactions. Fusaka reduced transaction costs by introducing PeerDAS, allowing validators to sample blob data instead of downloading it fully, increasing capacity without increasing hardware requirements.

The post also notes that validators raised Ethereum’s gas limit multiple times during the year, from 30 million to 60 million, without additional hard forks.

On the regulatory and institutional side, the U.S. SEC issued staking guidance in May clarifying that certain staking models are not securities offerings, and later stated publicly that Ethereum is not a security. U.S. lawmakers passed the GENIUS Act establishing a federal stablecoin framework.

Institutional adoption expanded with JPMorgan launching the MONY tokenized money market fund on Ethereum mainnet, BlackRock’s BUIDL fund reaching $2.9 billion, and spot Ethereum ETFs reaching $28.6 billion in assets under management.

The post further cites growth across layer-2 networks, decentralized finance, privacy infrastructure, developer activity, and early adoption of Ethereum-based rails for AI agents, positioning Ethereum as a continuously operating global infrastructure.

Vitalik Buterin on Usability vs Decentralization Tradeoffs

Vitalik Buterin argued that improving Ethereum’s usability should not come at the expense of its core decentralization guarantees, responding to ongoing debates about whether convenience-driven design choices risk re-introducing centralized points of failure.

According to the article, Buterin acknowledged that Ethereum today is still difficult to use for many people, particularly when compared to Web2-style applications. However, he cautioned that many proposed “UX fixes” rely on centralization in subtle ways, such as routing transactions through trusted relayers, custodial services, or opaque orchestration layers. While these approaches may simplify user flows, they can weaken censorship resistance and user sovereignty if adopted broadly.

Buterin emphasized that decentralization is not an abstract ideal but a practical defense against systemic risks. He pointed to scenarios where centralized intermediaries — whether infrastructure providers, wallets, or compliance-driven actors — could be pressured to censor transactions or restrict access. In that context, usability solutions that depend on trusted third parties may improve short-term convenience while increasing long-term fragility.

The article highlights Buterin’s view that Ethereum should favor designs that preserve user control even if they introduce more complexity under the hood. He argued that the ecosystem should aim for “decentralization-preserving UX,” where complexity is handled by open, permissionless infrastructure rather than centralized actors. This includes continued work on protocol-level and standardized solutions that reduce reliance on custodians or single points of failure.

Buterin also stressed that tradeoffs are inevitable, but they should be explicit rather than hidden. Developers and users should clearly understand which trust assumptions they are making, instead of being pushed toward centralized defaults masked as convenience. In his view, Ethereum’s long-term success depends on improving usability in ways that reinforce its core properties, not replace them.

L2BEAT - EIL Shows Trustless Ethereum Interoperability Is Possible

L2BEAT, an open-source, public-good analytics and research platform, shared its first detailed assessment of the Ethereum Interop Layer (EIL) following its public unveiling at Devconnect Buenos Aires, outlining why the design represents a meaningful shift in how cross-chain execution can work without trusted intermediaries.

According to L2BEAT’s analysis, the core idea behind EIL is to remove relayers and solvers from the critical execution path. Built on top of ERC-4337 Account Abstraction, EIL allows users to self-execute transactions across multiple chains while benefiting from gas abstraction and coordinated execution. Instead of delegating execution to third parties, the user remains the sole executor, reducing safety risks, censorship vectors, and liveness failures.

EIL replaces traditional relayers with Cross-chain Liquidity Providers (XLPs). These actors do not execute transactions or control user flows. Instead, they provide liquidity and gas through specialized Paymaster contracts. In a typical “happy path,” a user submits a transaction on a source chain, an XLP observes it in the mempool, and includes a payment voucher in the same block. That voucher enables the user to execute directly on the destination chain, creating a near-instant UX without requiring the user to hold funds on that chain.

L2BEAT emphasized that EIL’s use of canonical bridges is deliberately limited to failure scenarios. If an XLP misbehaves, it can be permissionlessly slashed on Ethereum L1, with proofs delivered via canonical bridges. This contrasts with many interop systems that rely on bridges or oracles for every message.

New Data Shows Rapid Growth in EIP-7702 Accounts Using ERC-4337

Kofi shared new insights into EIP-7702 adoption, publishing a summary on BundleBear that analyzes how upgraded EOAs are interacting with ERC-4337 infrastructure in 2025. The analysis focuses on real on-chain usage rather than theoretical wallet upgrades, highlighting where EIP-7702 is already being used in production and how those patterns are evolving.

According to the data, more than 6.6 million wallets currently have an active EIP-7702 authorization. When excluding contracts associated with post-compromise activity, the most commonly authorized contracts belong to major wallet providers. Bitget leads with over 605,000 accounts actively authorizing its implementation, followed closely by MetaMask and Ambire, showing that EIP-7702 is being adopted primarily through mainstream wallet integrations rather than niche tooling.

Usage activity also increased significantly over the year. In December alone, 1.2 million non-hacker EIP-7702 accounts transacted on-chain, continuing an upward trend throughout 2025. The most frequently called contracts included USDC, BSC-USD, the Bitget swapper, and VSN, with Bitget recording the highest number of transacting accounts across the year, ahead of MetaMask and TokenPocket.

Transaction patterns reveal that nearly half of all monthly actions by EIP-7702 accounts are still standard EOA transactions. Relayed actions initiated by third-party wallets rank second, followed by self-initiated smart-account calls and ERC-4337 UserOperations.

Like other authorization and batching mechanisms, EIP-7702 is also used after a wallet has already been compromised. Around 40% of observed authorizations point to contracts operated by attackers, primarily used to automate post-compromise fund sweeping. Importantly, this does not indicate that EIP-7702 itself is being exploited; instead, wallets are upgraded post-compromise to improve recovery and automation workflows.

Notably, ERC-4337 UserOps executed by EIP-7702 accounts hit an all-time high of 926,000 in December, largely driven by Coinbase Wallet upgrades within the Base ecosystem, signaling accelerating convergence between 7702 and 4337 in real-world wallet deployments.

Kofi also published a new analytics page tracking how EIP-7702 accounts are actively using ERC-4337, offering one of the clearest data views yet into early 7702 adoption.

The dashboard, hosted on BundleBear, shows a steep rise in weekly active EIP-7702×4337 accounts and UserOperations since late October, with activity accelerating sharply through December. The data is broken down by authorized contract, highlighting which smart-account implementations are driving real usage rather than experimental delegation alone.

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