Welcome to 2026! Milady is back.

Ethereum had quite the year in 2025. The network saw meaningful upgrades across multiple dimensions: gas limits got bumped up, blob transactions expanded their capacity, and the node infrastructure reached new quality standards. The real breakthrough came from layer-2 solutions—zkEVMs absolutely crushed their performance targets throughout the year. By combining zkEVM's computational efficiency with PeerDAS (a new peer-to-peer data sampling mechanism), Ethereum took a massive leap forward in addressing its core scaling challenge. These aren't just incremental tweaks either; they fundamentally reshape how the network handles transactions and data availability.

The convergence of these technologies signals Ethereum is evolving from a monolithic settlement layer into something far more sophisticated—a modular architecture where different pieces can be optimized independently. Gas costs continued their downward trend, transaction finality improved, and the barrier to entry for node operators lowered. It's the kind of progress that doesn't grab headlines every day but compounds into something transformative over time.