Ethereum's Roadmap to 2029: Scaling the Base Layer and Beyond

Introduction

Ethereum remains the leading smart contract blockchain by assets hosted, with the largest concentration of stablecoins, decentralized finance (DeFi) collateral, and tokenized real-world assets (RWAs). As financial activity increasingly moves on-chain and competition among blockchain networks intensifies, Ethereum faces a key challenge: scaling to meet future demand while preserving the decentralization and security that underpin its value proposition.

Against this backdrop, the Ethereum Foundation’s 2026 "Strawmap" outlines a clearer long-term vision for the network. The draft roadmap reflects a more balanced approach to scaling, combining continued support for Layer 2 (L2) networks with renewed emphasis on strengthening Ethereum's base layer. It also targets faster transaction finality, native privacy, and post-quantum resilience.

This article examines the strategy behind the ambitious proposal, the path to execution, beginning with the upcoming Glamsterdam and Hegotá upgrades, and the potential implications for ether’s investment thesis. It also assesses execution risk, which may be the roadmap's greatest challenge.

Key Takeaways:

• The Strawmap provides the clearest articulation yet of Ethereum's long-term strategy and development priorities through 2029.
• The draft signals a renewed focus on scaling Ethereum's base layer, reflecting the view that a more scalable Layer 1 (L1) is key to adoption and long-term value for token holders.
• The strategy seeks to scale Ethereum while preserving its core principles of censorship and capture resistance, open source, privacy and security (CROPS).
• Zero-knowledge (ZK) technology is emerging as a core enabler of scalability, privacy, and post-quantum security.
• Execution remains the primary investment risk, as the multi-year upgrade agenda may face technical challenges and delays.

Ethereum’s Third Act: A More Balanced, Long-Term Path

Ethereum’s roadmap has historically been complex, reflecting a broad stakeholder base with differing priorities and no single governing authority. However, the Ethereum community has become more explicit about its priorities with the publication of the Strawmap in February 2026. 

Named as a portmanteau of "strawman" and "roadmap," the draft establishes five long-term, high-level objectives—or “north stars”—encompassing seven hard forks through 2029. 

The Strawmap was published by the Ethereum Foundation and followed by commentary from Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum co-founder and one of its most influential voices.^1,2 The draft emphasizes building a faster, higher-capacity L1 (the primary Ethereum blockchain) while preserving security and decentralization.

The roadmap reflects Ethereum’s ability to adapt to evolving conditions, although delays have been a recurring theme. The Ethereum Foundation aims to implement its ambitious multi-year development plan while maintaining uninterrupted network operations, as it did during The Merge.

As with any major Ethereum initiative, the Strawmap’s ultimate direction remains subject to community feedback, ongoing research and development, and off-chain governance.

This vision reflects a more balanced approach than the post-Merge roadmap, which emphasized scaling through L2s, or rollups, that submit transactions directly to Ethereum. Strawmap aims to increase the capabilities of both the L1 and L2s. Even so, L2s should handle most of the network’s transactions, which are periodically settled on Ethereum, amortizing the single Ethereum fee over hundreds of batched transactions and lowering costs. 

Since Deneb-Cancun (Dencun) in 2024 and Pectra in 2025, Ethereum’s scaling strategy had centered on lowering costs for L2s through proto-danksharding. By introducing low-cost “blob” storage, Ethereum reduced L2 fees by over 90% and accelerated activity on rollups.³ Although the migration of activity compressed L1 fee revenue, it did not compromise security and decentralization on the base layer. 

The rollup-centric strategy was successful in several aspects, fostering a vibrant ecosystem of L2 projects by increasing throughput and substantially reducing transaction costs amid growing competition from faster, lower-cost blockchains. However, the shift came with trade-offs.

The introduction of blobs significantly reduced the cost of posting L2 data to Ethereum, lowering fee generation as more users migrated to rollups. Additionally, most L2s continue to rely on centralized sequencers (entities responsible for ordering and batching transactions before submitting them to Ethereum), which does not align with the principle of decentralization. 

The pivot helped retain high-value activity, capital, and developers within the Ethereum ecosystem, even though networks such as Solana surpassed Ethereum in terms of daily active addresses and transaction counts.^4,5 However, growth in transaction count has not offset the sharp drop in Ethereum fees, resulting in lower ether burn, causing issuance to exceed burn and net ether supply to increase.⁶

Even so, the Fidelity Digital Assets® Research team views lower transaction costs as a pre-requisite to remaining competitive and supporting adoption at scale as real-world applications migrate on-chain.

