Ethereum’s Path to Becoming the World’s Ledger by 2030 Amid the RWA Boom

Overview

The Ethereum Pectra upgrade went alive in May 2025 with 11 EIPs paving the way for technical innovation, which brings about the transformation of ETH.

Fueled by the GENIUS Act and BlackRock, the RWA boom has led to a surge in market capitalization and is reshaping the financial landscape through tokenization.

With the parallel development of alignment-oriented and performance-oriented Rollups, Ethereum will accommodate both high security and high throughput to become the world's ledger by 2030.

Pectra Upgrade: The Beginning of Ethereum's Technical Reform

At 10:05:11 UTC on May 7, 2025, the Ethereum mainnet successfully activated the Pectra upgrade. This upgrade introduced 11 EIPs among others—the most in any single update so far—laying the foundation for large-scale applications and advanced infrastructure, such as the complex modular architecture.

Key takeaways from several EIP included in the Pectra upgrade:

EIP-7691: Doubles the number of blobs per block to increase the data capacity of Rollups. This further reduces L2 (Layer 2) costs, though it also lowers the Ethereum mainnet revenue and ETH burn rate.

EIP-7702: Transforms regular wallets into smart ones featuring transaction batching, Gas sponsorship, session keys, account recovery, and Passkey integration, which aims to bring account abstraction to life, streamline DApp interactions, increase user experience, and accelerate mainstream adoption.

EIP-7251: Raises the staking limit from 32 ETH to 2048 ETH, reducing the number of validators to boost staking efficiency and improve network performance.

EIP-7002: Enables validator withdrawals to be triggered by smart contracts to make staking programmable and trustless, resulting in greater control, automation, and transparency of liquid staking platforms like Lido Finance.

EIP-7685: Standardizes communication between EL (execution layer) and CL (consensus layer) to allow contracts to send structured requests, laying critical groundwork for automated staking, trustless restaking, and modular architecture.

EIP-2935: Introduces a new system contract that expands access to historical block hashes to 8192 blocks. This benefits cross-chain bridges and light client use cases, and enhances the long-term ecosystem capabilities.

EIP-6110: Enables validator deposits to be directed embedded into blocks, speeding up staking while reducing onboarding time for new validators.

In essence, the Pectra upgrade ushers in the explosive growth of Ethereum by charting the course for Ethereum's development. In contrast to its previous ambition of becoming a "World Computer", Ethereum is now returning to a path inspired by Bitcoin—the foundational pillar of crypto. In a blog post published on May 3, 2025, titled "Simplifying the L1", Vitalik Buterin emphasized the need to radically simplify Ethereum's Layer 1 (L1) protocol to achieve a level of simplicity comparable to that of Bitcoin by 2030 over the next five years.

RWA Powering Ethereum's Adoption at the Application Layer

Real-world assets (RWA) are emerging as a powerful driver of growth on Ethereum’s application layer. The passage of the GENIUS Act has re-ignited the market's interest in RWA and set off its strong growth surge in Ethereum. BlackRock CEO Larry Fink summed it up by saying: "Tokenization represents the dawning integration of traditional finance and blockchain technologies. It will revolutionize how we manage assets by making it faster and more accessible." This idea is now playing out on Ethereum's RWA ecosystem.

For years, the total value of non-stablecoin RWAs hovered between 1 to 2 billion USD. But starting in April 2024, the value began to take off. By 2025, the pace has only picked up further—driven in large part by BlackRock's BUIDL fund, which has grown to 2.7 billion USD. Crypto investor Mark Cuban once said: “The rise of RWA shows blockchain isn’t just tech—it’s a tool to reshape finance.”

RWA helps turn assets into more liquid and accessible ones through tokenization and reduces the financial brokerage cost by coupling with the automated and transparent smart contracts from Ethereum. With the GENIUS Act providing regulatory support for RAW, more traditional insitutional players are stepping in. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong put up his vision: “RWA will turbocharge the blockchain adoption and Ethereum is in the best position to connect traditional finance with a decentralized world.” Thanks to technology, policy, and market demand aligning with one another, Ethereum is ready for new prosperity and greatness on the application layer.

Ethereum3.0: Upgrading L1 and Scaling Rollups Side by Side

Tamas Stanczak and Shay Wong, the new Co-Executive Directors of the Ethereum Foundation, have laid out a fresh vision for Ethereum’s evolution—a preliminary action plan for Ethereum to navigate by for years to come. They have stated that Ethereum will be strategically centered on Scaling L1, Expanding blob capacity, and improving user experience.

According to Tomasz Stanczak, Ethereum plans to increase the pace of hard forks, to around once every six months. After deploying the Pectra upgrade, the development of Fusaka, the next hard fork, will start immediately, and efforts will be made to ensure a timely launch in September or October 2025. The next hard fork will be Glamsterdam, set for upgrade by late 2026, which will include acceleration of L1 scalability. Some of this work has already started where certain improvements doesn't require hard forks, while others just require EIPs. Meanwhile, the Ethereum ecosystem team led by Jane Smith is restructuring to better support builders—especially those working on tokenization and RWAs.

Ethereum's most recent technical manifesto states that, by 2030, it aims to become a dual-track world’s ledger powered by Rollup evolution, which is gradually becoming a reality by the dual track featuring upgrading L1 and scaling Rollups.

Ethereum L1 will shift away from simply ensuring minimal consensus towards a more active role for faster block production and higher data cost-efficiency. The Beam Chain consensus mechanism (slated for testing between 2027–2029) aims to cut confirmation down to around 12 seconds and lower staking requirements to just 1 ETH to step up decentralization. Other than that, EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) may also be upgraded to RISC-V, which could improve proof efficiency by 50-100-fold and draw more developers from mainstream communities like Rust.

Given time, L2 will likely fall into two factions: Alignment-oriented Rollups and Performance-oriented Rollups. Alignment-oriented Rollups (like Taiko) are tightly connected with L1, sharing security and liquidity, whereas performance-oriented Rollups (like MegaETH) prioritize high throughput with some of them being reliant on DA (data availability) layer. Alignment-oriented Rollups zoom on security and composability, well-suited for high-value DeFi use cases. Performance-oriented Rollups, on the other hand, are ideal for high-traffic applications like payment and gaming for improved user experience. Rollups sitting in the middle may not survive long-term without clear strengths.

In a nutshell, alignment-oriented Rollups help ETH capture more value and performance-oriented Rollups expand application scenarios. As Vitalik said: "Ethereum's flexibility allows it to support all kinds of demand." Even as more enterprise Rollups like Base emerge, Ethereum L1 will remain a core hub due to its censorship resistance and MEV mechanism. By 2030, Ethereum will have the right balance of security with scalability and likely become a true "World Ledger".

Conclusion

Ethereum’s Pectra upgrade, launched on May 7, 2025, kicked off a new wave of Ethereum innovation, backed by 11 EIPs laying the groundwork for long-term technical changes. At the same time, RWA—driven by the GENIUS Act and wide institutional adoption—is propelling Ethereum’s boom at the application layer. With reforms underway at the Ethereum Foundation, Ethereum is building up the momentum to meet the fast-changing world. Looking ahead, L1 censorship resistance, MEV mechanism, and a dual Rollup strategy will do their part in positioning Ethereum to bridge traditional finance and blockchain and fulfill its vision of becoming the World’s Ledger by 2030.