Layla Zulfa
Ethereum, the world’s leading smart contract platform, has announced a significant strategic restructuring of its "Protocol" initiative for 2026, following a highly productive 2025 marked by two major network upgrades and substantial advancements across its core development roadmap. The Protocol initiative, initially introduced in June 2025 to organize development efforts around three strategic pillars—Scale L1, Scale Blobs, and Improve UX—is now evolving into three new, integrated tracks: Scale, Improve UX, and Harden the L1. This reorganization reflects a maturing understanding of the intertwined challenges and opportunities facing the network as it strives for greater scalability, enhanced usability, and unparalleled security.
A Retrospective on Ethereum’s Monumental 2025 Achievements
The year 2025 proved to be a pivotal period for Ethereum’s protocol-level development, characterized by an accelerated pace of innovation and successful implementation of critical upgrades. The core developer community shipped two major network upgrades to mainnet, alongside a host of other significant improvements, demonstrating a robust and agile development ecosystem.
The first major upgrade, Pectra, successfully landed on mainnet in May 2025. This upgrade brought forth several transformative EIPs (Ethereum Improvement Proposals) designed to enhance the network’s capabilities and prepare it for future growth. Among its most notable inclusions was EIP-7702, a groundbreaking feature that allows Externally Owned Accounts (EOAs) to temporarily execute smart contract code. This innovation laid foundational groundwork for more advanced account abstraction, unlocking crucial functionalities such as transaction batching, where multiple operations can be combined into a single transaction, thereby reducing costs and improving efficiency. It also enabled gas sponsorship, allowing third parties to cover transaction fees, and paved the way for more robust social recovery mechanisms, significantly enhancing user experience and security.
Pectra further addressed scalability concerns by doubling blob throughput through EIP-7691. Blobs, introduced with Proto-Danksharding (EIP-4844), are designed to provide cheap, temporary data availability for rollups, dramatically reducing transaction costs on Layer 2 (L2) networks. Increasing their throughput was a direct response to the growing demand for L2 scalability. Additionally, EIP-7251 raised the maximum effective validator balance to 2,048 ETH, a move that provides greater flexibility for large stakers and staking pools, potentially improving capital efficiency within the staking ecosystem. To bolster network decentralization and inclusivity, EIP-6110 dramatically shortened validator onboarding times, making it easier and quicker for new validators to join the network and contribute to its security. This reduction in the waiting queue for new validators is crucial for maintaining a healthy and distributed validator set.
Building on Pectra’s success, the Fusaka upgrade followed in December 2025, marking another monumental step forward with the mainnet deployment of EIP-7594, commonly known as PeerDAS (Peer Data Availability Sampling). PeerDAS represents a crucial advancement in Ethereum’s data availability layer. Instead of requiring all validators to download full blob data, PeerDAS enables validators to sample only a portion of the data, significantly reducing bandwidth requirements for individual nodes. This architectural shift is not merely an optimization; it is a prerequisite for dramatically increasing theoretical blob capacity by an astonishing 8x, further solidifying Ethereum’s commitment to supporting high-throughput L2 solutions. Complementing PeerDAS, two BPO (Blob Parameter Only) forks were shipped concurrently with Fusaka, initiating the gradual increase from the initial target of 6 blobs per block towards much higher future targets, signaling a clear path toward full Danksharding.
Beyond these major network upgrades, 2025 saw several other vital developments. The community successfully increased the mainnet gas limit from an initial 30 million to 60 million. This was the first significant increase since 2021 and a direct response to rising network activity and the need for greater transaction capacity on the L1. This adjustment allowed for more transactions per block, albeit with careful consideration for network health and decentralization. Furthermore, "History expiry," a critical maintenance effort, removed pre-Merge data from full nodes, saving hundreds of gigabytes of disk space. This optimization helps reduce the barrier to running a full node, contributing to network health and decentralization by making node operation more accessible.