Ethereum transaction growth has been outpaced by fee compression:

The original vision was for rollups to become progressively more decentralized over time. However, Vitalik has stated that progress has been slower than anticipated, even as Ethereum itself continued to scale.⁷ As a result, L2s are increasingly envisioned as specialized environments optimized for distinct use cases rather than serving as general-purpose infrastructure.

The Strawmap’s Five North Stars

Ethereum remains the leading network for high-value use cases such as DeFi, stablecoins, tokenized RWAs, and total value locked (TVL). However, it has ceded much of the retail-driven trading and engagement to competing chains.

The Strawmap represents a return to the original vision of scaling Ethereum’s base layer, reflecting the view that a stronger L1 is essential if the network is to serve as the global settlement layer for a future tokenized financial system. If successful, this approach could improve value capture for ether holders by strengthening Ethereum’s utility as a settlement and collateral layer for on-chain activity.

The plan is organized around five “north stars.” However, it is not a formal roadmap. Instead, it is a coordination tool that helps align Ethereum’s decentralized ecosystem around shared priorities, allowing the strategy to evolve over time.⁸

1. A Faster L1: From Minutes to Seconds

At the top of the roadmap’s priorities are shorter block times (or slots) and faster finality, the point at which transactions are effectively irreversible. These improvements could enhance the user experience for applications such as trading, payments, and AI-related activity while increasing capital efficiency. The objective is to gradually reduce slot times from 12 seconds to as little as 2 to 3 seconds, although the latter stages remain speculative. 

Like blob targets, progress will be incremental and contingent on maintaining network security, supported in part by networking improvements that allow for faster communication between nodes and reduce block propagation times.⁹ 

Economic finality, the point at which altering the blockchain becomes prohibitively expensive for any rational economic actor, could improve from approximately 15 minutes to just 6–16 seconds over time.

The reason for this is that two-thirds of validators of total staked ether on the network must attest the block for it to be considered finalized, with multiple rounds of voting. This improvement would be complex and require not only faster slot times but a new consensus mechanism that needs only one round of votes.

2. Scaling the Base Layer: Gigagas L1

While the first north star focuses on speed, the second aims to increase Ethereum’s computational capacity. Ethereum measures block capacity in gas. A traditional peer-to-peer transaction consumes 21,000 gas while a DeFi transaction is much more gas intensive.

Ethereum’s goal is to move from 5 million gas per second to one billion (one gigagas per second). This would raise throughput from approximately 30 transactions per second (TPS) today to 10,000 TPS. This goal reflects a long-term vision in which more activity will opt for the highest security and decentralization that the base layer offers.

Achieving this would require an L1 zk-EVM (zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine) and real-time proving. ZK proofs allow one party to verify a computation’s correctness without revealing the statement itself, potentially creating a pathway to meaningful scalability on the base layer. 

Today, every validator executes every transaction in a block. Under the proposed architecture, a specialized “prover” would execute transactions once and generate a ZK proof that validators can verify. This would reduce the computational burden on validators, enabling higher gas limits without a corresponding increase in hardware requirements.

Real-time proving would enable proofs to be generated within seconds, allowing them to keep pace with faster block production. Significant advancements have already been made, such as faster proof generation, greater EVM compatibility and lower proving costs. However, key challenges remain, particularly around achieving the desired security guarantees (100 bits, with a long-term target of at least 128 bits) and ensuring prover decentralization.^10,11

3. Scaling the L2s: Teragas L2

The Strawmap seeks to scale L2s to about 10 million TPS across rollups. Achieving this will require increasing the amount of L1 data availability to L2s, with Ethereum targeting 1 gigabyte per second of bandwidth. 

This is enabled by data availability sampling (DAS), or proto-danksharding, which allows validators to verify data availability without downloading every blob. PeerDAS, the first step toward this vision, was introduced with the Fusaka upgrade in December 2025.

Although L2s were originally envisioned primarily as a scaling solution, their role is evolving. They are increasingly expected to differentiate through specialized features, services, customizations, go-to-market strategies, and zones of control while providing additional scale. 

