In the first part of a long-form report by ShirleyLi, a researcher at Web3Caff Research, Ethereum’s 2026 outlook is examined through the lens of almost twelve years of roadmap changes. Since Vitalik Buterin and his team formally promoted Ethereum to global users at an international conference in 2014, the network has moved from a niche experiment to one of the most influential base platforms in the Web3 world. The same expansion has also made Ethereum harder to steer: it must maintain stability for a large ecosystem while continuing to define new technical directions under pressure from newer chains and internal coordination challenges.
The report traces Ethereum’s early staged planning between 2014 and 2016: Frontier, Homestead, Metropolis and Serenity. The first three stages are generally treated as Ethereum 1.0, centered on basic functionality and network stability, while Serenity represented the long-term goal of rebuilding consensus and core architecture. In 2020, Ethereum clarified its Serenity path by committing to Proof of Stake and introducing sharding logic. In 2022, a more complete medium- and long-term roadmap established a Rollup-centric scaling path, shifting execution toward Layer 2 networks while the main chain focused on security and data availability. In February 2026, the Ethereum Foundation released a ten-year “Strawmap” draft, giving more concrete optimization goals for the consensus layer, data layer and execution layer.
Foundation governance and resource allocation
The article revisits debates previously discussed by the author in a late-2024 report on Ethereum’s future path. Some views held that projects could lean toward Vitalik Buterin’s technical preferences or the Ethereum Foundation’s grant direction, leading to temporary resource concentration in certain sectors. Distributed technical teams also made it difficult for Ethereum’s overall execution pace to meet expectations around iteration and innovation. Sales of ETH by the Ethereum Foundation and Vitalik Buterin had also sparked market-level discussion, although Buterin and foundation-related members had said those funds were mainly used to support ecosystem development and grants.
At the beginning of 2025, with the broader market environment recovering and new narratives emerging, Ethereum’s relatively slow development pace led to community dissatisfaction. In February 2025, Aya Miyaguchi, who had served as executive director of the Ethereum Foundation since 2018, moved into the newly created role of President, shifting from daily operations and executive management toward 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, moved its strategic focus from Layer 2 back to Layer 1, and increased transparency in communication about technical roadmaps, development direction and resource use.
In June 2025, the foundation reorganized its internal research and development system. “Protocol Research & Development,” or PR&D, was simplified to “Protocol,” with short-term objectives to scale L1 performance, scale Blobs and improve user experience. The Protocol team later upgraded its work goals at the beginning of the year. In February 2026, Tomasz Stańczak announced that he would step down as co-executive director, with Bastian Aue and Hsiao-Wei Wang taking over together. During his term, Stańczak pushed exploration in privacy protection, quantum-computing security, and the combination of AI and Ethereum; after leaving, he planned to focus more on products and infrastructure related to AI and blockchain integration. 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 execution and operations are handled by management and functional teams.
The foundation also changed its grant system. In August 2025, it paused the open grant program that had been running since 2018, then restarted a new Ecosystem Support Program, or ESP, in November. After the adjustment, funding moved from passively accepting applications to actively guiding resource allocation. The first funding areas covered cryptography, privacy, the application layer, security and community growth. The foundation also decided to reduce its annual spending ratio from about 15% to 5% in order to slow the consumption of ETH reserves. In May, foundation researchers Carl Beek and Julian Ma announced departures. Former foundation researcher Dankrad Feist publicly said the Ethereum ecosystem needed a new organization better aligned with Ethereum’s economic interests to “save” Ethereum. Vitalik Buterin and Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin responded that the disputes reflected friction between Ethereum’s long-term technology-building orientation and the current commercialization process, describing it as a stage of development that must be worked through.
PoS staking, Pectra and the expanding Blob layer
Ethereum’s transition to Proof of Stake ended its high-energy consensus model, but the 32 ETH staking threshold raised the entry barrier for validators and led to concerns about concentration of validation power. Lowering the amount required for each validator would raise a separate issue: once validator numbers rise, the network must reduce communication and coordination costs while increasing the cost of malicious attacks. Vitalik Buterin had proposed increasing the participation ratio required for block finality, for example from the current roughly two-thirds threshold signature to 75% or higher, in order to strengthen security.
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 minimum staking threshold to become a validator remained 32 ETH; the proposal instead increased the amount of ETH that a single validator could directly represent in consensus voting. Large stakers therefore no longer needed to split into many validator nodes to receive corresponding incentives, which helps reduce cases where one entity controls many validator nodes and lowers network-wide communication and coordination overhead. EIP-7002 optimized staking withdrawals by introducing withdrawals triggered from the execution layer, allowing stakers under certain conditions to complete withdrawals without an active validator signature. This improves asset control for stakers and reduces operational complexity around entering and exiting staking.
The Ethereum Foundation has also explored Distributed Validator Technology, or DVT, for improving staking structure. DVT splits a single validator’s private key and signing capability across multiple nodes, reducing single-point-of-failure risk. In the traditional model, the system places high demands on node stability and private-key management. In a multi-node collaboration model, validation duties are shared across nodes, lowering dependence on one node’s continuous uptime and operations capability. Multi-node coordination also adds 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.
