Why Ethereum Maxis Says ETH Will Be the ‘Comeback Boy’ of 2025

Ethereum stalwarts say AI agents, major network upgrades, increased institutional interest and more regulatory reforms from incoming US President Donald Trump's crypto-friendly administration are the most exciting things in 2025.

Infinex founder Cain Warwick told Cointelegraph that Ethereum was launched in 2015. While it may have suffered from a very minor performance flaw in 2024, the asset is “source wrapped” and ready for release in 2025.

Ether (ETH) has gained 53.5% year-to-date, rising from $2,350 to $3,478 on January 1, according to TradingView data.

Meanwhile, other major crypto assets including Solana (SOL), Cardano (ADA) and Ripple's XRP (XRP) posted year-to-date gains of 92.7%, 57% and 276.5%, respectively.

“The longer they are, the springier they are. There's a lot of tailwinds — and there's a few things holding it back — but when it blows up and people are going to say, ‘Oh my gosh,'” Warwick said.

He cited several Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) and the improved user experience resulting from these improvements as key turning points for Ethereum and ETH price action moving forward.

“By 2025, I think we'll see that as label abstraction improves, L2 interoperability will be much better, and UX between L2s will improve as well.”

Ethereum got a Pectra upgrade in 2025

One of the major updates that Warwick and other Ethereum enthusiasts are eager to see is the Pectra update — the next major milestone on the Ethereum Roadmap, currently slated to be introduced in early 2025.

Gaia Regis, co-founder and CEO of the Byzantine refactoring platform, said the Pectra update will fundamentally change the functionality of Ethereum's security layer.

“At the moment, Ethereum's stock is heavily driven by liquidity. Basically, more ETH holders want to participate. That's generally good because more nodes mean more decentralization and more security,” she said.

However, the huge scale that Regis Ethereum has now reached – with more than 1 million Ethereum verifiers connected – has started to slow down the network.

“Pectra addresses this by increasing the maximum effective balance for validators from 32 ETH to 2,048 ETH, which greatly reduces the number of validators required and thus puts much less pressure on the network,” Regis said.

“Less stress means a faster network and happier Ethereum users all around.”

In September, Ethereum Core developers decided to split the Pectra update into two main packages. The first Pectra package introduces a total of eight EIPs, notably EIP-7702, which aims to improve the wallet and chain abstraction user experience.

“This makes shares cheaper, drives more people to shares and reduces share awards over time. Because of this, we are very upset about re-runs. Many people want to increase their rewards by keeping other networks.”

Trump's crypto-friendly SEC will be especially good for ETH.

Saul Rejwan, managing partner of crypto venture capital firm Masterkey, told Cointelegraph that Ethereum and “legitimate” projects in the crypto industry, particularly decentralized finance (deFi) and decentralized physical infrastructure (DePIN), will benefit from the Trump administration and more. More for crypto-friendly Securities and Exchange Commission.

On December 4, Trump tapped pro-crypto trader and former SEC Commissioner Paul Atkins as a candidate for the next SEC chairman, with current chairman Gary Gensler set to leave the agency on January 20.

“Defi projects on Ethereum will thrive in a more favorable regulatory environment, sectors such as recapitalization need less regulatory pressure to attract institutional investors,” he said.

“We expect this new leadership to lower barriers to entry and make it easier for early-stage crypto entrepreneurs and strong companies to innovate and grow.”

Stablecoins, tokenization and AI agents

Bitwise Chief Investment Officer Matt Houghan said that Ethereum has three main trends heading into 2025 and expects the asset to grow in the new year.

“Ethereum sits at the center of three big trends shaping crypto in 2025: the rise of stablecoins, tokenization and AI agents. It has dominant market share in all three areas,” Haughan said.

“I think the excitement from these three areas next year will rub off on ETH, making it the comeback child of 2025. You're seeing it with the recent strong performance and flow of ETFs,” he added.

Over the past two weeks, Ether ETFs generated $1.5 billion in net inflows, one of the largest inflow periods on record for a group of eight spot funds, according to data from Farside Investors.

Like Rejun, Hougan said a new crypto-friendly SEC under Trump would be particularly beneficial to Ethereum.

Related: Ethereum Price Eyes New High, But Will $15K Be the Top?

“I'm pleased to have lifted the regulatory sword of Damocles that has hung over the US crypto industry for the past four years. “The new approach in Washington is going to release a million entrepreneurs into crypto, and many of them are going to build killer apps on Ethereum and Layer 2,” Haughan said.

“We are entering the golden age of crypto, and Ethereum will be one of the main beneficiaries of this boom.”

According to Hugan, in general, Bitwise expects ETH to cross the previous high of $4,878, reaching a new high of $7,000 in the new year, which he described as a “conservative” forecast.

More layer 2s, refactoring and better DApps

Edu Timmers, an Ethereum advocate and chief marketing officer at crypto firm Keyrock, sees the imminent rollout of new layer-2 networks, including Abstract and Deutsche Bank's project, as increasing the utility of the Ethereum ecosystem.

Timmers also cited the recent addition of HyperLiquid, an onchain perps protocol built on Arbitrum, as evidence of Ethereum's growing onchain dominance, and said that Ethereum and its decentralized applications (DApps) ecosystem will begin to compete properly with centralized market leaders such as Binance. New Year.

“Things like Hyperliquid are starting to compete with centralized players like Binance, not decentralized like Uniswap 2025,” Timmers said.

Timmers also said that Ethereum's reshoring is another underappreciated area to enjoy in 2025, making the network stronger and more versatile.

“With solutions like EigenLayer, blockchains begin to install security into the Ethereum mainnet, which could see a breakthrough again.”

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