A new research report by ShirleyLi, a researcher at Web3Caff Research, reviews Ethereum’s development path as it approaches 2026. The report notes that nearly twelve years have passed since Vitalik Buterin and his team formally introduced Ethereum to global users at international conferences in 2014. During that period, Ethereum moved from a niche experiment into one of the most influential base-layer platforms in Web3, supporting a broad and increasingly complex ecosystem. That scale, however, has also made Ethereum harder to coordinate, as the network must preserve stability while continuing to adjust its technical direction.
The report frames Ethereum’s core tension as the need to maintain continuity while pursuing change. From 2014 to 2016, Ethereum’s early development plan was divided into Frontier, Homestead, Metropolis and Serenity. The first three stages are generally regarded as Ethereum 1.0, focused on basic functionality and network stability, while Serenity represented a longer-term target centered on restructuring consensus and the underlying architecture. In 2020, Ethereum clarified the technical path toward Serenity by committing to a transition to Proof of Stake and introducing sharding logic. In 2022, Ethereum published a more complete medium- and long-term roadmap and established Rollups as the core scaling path, shifting the main chain’s role toward security and data availability. In February 2026, the Ethereum Foundation released a Strawmap draft for the next decade, detailing optimization goals across the consensus layer, data layer and execution layer.
Foundation restructuring and a more selective funding model
The report revisits several issues raised in an earlier Web3Caff Research study from late 2024, including concerns that some projects tended to align with Vitalik Buterin’s technical preferences or the Ethereum Foundation’s grant priorities, which led to temporary resource concentration in specific areas. The distributed nature of Ethereum’s technical teams also made the overall pace of execution difficult to reconcile with expectations for faster upgrades and innovation. In addition, ETH sales by the Ethereum Foundation and Vitalik Buterin prompted market discussion. Foundation-related members had stated that those funds were mainly used to support ecosystem development and project grants, but the activity still became part of wider community debate.
In early 2025, as the broader market environment improved and new narratives emerged, Ethereum’s slower development rhythm led to dissatisfaction within parts of the community. Some views criticized the Ethereum Foundation and core developers for lagging in execution efficiency, market communication and ecosystem expansion. In response, the foundation carried out several important internal 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 daily operations and execution management to external cooperation, institutional relations and cultural communication. Nethermind founder Tomasz Stańczak and Hsiao-Wei Wang then became co-executive directors.
Under the new structure, the Ethereum Foundation streamlined its organization by cutting 19 employees and moved its strategic focus from Layer 2 back toward Layer 1. It also increased its emphasis on external communication and transparency around technical roadmaps, development direction and resource use. In June 2025, the foundation reorganized its internal research and development system, changing the name “Protocol Research & Development,” or PR&D, to “Protocol.” The revised team focused on three short-term goals: scaling L1 performance, scaling Blobs and improving 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 exploration in privacy protection, quantum computing security and the combination of AI with Ethereum. After leaving the role, he said he would devote more energy to products and infrastructure related to the integration of AI and blockchain. The report interprets this leadership change as part of a broader diffusion of authority inside the Ethereum Foundation and as a reflection of the tension between Ethereum as a decentralized open ecosystem and the Ethereum Foundation as a centralized coordinating body.
The latest internal structure lists Vitalik Buterin, Aya Miyaguchi, Patrick Storchenegger and Hsiao-Wei Wang as members of the Ethereum Foundation board, responsible for governance and strategic direction, while execution and operations are carried out by management and functional teams. In August 2025, the foundation also made a major adjustment to its grant system by suspending the open grant program that had been operating since 2018. In November, it restarted the Ecosystem Support Program, or ESP. After the change, funding allocation shifted from passively receiving applications to actively guiding support, with initial funding areas covering 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 depletion of ETH reserves.
In May, Ethereum Foundation researchers Carl Beek and Julian Ma announced their departures. Former Ethereum Foundation researcher Dankrad Feist publicly stated that the Ethereum ecosystem needed a new organization more closely aligned with Ethereum’s economic interests in order to “save” Ethereum. Vitalik Buterin and Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin responded separately, saying that the disputes reflected the adjustment between Ethereum’s long-term technical construction and its current commercialization process, and that such friction was part of the development process.
PoS, staking design and Blob capacity expansion
Ethereum’s transition to Proof of Stake ended its high-energy consensus model, but the 32 ETH staking threshold also raised the entry barrier for validators and introduced concerns over validator concentration. Vitalik Buterin had previously suggested that Ethereum could strengthen security by increasing the participation ratio required for block finality, for example from the current threshold of roughly two-thirds signatures to 75% or higher. The idea was to offset security risk by raising the consensus threshold while still considering decentralization.
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 report emphasizes that 32 ETH remains the minimum staking requirement to become a validator. The proposal mainly increases the upper limit of the balance that can be counted toward consensus weight for a single validator, allowing one validator to represent more ETH in voting. This means large stakers no longer need to split funds across many validator nodes to receive corresponding rewards, which helps reduce situations where the same entity controls many validators and lowers communication and coordination overhead during network consensus.