On the data availability side, EIP-4844 in the Dencun upgrade introduced a low-cost temporary data space called Blob. Layer 2 networks can submit batches of transaction data to Blobs, reducing the cost of publishing data on-chain. The initial design set a target of 3 Blobs per block and a maximum of 6. Ethereum uses a floating fee mechanism: when a block contains more than the target number of Blobs, the base fee increases; when Blob usage is below the target, the base fee falls to encourage usage. As Layer 2 demand for Blob space grew, actual Blob usage moved close to the target and repeatedly triggered fee increases, raising Blob costs in some periods.
To address capacity pressure, Pectra included two related proposals. EIP-7691 raised the target Blob count per block from 3 to 6 and the per-block carrying limit to 9. EIP-7623 raised the cost of Calldata to guide Layer 2 networks toward greater use of Blobs, relieving data-publication pressure on mainnet. With the Fusaka upgrade advancing in December 2025, Ethereum further introduced key mechanisms for data availability. In the longer-term technical path, Blobs are not an isolated design. Ethereum’s original sharding plan aimed to split the network into multiple subchains that process transactions and data in parallel, but execution sharding faced high engineering complexity and security challenges. Ethereum therefore shifted from execution sharding toward data sharding, with Blobs as a transitional implementation. PeerDAS further optimizes how Blob data is verified through data availability sampling. On December 11, 2025, the Ethereum Foundation said Blob capacity per block had been raised to 15.
Rollups: coordination, fragmentation and native integration
As the number of Rollup solutions continues to grow, their relationship with Ethereum mainnet is changing structurally. Rollups reduce the execution load on Ethereum mainnet by moving transaction execution to Layer 2. At the same time, they change fee distribution: users’ transaction fees flow more to Layer 2, while mainnet mainly handles data publication and settlement. Different Rollups also remain relatively independent in architecture and ecosystem, forming parallel sub-ecosystems and increasing the complexity of cross-Rollup interaction. Cross-Rollup interoperability mechanisms exist, but they are still evolving in security and implementation complexity.
Developers in the Ethereum ecosystem have proposed several paths to address fragmentation. LayerZero and Hyperlane attempt to enable communication between Rollups through standardized message-passing mechanisms. Astria and Espresso approach the issue from the sequencing layer, offering shared sequencing services for multiple Rollups. The report notes that this “Rollup — third-party infrastructure — Rollup” model is still a non-native Ethereum expansion path. It introduces additional trust assumptions, creates new security questions, and lets shared sequencers participate in value capture, affecting Layer 1 MEV distribution.
Different Rollup technology stacks are also building their own ecosystems. Arbitrum is promoting Orbit chains through its Nitro / Orbit stack, with Plume Network and ApeChain cited as examples. zkSync supports multi-chain expansion through the Elastic Chain architecture, represented by Abstract and ZERO Network. Optimism has built the Superchain around OP Stack, with members including OP Mainnet, Base, BOB and Soneium. In mid-to-late February of this year, the Base team announced that it would gradually move away from Optimism’s OP Stack architecture toward a Base Stack maintained by itself. Because Base was originally built on OP Stack, the process is closer to customized expansion on an open-source framework than a full departure from Optimism. Base also said it would continue cooperating with the Optimism ecosystem and follow related open-source standards.
The Ethereum Foundation has begun to address this changing relationship. While continuing to improve Rollup data availability, it created the Platform Team under the Protocol framework as a coordination unit connecting protocol research and ecosystem development. On March 23 of 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, lower latency and scenario-specific compliance adaptation. Layer 2’s own prosperity should create greater value for Ethereum mainnet rather than compete with Layer 1. Ethereum mainnet, in turn, takes on the role of the core settlement layer and liquidity layer for a multi-chain ecosystem.
To reach that goal, Ethereum is advancing along two paths. The first is stronger association between Rollups and mainnet. With Ethereum Foundation funding, Gnosis co-founder Friederike Ernst and Zisk founder Jordi Baylina announced the Ethereum Economic Zone, or EEZ. The plan attempts to build an L1<>L2 framework in which cross-chain interactions between Rollups and mainnet, and between Rollups themselves, are included in a unified execution framework. Under EEZ, cross-chain interaction no longer relies entirely on traditional asynchronous messaging. Contract calls between different execution environments are intended to be completed within one execution flow with atomicity, meaning related operations either all succeed or all roll back. The specific implementation path remains to be clarified.
The second path is Native Rollups, a concept raised in EIP-8079. Ethereum ecosystem developers recently released a proof-of-concept prototype. Today, both Optimistic Rollups and ZK Rollups execute transactions, generate state and then use additional mechanisms such as fraud proofs or zero-knowledge proofs to prove correctness to Ethereum mainnet. They also follow Ethereum’s underlying rules for processing transactions and updating state, which requires a relatively complex execution and verification system. EIP-8079 attempts to expose Ethereum’s state transition function as an interface that Rollups can call. In this model, Rollups submit transactions to mainnet, and mainnet completes state computation under unified rules, reducing dependence on independent proving systems and lowering Rollup maintenance costs. Both EEZ and Native Rollups point to the same direction: keeping Rollup scalability while strengthening their attachment to Ethereum mainnet instead of allowing multi-chain ecosystems to drift apart.
