2025 Technical Trends: Bitcoin enhances OP_RETURN, Ethereum double upgrades, SOL and BNB performance optimization, HYPER shifts to L1, etc.

Compilation | GaryMa Wu on Blockchain

Wu’s team summarizes the key updates in the blockchain technology field for 2025:

Bitcoin: Initiating the era of programmable features amidst the “purity” debate, with increased OP_RETURN data limit, BIP — 119 (CTV), and BIP — 348 (CSFS) introducing new scripting methods to achieve grassroots consensus.

Core v30 Default Settings Change: Led by reformers including Antoine Poinsot, significantly raising the OP_RETURN data limit from 80 bytes to 4MB, marking a substantial openness of Bitcoin as a “data layer.”

Covenants (Contract) Grassroots Consensus: BIP — 119 (CTV) and BIP — 348 (CSFS) gain broad developer support, aiming to introduce new scripting methods via soft forks to enable non-interactive withdrawals and vaults.

First “Health Report”: Bitcoin Core completes its first public third-party audit, with zero high-risk vulnerabilities, establishing its robustness as the global cryptofinancial foundation.

Ethereum: Pectra and Fusaka dual upgrades and ERC — 8004 AI standard

Pectra & Fusaka Hard Forks: Completed Pectra upgrade in May, one of the Ethereum forks involving the most EIPs (11 EIPs). It further optimizes on the Dencun upgrade, aiming to improve user experience (UX), validator operations, and promote Layer 2 scaling. The Fusaka upgrade in December raises the mainnet Gas Limit to 60M. Fusaka is a key step in Ethereum’s scaling roadmap: enhancing L1 performance, expanding blob capacity, reducing rollup costs, and improving UX. It also introduces the Blob Parameter Only (BPO) fork mechanism to safely increase blob capacity as rollup demand grows.

AI Agent Benchmark Protocol: Established the dAI team and implemented ERC — 8004 to support AI Agents to perform seamless transactions within the Ethereum ecosystem, aiming to build decentralized AI infrastructure.

Privacy Roadmap Iteration: The original team renamed to PSE (Ethereum Privacy Steward), advancing the PlasmaFold L2 design supporting private transfers, focusing on privacy writing, reading, and proofing.

Solana: Client diversification and consensus mechanism overhaul, Firedancer launch, Alpenglow upgrade, and SIMD — 0301 asynchronous execution

Firedancer Mainnet Launch: Developed by Jump Crypto, an independent validator client launched, supporting 1 million TPS through modular parallel architecture, completely resolving single-client dependency risks.

Alpenglow Consensus Architecture: Introduces Votor (Voting and Finality) and Rotor (single-layer relay block propagation protocol), significantly reducing propagation latency and stabilizing block times.

Throughput Limit Enhancement: Using SIMD — 0256 and SIMD — 0286, gradually increasing block computation limits from 60 million to 100 million CUs; also advancing SIMD — 0301 (asynchronous execution), removing replay paths from the consensus critical path.

BNB Chain: Moving towards “sub-second” block times and extreme low latency, with Fermi, Maxwell, and Lorentz series hard forks

Fermi Hard Fork (2025.11)): The core breakthrough is reducing block interval from 750 ms to 450 ms, achieving industrial-scale throughput with sub-second block times.

Maxwell and Lorentz Upgrades: Phased optimization of BSC block time to 0.75 seconds, final confirmation time reduced to 1.875 seconds, and simultaneous introduction of EIP-7702 smart contract wallet standard.

Economic Model Cost Reduction: Validator proposals reduce minimum Gas fee from 0.1 Gwei to 0.05 Gwei, targeting a $0.001 cost per transaction.

Hyperliquid: Leap from trading platform to programmable financial L1, with CoreWriter contracts, Read Precompiles, and HIP-3

HyperEVM Bidirectional Interaction: Successfully deployed CoreWriter system contracts, enabling smart contracts to directly write to and modify HyperCore( transaction engine) state.

Atomic Data Reading: Launched Read Precompiles( precompiled contracts), allowing contracts to read on-chain order books, prices, and positions in real-time without oracles.

HIP-3 Permissionless Deployment: Enabled network upgrade allowing developers to stake HYPE and create perpetual contract markets via Dutch auctions without permission.

Base: BaseApp social terminal and x402 AI payment protocol, with block Gas Target expanded fivefold to 112 Mgas/s

BaseApp Ecosystem: Integrates AI Agents, Mini Apps, and Farcaster streaming to create the first Web3 “super app” entry point.

x402 Protocol V2: Open-source protocol based on HTTP 402 status code, providing a native payment layer for AI bots with wallet-based identity, supporting small, instant stablecoin payments.

Performance Scaling: Block Gas Target steadily increased from about 20 Mgas/s to 112 Mgas/s, supporting high-frequency social and payment activities.