On February 18, 2026, the Ethereum Foundation published its most consequential protocol priorities update since the Merge. The announcement reorganizes all core development into three unified tracks — Scale, Improve UX, and Harden the L1 — and lays out two major network upgrades for the year: Gla...
"Starting in 2026, the protocol's work is organized into three tracks: Scale, Improve UX, and Harden the L1." — Ethereum Foundation Protocol Track Leads, February 18, 2026
On February 18, 2026, the Ethereum Foundation published its most consequential protocol priorities update since the Merge. The announcement reorganizes all core development into three unified tracks — Scale, Improve UX, and Harden the L1 — and lays out two major network upgrades for the year: Glamsterdam in H1 and Hegotá in H2. This is not an incremental roadmap adjustment. It is a structural overhaul of how Ethereum governs its own evolution.
The timing matters. ETH trades near $1,960, down roughly 60% from six months ago. Layer-2 rollups are capturing an outsized share of fee revenue. Competitors like Solana and Sui are eating into developer mindshare. The Foundation's response is not a marketing exercise — it is a coordinated engineering campaign to make Ethereum's base layer dramatically faster, more usable, and quantum-resistant within twelve months.
What makes this update different from prior roadmap communications is its specificity. Named track leads. Concrete EIP numbers. Measurable targets like a 100-million gas limit. The Foundation is betting that institutional credibility requires institutional transparency — and that Ethereum's survival as the settlement layer of record depends on executing two successful hard forks in a single calendar year.
The restructuring replaces the previous ad-hoc development structure with three named tracks, each with designated leads:
Scale — Led by Ansgar Dietrichs, Marius van der Wijden, and Raúl Kripalani. This track merges what was previously split between "Scale L1" and "Scale Blobs" into a single effort. Its mandate: push the gas limit toward and beyond 100 million, deliver the scaling components of Glamsterdam (including ePBS via EIP-7732), advance zkEVM attester clients toward production readiness, and pursue state scaling through repricing, history expiry, binary trees, and statelessness.
Improve UX — Led by Barnabé Monnot and Matt Garnett. The focus is native account abstraction (EIP-7701 and EIP-8141), post-quantum cryptography migration paths, seamless cross-L2 interactions via the Open Intents Framework, and faster L1 confirmations to shorten L2 settlement times. This track acknowledges a painful truth: Ethereum's user experience has been its weakest competitive dimension.
Harden the L1 — Led by Fredrik Svantes, Parithosh Jayanthi, and Thomas Thiery. This newly created track addresses long-term resilience: the Trillion Dollar Security Initiative (post-quantum readiness and execution-layer safeguards), FOCIL (EIP-7805) for censorship resistance, the VOPS framework for blob and statelessness censorship resistance, and testing infrastructure to support the accelerated two-forks-per-year cadence.
The organizational signal is as important as the technical content. By naming specific people and consolidating overlapping workstreams, the Foundation is moving away from Ethereum's historically decentralized — and sometimes incoherent — development culture toward something closer to a product organization with accountability.
Glamsterdam is targeted for the first half of 2026 and comprises up to 22 Ethereum Improvement Proposals. Its headline feature is EIP-7732: Enshrined Proposer-Builder Separation (ePBS), which moves block building infrastructure from off-chain relays into the protocol itself.
Supporting EIPs include:
The repricing suite is significant. Multidimensional gas metering (EIP-8011) would replace the current single-dimension gas model with separate accounting for different resource types. This is the kind of structural change that enables dramatically higher throughput without proportionally increasing the risk of denial-of-service attacks — because the network can now price compute, storage reads, and bandwidth independently.
Public testnets and dual audit phases are outlined for early-to-mid 2026, creating a realistic but ambitious activation timeline.
The second upgrade, Hegotá, is targeted for late 2026 and focuses on the features that were too risky or insufficiently tested for Glamsterdam:
The two-fork-per-year cadence is itself a statement. Ethereum has historically shipped one major upgrade per year, sometimes with delays measured in years (the Merge was delayed multiple times). Committing to two forks in 2026 signals confidence in the improved testing infrastructure — and urgency about the competitive landscape.
The gas limit rose from 30 million to 60 million between Pectra (May 2025) and Fusaka (December 2025) — the first significant increase since 2021. The 2026 target pushes this toward and beyond 100 million, with post-ePBS projections suggesting 200-300 million is achievable.
To put this in perspective: Ethereum L1 processed roughly 1.2 million transactions per day at the 30 million gas limit. At 100 million, theoretical capacity roughly triples. At 300 million, Ethereum L1 alone could handle volumes that today require multiple rollups.
The economic implications are substantial. More gas per block means lower per-transaction fees during peak periods. For users, this is unambiguously positive. For ETH holders concerned about the fee-burn mechanism (EIP-1559), the picture is more nuanced: higher throughput may mean more total fees burned even as per-transaction fees decline, but only if demand scales proportionally.
