Ethereum’s foundational development team has unveiled a significant evolution of its "Protocol" initiative, a strategic framework launched in June of the previous year. This ambitious undertaking, initially structured around three core pillars – Scale L1, Scale Blobs, and Improve UX – has seen substantial progress and is now being refined to address the growing needs and future trajectory of the Ethereum ecosystem. The updated roadmap for 2026 introduces three distinct, yet interconnected, tracks: Scale, Improve UX, and Harden the L1, signaling a maturing approach to scaling, enhancing user interaction, and fortifying the core Layer 1 blockchain.
A Year of Monumental Achievements: 2025 in Retrospect
The past year, 2025, has been characterized as one of Ethereum’s most productive periods at the protocol level. Two major network upgrades, Pectra and Fusaka, were successfully deployed, marking significant advancements across the board. These upgrades weren’t merely incremental; they represent substantial leaps forward in scalability, efficiency, and user-centric design.
The Pectra upgrade, which went live on mainnet in May 2025, introduced EIP-7702. This groundbreaking Ethereum Improvement Proposal grants Externally Owned Accounts (EOAs) the capability to temporarily execute smart contract code. This newfound flexibility unlocks a suite of powerful functionalities, including transaction batching, gas sponsorship for users, and enhanced social recovery mechanisms for account security. Beyond user-facing benefits, Pectra also doubled blob throughput, a critical component for data availability, and raised the maximum effective validator balance to 2,048 ETH, optimizing validator economics. Furthermore, it dramatically shortened validator onboarding times, making it easier and faster for new participants to join the network’s security infrastructure.
Following Pectra, the Fusaka upgrade was deployed in December 2025, bringing PeerDAS (Data Availability Sampling) to the mainnet. This innovation fundamentally alters how validators interact with blob data. Instead of downloading the entirety of blob data, validators now sample it, significantly reducing bandwidth requirements. This efficiency gain is projected to enable an impressive 8x increase in theoretical blob capacity. Accompanying Fusaka were two Blob Parameter Only (BPO) forks, initiating a phased approach to increasing blob targets per block, moving from the initial six towards higher capacities.
These upgrades collectively fueled significant network expansion. Between Pectra and Fusaka, the Ethereum community successfully raised the mainnet gas limit from an initial 30 million to 60 million. This doubling represents the first substantial increase in the gas limit since 2021, directly enhancing the network’s transaction processing capacity. Further optimizations in 2025 included the implementation of history expiry, which removed pre-Merge historical data from full nodes, leading to a reduction of hundreds of gigabytes in disk space requirements – a crucial step for node operators and network decentralization.
On the user experience (UX) front, the Open Intents Framework reached a production-ready state, laying the groundwork for more sophisticated decentralized application interactions. Progress was also made on L1 fast confirmation rule implementations across various consensus clients, aiming to reduce transaction finality times. Interoperability standards also saw significant movement, with the advancement of ERC-7930 + ERC-7828 for interoperable addresses and names, and ERC-7888, the Crosschain Broadcaster standard, paving the way for more seamless cross-network communication.
"2025 was one of Ethereum’s most productive years at the protocol level," the announcement stated. "We shipped two major network upgrades and made meaningful progress on every front we set out to tackle." This sentiment underscores the immense collaborative effort and technical achievement that defined the year.
Evolving the Framework: An Impactful 2026 and Beyond
As the Ethereum ecosystem matures and its demands evolve, the initial "Protocol" framework, designed for near-term deliverables like gas limit increases and blob scaling, has been refined. For 2026, the work is being reorganized into three distinct, yet synergistic, tracks, reflecting a more strategic and holistic approach to long-term development.
Scale
The Scale track, now led by Ansgar Dietrichs, Marius van der Wijden, and Raül Kripalani, represents a significant consolidation of previous efforts. It merges the former "Scale L1" and "Scale Blobs" initiatives into a single, unified endeavor. This integration acknowledges the deeply intertwined nature of increasing Layer 1 execution capacity and expanding data availability throughput. Increases in the gas limit are directly dependent on the performance of execution engines, while blob scaling relies on networking and consensus changes that often involve shared client code. By coordinating these efforts under one roof, the development team aims to accelerate progress and adopt a more holistic perspective.
