Devconnect 2025: Seven Key Topics to View the Future Development Path of Ethereum in the Next Three Years

Opening: Devconnect 2025 is more than just a developer conference; it’s a technical blueprint for Ethereum. The event clearly outlines four core directions of evolution—protocol stability, privacy protection, trustless automation, and enterprise-grade applications—pointing to a broad future for Web3 worldwide.

The Real Needs of Institutional Capital: Why Choose Ethereum?

Danny Ryan touched on a key insight at Devconnect ARG 2025: Wall Street’s desire for decentralization exceeds expectations. Traditional financial infrastructure faces stubborn issues—excessive fragmentation, reliance on intermediaries, long settlement cycles, and frequent counterparty risks.

What makes Ethereum stand out? Its trust-minimized neutrality, atomic real-time settlement, ZK privacy protection, ultra-high stability, and customizable L2 solutions perfectly address each pain point of institutional needs. Danny Ryan further pointed out that Ethereum is expected to support $120 trillion in global assets—key is not convincing institutions to adopt decentralization, but building a sufficiently robust infrastructure that naturally and irresistibly drives global assets onto the chain.

Vitalik’s 30-Minute Technical Deep Dive: Core Upgrade Blueprint

Vitalik Buterin’s keynote at Devconnect distilled the technical essence of Ethereum’s mid-term development. He systematically outlined long-term optimizations starting from the verification-first philosophy, including EIP-7732-driven decentralized scaling, zkVM supporting mobile full nodes, account abstraction, FOCIL, lightweight Ethereum, and more.

The common goal of these solutions is very clear: to make Ethereum a more robust, private, and trustless global verification layer. Ethereum’s form is also evolving—from a “world computer” to “cryptography-driven collaborative infrastructure,” ensuring security and neutrality while opening the door to billions of users into true Web3.

Kohaku: A Milestone Moment for Ethereum Privacy

Privacy has long been on the periphery of Ethereum’s agenda, but the launch of Kohaku rewrote this situation. Vitalik officially released this open-source privacy framework at Devcon, aiming to build default and optional on-chain privacy and security mechanisms for Ethereum through composable privacy primitives—such as Privacy Pools and Railgun.

This framework allows users to conceal fund movements while providing zero-knowledge proofs within a compliant framework. With the establishment of privacy clusters and the reorganization of the foundation’s privacy team, privacy has been elevated from a marginal issue to a priority at the protocol layer. Kohaku is widely regarded as marking Ethereum’s journey toward true privacy and world-class security.

Summary: Devconnect 2025 showcases not only the evolution of Ethereum’s technology but also its systemic upgrade to accommodate enterprise applications, privacy needs, and global asset allocation. From protocol stability to privacy protection and institutional adoption, Ethereum is transforming from a single function into a comprehensive infrastructure.