MEV, ePBS, high-performance L1s and faster confirmation
After Ethereum moved to PoS, the network randomly selects block proposers from ETH-staking validators. A proposer is responsible for final block publication and can extract value beyond standard block rewards and gas fees by changing transaction order, known as MEV. To reduce a single validator’s control over ordering and value extraction, Ethereum proposed Proposer-Builder Separation, or PBS. The idea separates block packaging from final confirmation: specialized builders package transactions, while proposers choose from multiple candidate blocks and submit one. This improves block-building efficiency and lowers validator complexity, but specialization can also concentrate block-building ability among a small number of builders, increasing their influence over transaction ordering and MEV distribution.
Glamsterdam is planned around restructuring responsibilities among network participants. Its core directions include introducing parallel processing to prepare for faster transaction execution, redefining the workflows for creating and verifying blocks to gain more data propagation time, and adjusting fee mechanisms so the storage cost of on-chain data better reflects its long-term use of node resources such as bandwidth and storage. One of the key changes is EIP-7732, Enshrined Proposer-Builder Separation, or ePBS. Previously, PBS was not written directly into the protocol. It was implemented through off-chain middleware such as MEV-Boost, which allows validators to outsource block construction to third-party builders and pass information through relays. This improved efficiency but relied on trusted relays and left MEV allocation with limited on-chain transparency and constraint.
EIP-7732 formally writes proposer-builder separation into Ethereum’s protocol. It introduces builders as official participants, requires them to stake, and asks them to submit block commitments. It also decouples consensus verification from execution verification. During the key stage of block propagation, the network can prioritize consensus-layer verification and delay full execution-layer verification, including transaction execution and state updates, to a later stage. This reduces reliance on relays and gives nodes more time to propagate block data, allowing Ethereum to support larger data loads, especially Blob writes, while maintaining network stability. The report treats ePBS not only as a structural optimization of MEV, but also as important groundwork for data availability scaling.
Ethereum is also being compared with high-performance Layer 1s. Solana improves overall processing through parallel execution and local fee markets. Sui uses an object model and DAG architecture to deliver more efficient concurrent processing in certain scenarios. These designs serve use cases such as high-frequency trading and on-chain gaming. High-performance Layer 1s can provide low-cost, high-throughput execution directly on a single chain, reducing users’ reliance on cross-Layer 2 operations. They also tend to offer a more integrated development environment and execution model than an L1+L2 architecture. Ethereum developers, by contrast, must handle cross-chain communication, dispersed liquidity and deployment complexity across Layer 1 and multiple Layer 2s. The report frames this as a difference in infrastructure exploration rather than a simple confrontation.
Finally, Ethereum is working on faster confirmation. In Ethereum, validators reach consensus roughly every 12 seconds on the transactions and ordering within a block; this time window is a Slot. Every 32 Slots, or about 6.4 minutes, form an Epoch used to organize validator voting and advance finality. Under the current mechanism, a block needs at least two-thirds of validators to complete two rounds of voting, across two Epochs, before it is considered final and irreversible. A block usually takes about 12 to 15 minutes to reach finality. Single Slot Finality, or SSF, is Ethereum’s long-term idea of compressing the finality logic that currently spans two Epochs into one Slot. Directly achieving this by reducing validator numbers or increasing hardware requirements would weaken decentralization, so the key bottleneck is optimizing validation and communication so nodes can process more signatures in the same time window.
Before SSF is fully implemented, the Ethereum Foundation has proposed a transitional optimization called Fast Confirmation Rule, or FCR. FCR aims to reduce the confirmation time for deposits from Ethereum L1 to Layer 2 networks and centralized exchanges from minutes to about 13 seconds. It does not change the current finality mechanism. Instead, it uses the first round of voting earlier to assess safety: when first-round votes reach a high proportion, for example clearly above two-thirds, the system can treat the block as basically confirmed because the chance of reorganization is already low. FCR is not true finality. Its safety depends on most validators behaving honestly and on stable, low-latency network communication. If the network is congested or attacked, a quickly confirmed block can still be reorganized under the original rules.
The report cites a broad set of materials, including Ethereum Foundation Treasury Policy, Possible futures of the Ethereum protocol, A new unified stack for Base Chain, How L1 and L2s can build the strongest possible Ethereum, Introducing the Ethereum Economic Zone, Native Rollups, Proposer-builder separation, Glamsterdam, Fast Confirmation Rule, Fusaka, zkEVM, DAC8, Etherealize’s $40 million raise, Wintermute’s warning on Pectra-related automated attack risks, Allocation Update Q4 2025, This Is Fine (Until the Grant Runs Out), Announcing Protocol, and related foundation and ecosystem posts. Web3Caff Research states that the report is for reference only and does not constitute any forecast, investment advice, proposal or offer. Readers should not rely on it to buy or sell securities or cryptocurrencies or to adopt investment strategies, and should comply with laws and regulations in their jurisdictions.