EIP-7002 optimized the staking withdrawal mechanism by introducing withdrawals triggered from the execution layer. Under specific conditions, stakers can complete withdrawals without an active validator signature. This improves stakers’ control over their assets, reduces operational complexity when entering or exiting staking and increases the flexibility of the PoS system. The Ethereum Foundation has also explored using Distributed Validator Technology, or DVT, to optimize staking structure. DVT splits a single validator’s private key and signing capability across multiple nodes, reducing the risk of a single point of failure. Because multi-node cooperation also adds system complexity, the foundation has been experimenting with 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 side, EIP-4844, implemented in the Dencun upgrade, introduced Blob space as a lower-cost data availability area mainly used for temporary data. Layer 2 networks can submit batches of transaction data to Blobs, lowering on-chain data publication costs. The original design set the target number of Blobs per block at 3 and the maximum at 6. Ethereum introduced a floating fee mechanism to prevent excessive use: if the number of Blobs in a block is above 3, the base fee rises; if it is below 3, the base fee falls to encourage use. As Layer 2 demand for Blob space grew, actual usage increasingly approached or frequently reached the target, triggering fee increases and causing temporary rises in Blob costs.
To ease Blob capacity pressure, Pectra included two related proposals. EIP-7691 raised the target number of Blobs per block from 3 to 6 and the per-block maximum from 6 to 9. EIP-7623 sought to raise the cost of Calldata in order to guide Layer 2 networks toward greater use of Blobs and relieve data publication pressure on mainnet. With the Fusaka upgrade in December 2025, Ethereum introduced additional mechanisms at the data availability layer. From a longer-term perspective, the report explains that Blobs are part of Ethereum’s shift from execution sharding toward data sharding. On December 11, 2025, the Ethereum Foundation stated that Blob capacity per block had been raised to 15.
Rollups, fragmentation and the search for native coordination
The report stresses that the growing number of Rollup solutions is changing the relationship between Rollups and Ethereum mainnet. Rollups reduce mainnet execution load by moving transaction execution to Layer 2, but they also change the fee distribution structure. Users’ transaction fees increasingly flow to Layer 2, while mainnet mainly provides data publication and settlement. This affects Ethereum mainnet’s fee structure and validator income. At the same time, different Rollups remain relatively independent in architecture and ecosystem design, forming several parallel sub-ecosystems and increasing the complexity of cross-Rollup interaction.
Several paths have emerged inside the ecosystem to address Rollup fragmentation. Interoperability protocols such as LayerZero and Hyperlane try to enable communication among different Rollups through standardized message passing. Shared sequencer projects such as Astria and Espresso approach the problem from the transaction-ordering layer and attempt to provide unified ordering services for multiple Rollups. The report notes that this “Rollup—third-party infrastructure—Rollup” communication model remains a non-native Ethereum extension path. It introduces additional trust assumptions and can create new security issues. Shared sequencers also participate in value capture, which again affects the MEV distribution structure of Layer 1.
Different Rollup technology stacks are also expanding 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, with Abstract and ZERO Network named as representative projects. Optimism has built the Superchain around OP Stack, including OP Mainnet, Base, BOB and Soneium. In mid-to-late February this year, the Base team announced that it would gradually move away from Optimism’s OP Stack architecture system and adopt a unified Base Stack maintained by itself. Because Base was originally built with OP Stack, the report describes this as a customized extension based on an open-source framework rather than a complete departure from the Optimism system. Base also said it would continue collaborating with the Optimism ecosystem and follow relevant open-source standards.
The Ethereum Foundation has begun to address this changing relationship more directly. While continuing to optimize Rollup data availability, it established the Platform Team under the Protocol team framework as a coordination unit between protocol research and ecosystem development. The team is intended to re-examine and improve the relationship between Ethereum mainnet and Layer 2, turning a delicate alliance into a more unified platform. On March 23, the Ethereum Foundation published a systematic explanation of the evolving roles of Layer 1 and Layer 2. In the newer definition, Layer 2 is no longer limited to scaling. It also serves differentiated needs that Layer 1 cannot provide, such as stronger privacy protection, lower latency requirements and compliance adaptation for specific scenarios. Meanwhile, mainnet takes on the role of the core settlement layer and liquidity layer for a multi-chain ecosystem.
To reach that goal, Ethereum is pursuing two paths: strengthening the connection between Rollups and mainnet, and exploring Native Rollups. With 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, as well as Rollup-to-Rollup interactions, are brought into a unified execution framework. Under EEZ, cross-chain interaction would not rely entirely on traditional asynchronous message passing. Contract calls across different execution environments could be completed within the same execution flow and have atomicity, meaning the related operations either all succeed or all roll back, reducing the risk of inconsistent states.