The Foundation is pairing gas limit increases with repricing EIPs specifically to prevent state bloat from undermining the gains. EIP-8037 and EIP-8038 increase the cost of creating and accessing state, respectively, ensuring that cheaper execution doesn't translate to unbounded storage growth.
The enshrinement of proposer-builder separation may be Glamsterdam's most consequential change for Ethereum's economic structure. Today, roughly 90% of Ethereum blocks are built through MEV-Boost, an off-chain relay system maintained by Flashbots. This works, but it creates a single point of centralization and trust.
Under ePBS (EIP-7732), block builders assemble and cryptographically seal their contents. Proposers choose the highest-paying block without seeing or tampering with what's inside. Transactions are only revealed after finalization, reducing front-running and sandwich attack opportunities.
The MEV redistribution is significant: proposers receive protocol-sponsored incentives, builders compete for small MEV margins after burning their bids, and the burn mechanism ensures all ETH holders benefit from the value extraction that currently accrues disproportionately to a small number of sophisticated actors.
This directly addresses one of the most persistent criticisms of Ethereum's economic model — that MEV is a hidden tax on users that benefits a concentrated group of searchers and builders. ePBS doesn't eliminate MEV, but it redistributes its proceeds more equitably across the validator set and ETH holders.
EIP-7701 represents the culmination of years of iteration on account abstraction, from ERC-4337's off-chain approach to the protocol-level integration now on the roadmap.
The current system under ERC-4337 requires externally owned accounts (EOAs) to sign and relay "user operations" via bundlers and paymaster contracts. This adds approximately 20,000 extra gas per transaction and exposes users to bundler front-running risk. It also creates a two-tier system where smart wallets are second-class citizens requiring additional infrastructure.
Native account abstraction would make smart contract wallets — including multisigs, quantum-resistant signature systems, key-rotation wallets, and gas-sponsored transactions — operate as first-class protocol entities. This intersects directly with the post-quantum agenda: if accounts can natively support arbitrary signature schemes, migrating from ECDSA to lattice-based cryptography becomes a wallet upgrade rather than a protocol emergency.
The Open Intents Framework, which reached production in 2025, complements this by enabling seamless cross-L2 interactions. The combination — native smart wallets plus trust-minimized cross-rollup transfers — would represent the most significant UX improvement in Ethereum's history.
The Foundation's framing is deliberate: the "Trillion Dollar Security Initiative" is named for the approximate value that Ethereum secures across L1, L2s, and the DeFi ecosystem. The initiative, led by Fredrik Svantes, encompasses post-quantum readiness, execution-layer safeguards like post-execution transaction assertions, and trustless RPCs.
The quantum threat timeline remains debated, but the Foundation is not waiting for consensus. A dedicated post-quantum research and engineering team has been created, and the work — which has progressed behind the scenes for several years — is now being elevated to a core protocol priority.
The practical concern is not that quantum computers will break ECDSA tomorrow. It is that migrating 236 million ETH addresses and the entire DeFi stack to quantum-resistant cryptography takes years, and the window to begin that migration is now. Justin Drake has signaled that the transition will adopt NIST-standard lattice-based cryptography, with native account abstraction providing the migration pathway.
For institutions evaluating Ethereum as a settlement layer, the quantum readiness commitment is arguably more important than any scaling metric. No institution will commit to multi-decade exposure on a chain that hasn't credibly addressed post-quantum migration.
The unspoken context for this entire roadmap is Ethereum's value-capture crisis. Since EIP-4844 (Dencun, March 2024), L2 operating costs plummeted from roughly $1.5 million daily to $135,100, while L2 transaction volumes surged from 500,000 to 2.1 million per day. The rollups are thriving; Ethereum L1 fee revenue has cratered.
The 2026 roadmap is a multi-pronged response:
The strategic question is whether Ethereum can execute a shift from "rollup-centric" to "security settlement layer" — a reframing that positions L1 fees as insurance premiums rather than transaction costs, and blob fees as the primary L2 value-capture mechanism.
At $1,960 and a $236 billion market cap, ETH is priced as though this transition has already failed. The 2026 roadmap is the Foundation's most credible argument that it hasn't.
The February 18 announcement is not a vision document — it is an engineering plan with named owners, specific EIP numbers, and two hard fork targets within twelve months. The Ethereum Foundation is simultaneously addressing its three biggest vulnerabilities: L1 throughput limitations, user experience friction, and the looming quantum threat.
The execution risk is real. Two hard forks in one year is unprecedented for Ethereum. The repricing suite (EIP-7904, 8011, 8032, 8037, 8038) introduces complexity that could have unintended consequences for DeFi protocols that have optimized around current gas economics. And the post-quantum migration is a multi-year effort whose timeline depends on cryptographic research that is inherently unpredictable.
But the alternative — slow, incremental improvement while competitors ship faster execution environments and institutions defer long-term commitments — is more dangerous than ambition. The Ethereum Foundation appears to have concluded that the biggest risk to a $236 billion network is not moving too fast, but moving too slowly. The next twelve months will determine whether that bet pays off.