ShirleyLi, a researcher at Web3Caff Research, uses the first part of a 2026 Ethereum outlook report to revisit nearly twelve years of Ethereum development since Vitalik Buterin and his team formally introduced the network to global users at an international conference in 2014. The report frames Ethereum’s path as a shift from an early niche experiment into one of the most influential infrastructure layers in Web3, while also noting that the growing scale of the ecosystem has made the network heavier to coordinate and harder to evolve quickly.
The report describes Ethereum’s long-running tension between stability and change. From 2014 to 2016, Ethereum’s early staged roadmap took shape around Frontier, Homestead, Metropolis and Serenity. The first three stages are generally treated as the Ethereum 1.0 phase, focused on basic functionality and network stability, while Serenity represented a longer-term goal built around changes to consensus and underlying architecture. In 2020, Ethereum clarified the technical path of Serenity by formally establishing the transition to proof of stake and introducing sharding logic. In 2022, it set a more complete medium- and long-term roadmap centered on Rollups, moving execution expansion to Layer 2 while positioning the main chain around security and data availability. In February 2026, the Ethereum Foundation released a draft Strawmap for the next decade, adding more specific goals across the consensus layer, data layer and execution layer.
Foundation governance and funding move into a new phase
The report follows up on questions raised by the author in a late-2024 study on Ethereum’s future path, including concerns around governance, development efficiency, market communication and ecosystem expansion. At the beginning of 2025, amid a warmer overall market environment and the emergence of new narratives, Ethereum’s pace was viewed by parts of the community as relatively slow. Some views cited in the report argued that the Ethereum Foundation and core developers lagged in execution efficiency, external communication and ecosystem expansion compared with the broader industry tempo.
In response, the Ethereum Foundation made a series of organizational changes. In February 2025, Aya Miyaguchi, who had served as executive director since 2018, moved into the newly created role of President, shifting her focus from day-to-day operations and execution management toward external cooperation, institutional relationships and cultural communication. Nethermind founder Tomasz Stańczak and Hsiao-Wei Wang became co-executive directors. Under the new management structure, the Foundation streamlined its organization, cut 19 employees, and shifted strategic emphasis from Layer 2 back to Layer 1. It also placed more weight on external communication and transparency around technical direction, development priorities and resource use.
In June 2025, the Foundation reorganized its internal research and development system. The previous Protocol Research & Development unit was simplified to Protocol, with three short-term goals: scaling L1 performance, scaling Blobs and improving user experience. The report reads this as a move from research orientation toward engineering implementation and practical delivery. In early 2026, the Protocol team upgraded its work goals again. Then 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 tenure, Stańczak promoted exploration in privacy protection, quantum computing security, and the combination of AI and Ethereum. After leaving the role, he shifted more attention to products and infrastructure related to AI and blockchain integration.
The latest internal organizational structure cited by the report lists Vitalik Buterin, Aya Miyaguchi, Patrick Storchenegger and Hsiao-Wei Wang as members of the Ethereum Foundation board, responsible for governance and strategic direction. Execution and operations are handled by management and functional teams. The report presents this structure as part of the continuing balance between Ethereum as a decentralized open ecosystem and the Ethereum Foundation as a centralized core coordination body.
The Foundation also adjusted its grant system. In August 2025, it paused the open grant program that had been running since 2018, and in November relaunched a new Ecosystem Support Program. After the change, funding allocation moved from passively accepting applications to actively guiding resources. The first funding areas covered cryptography, privacy, the application layer, security and community growth. At the same time, the Foundation decided to reduce annual spending from about 15% of funds to 5%, slowing the depletion of ETH reserves. The report describes this as a shift from broad ecosystem funding toward more refined resource allocation focused on infrastructure and core technologies.
