The recent volatility in the crypto market has definitely kept everyone on edge, with many still debating how high Ethereum's short-term price can soar. Honestly, instead of fixating on the price charts, it's better to look at the five-year horizon—when Ethereum 2.0 fully materializes, that will be the real variable determining the landscape of this sector.

Let's start with the basic concepts. The core issues Ethereum 2.0 aims to solve are only two: network congestion and transaction costs. It sounds simple, but implementing it involves overcoming a series of technical hurdles—from "merge" to "sharding" and then to "danksharding." Each step is fraught with challenges, but also presents opportunities for ecosystem upgrades.

The most noteworthy breakthrough to watch is the advancement of danksharding. Previously, sharding solutions were stuck on two major problems: data availability and cross-shard communication—either compromising data verification security or causing bottlenecks in information exchange between shards. Danksharding takes a different approach by redesigning the data packaging logic, storing transaction data separately as "data blobs." This change directly increases the processing capacity of a single shard by more than ten times. More importantly, it significantly lowers the barrier for validators to participate. Currently, becoming a validator requires locking up 32 ETH, which has deterred many community members. Once danksharding is fully deployed, this requirement could be drastically reduced, enabling more retail investors to participate in network validation, thereby enhancing the ecosystem's decentralization.

Another crucial variable is the evolution of the Layer 2 ecosystem. While Optimism and Arbitrum have already dominated most of the market share, a new trend is emerging: Layer 2 projects are no longer just competing but exploring cross-layer collaboration possibilities. How this "internal competition upgrade" will reshape the market landscape remains to be seen.