Ethereum transitions to global infrastructure in 2025 with protocol upgrades, regulatory clarity and institutional adoption

Ethereum crossed a key inflection point in 2025, shedding its "experimental network" label to operate as core infrastructure for financial institutions, developers and AI systems, according to a year-end review by Ethereum Foundation member renaissancing on December 23. The network executed two major hard forks, with Pectra in May advancing account abstraction for gas sponsorship and transaction bundling, and Fusaka in December using PeerDAS to cut costs and deliver 8x scaling, while the gas limit was raised three times without hard forks. The U.S. SEC issued staking compliance guidance and its chair stated "Ethereum is not a security", the U.S. passed the GENIUS Act as a federal stablecoin framework, sanctions on Tornado Cash were lifted, JPMorgan launched the tokenized money market fund MONY on mainnet, and spot Ethereum ETFs reached $28.6B in AUM. Total stablecoin supply surpassed $300B with about $46T in annual volume and a 54% Ethereum share, Layer 2 TVL hit $35.7B, DeFi TVL rose to $93.9B with Uniswap annual volume above $1T and Aave active borrowing at $25B, while ERC-8004 and Coinbase's x402 protocol positioned Ethereum as a key settlement layer for the emerging AI economy at its ten-year mark.