The Ethereum Foundation published its most detailed protocol roadmap in years across February and March 2026, culminating in a March 23 post by Josh Rudolf, Julian Ma, and Josh Stark that formally redefines the relationship between Layer 1 and Layer 2. The documents collectively outline seven har...
"Introducing strawmap, a strawman roadmap by EF Protocol. Believe in something. Believe in an Ethereum strawmap." — Justin Drake, Ethereum Foundation Protocol Researcher
The Ethereum Foundation published its most detailed protocol roadmap in years across February and March 2026, culminating in a March 23 post by Josh Rudolf, Julian Ma, and Josh Stark that formally redefines the relationship between Layer 1 and Layer 2. The documents collectively outline seven hard forks through 2029, a gas limit increase from 60 million to 100 million and beyond, slot time reductions from 12 seconds to 2 seconds, and finality compression from approximately 16 minutes to 8 seconds. The Foundation simultaneously released a 38-page organizational mandate declaring its intent to make itself unnecessary.
ETH trades at $2,134 as of March 25, 2026, down from its August 2025 peak near $5,000. Market capitalization stands at $257.5 billion. Ethereum L2 total value secured exceeds $40 billion across 146 live networks, though Arbitrum and Base account for 77% of L2 DeFi TVL. The gap between the ambition of the technical roadmap and the price action of its native token defines the current moment.
On February 26, 2026, Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake published the "strawmap" — a strawman roadmap detailing seven consecutive hard forks through 2029, maintaining a cadence of approximately two upgrades per year. The document, which originated at an internal EF workshop in January 2026 and is hosted at strawmap.org, represents what Vitalik Buterin called "a very important document" and described as a "ship of Theseus" style rebuild — replacing components incrementally rather than through a single overhaul.
The 2025 precedent is instructive. Ethereum delivered both the Pectra and Fusaka hard forks last year, establishing the two-per-year cadence that the strawmap now codifies through 2029. Glamsterdam is slated for the first half of 2026, with Hegotá following in the second half.
Buterin separately proposed incremental slot time reductions following a square-root-of-two progression: 12 seconds to 8, then 6, 4, 3, and eventually 2 seconds. Each step would be gated by network safety confidence thresholds. The new "Minimmit" finality algorithm, enabling single-round voting, would compress finality from approximately 16 minutes to roughly 8 seconds — a 480x improvement.
Drake's strawmap organized the roadmap around five strategic objectives:
| North Star | Target | Current State | |---|---|---| | Fast L1 | ~8-second finality | ~16-minute finality | | Gigagas L1 | ~10,000 TPS | ~30 TPS (variable) | | Teragas L2 | ~10,000,000 TPS | Fragmented across 146 chains | | Post-Quantum L1 | Hash-based cryptography | BLS signatures (vulnerable) | | Private L1 | Shielded ETH transfers | Transparent by default |
These targets represent orders-of-magnitude improvements across every dimension. The Gigagas designation refers to a gas limit regime enabling approximately 10,000 transactions per second on L1 alone. The Teragas target envisions L2 networks collectively processing roughly 10 million TPS. Both require infrastructure that does not yet exist.
The decoupling of slot time from finality is a structural decision. According to Buterin, each parameter can now be optimized independently, allowing quantum-resistant slots to be deployed before quantum-resistant finality — a pragmatic sequencing choice given the different cryptographic requirements of each subsystem.
Glamsterdam, expected in H1 2026, comprises up to 22 Ethereum Improvement Proposals. The Ethereum Foundation's DevOps team has already tested three EIPs on Devnet-4 and is transitioning to Devnet-5. Two headline proposals define the upgrade:
EIP-7732 (Enshrined Proposer-Builder Separation): Currently, 80–90% of Ethereum block production depends on off-chain builders routing through external relays like Flashbots. EIP-7732 moves proposer-builder coordination into the protocol itself, implementing a commit-reveal pipeline and introducing a Payload Timeliness Committee for validation. This eliminates a centralization vector while increasing transaction verification time for validators.
EIP-7928 (Block-Level Access Lists): Blocks will declare state access upfront in headers via a new block_access_list_root field. Execution layer clients must store these access lists for a minimum of 3,533 epochs. This infrastructure enables future parallel block verification.
Additional EIPs under consideration include EIP-7904 (general opcode repricing based on benchmarks), EIP-8037 (increased state creation gas costs), EIP-8038 (increased cold read costs), and EIP-7954 (increased maximum contract size). The Foundation projects 10–30x short-term execution improvements from ePBS and block-level access lists, with 1,000x improvements targeted longer-term via ZK-EVMs.
