ShirleyLi, a researcher at Web3Caff Research, frames Ethereum’s current position through nearly twelve years of development. Since Vitalik Buterin and his team formally introduced Ethereum to global users at international conferences in 2014, the network has moved from a niche experiment to one of the most influential base platforms in the Web3 ecosystem. The report argues that Ethereum has to manage two tightly linked but often conflicting demands: maintaining network stability for a large ecosystem, while continuing to define new technical directions.
Ethereum’s early development plan, formed between 2014 and 2016, was organized into four stages: Frontier, Homestead, Metropolis and Serenity. The first three are generally viewed as Ethereum 1.0, focused on completing basic functions and improving network reliability. Serenity represented the longer-term objective: rebuilding consensus and the underlying architecture to improve scalability and performance. In 2020, Ethereum clarified the technical path for Serenity by formally committing to a transition to PoS and introducing sharding logic. In 2022, it released a more complete medium- and long-term roadmap centered on Rollups, moving execution scaling to Layer 2 while positioning the main chain around security and data availability. In February 2026, the Ethereum Foundation issued a ten-year Strawmap draft, further detailing optimization goals across the consensus layer, data layer and execution layer.
The report revisits questions raised in the author’s late-2024 study, The Future Path of Ethereum: Can the Ecosystem Giant Withstand Emerging Crises Amid Controversy? By early 2025, as the broader market environment improved and new narratives emerged, Ethereum’s development pace was viewed by parts of the community as relatively slow. Criticism focused on the Ethereum Foundation and core developers in areas such as delivery speed, market communication and ecosystem expansion. Some views also held that projects could align with Vitalik Buterin’s technical preferences or foundation funding priorities, leading to temporary concentration of resources in specific tracks. The selling behavior of the Ethereum Foundation and Vitalik Buterin also generated discussion, although Vitalik Buterin and foundation-related members had stated that such funds were mainly used to support ecosystem development and grants.
In response, the Ethereum Foundation made a series of organizational changes in 2025. In February, Aya Miyaguchi, who had served as executive director since 2018, moved into the newly created role of President. Her responsibilities shifted from daily operations and execution management to external cooperation, institutional relations and cultural communication. Nethermind founder Tomasz Stańczak and Hsiao-Wei Wang became co-executive directors. Under the new structure, the foundation streamlined its organization, cut 19 employees, and moved its strategic focus back from Layer 2 to Layer 1. It also began to place greater emphasis on external communication and transparency around its technical roadmap, development direction and use of resources.
In June 2025, the foundation reorganized its internal research and development system. Protocol Research & Development, or PR&D, was simplified to Protocol, with three short-term goals: scale L1 performance, scale Blobs and improve user experience. In February 2026, Tomasz Stańczak announced that he would step down as co-executive director, with Bastian Aue and Hsiao-Wei Wang taking over. During his tenure, Stańczak promoted work around privacy protection, quantum-computing security and the combination of AI and Ethereum. After leaving the position, he said he would devote more energy to products and infrastructure related to the integration of AI and blockchain. The latest internal structure lists Vitalik Buterin, Aya Miyaguchi, Patrick Storchenegger and Hsiao-Wei Wang as board members responsible for governance and strategic direction, while management and functional teams handle execution and operations.
The foundation also adjusted how it allocates resources. In August 2025, it paused the open grants program that had operated since 2018, then restarted a new Ecosystem Support Program, or ESP, in November. The funding model shifted from passively receiving applications to actively guiding resources. The first batch of supported areas included cryptography, privacy, application-layer work, security and community growth. At the same time, the foundation decided to reduce annual spending from about 15% to 5% in order to slow the consumption of ETH reserves. In May, Ethereum Foundation researchers Carl Beek and Julian Ma announced their departures. Former researcher Dankrad Feist publicly said that the Ethereum ecosystem needed a new organization with interests more aligned with Ethereum’s economy to ‘save’ Ethereum. Vitalik Buterin and Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin both responded that these disputes reflected the friction between Ethereum’s long-term technical construction and its current commercialization process.
On staking, the report notes that Ethereum’s transition to PoS ended its high-energy consensus model, but the 32 ETH staking requirement raised the entry barrier for validators and created risks around concentration of validation power. Vitalik Buterin had proposed strengthening network security by raising the participation ratio required for finality, such as increasing the current roughly two-thirds threshold signature requirement to 75% or higher. In May 2025, the Pectra upgrade was activated on Ethereum mainnet. EIP-7251 raised the maximum effective balance of a validator from 32 ETH to 2048 ETH. The 32 ETH minimum requirement to become a validator remained unchanged; the proposal mainly allowed a single validator to represent more ETH in consensus voting, reducing the need for large stakers to split funds across many validator nodes and lowering network communication and coordination overhead. EIP-7002 improved staking withdrawals by allowing execution-layer-triggered withdrawals under specific conditions, giving stakers more control over assets and reducing operational complexity.