Under this framework, L2s complement Ethereum’s base layer, reinforcing its position at the center of the ecosystem while extending a portion or all of the L1 properties. While blobs are currently underutilized, the community will continue to support further increases if needed.¹²

4. A Post-Quantum Ethereum

The potential quantum risk lies largely in public-key cryptography that secures fund ownership and network consensus, specifically the ECDSA signatures used by accounts and the BLS signatures used by validators.

Large-scale quantum computers could eventually break this elliptic-curve cryptography using Shor’s algorithm, potentially allowing bad actors to derive private keys from exposed public keys and risking theft from the forging of signatures or validation of transactions. While past transactions cannot be rewritten, accounts with exposed public keys and future transactions could be vulnerable in a post-quantum scenario.

Although widely considered to be a long-term hurdle, post-quantum preparedness has become a higher priority given the time required to implement it effectively. Migrating hundreds of millions of accounts to quantum-resistant cryptography would be a gradual and voluntary process, requiring careful execution to avoid introducing new bugs or security vulnerabilities.¹³ 

At the consensus layer, the proposed approach is to replace BLS signatures with hash-based signatures. Because these signatures are much larger, Ethereum plans to develop a minimal ZK virtual machine (zkVM), known as leanVM, that can compress many signatures into a single proof and preserve network scalability. 

Implementation would also be phased. Validators would first register post-quantum keys alongside their existing BLS ones, with quantum-safe attestations introduced gradually over time. The broader objective is to maintain flexibility, allowing new cryptographic schemes to be added or replaced with minimal disruption. 

The first meaningful step could occur with the Hegotá hard fork. One proposal under consideration, EIP-8141, would introduce signature agility, enabling accounts to verify any signature scheme, not just the current ECDSA. 

The Ethereum Foundation anticipates achieving post-quantum readiness in 2029, with ongoing migration continuing thereafter. Importantly, it estimates that long-dormant exposure, or abandoned funds, account for only ~0.1% of total supply, reducing the potential impact of inaccessible accounts relative to other networks such as Bitcoin.¹⁴ 

5. A Private L1 

Native privacy is the least developed of the five strategic priorities, though the long-term objective is to enable shielded transfers on the base layer as a first-class option. 

Today, activity is transparent by design. Wallet addresses, transaction amounts, smart contract interactions, and activity patterns are publicly visible, allowing participants to independently verify the blockchain’s state and maintain a decentralized consensus. However, this can create privacy concerns for individuals and institutions alike.

Zero-knowledge cryptography offers a potential solution, enabling users to prove that a transaction is valid without revealing the underlying information. 

The Execution Plan: Seven Upgrades Over Four Years

The Strawmap outlines approximately seven hard forks through 2029, although only the first two have been formally named: Glamsterdam and Hegotá. Both were initially slated for 2026 under Ethereum’s planned twice-yearly upgrade cadence. However, it has already proven difficult given the amount of work and testing that is required for each upgrade. 

As of September 2026, Glamsterdam appears likely to be implemented in late 2026, with Hegotá following in 2027. By then, investors should have a clearer indication as to whether Ethereum developers can sustain the intended twice-yearly upgrade cadence.

Beyond cadence, investors can evaluate progress by examining how closely the EIPs included with each upgrade align with the Strawmap’s outlined priorities. While this approach does not capture the full value of every update, such as technical debt reduction or infrastructure improvements, it provides a useful gauge of whether developers are making progress toward the outlined vision. 

Not all development aligns directly with the Strawmap, however. Glamsterdam includes several user experience improvements and technical debt reductions that do not fit within the roadmap’s five categories. 

Similarly, one of Hegotá’s headline proposals falls outside the framework, suggesting that factors beyond the Strawmap continue to influence development priorities.

Glamsterdam: Advancing Layer 1 Scalability and Performance

As of August 28, 2026, the Glamsterdam upgrade is expected to include 19 EIPs. Among them, the two most consequential proposals are enshrined proposer-builder separation (ePBS) and block-level access lists (BALs), both of which are intended to increase Ethereum’s L1 throughput while limiting growth in validator hardware requirements.

Enshrined Proposer-Builder Separation (ePBS): Introducing Native Block Builders

Today, Ethereum validators must execute all transactions within a proposed block and verify the execution results before attesting to the block. This process must be completed within Ethereum’s four-second validation window to maximize validator rewards, even though the full slot time is 12 seconds.

ePBS changes this workflow by introducing block builders as a protocol-native role within Ethereum’s consensus mechanism. Rather than independently re-executing transactions before attestation, validators primarily verify that a staked block builder has correctly constructed and signed the block. Validators can then attest to the block and perform transaction re-execution afterward to update their local state.

