London, UK – [Date of Publication] – The Ethereum ecosystem, a cornerstone of decentralized finance and web3 innovation, is poised for a significant strategic evolution in 2026, building on a remarkably productive year in 2025. Following a period defined by critical network upgrades and foundational enhancements, the Ethereum Foundation’s "Protocol" initiative has unveiled a refined organizational structure designed to accelerate core development, enhance user experience, and fortify the network’s resilience.
The "Protocol" initiative, initially launched in June 2025 with a focus on "Scale L1," "Scale Blobs," and "Improve UX," has successfully navigated a year of intense development. This period saw the deployment of two major network upgrades, Pectra and Fusaka, alongside substantial improvements in gas limits, data management, and early-stage user experience enhancements. As the network matures and the demands of its global user base grow, the Ethereum Foundation recognizes the necessity of adapting its development strategy to address interconnected challenges with a more holistic approach.
The new framework for 2026 consolidates previous efforts into three distinct, yet deeply intertwined, tracks: "Scale," "Improve UX," and a newly introduced "Harden the L1." This restructuring aims to streamline coordination, optimize resource allocation, and foster a clearer, more impactful roadmap for Ethereum’s continued evolution as a robust, scalable, and user-friendly blockchain.
Key Achievements and Strategic Realignment
The core message from the Ethereum Foundation underscores a commitment to continuous innovation while ensuring the network’s long-term stability and decentralization. The achievements of 2025 have laid critical groundwork, demonstrating the community’s capacity to deliver complex, high-impact upgrades. The strategic shift for 2026 reflects an evolving understanding of the interdependence between scaling, usability, and the foundational security of the Layer 1 blockchain.
The consolidation of scaling efforts into a single "Scale" track, for instance, acknowledges that increasing transaction capacity on the Layer 1 (L1) and expanding data availability through blobs are inextricably linked. Similarly, the "Improve UX" track maintains its focus but with a sharpened emphasis on native account abstraction and seamless interoperability, recognizing these as pivotal for mass adoption. The introduction of "Harden the L1" signifies a proactive stance on safeguarding Ethereum’s core properties—such as censorship resistance, decentralization, and security—as the network expands its capabilities.
This realignment is not merely an administrative change but a strategic pivot designed to foster greater synergy among development teams and tackle the next generation of challenges with enhanced efficiency. With ambitious upgrades like "Glamsterdam" and "Hegotá" on the horizon for 2026, the Ethereum community is gearing up for another year of groundbreaking advancements that promise to further cement its position at the forefront of blockchain technology.
A Look Back: Ethereum’s Landmark Year in 2025
The year 2025 stands out as one of Ethereum’s most productive and transformative periods at the protocol level. The dedicated efforts of core developers, researchers, and the broader community culminated in significant advancements, marking tangible progress across the strategic initiatives outlined at the start of the year. Two major network upgrades, Pectra and Fusaka, alongside a series of other critical developments, propelled Ethereum closer to its vision of a scalable, efficient, and user-friendly global computer.
The Pectra Upgrade: Enhancing Core Functionality
In May 2025, the Ethereum mainnet welcomed the Pectra upgrade, a pivotal moment that introduced several high-impact Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs). Among the most anticipated was EIP-7702, a groundbreaking feature that empowers Externally Owned Accounts (EOAs)—the standard user wallets—with the temporary ability to execute smart contract code. This innovation unlocked a host of possibilities previously reserved for smart contract wallets, including:
- Transaction Batching: Users could now group multiple operations into a single transaction, reducing gas costs and simplifying complex interactions. This was a significant step towards improving efficiency for users engaging with various DeFi protocols or dApps simultaneously.
- Gas Sponsorship: EIP-7702 paved the way for third parties to pay transaction fees on behalf of users, a crucial component for onboarding new users unfamiliar with cryptocurrency or for applications subsidizing user interactions. This feature dramatically lowers the barrier to entry for mainstream adoption.
- Social Recovery: The ability for EOAs to temporarily act as smart contracts enabled more robust and user-friendly account recovery mechanisms, moving beyond traditional seed phrase reliance and enhancing security against loss of access.
Beyond EIP-7702, Pectra also delivered vital scaling and validator-centric improvements. The upgrade doubled blob throughput, a direct enhancement to Ethereum’s data availability layer, which is crucial for Layer 2 rollups to store their transaction data efficiently. This increase directly translated to lower transaction costs and higher capacity for rollup solutions. Furthermore, Pectra raised the maximum effective validator balance to 2,048 ETH (via EIP-7251), allowing existing validators to consolidate their stake and participate more effectively in network consensus. Concurrently, EIP-6110 dramatically shortened validator onboarding times, reducing the waiting period for new validators to join the network and contribute to its security, thereby promoting greater decentralization and participation.