The Ethereum Foundation also explored Distributed Validator Technology, or DVT, to optimize staking structure. DVT divides a single validator’s private key and signing capacity across multiple cooperating nodes, reducing single points of failure. In the traditional model, validator nodes need strong stability and private-key management. In a multi-node model, validation duties are shared, lowering the reliance on one node’s continuous uptime and operational quality. This also introduces extra system complexity, so the foundation has been testing lighter implementations such as DVT-lite. According to information disclosed by the Ethereum Foundation in March 2026, 72,000 ETH had participated in staking through related mechanisms.
Data availability is another major thread. EIP-4844, implemented in the Dencun upgrade, introduced Blobs as a low-cost temporary data availability space. Layer 2 networks can submit batches of transaction data to Blobs, reducing the cost of publishing data on-chain. The original design set a target of 3 Blobs per block and a maximum of 6. Ethereum uses a floating fee mechanism: if the number of Blobs in a block exceeds the target, the base fee rises; if usage is below target, the fee falls to encourage usage. As Layer 2 demand for Blob space grew, actual usage increasingly approached or reached the target, repeatedly triggering fee increases and raising Blob costs during certain periods.
To relieve Blob capacity pressure, Ethereum included two related proposals in Pectra. EIP-7691 raised the target number of Blobs per block from 3 to 6 and the maximum from 6 to 9. EIP-7623 aimed to raise the cost of Calldata, guiding Layer 2 networks to use Blobs more and reducing data-publication pressure on mainnet. With the Fusaka upgrade in December 2025, Ethereum introduced further mechanisms at the data availability layer. In the longer technical path, Blobs are not an isolated design but part of Ethereum’s move from execution sharding toward data sharding. Ethereum’s earlier Sharding plan sought to split the network into multiple subchains for parallel transaction and data processing, but execution-layer sharding faced high engineering complexity and security challenges. The roadmap therefore shifted toward expanding data availability first, with Blobs serving as an intermediate implementation and PeerDAS improving the way Blob data is verified through data availability sampling. On December 11, 2025, the Ethereum Foundation said Blob capacity per block had been increased to 15.
The report then turns to Rollups. As the number of Rollup solutions keeps increasing, their relationship with Ethereum mainnet is changing structurally. Rollups reduce mainnet execution load by moving transaction execution to Layer 2. At the same time, the fee structure changes: more fees paid by users flow to Layer 2, while the main chain mainly handles data publication and settlement. This affects mainnet fee composition and validator income. Different Rollups also remain relatively independent in architecture and ecosystem, forming multiple parallel sub-ecosystems and making cross-Rollup interaction more complex. LayerZero and Hyperlane try to enable communication through standardized messaging, while Astria and Espresso approach the issue at the sequencing layer by offering shared sequencing services. The report notes that this Rollup-to-third-party-infrastructure-to-Rollup model is still not Ethereum-native, introduces additional trust assumptions, and can create new security concerns. Shared sequencers also affect Layer 1 MEV distribution.
Different Rollup technology stacks are expanding their own ecosystems. Arbitrum promotes Orbit chains through its Nitro / Orbit stack, with Plume Network and ApeChain named as examples. zkSync supports multi-chain expansion through its Elastic Chain architecture, with Abstract and ZERO Network as representative projects. Optimism has built the Superchain around OP Stack, with members including OP Mainnet, Base, BOB and Soneium. In late February this year, the Base team said it would gradually move away from Optimism’s OP Stack architecture and toward its self-maintained Base Stack. Because Base was originally built using OP Stack, the process is closer to customized expansion on top of an open-source framework than a complete separation from Optimism. Base also said it would continue collaborating with the Optimism ecosystem and follow relevant open-source rules. The event shows that as Rollup ecosystems expand, their autonomy in technical architecture and governance is increasing.
The Ethereum Foundation has begun to address this issue directly. While continuing to improve data availability for Rollups, it created a Platform Team within the Protocol framework. The team connects protocol research and ecosystem development, with the goal of reorganizing and improving the relationship between Ethereum mainnet and Layer 2. On March 23 this year, the foundation published a systematic explanation of the evolving roles of Layer 1 and Layer 2. In the updated definition, Layer 2 is no longer limited to scaling. It also serves differentiated needs that Layer 1 does not provide, such as stronger privacy protection, lower latency and compliance adaptation for specific scenarios. Layer 2 should create more value for mainnet through its own prosperity rather than compete with Layer 1, while mainnet should become the core settlement and liquidity layer of the multi-chain ecosystem.
To move in that direction, Ethereum is following two paths: strengthening the connection between Rollups and mainnet, and exploring Native Rollups. Under Ethereum Foundation co-funding, Gnosis co-founder Friederike Ernst and Zisk founder Jordi Baylina recently announced the Ethereum Economic Zone, or EEZ. The plan attempts to build an L1<>L2 framework that places cross-chain interactions between Rollups and mainnet, and among Rollups themselves, into one execution framework. In that framework, cross-chain interaction would not rely entirely on traditional asynchronous messaging. Contract calls across execution environments could be completed in the same execution flow with atomicity, meaning that operations either all succeed or all roll back, reducing state-inconsistency risks. The concrete implementation path of EEZ still needs further clarification.