Concretely, the Scale track is focused on:
- Execution Layer Scaling: Enhancing the capacity of the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) to process more transactions per block. This includes further gas limit increases and optimizations to execution clients.
- Data Availability Scaling: Expanding the capacity of blob space on Ethereum, making it more affordable and accessible for rollups and other decentralized applications to store their data. This involves continued development and refinement of Data Availability Sampling (DAS) and related technologies.
- Network and Consensus Efficiency: Improving the underlying network protocols and consensus mechanisms to handle increased transaction volumes and data loads more effectively. This includes optimizing peer-to-peer communication and validator performance.
Improve UX
The Improve UX track, helmed by Barnabé Monnot and Matt Garnett, builds upon the momentum of the previous year’s efforts, with a sharpened focus on two high-leverage areas for Ethereum’s usability in 2026: native account abstraction and interoperability.
On the front of native account abstraction, EIP-7702 was a crucial initial step. However, the ultimate goal is to establish smart contract wallets as the default user experience, eliminating the need for bundlers, relayers, or additional gas overhead. Proposals such as EIP-7701 and the more recent EIP-8141 (Frame Transactions) are driving toward embedding smart account logic directly into the protocol. This work also intersects with the critical need for post-quantum readiness, as native account abstraction offers a natural migration path away from current ECDSA-based authentication methods, which are vulnerable to future quantum computing advancements. Complementary proposals are in development to significantly enhance the gas efficiency of verifying quantum-resistant signatures within the EVM, a vital step for long-term security.
In terms of interoperability, the Improve UX track is continuing to build upon the foundation established by the Open Intents Framework. The overarching objective remains to facilitate seamless, trust-minimized cross-Layer 2 interactions. This goal is progressively being realized through ongoing development. Continued progress in areas such as faster L1 confirmations and reduced L2 settlement times directly supports this vision, promising a more integrated and user-friendly multi-chain Ethereum experience.
Harden the L1
A newly introduced track, Harden the L1, led by Fredrik Svantes, Parithosh Jayanthi, and Thomas Thiery, signifies a dedicated focus on ensuring Ethereum’s core Layer 1 blockchain retains its fundamental value propositions as it scales and evolves. This track addresses several critical areas:
- Censorship Resistance: Developing mechanisms to ensure that transactions and state transitions cannot be arbitrarily blocked or censored by any single entity or group. This is a cornerstone of Ethereum’s decentralized ethos.
- MEV Mitigation: Researching and implementing solutions to address the potential negative impacts of Miner Extractable Value (MEV), aiming to ensure a fairer and more equitable transaction ordering process.
- Protocol Security: Continuously auditing and strengthening the core protocol against potential vulnerabilities and attack vectors, ensuring the long-term integrity and security of the network.
- Post-Quantum Readiness: Proactively preparing the network for the advent of quantum computing by exploring and integrating quantum-resistant cryptography, as mentioned in the context of native account abstraction.
- Economic Security: Analyzing and reinforcing the economic incentives that secure the network, ensuring that staking and validation remain robust and profitable.
Looking Ahead: Glamsterdam and Hegotà
The immediate future of Ethereum’s protocol development is marked by two major network upgrades slated for 2026: Glamsterdam and Hegotà. Glamsterdam is targeted for the first half of the year, with Hegotà planned for deployment later in the year. The ambition for these upgrades is substantial, encompassing parallel execution capabilities, significantly higher gas limits, enshrined proposer-builder separation (PBS), continued blob scaling, and advancements in censorship resistance, native account abstraction, and post-quantum security.
The Ethereum Foundation plans to continue its practice of publishing track-level updates, providing ongoing transparency and detail on development progress. The resource protocol.ethereum.foundation is highlighted as the primary starting point for those wishing to follow along or contribute to these efforts. The overarching message from the development community is one of continued commitment and action: "Let’s keep shipping." This forward-looking statement encapsulates the pragmatic and results-oriented approach that has driven Ethereum’s evolution, signaling a clear path towards a more scalable, user-friendly, and secure decentralized future.
