Original author: Leek, Foresight News
On the morning of April 8, Ethereum founder Vitalik returned to Hong Kong after a year and attended the Web3 Scholar Summit. V God’s speech was as usual, with a packed audience and constant applause.
At the same time, market data shows that Ethereums latest price has reached $1,580, down more than 60% from its high of $4,000, and fell below the $1,500 mark on April 7, a single-day drop of more than 15%.
So, facing the current situation of Ethereum, as a community leader, what does Vitalik Buterin think? Unfortunately, Vitalik Buterin doesn’t care. His focus is still on the technological development of Ethereum.
Key points of this speech: Vitalik once again elaborated on the long-term goals of Ethereum, including achieving 12-second native asynchronous communication between L2 and L1; users can still perform various operations through intent mode (such as obtaining less than 12 seconds of latency or better costs), but the liquidity cost will become extremely low; greatly strengthen the coupling between L2 and L1, and promote more applications to deploy components on L2 and L1 at the same time. Vitalik Buterin also said that accelerating L2 confirmation time and building a more integrated and unified Ethereum system requires the following steps: ZK+TEE+OP three-choice-two design, L1 asynchronous load, proof aggregation, and reducing proof latency.
Unlike previous cycles when Ethereum dominated the market, in this cycle, different institutions have completely different views on Ethereum.
In a report released in March 2025, Standard Chartered Bank drastically lowered the target price of Ethereum from $8,500 to $2,500, a drop of 70%. The report directly pointed out the three core risks of tightening global regulatory policies, obstacles to the development of the Layer 2 ecosystem, and large-scale withdrawals by institutional investors. It specifically warned that the US SEC may characterize ETH as a regulatory bomb for securities. Data shows that the top 100 addresses of Ethereum hold 39% of ETH, and the degree of decentralization is far lower than that of Bitcoin (14%), and it faces the risk of substitution by public chains such as Solana and Cardano. Morgan Stanley predicts that the ETH/BTC exchange rate will fall to 0.015 in 2027, a new low since 2017.
However, Grayscale still lists ETH as a core asset in its list of crypto assets for the first quarter of 2025, believing that its technical foundation and ecosystem are irreplaceable. Galaxy Digital emphasizes that the staking economy (annualized 4% return) and Layer 2 integration (70% of on-chain activities have been migrated to L2) will enhance the long-term value of ETH, and predicts that the price of ETH may exceed $5,500 in 2025. In addition, new scenarios such as tokenized assets (such as 70% of US Treasury bonds issued on Ethereum) and AI agents (such as Virtual Protocol on the Base chain) may become new growth engines.
The ZK+TEE+OP three-choice two technical roadmap proposed by Vitalik aims to achieve deep coupling of L2 and L1 through a combination of zero-knowledge proof, trusted execution environment and optimistic rollup. If key upgrades such as asynchronous load and proof aggregation can be completed in 2025, Ethereum is expected to regain its performance advantage. Galaxy Digital predicts that the Pectra upgrade plan will be activated in April-May 2025, improving network efficiency by optimizing the proof-of-stake mechanism and expanding data availability. In addition, cooperation with traditional financial institutions (such as Standard Chartered Banks issuance of tokenized bonds on Ethereum) and the implementation of AI agent technology may inject new momentum into Ethereum.
The current market disagreement on Ethereum is essentially a trust game over its technological iteration speed and ecological integration capabilities. Under Vitalik Buterins technicalism of not looking at prices, whether Ethereum can achieve the transformation from a congested chain to a modular network in 2025 will determine whether it can maintain its leadership in the Web3 era. Institutional investors need to pay close attention to the progress of technological upgrades, changes in regulatory policies, and the competitive dynamics of emerging public chains, and find a balance in a market where risks and opportunities coexist.