Ethereum ecosystem developers have also released a proof-of-concept prototype for Native Rollups, proposed in EIP-8079. The idea is to reconstruct how Rollups are verified. Today, both Optimistic Rollups and ZK Rollups execute transactions and generate state, then prove correctness to Ethereum through additional mechanisms such as fraud proofs or zero-knowledge proofs. They also need to follow Ethereum’s underlying rules for transaction processing and state updates, which forces them to maintain relatively complex execution and verification systems. EIP-8079 attempts to expose Ethereum’s state transition function as an interface that Rollups can call. Under this model, Rollups submit transactions to mainnet and mainnet computes the state according to unified rules, reducing reliance on independent proof systems and lowering Rollup maintenance costs. The report compares this to students submitting organized questions directly to a teacher, who performs the calculation according to one rule set, rather than students solving the problem and submitting a separate proof of correctness.
The report also reviews MEV and proposer-builder separation. After Ethereum moved to PoS, the network randomly selects block proposers from validators staking ETH. A proposer can extract value beyond standard block rewards and gas fees by changing transaction order, known as MEV. Ethereum therefore proposed PBS, separating block building from final block proposal. Builders collect, order and package transactions into candidate blocks, while proposers choose from candidates and submit the final block. This improves block-building efficiency and lowers the complexity for validators. However, increasing specialization has also concentrated block-building ability among a smaller number of builders, raising concerns about power concentration and centralization risks.
Glamsterdam is planned to reorganize responsibilities among network participants. Its core directions include introducing parallel processing to prepare for faster execution, separating the workflows for creating blocks and validating blocks to give the network more time for data propagation and support larger data loads, and adjusting the fee mechanism so storage costs more accurately reflect long-term node resource usage such as bandwidth and storage. One of its key changes is EIP-7732, Enshrined Proposer-Builder Separation, or ePBS. In earlier practice, PBS was not directly embedded in the protocol, but implemented through third-party middleware such as MEV-Boost. Validators could outsource block building to third-party builders and use relays for information transmission. This improved block-building efficiency, but remained an off-chain market that relied on trusted relays and offered limited on-chain transparency and constraints around MEV distribution.
EIP-7732 embeds proposer-builder separation into Ethereum itself. It introduces Builders as formal participants, requires them to stake in advance and submit block commitments. It also decouples consensus verification from execution verification. During the critical stage of block propagation, the network can first complete consensus-layer verification and postpone full execution-layer verification, including transaction execution and state updates, to a later stage. The report compares this to a teacher first confirming that every student has submitted an exam paper, then taking the papers back to the office for grading. This design reduces reliance on relays and gives nodes more time to propagate block data, allowing Ethereum to support larger-scale data, especially Blob inclusion, while maintaining network stability.
Ethereum’s Rollup-centered roadmap is also compared with high-performance Layer 1 chains such as Solana and Sui. Solana uses parallel execution and local fee markets to improve processing capacity, while Sui uses an object model and DAG architecture to enable more efficient concurrent processing in certain scenarios. These features serve application types such as high-frequency trading and on-chain games. A high-performance Layer 1 can provide a low-cost, high-throughput execution environment directly on one chain, reducing user dependence on cross-Layer 2 operations and weakening part of Ethereum’s ecosystem advantage. Compared with a Layer 1 plus Layer 2 system, ordinary public chains can also offer a more integrated development environment and execution model. Ethereum developers, by contrast, must handle cross-chain communication and fragmented liquidity across Layer 1 and different Layer 2 networks. The report emphasizes that this competition is not a simple confrontation, because high-performance Layer 1 chains and Ethereum serve different infrastructure exploration paths.
Finally, the report explains Ethereum’s long-term idea of Single Slot Finality, or SSF. In Ethereum, validators reach consensus roughly every 12 seconds on which transactions can be included in a block and in what order. This time window is called a Slot. Every 32 Slots, or about 6.4 minutes, form an Epoch, which organizes validator voting and advances finality. Under the current mechanism, a block needs at least two-thirds of validators to complete two rounds of voting, meaning roughly two Epochs, before it is considered final and not reversible. This normally takes about 12 to 15 minutes. SSF aims to compress finality that currently spans two Epochs into one Slot. Directly achieving this by reducing validator count or raising hardware requirements would weaken decentralization, so the key bottleneck lies in optimizing validation and communication. The community has discussed paths such as a supercommittee mechanism, randomly selecting part of the validator set within one Slot to vote and confirm quickly, or adjusting validator participation and weight distribution while maintaining security.
Before SSF is fully implemented, the Ethereum Foundation has proposed the Fast Confirmation Rule, or FCR, as a transitional optimization. FCR aims to reduce deposit confirmation time from Ethereum L1 to L2s and centralized exchanges from several minutes to about 13 seconds. It does not change the existing finality mechanism; instead, it uses the result of the first voting round to judge safety earlier. If the first round has already reached a high proportion, such as clearly above two-thirds, the system can treat the block as basically confirmed. FCR is not true finality. Its safety depends on two conditions: most validators must remain honest, and network communication must remain stable and low-latency. If the network becomes congested or is attacked, a block that received fast confirmation can still be reorganized under the original rules. The original report states that its content is for reference only and does not constitute any prediction, investment advice, proposal or offer.