In May 2026, Ethereum Foundation researchers Carl Beek and Julian Ma announced their departures. Former Foundation researcher Dankrad Feist publicly said the Ethereum ecosystem needed a new organization more aligned with Ethereum’s economic interests to save Ethereum. Vitalik Buterin and Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin responded that these disputes reflected friction between Ethereum’s long-term technology-building orientation and the current commercialization process, and that this was a stage of development pain.
PoS staking, validator design and Blob capacity
The transition to proof of stake moved Ethereum away from an energy-intensive consensus model, but the 32 ETH staking threshold raised the entry requirement for validators and contributed to concerns about concentration of validation power. The report notes that if the staking threshold for a single validator is lowered, the network must also solve the communication and coordination costs created by a larger validator set, while increasing the cost of malicious behavior. Vitalik Buterin previously suggested strengthening security by increasing the participation ratio required for block finality, for example from the current roughly two-thirds threshold signature level to 75% or higher.
Pectra was activated on Ethereum mainnet in May 2025. EIP-7251 raised the maximum effective balance of validators from 32 ETH to 2048 ETH. The report stresses that 32 ETH remains the minimum stake required to become a validator; the proposal instead raises the amount of ETH that one validator can count toward consensus weight. Large stakers therefore no longer need to split their stake across many validator nodes to receive corresponding rewards, which helps reduce cases where the same entity controls multiple validator nodes and lowers communication and coordination overhead across the network.
EIP-7002 optimized the staking withdrawal mechanism. It introduced withdrawals triggered from the execution layer, allowing stakers to withdraw under specific conditions without an active validator signature. The report says this enhances stakers’ control over their assets, reduces operational complexity around entering and exiting staking to some extent, and improves flexibility in the proof-of-stake system.
The Foundation has also explored Distributed Validator Technology, or DVT, as a way to optimize staking structure. DVT splits a single validator’s private key and signing capability across multiple nodes that work together, lowering the risk of a single point of failure. In the traditional model, validator nodes need high stability and strong private key management. Under multi-node collaboration, validation duties are shared. The report also notes that multi-node collaboration introduces extra system complexity, so the Foundation is experimenting first with lightweight implementations such as DVT-lite. According to information disclosed by the Ethereum Foundation in March 2026, 72,000 ETH had been staked through related mechanisms.
On the data side, EIP-4844 in the Dencun upgrade introduced Blob space, a low-cost data availability area used for temporary data. Layer 2 networks can submit batches of transaction data to Blobs, reducing the cost of publishing data onchain. Under the original design, each block targeted 3 Blobs and allowed a maximum of 6. A floating fee mechanism raises the base fee when Blob usage in a block is above the target and lowers it when usage is below the target. As Layer 2 demand for Blob space grew quickly, actual Blob usage increasingly approached or reached the target, repeatedly triggering fee increases and causing Blob costs to rise during certain periods.
To ease Blob capacity pressure, Pectra included two related proposals. EIP-7691 increased the target number of Blobs per block from 3 to 6 and raised the maximum per block to 9. EIP-7623 attempted to raise the cost of Calldata in order to guide Layer 2 networks toward greater Blob usage and reduce data publication pressure on mainnet. With the Fusaka upgrade in December 2025, Ethereum further introduced key mechanisms at the data availability layer. On December 11, 2025, the Ethereum Foundation stated that Blob capacity per block had been raised to 15.
The report places Blobs within Ethereum’s longer scaling path. Ethereum originally proposed sharding as a way to split the network into multiple subchains that process transactions and data in parallel. Because execution sharding involved high engineering complexity and security challenges, Ethereum gradually moved from execution sharding toward data sharding, prioritizing data availability expansion. Blobs are described as a transitional implementation in this direction. PeerDAS, through data availability sampling, further optimizes the way Blob data is verified.
Rollups, fragmentation and attempts to rebuild alignment
The report says the relationship between Rollups and Ethereum mainnet is undergoing structural change as the number of Rollup solutions grows. On one hand, Rollups reduce the execution load on mainnet by moving transaction execution to Layer 2. At the same time, fee distribution changes: more transaction fees paid by users flow to Layer 2, while mainnet mainly handles data publication and settlement. This affects mainnet’s fee structure and validator revenue. On the other hand, different Rollups are relatively independent in architecture and ecosystems, forming parallel sub-ecosystems and increasing the complexity of cross-Rollup interaction.
