Layla Zulfa
The Ethereum development community, through its "Protocol" framework introduced in June 2024, has delivered a landmark year of advancements, significantly enhancing the network’s scalability, efficiency, and user experience. This strategic organizing principle, initially structured around three core initiatives—Scale L1, Scale Blobs, and Improve UX—has now matured, evolving into a refined three-track system for 2026, designed to tackle the next generation of challenges and opportunities for the world’s leading smart contract platform. The past year saw the successful deployment of two major network upgrades, Pectra and Fusaka, alongside a host of other critical improvements that have set a formidable foundation for Ethereum’s future trajectory.
A Retrospective on Ethereum’s Transformative Year: 2025’s Major Milestones
The year 2025 stands out as one of the most prolific periods in Ethereum’s protocol-level development history. Under the initial "Protocol" framework, core developers shipped two monumental network upgrades and made substantial progress across all strategic fronts. These achievements were not merely incremental but represented significant architectural shifts aimed at addressing long-standing challenges like transaction costs, network congestion, and user accessibility, ultimately paving the way for a more robust and scalable ecosystem capable of supporting a global decentralized future.
The first major upgrade, Pectra, successfully landed on the Ethereum mainnet in May 2025. This upgrade was a multifaceted enhancement, bringing several key Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) to fruition. Central to Pectra was the implementation of EIP-7702, a groundbreaking proposal that empowers Externally Owned Accounts (EOAs)—the most common type of user account on Ethereum—with the temporary ability to execute smart contract code. This innovation unlocks a new paradigm for user interactions, facilitating advanced features such as transaction batching, where multiple operations can be bundled into a single transaction, thereby reducing overall gas costs; gas sponsorship, allowing third parties or decentralized applications to cover transaction fees for users; and enhanced social recovery mechanisms, significantly improving the security and usability of user accounts by allowing trusted parties to help recover lost access. These capabilities are crucial steps towards the broader vision of native account abstraction, making Ethereum more intuitive and less prone to user errors.
Beyond EIP-7702, Pectra also dramatically improved network throughput and validator efficiency. EIP-7691 effectively doubled the network’s blob throughput, a vital step in expanding data availability for Layer 2 (L2) scaling solutions. Blobs, introduced with the Dencun upgrade, provide a cost-effective way for rollups to post transaction data to the mainnet. Doubling their capacity directly translates to lower L2 transaction fees and increased network activity, making rollups even more viable for mass adoption. Furthermore, EIP-7251 raised the maximum effective validator balance to 2,048 ETH, a significant increase from the previous 32 ETH limit. This adjustment enhances staking flexibility for large-scale operators and reduces the complexity associated with managing multiple validator keys, while EIP-6110 dramatically shortened validator onboarding times, making it easier and faster for new participants to join the network and contribute to its security. These validator-centric improvements underscore Ethereum’s commitment to maintaining a decentralized and robust proof-of-stake consensus layer.
The second major network upgrade, Fusaka, followed swiftly in December 2025, marking another pivotal moment with the integration of EIP-7594: PeerDAS (Peer Data Availability Sampling) onto the mainnet. PeerDAS is a transformative technology designed to fundamentally alter how validators handle blob data. Instead of requiring every validator to download and store all blob data in full—a resource-intensive process that quickly becomes a bottleneck for scaling—PeerDAS enables them to sample small, randomly selected portions of the data. This innovative sampling mechanism significantly reduces bandwidth and storage requirements for individual nodes, thereby making it feasible to dramatically increase the overall data availability capacity of the network. With PeerDAS, Ethereum achieved an impressive eightfold increase in theoretical blob capacity, a monumental leap for L2 scalability. To complement this, two Blob Parameter Only (BPO) forks were shipped concurrently with Fusaka, initiating the gradual ramp-up from an initial six blobs per block towards much higher targets, ensuring a smooth and measured expansion of data availability as the ecosystem matures.
Between these two major upgrades, the Ethereum community demonstrated its proactive approach to network optimization by steadily raising the mainnet gas limit. Starting from an initial 30 million gas, the limit was progressively increased to 60 million gas, marking the first significant adjustment since 2021. This increase directly translates to more transactions being processed per block, alleviating network congestion and contributing to lower transaction fees for users, especially during periods of high demand. Simultaneously, the History Expiry initiative, which removes pre-Merge historical data from full nodes, began to yield tangible benefits, saving hundreds of gigabytes of disk space for node operators. This optimization is crucial for maintaining the long-term health and accessibility of running an Ethereum node, preventing excessive hardware requirements as the blockchain’s historical data continues to grow.