Fusaka’s Rollout: A Leap in Data Availability
As 2025 drew to a close, December brought another monumental upgrade: Fusaka. This upgrade was primarily characterized by the mainnet deployment of PeerDAS (EIP-7594), a significant advancement in how validators handle blob data. Prior to PeerDAS, validators were required to download full blob data, which imposed substantial bandwidth requirements and limited the network’s overall data availability capacity. With PeerDAS, validators now sample blob data rather than downloading it entirely.
This innovative approach drastically reduces bandwidth requirements for validators, making it easier and less resource-intensive to run a node. The most profound impact of PeerDAS was its enablement of an 8x increase in theoretical blob capacity. This exponential jump is a game-changer for Layer 2 scaling solutions, providing them with vastly more space to publish data cheaply and efficiently, which in turn leads to lower transaction fees and higher throughput for end-users on rollups.
To immediately capitalize on this increased capacity, two BPO (Blob Parameter Only) forks were shipped alongside Fusaka. These forks initiated a gradual ramp-up from the initial 6 blobs per block towards higher targets, ensuring a measured and stable increase in data availability while monitoring network performance. This phased approach demonstrates the Ethereum community’s commitment to cautious and robust protocol development.
Broader Advancements: Gas Limits, Efficiency, and User Experience
Beyond the major network upgrades, 2025 witnessed several other critical advancements that collectively improved Ethereum’s performance and usability:
- Mainnet Gas Limit Increase: In a significant move that had not occurred since 2021, the community steadily raised the mainnet gas limit from an initial 30 million to an unprecedented 60 million. This doubling of the network’s computational capacity per block allowed for more transactions and complex operations to be processed, directly impacting network throughput and reducing congestion, albeit requiring careful monitoring of client performance.
- History Expiry: Addressing the ever-growing blockchain data size, History Expiry was successfully implemented, removing pre-Merge data from full nodes. This crucial optimization saved hundreds of gigabytes of disk space for node operators, making it more feasible to run a full node and further decentralizing network participation by lowering hardware requirements.
- User Experience (UX) Enhancements: The Open Intents Framework reached production readiness, providing a robust foundation for expressing user intentions in a more intuitive and flexible manner. This framework is vital for abstracting away blockchain complexities and making dApps more accessible. Concurrently, implementations of L1 fast confirmation rules progressed across various consensus clients, promising quicker finality for transactions on the Layer 1 and enhancing the responsiveness of the network.
- Interoperability Standards: Recognizing the multi-chain future, significant strides were made in establishing interoperability standards. ERC-7930 + ERC-7828: Interoperable addresses and names laid the groundwork for a more unified identity system across different chains, simplifying user interactions. Furthermore, ERC-7888: Crosschain Broadcaster advanced, aiming to facilitate seamless and trust-minimized communication and asset transfer between various Layer 2 solutions and potentially other blockchains.
While 2025 was undeniably a year of profound accomplishments, the experience also highlighted the need for an evolving strategy. The success of these initiatives underscored the interconnected nature of scaling, user experience, and network hardening, prompting the Ethereum Foundation to re-evaluate its "Protocol" track structure for the subsequent year.
Strategic Evolution: Ethereum’s Protocol Tracks for 2026
The initial "Protocol" framework, with its focus on "Scale L1," "Scale Blobs," and "Improve UX," served Ethereum well through the Pectra and Fusaka upgrades. These initiatives were designed around immediate, tangible deliverables: raising the gas limit, deploying PeerDAS, and making concrete strides in user experience. With these significant milestones now achieved, the Ethereum Foundation has taken the opportunity to rethink its organizational approach, moving towards a higher-level, more integrated strategy for 2026. This strategic evolution aims to foster greater synergy, address complexities more effectively, and prepare Ethereum for the challenges and opportunities of the coming years.
Starting in 2026, Protocol’s work is organized into three refined tracks: "Scale," "Improve UX," and the newly introduced "Harden the L1."
