Ethereum Foundation’s 2025 Pivot: What It Means for Scalability and User Experience

Ethereum’s New Strategy: Scaling Layer-1, Enhancing UX

In 2025, the Ethereum Foundation (EF) undertook a major strategic shift, putting user experience (UX) and Layer-1 (L1) scalability at the forefront of its agenda. This move marks a departure from a strictly rollup-centric roadmap and aims to make the Ethereum mainnet itself more efficient, usable, and ready for mass adoption. With this pivot, Ethereum signals a new era of rapid iteration—one that could shape the blockchain industry at large.

What Triggered the Shift?

Ethereum faced mounting pressure in early 2025. User onboarding remained difficult, transaction fees were volatile, and Ethereum’s once-unquestioned lead in developer growth started to waver. Competitors like Solana and BNB Chain began to outpace Ethereum in some key usage and cost metrics. The Ethereum Foundation recognized that simply pushing long-term research wasn’t enough — real-time improvements to L1 were essential.

A New Leadership Engine

The EF responded with a leadership revamp. Hsiao-Wei Wang and Tomasz Stańczak now co-lead the organization, allowing co-founder Vitalik Buterin to step back from daily operations and refocus on visionary research. This restructure aims to streamline protocol upgrades and accelerate product-oriented outcomes. It's a shift from Ethereum as a “science lab” to a more agile, delivery-focused platform.

What’s Changing Under the Hood?

Pectra: The First Step

Scheduled for deployment in May 2025, the Pectra upgrade combines technical enhancements that make Ethereum’s core more efficient:

• Increased Data Throughput: By raising blob capacity, Pectra enables rollups to scale cost-effectively.
• Account Abstraction: EIP-7702 allows users to turn externally owned accounts (EOAs) into smart contract wallets, introducing gasless transactions and better recovery features.
• Validator Consolidation: The maximum stake per validator increases, improving consensus efficiency and reducing operational overhead.

Fusaka and Beyond

Fusaka, expected later in 2025, will implement PeerDAS (a sharding precursor) and Ethereum Object Format (EOF) upgrades to improve data availability and execution speed. Following that, the “Glamsterdam” upgrade will polish UX and interoperability across Layer-1 and Layer-2 networks.

Addressing Ethereum’s UX Bottlenecks

Ethereum’s base layer still poses challenges for non-technical users. These include:

• Wallet Management Complexity: Recovery mechanisms and onboarding processes remain intimidating for newcomers.
• Volatile Gas Fees: Network spikes can drive fees up unexpectedly, discouraging frequent use.
• Slow Onboarding Times: Final settlement and multi-step confirmations confuse users accustomed to Web2 speed.
• Fragmented Multi-Chain Experience: Switching between Layer-2s often requires bridging assets and using different fee tokens—far from seamless.

The EF’s new roadmap addresses these pain points through cross-chain address standardization, social recovery wallets, and improved transaction finality. These changes aim to make Ethereum “just work,” no matter which network users engage with.

Ethereum L1 and L2: Working Together

This isn't a pivot away from rollups. Rather, it’s a recalibration. Ethereum will improve its L1 so that rollups can scale even more efficiently. Think of it as optimizing the foundation to support the superstructure. Upgrades like increased blob space and data sampling are directly aimed at making L2s faster and cheaper — enhancing the full-stack Ethereum experience.

How This Impacts the Crypto APIs Ecosystem

At Crypto APIs, our infrastructure thrives on Ethereum’s reliability. These upgrades mean:

• Faster API Response Times: As Ethereum scales, nodes and data queries will become more efficient, directly benefiting API throughput.
• Lower Gas Fees: Our wallet and transaction APIs will help partners reduce user friction when fees drop across L2s.
• Broader Compatibility: With new standards like account abstraction, we (Crypto APIs) will be able to adapt to supporting smart wallet operations, token-fee transactions, and more streamlined account recovery.

We are actively aligning our roadmap with Ethereum’s evolution to ensure that developers using Crypto APIs can tap into the newest Ethereum features without friction.

What to Expect Next

The Ethereum Foundation has already delivered several core upgrades in 2025. Pectra is imminent, with Fusaka and Glamsterdam on the horizon. These enhancements set Ethereum on a course to compete not just on decentralization and security, but on user-friendliness and speed.

For institutions, developers, and fintech platforms relying on blockchain infrastructure — like those using Crypto APIs — this evolution opens up new possibilities for building scalable, cost-efficient applications on Ethereum.

Crypto APIs continues to provide seamless integration with Ethereum’s evolving tech stack. As Ethereum becomes faster and easier to use, our APIs will help you harness its full potential — from L1 scalability to the most advanced L2 environments.

Want to build on a future-proof Ethereum? Start with Crypto APIs.