On the user experience (UX) front, 2025 also saw substantial advancements. The Open Intents Framework reached production readiness, providing a robust foundation for more expressive and user-friendly interactions with decentralized applications (dApps). This framework enables users to declare their desired outcomes rather than specifying every step, allowing smart contracts or off-chain solvers to find the most efficient path. Furthermore, the implementations of L1 fast confirmation rules progressed across various consensus clients, promising quicker finality for transactions and improved responsiveness for users, which is vital for time-sensitive applications. Interoperability standards also gained significant traction, with ERC-7930 + ERC-7828: Interoperable Addresses and Names and ERC-7888: Crosschain Broadcaster moving forward. These standards are critical for fostering a more seamless and interconnected ecosystem, enabling easier asset and data transfer across different Layer 2s and other blockchain environments, a key component of a multi-chain future.
Ethereum developers and community leaders expressed profound satisfaction with the year’s accomplishments. "2025 was a testament to the collective dedication and innovative spirit of the Ethereum community," remarked a senior protocol developer during a recent forum. "The upgrades delivered not only significant technical advancements but also laid crucial groundwork for future scalability and usability, positioning Ethereum strongly against its competitors." Industry analysts echoed this sentiment, highlighting that the rapid pace of development and successful deployment of complex features like PeerDAS demonstrated Ethereum’s continued leadership in blockchain innovation. The consistent delivery of these milestones reinforced confidence in Ethereum’s roadmap and its ability to evolve dynamically under continuous demand.
Charting a New Course: Ethereum’s Evolved Protocol Tracks for 2026
While 2025 was a year of successful execution against clearly defined, near-term deliverables—such as increasing the gas limit, shipping PeerDAS, and initiating UX improvements—the Ethereum core development teams recognized the need for an evolved organizational structure to address the platform’s future needs. The successful completion of these initial milestones provided an opportune moment to elevate the strategic framing of their work, moving from specific initiatives to broader, more encompassing tracks.
Starting in 2026, "Protocol" initiatives are now organized into three distinct, higher-level tracks, each led by experienced domain experts. This restructuring reflects a more holistic and long-term vision for Ethereum’s development, moving beyond individual EIPs to encompass broader strategic objectives for the network’s next phase of growth.
1. The Scale Track
Led by Ansgar Dietrichs, Marius van der Wijden, and Raúl Kripalani
The newly unified Scale track represents a strategic consolidation of the previous "Scale L1" and "Scale Blobs" initiatives. This integration acknowledges a critical practical reality: the efforts to increase Layer 1 (L1) execution capacity and to expand data availability throughput are inherently and deeply intertwined. Enhancements to the mainnet’s gas limit, for instance, are inextricably linked to the performance and optimization of execution engines, requiring careful coordination to prevent new bottlenecks or performance regressions. Similarly, advancements in blob scaling, essential for the efficiency of rollups, depend heavily on underlying networking and consensus changes that often touch the same client codebase.
By bringing these efforts under a single, cohesive umbrella, the Scale track aims to foster greater synergy, accelerate development cycles, and reduce the potential for fragmentation or conflicting priorities. This unified approach provides a more holistic view of Ethereum’s overall scaling strategy, ensuring that L1 execution and data availability evolve in concert. The track’s primary focus for 2026 will be to continue pushing the boundaries of what the Ethereum network can handle, both in terms of transaction processing and data storage for L2s. This includes further gas limit optimizations, continuous improvements to client performance, and the incremental scaling of blob capacity beyond the initial PeerDAS deployment, ensuring Ethereum remains the premier settlement layer for a burgeoning rollup ecosystem. Developers under this track will also actively explore advanced sharding concepts and state growth management techniques to ensure long-term scalability without compromising the network’s core tenets of decentralization and security.
2. The Improve UX Track
Led by Barnabé Monnot and Matt Garnett
Building upon the foundations laid in 2025, the Improve UX track will carry forward much of its previous momentum, but with a sharpened and more focused lens on two areas deemed to have the highest leverage for enhancing Ethereum’s usability in 2026: native account abstraction and interoperability. The goal is to make interacting with Ethereum as seamless and intuitive as possible, abstracting away much of the underlying blockchain complexity from the end-user. This approach is critical for onboarding the next billion users to the decentralized web.
On the front of native account abstraction (AA), EIP-7702 was an important first step, demonstrating the potential for EOAs to execute smart contract logic. However, the ultimate vision is to transition towards smart contract wallets becoming the default user experience, eliminating the need for intermediary bundlers, relayers, or incurring additional gas overhead for basic functionalities. Proposals such as EIP-7701