Because block builders are required to stake ether, they can be penalized for invalid block construction, just as a validator would. This preserves economic accountability while offloading the amount of work validators must complete during this critical consensus path to a more specialized role, the block builder.¹⁵

By reducing the computational burden associated with block attestation, ePBS creates additional capacity within each slot. This, in turn, allows Ethereum to support larger blocks and higher gas limits without materially increasing the processing requirements for validators.

As a result, ePBS is viewed as an important step toward significantly increasing L1 throughput and has already proven capable of supporting throughput over five times the current gas limit.¹⁶

Block-Level Access Lists (BALs): Introducing Parallel Execution

BALs complement ePBS by improving execution efficiency. A block-level access list provides information about which portions of Ethereum’s state will be accessed during block execution in advance. This enables client software to effectively parallelize transaction processing.

Today, all transactions must be executed sequentially because nodes cannot determine in advance whether transactions will interact with the same state objects. BALs specifically provide nodes with all the data required to determine which transactions overlap, and which can be processed concurrently.¹⁷ 

The result is a meaningful increase in execution capacity, with the ultimate benefit depending on the degree of parallelization that nodes can achieve.

Together, ePBS and BALs reduce the amount of work validators must perform on the critical path to consensus while making ongoing block execution more efficient. This combination allows Ethereum to increase transaction throughput without requiring a proportional increase in validator resources.

However, these changes do not eliminate the need for validators to maintain a complete local copy of the blockchain. Validators must still download and process all block data after attesting. Consequently, while hardware requirements may remain relatively stable, bandwidth and data-transfer requirements will continue to scale with transaction volumes and block size until a more optimal solution is reached.

In practice, the Glamsterdam upgrade shifts Ethereum’s primary scaling constraint away from computational validation, toward data propagation and sets the stage for substantial increases in throughput following the upgrade.

Hegotá: Advancing Censorship-Resistance and Post-Quantum Security

The exact scope of the Hegotá upgrade remains undecided, but developers have indicated that FOCIL (Fork-Choice Enforced Inclusion Lists) is expected to be one of the headline features. 

FOCIL is designed to strengthen Ethereum's censorship resistance by reducing the ability of block producers to exclude valid transactions from blocks for extended periods. In practice, the proposal introduces mechanisms that increase the likelihood that user transactions are eventually included on-chain, reinforcing Ethereum's neutrality and credibility as a settlement layer.

Another candidate for inclusion is Frame Transactions, which would introduce a more flexible transaction framework capable of supporting alternative validation methods beyond Ethereum's current signature scheme. 

While the proposal has broader applications, one of its most important implications is that it lays the groundwork for post-quantum cryptography. By decoupling transaction validation from a single signature standard, Ethereum could eventually support wallets secured by quantum-resistant signature schemes without requiring a disruptive architectural overhaul.

Beyond these headline initiatives, Hegotá is expected to continue Ethereum's recent focus on scalability and efficiency. Likely areas of development include refinements to the block-level access list architecture introduced in Glamsterdam, additional execution-layer optimizations, and further improvements aimed at supporting higher throughput while preserving decentralization.

Conclusion

The Strawmap’s publication marks an important milestone for Ethereum. More than any individual upgrade, it provides a clearer framework for how the network intends to scale while preserving its core CROPS principles. The roadmap reflects a more balanced strategy, pairing renewed interest in scaling Ethereum’s base layer with continued support for L2s. 

From an investment perspective, the Strawmap is broadly supportive of ether’s long-term fundamentals. Greater scalability, faster settlement, enhanced privacy, and post-quantum resilience could strengthen Ethereum's competitive position and support wider adoption over time.

However, the draft roadmap represents a multi-year development rather than a near-term catalyst. Any positive effects on network activity, value accrual, or valuation will likely emerge gradually as upgrades are implemented and adopted. 

Ethereum's history suggests that timelines can shift and priorities can evolve as technical challenges and ecosystem needs change. Nevertheless, the community has demonstrated an ability to deliver complex upgrades while adapting to new realities. As digital assets and tokenized markets continue to develop, Ethereum’s combination of adaptability and consistency may prove to be the network’s most durable competitive advantage. 

Get in touch to learn more about Ethereum's evolving roadmap and its potential investment implications.