This week in East 8 Time, Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake threw out a draft of a technical roadmap called Strawmap via EFProtocol on strawmap.org, raising Ethereum's future performance targets directly to around 10,000 TPS for L1 and around 10,000,000 TPS for L2. This "sketch" forms a stark contrast with the current reality where the main network is still constrained by throughput and costs. Meanwhile, in the same market, Blockfills experienced management changes due to a borrowing loss of around 75 million dollars, while on the other side, Circle announced FY2025 revenues of approximately 770 million dollars, up about 77% year-on-year, with a USDC circulation of about 75.3 billion dollars. Rapid technological advancements, credit risks, and the profitability of compliance giants together paint the truest picture of today's crypto world.
From White Paper to Sketch: Ethereum Unveils...
● Source and Positioning of the Draft: Strawmap comes from the research side of the Ethereum Foundation, published by Justin Drake through EFProtocol at strawmap.org, and takes the form more akin to a "research blueprint" rather than a formal upgrade proposal. It is neither a hard commitment nor a marketing white paper, but rather a systematic abstraction from the research team on the crossroads of the future, marking potential directions and boundary conditions for the consensus layer and execution layer, providing a mid-to-long-term technical reference for client developers and ecological projects.
● Deconstructing Performance Goals: Among the five core goals proposed by Strawmap, the most impactful and clearly defined is around performance with the setting of L1 "gigagas" and L2 "teragas". The draft sets the L1 goal at around 10,000 TPS, while L2 after aggregation targets about 10,000,000 TPS, leveraging data availability and the settlement layer to push Ethereum directly from the "tens to hundreds TPS era" into the "millions TPS" narrative. These numbers themselves represent a re-seating of the competitive landscape for public chains over the next decade.
● Contrast with Reality and Competing Chains: Placing the goals of Strawmap back into today's mainnet experience creates a strong sense of contrast—on-chain congestion still frequently occurs, and gas costs remain glaring during peak periods, while similar public chains are already achieving seemingly "advanced" high TPS metrics through larger blocks, weaker decentralization, or more aggressive consensus mechanisms. Ethereum, on the other hand, attempts to catch up or even surpass using a longer, modular route, without sacrificing security and decentralization, making Strawmap resemble a performance check spanning a vast distance: enticing enough, but the path to realization is bound to be complex.
Behind Millions of TPS: Technological Grandiosity...
● Constraints of Security and Decentralization: To approach gigagas and teragas without sacrificing security and decentralization, the roadmap relies on a combination of sharding, Danksharding, data availability layers, and more. By pushing most scalability pressure onto the data layer and L2, it converges L1 into a core focused on high-security settlement and consensus, achieving throughput through "more data + smarter proofs" rather than simply enlarging blocks or reducing validators. However, this also means every step affects economic incentives and attack surfaces, where slight parameter adjustments could change the system’s security budget allocation.
● The Execution Layer's Challenges: From draft to mainnet, there is a long engineering chain, far more complicated than simply "writing it into the roadmap." Client implementation complexity, developer coordination costs, upgrade rhythm, and historical compatibility will all be magnified before the gigagas/teragas goals: how to synchronize evolution among multiple clients, how old contracts and tools remain usable amidst ever-upgrading execution environments, and how Rollup and infrastructure adapt to new data layers all require continuous EIPs and testnets to digest. While the roadmap can be drawn in an abstract and elegant manner, the execution layer must deconstruct every abstraction into runnable code and operational processes.
● L2 Experience and Old Problems: Even if performance goals are gradually approached over the long term, what's truly impactful at the user and application level is whether gas is low enough and interactions are smooth enough. Under the teragas narrative, L2 theoretically can accommodate higher frequencies of transactions and more complex applications, but old issues such as bridge security, fragmented cross-chain liquidity, MEV, and ordering power battles won’t automatically disappear. If the bridges remain weak, withdrawal experiences remain fragmented, and ordering power is monopolized by a few participants, then even the highest TPS may just turn into a "high-frequency game" played among a few professional market makers and bots, rather than a public infrastructure benefit.
Technical Narratives Ignite Imagination: Ethereum...
● Upgrade History and Valuation Memory: Looking back at Ethereum's past rounds of key upgrades—from EIP-1559 adjusting fee and burning mechanisms to The Merge completing the historic switch from PoW to PoS—market sentiment and valuations have shown significant re-pricing around each major milestone. Whether it’s an "inflation narrative" or an "energy-friendly narrative," the roadmap and upgrades themselves are being transacted as part of an asset. As a forward-looking draft, Strawmap also provides the market with new imaginative anchors: even if the technology is still on the way, the story can already be preciously labeled with a price tag.
● Different Participants’ Reading Methods: For developers and institutions, Strawmap seems more like a long-term certainty signal—it indicates that Ethereum does not intend to relinquish its status as a settlement and data layer, and the performance route has clear parameter targets, affecting their technology stack choices and capital expenditures in the next 3–5 years. For retail investors and speculative funds, Strawmap is more easily simplified into “the main storyline of the next big cycle”: million TPS, Rollup explosion, the new generation application scenario—these keywords are enough to complete emotional loops again and again on social networks.
● Resonance with Macro Sentiment: Current market public reports on Bitcoin price rebounds mostly linger at the macro trends and emotional recovery levels, lacking verifiable precise points and settlement data. Thus, this round of expectations resembles a resonance of multiple narratives with the technical roadmap, regulatory developments, and macro funding environment, rather than short-term trades targeting specific price points or settlement scales. The release of Ethereum's Strawmap conveniently embeds into this emotional main line: as funds begin to seek "the next stage story," a sketch that raises TPS targets to the million level naturally has the ability to amplify the imagination of risk capital.
