What’s Coming in the Next Decade?

Ethereum celebrated its 10th birthday on Wednesday, marking a decade since its first block was produced. But what about the next 10 years?

In its first decade, the network has established itself with the second-largest cryptocurrency by market cap, survived existential threats, and evolved in various ways.

The Frontier launch brought Ethereum to life as a proof-of-work blockchain, the DAO hack divided the community and led to a controversial hard fork, celebs splashed millions of dollars on monkey JPEGs, the “merge” saw the network adopt a more environmentally friendly proof-of-stake model, and countless scaling networks have been deployed.

Over the next 10 years, what can we expect from Ethereum? Decrypt asked some of the leading ETH experts for their predictions.

The next five years

Predictors on Myriad Markets believe that it is 64% likely that Ethereum sets a new all-time high price by the end of the year, which would be a great start to its second decade—particularly since the current record has held since 2021, while Bitcoin and other leading cryptocurrencies have set more recent records.

(Disclosure: Myriad is a product of Decrypt‘s parent company, DASTAN.)

Within this timeframe, the network is expected to undergo the Fusaka upgrade, which Bitwise Senior Research Associate Max Shannon estimated will roll out this November. In its current draft form, Fusaka will focus on data efficiency, accessibility, and user experience, or UX.

The Glamsterdam upgrade is also anticipated for 2026, per the Ethereum roadmap. Victor Zhou, an Ethereum Improvement Proposal editor and founder of Namefi, told Decrypt that it’s still in the scoping phase, but will broadly look to enhance the network’s capabilities.

“The Ethereum L1 will continue to scale, with a target of 10x within the next 12 months,” Jason Linehan, Chief Strategy Officer at Consensys, told Decrypt. “This will complement the L2 scaling roadmap, which is moving towards interoperability faster than ever.”

(Disclosure: Consensys is one of 22 investors in an editorially independent Decrypt.)

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

“Ethereum already scales thanks to layer-2s, but that broke the experience; moving between chains is (still) clunky and expensive,” Lambur said. “Solving interoperability is the big milestone ahead. Once interop feels seamless, Ethereum will feel like one unified network again.”

As the Ethereum ecosystem moves closer to interoperability, a host of new network upgrades are waiting in the wings to improve the base layer.

“Over the next five years, upgrades like the ‘surge,’ ‘scourge,’ ‘verge,’ ‘purge,’ and ‘splurge’ will bring cheaper transactions, faster processing, stronger MEV (maximal extractable value) protections, and simpler node operation,” James Toledano, chief operating officer at Unity Wallet, told Decrypt. “While not as dramatic as the merge, these changes tackle long‑standing pain points.”

The merge, surge, scourge, verge, purge, and splurge are loosely defined terms that group together improvements that Ethereum may undergo, Consensys Senior Product Strategy Manager TJ Keel told Decrypt. Toledano believes that many of those improvements will take root over the next five years.

“Ethereum’s first decade was about idealism,” Zhou told Decrypt. “The next will be about adoption—bringing crypto to the general public.”

Endgame

As Ethereum celebrates its 15th birthday, experts believe that institutional adoption will kick into third and fourth gear, thanks to another set of upgrades.

Shannon, the researcher from Ethereum ETF provider Bitwise, predicts that Ethereum will “complete danksharding with verkle tree state commitments and state expiry”—which, in plain English, will cut hardware requirements for nodes and streamline the network.

Linehan added that it is a Consensys “ambition” to add zero-knowledge proofs as a part of the base Ethereum protocol. Shannon hopes such an upgrade would unlock the use of on-chain digital IDs, as a way to prove “unique personhood” without needing to reveal personal data.

“These structural upgrades should drive sustained increases in on‑chain throughput, institutional adoption, and real‑world asset tokenization,” Shannon added.

In recent years, Ethereum has seen a significant uptick in institutional adoption with the passing of U.S. spot ETFs—which have collectively racked up more than $9.65 billion worth of inflows, per CoinGlass. But many experts think this is just the beginning.

“Ethereum is well-positioned to become the core infrastructure for global finance and digital coordination,” Rob Viglione, CEO of infrastructure firm Horizen Labs, told Decrypt. “It’s not hard to imagine ETH and stablecoins replacing much of what SWIFT, CashApp, Venmo, Mastercard, and Visa do today, while tokenized assets begin trading around the clock on Ethereum-based rails.”

For Risk Labs’ Lambur, he believes this will manifest with “most assets” becoming tokenized on Ethereum—think real-world assets, equities, and bonds. He points to BlackRock already tokenizing funds on Ethereum as evidence that the network is already heading there. In doing this, Lambur said, Ethereum will become the “settlement and payment layer for all things of value on the internet.”

“New generations of stakeholders will be at the table—including, we believe, some of the world’s largest institutions—who will increasingly embrace Ethereum as a kind of public utility, a base layer for the future global economy,” Linehan told Decrypt. “We saw with the internet, with the web, with Linux, with all systems of this kind, how powerful it is when you hit that turning point where the whole world is building together. This is the power of open systems like Ethereum.”

“It’s going to be the base layer of the future global economy,” he added.

Ethereum Improvement Proposal editor Zhou added that smart contract standardization, combined with real-world assets, will be the key to making this leap.

“The real endgame is straightforward: a giant payments and exchange network that connects every blockchain,” he told Decrypt. “[My] craziest prediction might be that Ethereum becomes boring because it just works as the settlement layer for everything.”

Will quantum computing ruin everything?

Some experts believe that quantum computing poses an “existential crisis” to leading cryptocurrency Bitcoin, as the technology to break the chain’s encryption could be less than a decade away. However, Linehan says Consensys isn’t so concerned about the threat to Ethereum.

“We don’t anticipate quantum computing posing a risk to Ethereum in the near term,” Linehan told Decrypt. “But Ethereum is the most advanced in terms of research and readiness to start a transition.”

That research and readiness were already kick-started with a 2024 blog post from Vitalik Buterin outlining possible cryptographic improvements via the aforementioned “splurge.” Since then, Toledano from Unity Wallet claims, development on new quantum-resistant cryptographic schemes has started as network builders attempt to stay ahead of any potential threat.

“In short: It’s a serious future challenge, but far from an existential threat,” Toledano added.

If Ethereum can battle against the threat of quantum computing, improve its user experience, and become the settlement layer for traditional finance, then one expert thinks it could eventually flip Bitcoin—which currently has a market cap five times larger than ETH.

“If the UX is there, and users eventually realize it, as they always do, Ethereum is going to win and flip Bitcoin,” Amir Forouzani, co-founder of Ethereum infrastructure firm Puffer Labs, told Decrypt. “It’s better money, and it offers a platform where you can truly own and trust your money. The flippening won’t happen in a single cycle, but it will happen eventually.”