Ethereum ecosystem developers have also released a proof-of-concept prototype for Native Rollups, proposed in EIP-8079. The idea is to restructure Rollup verification at a deeper level. Today, both Optimistic Rollups and ZK Rollups execute transactions, generate state and then prove the correctness of results to Ethereum mainnet through mechanisms such as fraud proofs or zero-knowledge proofs. EIP-8079 attempts to make Ethereum’s state transition function an open interface that Rollups can call. In this model, a Rollup can submit transactions to mainnet, and mainnet performs state computation under unified rules. This reduces reliance on independent proof systems and lowers the Rollup’s maintenance burden.
MEV reform, ePBS and faster confirmation
After Ethereum moved to PoS, the network randomly selects block proposers from validators who stake ETH. The proposer is responsible for final block publication. During this process, a proposer can extract value beyond standard block rewards and gas fees by changing the order of transactions inside a block, which is known as MEV. To reduce a single validator’s control over transaction ordering and value extraction, Ethereum had already proposed Proposer-Builder Separation, or PBS. The goal is to separate the responsibilities of block packaging and final confirmation: specialized builders package transactions, while proposers choose from several candidate blocks and submit one. This improves block construction efficiency and reduces the complexity and entry barrier for validators participating in block production.
However, this division also introduced structural concerns. As specialization increased, block-building capability concentrated among fewer builders, giving them greater influence over transaction ordering and MEV distribution. In practice, PBS was not written directly into the protocol. It was implemented through third-party middleware such as MEV-Boost, which allows validators to outsource block construction to third-party builders and transmit information through relays. The report notes that this improved block-building efficiency but remained an off-chain market. It relied on trusted relays, carried centralization concerns and lacked on-chain transparency and constraints around MEV distribution.
Glamsterdam is planned around a restructuring of responsibilities among network participants. Its main directions include introducing parallel processing capability for future transaction execution improvements, re-dividing the workflow of block creation and block verification to provide more data propagation time, and adjusting fee mechanisms so that the storage cost of on-chain data better reflects its long-term resource use for nodes, such as bandwidth and storage. One of the most important changes in the upgrade is EIP-7732, known as Enshrined Proposer-Builder Separation, or ePBS.
EIP-7732 writes Proposer-Builder Separation directly into the Ethereum protocol. It introduces builders as formal participants in the Ethereum network, requires them to stake first and submit block commitments. It also decouples consensus verification from execution verification. This allows the network to prioritize consensus-layer verification during the critical stage of block propagation and postpone complete execution-layer verification, including transaction execution and state updates, to a later phase. The report compares this to a teacher first confirming that students have submitted their papers and then grading them later. In this way, ePBS reduces reliance on relays and gives nodes more time to propagate block data, supporting larger data loads, especially Blob inclusion, while maintaining network stability.
The report also compares Ethereum’s Rollup-centered future with high-performance Layer 1 chains represented by Solana and Sui. Solana improves processing capacity through parallel execution and local fee markets, while Sui uses an object model and DAG architecture to enable more efficient concurrent processing in specific scenarios. Such designs can serve application scenarios such as high-frequency trading and on-chain games. High-performance Layer 1 networks can provide low-cost and high-throughput execution on a single chain, reducing user dependence on cross-Layer 2 operations. At the same time, ordinary public chains often provide a more integrated developer environment and execution model than a Layer1-plus-Layer2 structure, while Ethereum developers must handle cross-chain communication and fragmented liquidity across Layer 1 and different Layer 2 networks.
For faster settlement, Ethereum has proposed Single Slot Finality, or SSF, as a long-term goal. In Ethereum, validators reach consensus on the transactions and ordering that a block can contain about every 12 seconds; this window is called a Slot. Every 32 Slots, or about 6.4 minutes, form an Epoch. Under the current mechanism, a block requires at least two rounds of voting by at least two-thirds of validators, meaning two Epochs, before it is considered final and irreversible. A block typically takes about 12 to 15 minutes to reach finality. SSF aims to compress the finality logic that currently spans two Epochs into one Slot.
Before SSF is fully implemented, the Ethereum Foundation has proposed a transitional optimization called the Fast Confirmation Rule, or FCR. Its goal is to shorten deposit confirmation times from Ethereum L1 to L2 networks and centralized trading platforms from several minutes to about 13 seconds. FCR does not change the existing finality mechanism. Instead, it uses the result of the first voting round to judge safety earlier. When the first round already reaches a high proportion, such as clearly above two-thirds, the system can regard the block as basically confirmed before full finality. The report also notes the limits of FCR: it depends on honest behavior by most validators and stable, low-latency network communication. If the network is congested or attacked, a rapidly confirmed block can still be reorganized under the original rules.
The report concludes with a disclaimer that it was prepared by Web3Caff Research for reference only. It does not constitute any forecast, investment advice, proposal or offer. Investors should not rely on it to buy or sell securities or cryptocurrencies or to adopt any investment strategy. The views expressed reflect the author’s personal opinions as of the stated date and are not the position of Web3Caff Research. The information and views come from proprietary and non-proprietary sources that Web3Caff Research considers reliable, but the report does not guarantee completeness or accuracy. Readers are responsible for deciding whether to rely on the information and must comply with the laws and regulations of their jurisdictions.