The Unified "Scale" Track: Synergizing L1 and Data Throughput
Led by Ansgar Dietrichs, Marius van der Wijden, and Raúl Kripalani
The newly consolidated "Scale" track merges the previous "Scale L1" and "Scale Blobs" initiatives into a single, cohesive effort. This strategic unification is a practical acknowledgment of the deep interdependence between increasing the Layer 1’s execution capacity and expanding its data availability throughput. As explained by the track leads, gas limit increases, which enhance L1 transaction processing, are intrinsically linked to the performance of execution engines. Similarly, the ongoing scaling of blob capacity, critical for Layer 2 efficiency, relies heavily on coordinated networking and consensus changes that often touch the same core client codebases.
By bringing these efforts under one umbrella, the Ethereum Foundation aims to accelerate development and reduce potential friction points. This integrated approach ensures a more holistic view of scaling challenges, allowing teams to address bottlenecks and optimize performance across the entire data and execution stack. The "Scale" track will be focused on several key areas, including:
- Further Blob Capacity Expansion: Building on the success of PeerDAS, the track will continue to explore and implement mechanisms for increasing the number of blobs per block and optimizing their distribution, potentially pushing theoretical capacity even higher. This is crucial for sustaining the growth of Layer 2 rollups and keeping transaction costs low.
- Execution Layer Optimizations: Work will continue on improving the performance and efficiency of Ethereum’s execution layer, including client optimizations and exploring novel execution paradigms that can support higher gas limits without compromising network stability.
- Sharding Progress (Proto-Danksharding & Beyond): While PeerDAS laid the foundation for "proto-danksharding" by increasing data availability, the Scale track will also focus on further research and development towards full danksharding, which promises even greater scalability through a more comprehensive sharding architecture for data.
- Network Performance and Latency: Enhancing the underlying network infrastructure to support increased data flow and transaction volume will be a continuous effort, ensuring that scaling measures are met with robust network performance.
The "Improve UX" Track: Towards Native Account Abstraction and Seamless Interoperability
Led by Barnabé Monnot and Matt Garnett
The "Improve UX" track carries forward much of the momentum from 2025 but with a sharpened focus on two areas deemed highest-leverage for Ethereum’s usability in 2026: native account abstraction (AA) and interoperability. These areas are critical for moving Ethereum from a niche technology to a platform accessible to billions.
On account abstraction, EIP-7702 was an important first step, offering temporary smart contract capabilities to EOAs. However, the ultimate vision for Ethereum is one where smart contract wallets are the default, offering advanced features like multi-signature security, custom recovery mechanisms, and flexible fee payment without the need for bundlers, relayers, or additional gas overhead. The track will push forward proposals like EIP-7701 and the more recent EIP-8141 (Frame Transactions), which aim to embed smart account logic directly into the protocol itself. This native integration would significantly simplify the user experience, making crypto wallets as intuitive as traditional online accounts.
Crucially, this work on native AA also intersects with post-quantum readiness. As the threat of quantum computing looms, native account abstraction provides a natural and robust migration path away from current ECDSA-based authentication methods to more quantum-resistant signature schemes. Complementary to this, the "Improve UX" track will explore and advance proposals that can make it significantly more gas-efficient to verify quantum-resistant signatures directly within the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), ensuring long-term cryptographic security.
On interoperability, the track will build on the foundation laid by the Open Intents Framework. The overarching goal remains seamless, trust-minimized cross-Layer 2 (L2) interactions. This involves ensuring that users can effortlessly move assets and interact with applications across different rollups without friction or excessive trust assumptions. Continued progress on achieving faster L1 confirmations and shorter L2 settlement times directly supports this goal, creating a more cohesive and efficient multi-rollup ecosystem. Efforts will also extend to refining cross-chain messaging standards and developing infrastructure that enables dApps to operate smoothly across various L2s, presenting a unified experience to the end-user.
The New "Harden the L1" Track: Fortifying Ethereum’s Foundational Principles
Led by Fredrik Svantes, Parithosh Jayanthi, and Thomas Thiery
"Harden the L1" is a brand-new track, signifying a dedicated and explicit focus on ensuring that as Ethereum scales and evolves, it rigorously retains the fundamental properties that define its value proposition: decentralization, security, and censorship resistance. This track acknowledges that rapid innovation must be balanced with a steadfast commitment to the network’s core tenets.
This track covers several critical areas:
- Enshrined Proposer-Builder Separation (ePBS): A primary focus will be the research and implementation of ePBS. This aims to mitigate the risks associated with Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) by separating the roles of block proposers and block builders at the protocol level. ePBS is designed to improve censorship resistance, reduce centralization pressures on validators, and ensure a more fair and predictable transaction ordering, thereby hardening the network against potential abuses of power.
