Can Pectra, UX and Team Shuffle Revive ETH? 🛠️
“One of the best things about Bitcoin is how beautifully simple the protocol is.” Vitalik Buterin, the founder of the second largest cryptocurrency - Ethereum, said this about the largest cryptocurrency.
The timing coincides with Ethereum's ongoing identity crisis.
He wrote this in his blog post ‘Simplifying the L1’ exactly a week ago. Three days later, Ethereum developers pushed the network's most complex upgrade yet to the blockchain.
On one hand, ETH recorded its strongest weekly performance since 2021 after Wednesday's Pectra upgrade. On the other, its co-founder wants to rebuild the network with a simpler architecture.
Is this the beginning of Ethereum's renaissance or just another false dawn for a network that's traded sideways while competitors reached new heights?
In today's Wormhole, we examine what's changing, why it matters, and whether these rapid-fire developments can pull Ethereum out of its multi-year rut.
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The Pectra Move
The fate of Ethereum's revival attempt hinges a lot on its most recent upgrade.
The most extensive code change since The Merge (September 2022) went live on May 7, making wallets smarter, validators more efficient, and Layer 2s cheaper.
The upgrade that took over a month longer than planned to finalise changes how Ethereum works. The centerpiece, EIP-7702, brings smart contract functionality to regular wallets.
This seemingly technical change transforms basic user experience.
"This is where Ethereum starts feeling like a modern network," pseudonymous Optimism contributor Binji wrote on X adding that Pectra reduces how many clicks it takes “to do what you want.”
In simpler words? Users can now
Bundle actions together, instead of approving each step of a transaction
Pay fees in stablecoins, instead of needing ETH for every transaction
Dapps can even sponsor user gas fees, enabling "freemium" models where users interact without holding any ETH at all.
For validators, EIP-7251 increases maximum staking limits from 32 ETH to a whopping 2,048 ETH. Means lower operational costs, particularly beneficial for institutional stakers.
Layer 2 networks got their boost too.
EIP-7691 doubles blob space per block, which should help keep L2 transaction fees low even as demand increases. This boost came just in time – Coinbase's Base chain developer Jesse Pollak had warned of a "10- to 20-fold increase in demand in 2025."
Will these technical improvements translate to renewed market confidence?
Ethereum upgrades have historically been "sell the news" events. The Merge in 2022 saw prices fall more than 30% after completion.
The difference this time might be the concurrent narrative and leadership shifts accompanying the code changes.
Result? ETH price shot up about 40% in 40 hours after the Pectra upgrade went live.
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Buterin’s Call for UX Overhaul
Three days before Pectra went live, Vitalik Buterin published what might be his most significant vision statement in years: "Simplifying the L1."
His message: Ethereum must become "close to as simple as Bitcoin" within five years.
After years of adding complexity to meet technical challenges, Ethereum's co-founder now wants to strip away complexity for network's longevity and resilience.
He argued in his vision statement that even a high schooler could understand Bitcoin's code. Ethereum, by contrast, has grown increasingly complex, limiting who can effectively contribute to it.
Buterin's plan includes three radical proposals.
Replacing the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) with RISC-V, a simpler and more efficient architecture that could deliver "100x performance improvements"
Streamlining Ethereum's consensus mechanism with "3-slot finality," eliminating complex systems like epochs and validator shuffling
Standardising protocols across the entire stack, from data encoding to tree structures
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Foundation Leadership Resuffle
When Aya Miyaguchi, Ethereum Foundation's executive director, announced her transition to a newly created "President" role in February, it capped months of community frustration over leadership and direction.
Critics had increasingly questioned whether the Foundation's approach, prioritising philosophical purity over competitive positioning, was still serving Ethereum's needs in an increasingly competitive landscape.
The resulting reorganisation, formalised in late April, represents a significant governance shift in the Foundation's history.
The Foundation's new leadership wasted no time outlining priorities: scaling Ethereum's base layer, improving Layer 2 rollups, and enhancing user experience.
"We understand that we need to accelerate journeys of developers, founders, institutions through the pathways towards building on Ethereum and adopting Ethereum," the co-directors wrote.
For years, the Foundation maintained what critics called a "neutral" stance toward ecosystem development, avoiding anything that looked like marketing or competitive positioning.
New co-director Stańczak told Bankless that better communication is now a priority and “clarity is also part of marketing."
That simple statement represents a sea change from the Foundation's previous reluctance to even acknowledge marketing as a legitimate function.
Challenges Persist
Despite these promising developments, Ethereum faces substantial headwinds.
ETH currently trades at $2,200, less than half its all-time high of $4,878 set in November 2021. Bitcoin and Solana have both surpassed their previous records in 2025, while Ethereum languishes.
In March, amid market turbulence triggered by Trump's tariff policies, ETH crashed harder than other major cryptocurrencies, briefly falling below $1,600, a level last seen a year and a half ago.
Critics point to fundamental issues with Ethereum's economic model.
Layer 2 paradox: Successful L2 scaling means fewer transactions on mainnet, reducing fee revenue for ETH
Staking inefficiency: Pre-Pectra limitations forced institutional stakers to operate multiple validator nodes, increasing costs and reducing yield
Technical debt: Ethereum's complexity slows innovation and raises barriers to contribution
Competition has intensified too.
Solana's DEX volume surpassed Ethereum's in February and April this year. Even on the institutional front, Bitcoin ETFs have captured the lion's share of investment inflows, with Ethereum products seeing tepid adoption by comparison.
The March leadership crisis compounded these problems.
This context helps explain why the Foundation, Buterin, and core developers are now moving aggressively on multiple fronts. The status quo had become untenable.
Can these changes reverse years of accumulated challenges?
Token Dispatch View 🔍
Ethereum's current transformation is less about isolated upgrades and more about a recalibration of its entire approach.
With the set of changes, now, Ethereum is finally acknowledging that technical excellence alone isn't enough to sustain in the crypto world.
What’s key is the timing. These changes are arriving after years of market share erosion and price underperformance. The 40% price surge following Pectra shows investor appetite remains, but Ethereum faces an uphill battle against competitors who designed for simplicity from day one rather than retrofitting it later.
Bringing technical expertise to management roles and acknowledging marketing's importance suggests that the Foundation has begun addressing the cultural inertia that has hampered Ethereum's competitiveness.
Pectra's improvements to validator economics and L2 scaling will deliver short-term benefits. For long-term turnaround, Buterin’s five-year RISC-V vision will have to sustain focus that Ethereum has historically struggled to maintain amid competing priorities.
Look to the next upgrade, Fusaka, as a critical indicator. If it prioritises base layer improvements over L2 infrastructure, that will confirm this strategic pivot is genuine rather than temporary.
The next 12 months will reveal whether these changes represent Ethereum's renaissance or merely delayed adaptation to market realities. For investors, the network's commitment to its new direction, measured by continued leadership effectiveness and development momentum, will matter more than any single technical milestone.
If Ethereum can execute this transformation while maintaining its core values, the "world ledger" vision could reposition ETH as the asset underpinning the next generation of global finance, something worth substantially more than today's $2,200 price tag suggests.
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