Compiled: Vernacular Blockchain

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Ethereum celebrates its tenth anniversary on Wednesday, marking ten years since the birth of its first Block. So, what will the next ten years look like?

In its first decade, Ethereum has become the second largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, successfully facing survival threats and evolving in various ways.

What can we expect from Ethereum in the next ten years? Decrypt interviewed some top Ethereum experts to learn about their predictions.

Next Five Years

Predictors at Myriad Markets believe that the likelihood of Ethereum reaching a historical high before the end of the year is 64%, which would set a positive tone for its second decade—especially considering that the current record has not been broken since 2021, while Bitcoin and other major cryptocurrencies have reached more recent highs.

Within this timeframe, the network is expected to undergo the Fusaka upgrade, with Bitwise Senior Research Assistant Max Shannon estimating that the upgrade will be launched in November this year. The current draft indicates that Fusaka will focus on data efficiency, accessibility, and user experience (UX).

According to the Ethereum roadmap, the Glamsterdam upgrade is expected to be launched in 2026. Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) editor, Namefi founder Victor Zhou, told Decrypt that the upgrade is still in the planning stages but will significantly enhance the network's capabilities.

"Ethereum L1 will continue to scale, aiming for a 10x expansion over the next 12 months," ConsenSys Chief Strategy Officer Jason Linehan told Decrypt. "This will complement the L2 scaling roadmap, whose interoperability progress is faster than ever before."

Hart Lambur, co-founder of Risk Labs—whose team developed the UMA oracle service and the Across bridging protocol—told Decrypt that interoperability is key to its short-term future.

"Ethereum has achieved scalability through layer two networks, but this has broken the user experience; moving between different chains is still clunky and expensive," said Lambur. "Solving interoperability is a major milestone ahead. Once interoperability becomes seamless, Ethereum will feel like a unified network again."

As the Ethereum ecosystem approaches interoperability, a series of new network upgrades are awaiting implementation to improve the underlying layer.

"In the next five years, upgrades such as 'surge', 'cleanup', 'edge', 'purification', and 'squandering' will bring cheaper transactions, faster processing, stronger MEV( maximum extractable value) protection, and simpler node operations," said Unity Wallet COO James Toledano to Decrypt. "Although not as eye-catching as the merge, these changes address long-standing pain points."

"Merging, surging, cleansing, edging, purifying, and squandering are loosely defined terms that encompass the improvements Ethereum may undergo," said TJ Keel, Senior Product Strategy Manager at ConsenSys, to Decrypt. Toledano believes that many of these improvements will take root within the next five years.

"The first decade of Ethereum was about idealism," Zhou told Decrypt. "The next decade will be about adoption - bringing cryptocurrency to the general public."

Endgame

As Ethereum celebrates its 15th anniversary, experts believe that due to another series of upgrades, institutional adoption will enter the third and fourth phases.

Shannon, a researcher from Ethereum ETF provider Bitwise, predicts that Ethereum will "complete danksharding, adopt verkle tree state commitments and state expiry"—in simple terms, this will reduce hardware requirements for nodes and simplify the network.

Linehan added that ConsenSys's "goal" is to integrate zero-knowledge proofs as part of the Ethereum base protocol. Shannon hopes that such an upgrade will unlock the use of on-chain digital IDs to prove "unique identity" without revealing personal data.

"These structural upgrades should drive the continued increase in on-chain throughput, institutional adoption, and the tokenization of real-world assets," Shannon added.

In recent years, institutional adoption of Ethereum has significantly increased, with the approval of the US spot ETF—according to CoinGlass data, cumulative inflows have exceeded $9.65 billion. However, many experts believe this is just the beginning.

"Ethereum has the potential to become the core infrastructure for global finance and digital coordination," said Rob Viglione, CEO of Horizen Labs, to Decrypt. "It is not hard to imagine that ETH and stablecoins will replace many functions of SWIFT, CashApp, Venmo, Mastercard, and Visa, while tokenized assets will trade around the clock on Ethereum-based rails."

For Lambur of Risk Labs, he believes this will manifest as "most assets" being tokenized on Ethereum—think of real-world assets, stocks, and bonds. He pointed out that BlackRock has already tokenized funds on Ethereum, proving that the network is moving in this direction. Lambur stated that by doing so, Ethereum will become "the settlement and payment layer for all valuable things on the internet."

"A new generation of stakeholders will join - we believe that some of the largest institutions in the world will be among them - and they will increasingly embrace Ethereum as a public utility, the foundational layer of the global economy of the future," Linehan told Decrypt. "We see the power of systems like the internet, Web, Linux, etc. When they reach a turning point of global co-construction, the power of such open systems is immense."

"It will become the foundational layer of the future global economy," he added.

Ethereum Improvement Proposal editor Zhou added that the standardization of smart contracts combined with real-world assets will be key to achieving this leap.

"The real endgame is simple: a huge payment and exchange network that connects every Blockchain," he told Decrypt. "My craziest prediction might be that Ethereum becomes boring because it just functions as the settlement layer for everything."

Will quantum computing destroy everything?

Some experts believe that quantum computing poses an "existential crisis" for major cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, as the technology to crack on-chain encryption may emerge in less than a decade. However, Linehan stated that ConsenSys is not as concerned about the threat to Ethereum.

"We do not believe that quantum computing poses a risk to Ethereum in the short term," Linehan told Decrypt. "But Ethereum is the most advanced in research and preparation for the transition."

These studies and preparations were initiated in a blog post by Vitalik Buterin in 2024, which outlined possible cryptographic improvements through the aforementioned "extravagances." Since then, Toledano of Unity Wallet has stated that network builders have begun developing new post-quantum cryptographic schemes in an attempt to stay ahead of any potential threats.

"In short: this is a serious challenge for the future, but far from a threat to survival," Toledano added.

If Ethereum can withstand the threats of quantum computing, improve user experience, and become the settlement layer for traditional finance, then one expert believes it could ultimately surpass Bitcoin—currently, Bitcoin's market cap is five times that of Ethereum.

"If the user experience is in place, users will ultimately realize it, just as they always do, Ethereum will win and surpass Bitcoin," said Amir Forouzani, co-founder of Ethereum infrastructure company Puffer Labs, to Decrypt. "It is a better currency; it provides a platform where you can truly own and trust your currency. The flip will not happen in one cycle, but it will happen eventually."

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