- Censorship Resistance: Beyond ePBS, the track will actively research and develop mechanisms to enhance Ethereum’s censorship resistance, exploring various approaches to make it more difficult for any single entity or group to prevent legitimate transactions from being included in blocks. This includes exploring decentralized block building mechanisms and other protocol-level guarantees.
- Client Diversity and Robustness: Maintaining and improving client diversity across both execution and consensus layers is paramount for network health. This track will support efforts to encourage the development and adoption of multiple robust client implementations, reducing the risk of a single point of failure and enhancing the network’s overall resilience to bugs or attacks.
- Protocol Security Audits and Formal Verification: Continuous and rigorous security audits of core protocol changes, alongside the exploration of formal verification methods, will be a cornerstone of this track. Ensuring the cryptographic and logical integrity of the protocol is critical to prevent vulnerabilities as complexity increases.
- Network Stability and Resiliency: Proactive measures to monitor and improve the overall stability and resiliency of the Ethereum network, including its peer-to-peer layer, will be undertaken. This involves research into network topology, attack vectors, and disaster recovery mechanisms to ensure Ethereum can withstand adverse conditions.
By dedicating a specific track to "Harden the L1," the Ethereum Foundation underscores its long-term commitment to safeguarding the network’s integrity and preserving its decentralized ethos, even as it pursues ambitious scaling and usability goals.
Looking Ahead: A Roadmap Paved with Innovation
The strategic restructuring of Ethereum’s "Protocol" initiatives for 2026 sets a clear and ambitious trajectory for the network’s future. The insights gained from a highly productive 2025, culminating in the Pectra and Fusaka upgrades, have provided a solid foundation upon which to build. The refined tracks—"Scale," "Improve UX," and "Harden the L1"—are designed to tackle the next generation of challenges with greater synergy and impact.
The Path to Glamsterdam and Hegotá: Major Upgrades on the Horizon
The immediate future is marked by two major network upgrades: Glamsterdam, targeted for the first half of 2026, and Hegotá, planned to follow later in the year. These upgrades encapsulate the ambitious goals outlined within the new track structure.
Glamsterdam is anticipated to bring a host of significant advancements, including initial implementations of parallel execution, a transformative technology that allows multiple transactions to be processed simultaneously, dramatically increasing L1 throughput. This upgrade is also expected to feature significantly higher gas limits, building on the 2025 increases, and continued progress on blob scaling, ensuring ample data availability for Layer 2s. Early components of enshrined PBS (Proposer-Builder Separation) are also likely to be introduced, strengthening censorship resistance and decentralization. Further enhancements in native account abstraction and foundational work on post-quantum security are also expected to feature prominently.
Hegotá, planned for the latter half of 2026, will likely build upon Glamsterdam’s foundations, pushing the boundaries further in all these areas. It could see more mature forms of parallel execution, deeper integration of ePBS, and further refinements in account abstraction and cross-chain interoperability. The ambition is clear: to evolve Ethereum into a truly global, high-performance, and resilient blockchain platform.
Long-Term Vision and Broader Implications
The implications of this strategic roadmap extend far beyond technical specifications. For users, these developments promise a future of lower transaction costs, faster confirmations, and an incredibly intuitive experience through native account abstraction, making complex decentralized applications as simple to use as traditional web services. The focus on interoperability means a seamless experience across various Layer 2 solutions, fostering a truly interconnected ecosystem.
For developers, the increased scalability and robust tooling will unlock new frontiers for dApp creation, allowing for more complex, high-throughput applications that were previously infeasible. The commitment to hardening the L1 ensures that the foundational layer remains secure and decentralized, providing a stable and trustworthy platform for innovation.
For the Ethereum ecosystem as a whole, this strategic pivot reinforces its leadership in the blockchain space. By proactively addressing the intertwined challenges of scalability, usability, and core network resilience, Ethereum positions itself as a future-proof platform capable of supporting the next wave of decentralized innovation and mass adoption. The emphasis on post-quantum security also demonstrates a foresight that is critical for long-term viability in an evolving technological landscape.
The Ethereum Foundation has committed to providing regular, track-level updates, ensuring transparency and inviting community involvement. The protocol.ethereum.foundation portal remains the primary hub for anyone wishing to follow along or contribute to these monumental efforts. With a clear vision and a renewed strategic focus, Ethereum is not just building a blockchain; it’s architecting the future of decentralized technology, one impactful upgrade at a time. The message from the developers is resolute: "Let’s keep shipping."