Ethereum ecosystem developers have proposed different approaches to Rollup fragmentation. LayerZero and Hyperlane try to enable communication between Rollups through standardized messaging. Astria and Espresso, as shared sequencer projects, approach the issue from transaction ordering and attempt to provide unified sequencing services for multiple Rollups. The report notes that this Rollup-to-third-party-infrastructure-to-Rollup model remains a non-native Ethereum scaling path. It introduces additional trust assumptions and security issues, while shared sequencers participating in value capture also affect the MEV distribution structure of Layer 1.
Different Rollup technology routes are also building their own ecosystems. Arbitrum is promoting Orbit chains through its Nitro and Orbit stack, with Plume Network and ApeChain cited as examples. zkSync supports multi-chain expansion through its 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 2026, the Base team announced that it would gradually move away from Optimism’s OP Stack architecture toward its own maintained Base Stack. Because Base was originally built with OP Stack, the report describes this process as closer to customized expansion based on an open-source framework than a complete separation from Optimism. Base also said it would continue cooperating with the Optimism ecosystem and follow relevant open-source standards.
The Ethereum Foundation has begun to address these issues more directly. While continuing to optimize Rollup data availability, it established a Platform Team under the Protocol team framework as a coordination unit between protocol research and ecosystem development. The team aims to reorganize and improve the relationship between Ethereum mainnet and Layer 2, turning a delicate alliance into a more coordinated, mutually reinforcing platform.
On March 23, 2026, the Ethereum Foundation published a systematic statement on the evolving roles of Layer 1 and Layer 2. In the updated definition, Layer 2 is no longer positioned only as a scaling layer. It is also meant to meet differentiated needs that Layer 1 cannot provide, such as stronger privacy protection, lower latency requirements and compliance adaptation for specific scenarios. Layer 2 prosperity should create more value for Ethereum mainnet rather than compete with Layer 1. Meanwhile, Ethereum mainnet is positioned as the core settlement layer and liquidity layer of a multi-chain ecosystem.
To advance this goal, Ethereum is pursuing two paths: strengthening the association between Rollups and mainnet, and exploring Native Rollups. Under Ethereum Foundation 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 in which interactions between Rollups and mainnet, and between Rollups themselves, are placed into a unified execution framework. In such a design, cross-chain interaction would not rely entirely on traditional asynchronous messaging, and contract calls across different execution environments could be completed in the same execution flow with atomicity.
The second path is Native Rollups, proposed in EIP-8079. Current Optimistic Rollups and ZK Rollups execute transactions and generate state, then prove correctness to Ethereum mainnet through additional mechanisms such as fraud proofs or zero-knowledge proofs. They must also follow Ethereum’s underlying rules for transaction processing and state updates, which requires a relatively complex execution and verification system. EIP-8079 attempts to expose Ethereum’s state transition function as an interface for Rollups. In that model, Rollups can submit transactions to mainnet and let mainnet compute state according to unified rules, reducing reliance on independent proof systems and lowering maintenance costs.
ePBS, Glamsterdam and faster confirmation
After Ethereum moved to proof of stake, the network randomly selects block proposers from validators staking ETH. A proposer is responsible for final block publication and can extract value beyond standard block rewards and gas fees by changing transaction ordering, known as MEV. To reduce a single validator’s control over ordering and value extraction, Ethereum previously proposed proposer-builder separation, or PBS. Under PBS, specialized builders package transactions while proposers choose from candidate blocks and submit the final block.
