Ethereum's development direction has once again become a focus of industry attention. Vitalik Buterin recently mentioned in an interview that Ethereum's future plans will bring significant changes to the entire ecosystem — this is not a casual statement, but based on existing technological achievements and data support.

Since the Merge upgrade last year, Ethereum has indeed experienced a critical turning point. Energy consumption has decreased by 99.9%, from the original annual electricity usage of 23 billion kWh to an almost negligible level. This improvement is not just a numbers game; it directly impacts the sustainability assessment of the entire network.

On-chain activity also performs remarkably. The number of active addresses per day has maintained a level of over 500,000 for a long time, and the total locked value in the DeFi ecosystem has returned to $40 billion, continuing to hold the top-tier ecosystem position. From the perspective of long-term holders, the proportion of profit-makers since last year has exceeded 60%, and institutional capital inflows have also accelerated significantly, with growth reaching three times.

What is even more noteworthy is the advancement of the technical roadmap. Danksharding upgrade has entered a substantial testing phase, aiming to increase transaction speed by about 100 times and reduce Gas fees to near zero. Based on the validation results from testnets, processing 100,000 transactions per second is no longer a theoretical hypothesis but an achievable technical goal.

The staking scale of Ethereum 2.0 is also continuously breaking new records, indicating that market confidence in this ecosystem for the long term still persists. All signs suggest that subsequent developments indeed have the potential to bring industry-level changes.