On the user experience (UX) front, the Open Intents Framework reached production, providing a new paradigm for users to express their desired outcomes rather than specifying exact transaction paths. This framework is a cornerstone for more intuitive and powerful decentralized applications. Concurrently, implementations of L1 fast confirmation rules progressed across various consensus clients, aiming to reduce the time users wait for transaction finality. Interoperability standards also saw significant momentum, with the advancement of ERC-7930 + ERC-7828 for interoperable addresses and names, and ERC-7888: Crosschain Broadcaster, both geared towards creating a more seamless and unified experience across the growing multi-chain Ethereum ecosystem. These standards are critical for enabling fluid asset and data transfer between Ethereum’s mainnet and its various L2s.
Core developers and community members universally lauded 2025 as a year of unprecedented progress. A representative statement from a leading core developer, speaking on background, might reflect this sentiment: "The achievements of 2025, particularly the successful deployment of Pectra and Fusaka, underscore the dedication and collaborative spirit of the Ethereum community. We’ve not only delivered on ambitious technical goals but also laid robust foundations for the next era of scaling and user empowerment. This momentum is precisely what we need to tackle the challenges of 2026 and beyond."
Evolving for an Impactful 2026: A New Strategic Framework
While the initial Protocol framework of Scale L1, Scale Blobs, and Improve UX effectively guided development through the Pectra and Fusaka upgrades, the Ethereum team recognized that the evolving landscape and the successful completion of these milestones necessitated a more refined and integrated organizational structure. The new framework for 2026 organizes Protocol’s work into three distinct, yet deeply interconnected, tracks: Scale, Improve UX, and Harden the L1. This shift allows for a higher-level, more holistic approach to complex, multi-faceted development challenges.
The Scale Track: Unifying L1 Execution and Data Availability
The newly formed Scale track, led by Ansgar Dietrichs, Marius van der Wijden, and Raúl Kripalani, represents a strategic consolidation of the previous Scale L1 and Scale Blobs initiatives. This unification acknowledges the practical reality that increasing the Layer 1 (L1) execution capacity and expanding data availability throughput are profoundly intertwined. Enhancements to the gas limit, for instance, are directly dependent on optimizing execution engine performance, while blob scaling relies heavily on coordinated networking and consensus changes that often touch the same client codebase. By bringing these efforts under a single, unified umbrella, the team aims to accelerate development, reduce potential points of friction, and foster a more comprehensive understanding of the entire scaling landscape.
Concretely, this track is focused on pushing the boundaries of Ethereum’s transaction processing capabilities and data availability. This includes continued research and implementation for further gas limit increases, which necessitate ongoing improvements in execution client efficiency and state management. For blobs, the focus will be on the continued ramp-up of capacity, moving beyond the initial BPO forks towards higher targets, potentially culminating in the full implementation of Danksharding. This involves optimizing data propagation, storage, and retrieval mechanisms to ensure that the network can handle an ever-increasing volume of data from L2s without compromising decentralization or node health. The implications of this track are immense, promising lower transaction fees for users, higher throughput for applications, and a more robust foundation for the entire rollup-centric ecosystem.
The Improve UX Track: Native Account Abstraction and Seamless Interoperability
The Improve UX track, spearheaded by Barnabé Monnot and Matt Garnett, builds upon the foundations laid in 2025, sharpening its focus on two areas deemed critical for Ethereum’s widespread adoption and usability in 2026: native account abstraction and interoperability.
On the front of account abstraction (AA), EIP-7702 in Pectra was a crucial first step, but the ultimate vision is to establish smart contract wallets as the default account type, seamlessly integrated into the protocol without the need for external bundlers, relayers, or additional gas overhead. This paradigm shift would empower users with features like multi-factor authentication, social recovery, batched transactions, and custom validation logic, all natively supported. Proposals like EIP-7701 and the more recent EIP-8141 (Frame Transactions) are central to this effort, aiming to embed smart account logic directly into the Ethereum protocol itself. This approach differs from EIP-4337, which achieves AA through a separate mempool and bundler network. Native AA promises a more efficient and integrated user experience.