Gas fees for both simple and complex smart contracts are projected to fall by 78.6% under the new repricing model.
The March 23 post by Rudolf, Ma, and Stark formally redefined how L1 and L2 should relate. The key structural claim: Ethereum L1 will remain the primary hub for settlement, shared state, liquidity, and DeFi, while L2 networks should pivot from scaling as their primary value proposition to differentiation and customization.
This is a notable reversal in emphasis. For years, L2s were positioned as Ethereum's scaling answer. The Foundation now states that L1 itself will "scale by several orders of magnitude," which reframes L2s as specialized execution environments rather than necessary throughput extensions.
The post established minimum security standards: all L2s must reach "at least Stage 1 security," defined as the ability for users to exit safely to L1 even if operators or security councils act maliciously. Stage 2, which involves synchronous composability and native rollup status, would enable the removal of security councils entirely.
Blobs — the data availability mechanism introduced in 2024 via proto-danksharding — are currently only about 30% full, according to the Foundation. This suggests L2 data throughput has room to expand substantially before requiring further protocol changes.
The L2Beat monitoring platform is cited as the de facto auditor for these security stages. The Foundation also promoted the Open Intents Framework for cross-L2 interoperability and a Fast Confirmation Rule for improved user experience.
The Ethereum Foundation launched pq.ethereum.org, a dedicated public resource consolidating eight years of post-quantum research that began in 2018. The site, maintained by the Protocol Architecture team, marks the maturation of a long-running initiative now elevated to top strategic priority.
The implementation plan spans three layers:
The Foundation targets completion of L1 protocol upgrades by 2029, with the quantum threat window estimated at early to mid-2030s. According to the Foundation, Ethereum's design targets "century-scale infrastructure resilience," treating the post-quantum transition as an opportunity to strengthen security, simplicity, and decentralization simultaneously.
Buterin stated that Ethereum will "keep chugging along" even if quantum computers arrive earlier than expected, citing the incremental upgrade path as a built-in hedge.
On March 13, 2026, the Ethereum Foundation published its organizational mandate — a 38-page document defining four core properties it deems essential to Ethereum, grouped under the acronym CROPS: Censorship resistance, open source and free (as in freedom), Privacy, and Security.
The mandate's central thesis: "Our goal is to reduce the Foundation's relative influence over time." The Foundation explicitly stated it measures success by becoming "unnecessary" and described itself as "the original steward of the Ethereum project" rather than its governing body.
This publication followed organizational turbulence. Co-executive director Tomasz Stańczak departed in February 2026, with Bastian Aue assuming interim duties. The mandate functions as an institutional anchor during a period of leadership transition.
The Foundation committed to focusing on work "others won't undertake" — specifically long-term protocol research, public-goods security work, and coordination across development teams. The document signals a deliberate narrowing of scope even as the protocol's ambition expands.
The divergence between Ethereum's protocol activity and its token price defines 2026. ETH reached approximately $5,000 in August 2025 and has since declined to $2,134 — a drawdown exceeding 57%. Market capitalization sits at $257.5 billion. Meanwhile, network usage continues to expand.
The gas limit increase from 30 million to 60 million in 2025 marked the first such change since 2021. The 2026 target of 100 million and beyond would represent a further 67%+ increase in on-chain capacity. Anthony Sassano, an Ethereum educator, stated in November that reaching 180 million is a "baseline target for the year, not a best-case outcome."
L2 ecosystem metrics present a mixed picture. Total value secured across all scaling solutions exceeds $40 billion, but this figure is concentrated: Arbitrum holds approximately 44% of L2 TVL, Base accounts for 33%, and OP Mainnet for 6%. The remaining 146 networks split the balance. According to 21Shares, the majority of smaller L2s are projected not to survive 2026.
The Ethereum Foundation has laid out the most technically detailed four-year plan in its history. The ambition is clear: transform a 12-second, 16-minute-finality chain into a 2-second, 8-second-finality platform capable of 10,000 TPS, resistant to quantum computing, and structurally independent of its founding organization.
Execution risk is substantial. Seven hard forks in four years requires sustained coordination across client teams, L2 operators, and a developer workforce that multiple industry reports flag as shrinking. The 2025 delivery of Pectra and Fusaka on schedule provides some confidence in the cadence. The Foundation's deliberate organizational retreat — publishing a mandate to make itself unnecessary — adds governance risk to the technical challenge.
The market is pricing none of this in. ETH has lost 57% from its 2025 high while the protocol roadmap accelerates. Whether that gap represents a disconnect or a verdict will be determined by whether Glamsterdam ships on time and whether the gas limit actually moves toward 100 million in the coming months.