The report explains that this division improves efficiency but introduces structural issues. As specialization rises, block-building capability can concentrate among a smaller number of builders, increasing their influence over transaction ordering and MEV distribution. In practice, PBS has not previously been directly written into the protocol. It has been implemented through third-party middleware such as MEV-Boost, which lets validators outsource block construction to third-party builders and use relays for communication. Although this improved block-building efficiency, it remained an offchain market dependent on trusted relays, with centralization risk and limited onchain transparency around MEV distribution.
Glamsterdam is planned around restructuring the responsibilities of different network participants. Its core directions include introducing parallel processing capacity to prepare for faster transaction execution, reorganizing the workflow for creating and verifying blocks to provide more time for data propagation and larger data loads, and adjusting fee mechanisms so that onchain data storage costs better reflect the long-term use of node resources such as bandwidth and storage.
One of Glamsterdam’s key changes is EIP-7732, Enshrined Proposer-Builder Separation, or ePBS. The proposal writes proposer-builder separation directly into the Ethereum protocol. It introduces builders as formal participants in the network, requires them to stake first, and requires them to submit block commitments. It also decouples consensus verification and execution verification. During the critical block propagation phase, the network can prioritize consensus-layer verification and defer full execution-layer verification, including transaction execution and state updates, to a later stage. The report compares this to a teacher first confirming that each student has submitted an exam paper, then taking the papers back to grade them more carefully.
Through this process, ePBS reduces dependence on relays and gives nodes more time to propagate block data. That helps Ethereum support larger volumes of data, especially Blob writes, while maintaining network stability. The report therefore treats ePBS not only as a structural improvement to MEV, but also as an important foundation for expanding Ethereum’s data availability.
The report also compares Ethereum’s Rollup-centered future with high-performance Layer 1 chains. Solana uses parallel execution and local fee markets to improve processing capacity, while Sui uses an object model and DAG architecture to achieve more efficient concurrent processing in specific scenarios. These features can serve use cases such as high-frequency trading and onchain gaming. High-performance Layer 1s can provide low-cost, high-throughput execution on a single chain, reducing user reliance on cross-Layer 2 operations. They also often offer a more integrated development environment than Ethereum’s Layer1-plus-Layer2 system, where developers must handle cross-chain communication and liquidity fragmentation. The report nevertheless treats the relationship as a difference in infrastructure direction rather than a simple confrontation.
Finally, the report discusses finality. Ethereum validators need to reach consensus roughly every 12 seconds on the transactions and ordering inside a block; this time window is a Slot. Every 32 Slots, or about 6.4 minutes, form an Epoch. Under the current mechanism, an Ethereum block requires at least two-thirds of validators to complete two rounds of voting, across two Epochs, before it is considered final and irreversible. A block therefore usually takes about 12 to 15 minutes to reach final confirmation. This design balances security and decentralization, but the confirmation time remains long from a user experience perspective.
Ethereum’s long-term idea is Single Slot Finality, or SSF, which aims to compress finality that currently spans two Epochs into one Slot. Directly achieving this through fewer validators or stronger hardware would weaken decentralization to different degrees, so the key challenge is optimizing verification and communication so nodes can complete more signature processing within the same time window. The community has discussed approaches such as a super committee, where a temporary group of validators is randomly selected in a single Slot to vote and confirm more quickly, as well as changes to validator participation and weight distribution.
Before SSF is fully implemented, the Ethereum Foundation has proposed a transitional Fast Confirmation Rule, or FCR. The goal is to reduce confirmation time for deposits from Ethereum L1 to L2s and centralized trading platforms from several minutes to about 13 seconds. FCR does not change the existing finality mechanism; instead, it uses first-round voting results earlier to assess safety. If the first round already shows a high ratio, clearly above two-thirds, the system can treat the block as basically confirmed. The report emphasizes that FCR is not true finality. Its safety depends on most validators behaving honestly and network communication staying stable and low latency. If the network is congested or attacked, a quickly confirmed block can still be reorganized under the original rules. The report closes with a disclaimer that its content is for reference only and does not constitute any forecast, investment advice, proposal or offer.