On the Other Side: Crashes and Departures: Bl...
● Blockfills Event Framework: In contrast to the narrative of technological acceleration, there is the reality shock of Blockfills, a lending and trading platform. As a provider of crypto lending and trading services targeting institutional and professional clients, its co-founder and CEO Nicholas Hammer recently resigned, with Joseph Perry stepping in as Interim CEO. The leadership transition amid a market that has not yet fully recovered sends signals of business and balance sheet pressures, reminding the market that behind technological optimism, there exist currents of liquidity and credit risks.
● Sensitivity of the Approximate 75 Million Dollar Loss: According to Planet Daily, this resignation is related to an approximate 75 million dollar lending loss, but this is a piece of information from a single source awaiting verification, and currently lacks more granular public disclosures. Without transparent reports and detailed breakdowns, it is challenging to determine whether it results from collateral price fluctuations, risk management failures, or counterparty defaults, hence one should not overly extend or infer its loss structure. However, the number itself has already alerted the market: in a business reliant on leverage and credit matchmaking, a single misstep could evolve into a black hole capable of shaking management.
● Placing it within the Long Chain of CeFi Risks: Returning the Blockfills event to the long chain of multiple lending and CeFi platform risk outbreaks since 2022, one can see a curve entirely different from Ethereum’s narrative of technological acceleration. On one end, Ethereum is planning for a future of higher performance and stronger scalability, while on the other end, businesses reliant on centralized lending and opaque credit expansions are still paying for past cycles. The technological roadmap depicts the upper limits of throughput and security, whereas CeFi lending crashes reveal the lower limits of leverage and risk control, with both curves opening an increasingly larger gap within the same cycle.
Circle Cashes In Hugely...
● Key Numbers and Scale: On another mainline, Circle announced FY2025 performance data, delivering a completely different answer—revenues of approximately 770 million dollars, growing by around 77% year-on-year, and USDC circulation of about 75.3 billion dollars (according to a single source). These figures demonstrate that as one of the core components of crypto financial infrastructure, USDC has reached a scale and revenue level approaching that of "semi-traditional financial institutions", thus possessing structural influence over upstream and downstream exchanges, custodians, DeFi protocols, and even parts of payment services.
● Interest Rate Environment and Profit Model: In a high-yield environment, Circle can obtain substantial interest income through holding highly liquid, low-risk reserve assets, adding to business fees, converting into visible revenue growth. This model is akin to traditional financial institutions—earning on interest spreads and scale effects—but with essential differences: its asset base relies on on-chain circulation and demand within the crypto ecosystem, and regulatory frameworks and disclosure requirements are continuously evolving. As macro interest rates rise, the yield levels of USDC reserve assets increase, subsequently amplifying Circle's profitability, making it one of the most visible "yield amplifiers" in this round of crypto finance.
● Divergence of Compliance Winners and Leverage Losers: Comparing Circle's strength with Blockfills' losses reveals starkly different trajectories within the same cycle: winners rely more on compliance paths and scale effects, embedding into infrastructure layers and enjoying interest rate dividends; losers often succumb to excessive leverage and weak risk controls. The former has turned themselves into a part of public services at the foundational layer, profiting from the overall expansion of the ecosystem; the latter bear the last ring of tail risks on the credit chain. As underlying protocols like Ethereum seek million TPS, crypto finance is also completing a layered evolution—capital increasingly favors entities that "resemble traditional finance while enjoying on-chain dividends."
When the Roadmap Meets Black Holes: In Crypto...
The distant technical vision outlined by Ethereum’s Strawmap, the credit cracks exposed by the lending platform Blockfills, and Circle's displayed profitability and expansion in FY2025 together sketch a multi-faceted portrait of today’s crypto market: on one side, there’s the underlying technical blueprint pushing TPS towards millions and attempting to reshape application limits; on the other side, old problems are repeatedly echoed within centralized credit and high leverage sectors; and on the other side, a few compliant infrastructures are making huge profits in the interest rate cycle. These three threads coexist, and no single narrative is adequate to explain today's market structure.
From a funding perspective, the story of performance and scale will continue to dominate the narrative framework for mainstream assets; Ethereum's gigagas and teragas goals will remain incorporated into discussions of mid-to-long-term allocations. However, the flow of funds is shifting: more capital will choose to bet on underlying protocols and compliant infrastructures, placing their positions on the "technology stack" and "compliance licenses," while distancing themselves from products with opaque information disclosures, heavily reliant on high leverage and complex credit matchmaking. Technical narratives no longer automatically suggest valuation premiums; whether one can convert narratives into stable cash flows and manageable risks will become a core metric distinguishing asset quality in the new cycle.
Looking forward to one or two major cycles, whether Ethereum can gradually realize the gigagas and teragas from a strawman-like sketch to real capabilities on the mainnet and L2 will directly impact whether long-term funding is willing to make continuous, substantial allocations within its ecosystem. If the roadmap continues to be fulfilled, million TPS may become a new threshold for infrastructure, and the financial and application layers built around it will enjoy higher security premiums; conversely, each similar risk event like Blockfills will act as a stress test, forcing the market to re-evaluate the substantive value behind the "high performance, high valuation" narrative and find the truly sustainable middle ground between technological acceleration and credit black holes.
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