Furthermore, this work significantly intersects with post-quantum readiness. As quantum computing advances, the cryptographic primitives currently used by Ethereum (like ECDSA for signatures) could become vulnerable. Native account abstraction provides a natural and flexible migration path away from these potentially vulnerable authentication methods to quantum-resistant signature schemes. Complementary to this, several proposals are in active development to make the verification of quantum-resistant signatures much more gas-efficient within the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), ensuring that future security upgrades are not prohibitively expensive.
Regarding interoperability, the track aims to leverage the groundwork laid by the Open Intents Framework to achieve seamless, trust-minimized cross-Layer 2 (L2) interactions. The proliferation of L2 solutions has created a fragmented user experience, and robust interoperability is key to creating a unified and fluid ecosystem. Continued progress on faster L1 confirmations directly supports this, as quicker finality on the base layer translates to faster and more secure settlement times for transactions crossing between L2s or between L1 and L2s. The goal is to allow users to interact with applications and assets across different L2s as if they were on a single, cohesive network, drastically simplifying the user journey and expanding the utility of decentralized applications.
The Harden the L1 Track: Safeguarding Ethereum’s Core Principles
A significant new addition to the Protocol framework is the Harden the L1 track, led by Fredrik Svantes, Parithosh Jayanthi, and Thomas Thiery. This track underscores a dedicated focus on ensuring that as Ethereum scales and evolves, it steadfastly retains the fundamental properties that make it valuable: decentralization, security, censorship resistance, and robustness. It acknowledges that growth must not come at the expense of its core tenets.
This critical track encompasses several key areas of focus. Client diversity is paramount, encouraging the development and adoption of multiple, independent client implementations for both the execution and consensus layers. This prevents a single point of failure, enhancing the network’s resilience against bugs or attacks in any one client. Censorship resistance is another major priority, addressing concerns related to transaction ordering (MEV – Maximal Extractable Value) and ensuring that transactions cannot be unfairly excluded from blocks. Efforts here include continued work on enshrined Proposer-Builder Separation (PBS), which aims to decouple block production from block content selection, mitigating centralization risks associated with MEV.
The track also focuses on maintaining network stability and security audits, rigorously testing and verifying all new protocol changes to prevent vulnerabilities. This includes formal verification methods to mathematically prove the correctness of critical components. Furthermore, economic security aspects, such as optimizing staking mechanics and validator rewards, are continuously evaluated to ensure the long-term health and stability of the staking ecosystem, which underpins the entire network’s security. By dedicating a distinct track to these foundational elements, Ethereum reinforces its commitment to being a secure, decentralized, and reliable base layer for the global internet.
Looking Ahead: Glamsterdam, Hegotá, and Beyond
The ambitious vision for 2026 is already taking shape with the next major network upgrade, Glamsterdam, targeted for the first half of the year. This upgrade promises to introduce parallel execution, a groundbreaking architectural change that would significantly boost transaction throughput by allowing multiple transactions to be processed simultaneously. Glamsterdam is also expected to deliver further, significantly higher gas limits, continued advancements in blob scaling, and the crucial implementation of enshrined PBS, which will further decentralize block production and enhance censorship resistance. Progress on native account abstraction and post-quantum security measures are also key components of this forward-looking upgrade.
Following Glamsterdam, the Hegotá upgrade is planned for later in 2026, building upon the foundations laid by its predecessors and continuing the relentless pursuit of Ethereum’s long-term roadmap. The collective ambition for 2026 is clear: to deliver a more scalable, more user-friendly, and more robust Ethereum, capable of supporting a truly global, decentralized future.
The Ethereum Foundation has indicated that it will continue publishing track-level updates throughout the year, providing transparency and opportunities for community engagement. For those interested in following the development journey or getting involved, protocol.ethereum.foundation remains the primary resource. As Ethereum’s core developers and community embark on this new strategic phase, the message is resolute: the work of shipping a more powerful and accessible decentralized platform continues unabated.
