Since Vitalik Buterin and his team formally introduced Ethereum to global users at international conferences in 2014, the network has gone through nearly twelve years of development. In the first part of a 2026 outlook report, ShirleyLi, a researcher at Web3Caff Research, frames Ethereum’s current position as a transition from basic infrastructure toward an ecosystem center. The report argues that Ethereum must keep a very large ecosystem stable while repeatedly revising its technical coordinates, as internal operating pressure and challenges from other public chains continue to shape its path.
The report traces Ethereum’s early roadmap through four phases: Frontier, Homestead, Metropolis and Serenity. Frontier, Homestead and Metropolis are generally treated as Ethereum 1.0, focused on core functionality and network stability, while Serenity represented the long-term goal of rebuilding consensus and the underlying architecture. In 2020, Ethereum clarified the technical route for Serenity by confirming the transition to proof of stake and introducing the logic of sharding. In 2022, a fuller medium- and long-term roadmap set a Rollup-centered scaling direction, moving execution expansion to Layer 2 and repositioning the main chain around security and data availability. In February 2026, the Ethereum Foundation released a ten-year Strawmap draft, adding more detailed goals across the consensus layer, data layer and execution layer.
Foundation leadership, staffing and grants were reshaped
The report revisits the community discontent that appeared in early 2025, when the broader market environment was improving and new narratives were emerging, while Ethereum’s pace was viewed by some community members as comparatively slow. The criticism focused on the Ethereum Foundation and core developers, including execution efficiency, market communication and ecosystem expansion. In response, the foundation carried out several important changes.
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. Her responsibilities shifted away from day-to-day operations and execution management toward external cooperation, institutional relationships and cultural communication. At the same time, Nethermind founder Tomasz Stańczak and Hsiao-Wei Wang became co-executive directors.
Under the new management structure, the Ethereum Foundation streamlined its organization, cut 19 employees and shifted strategic emphasis back from Layer 2 to Layer 1 itself. The foundation also increased its attention to external communication and improved transparency around technical direction, development priorities and resource use. In June 2025, the internal research and development system was reorganized as well. The former Protocol Research & Development, or PR&D, was shortened to Protocol, with three short-term goals: scaling L1 performance, scaling Blobs and improving user experience. The report describes this as a move from a research-oriented mode toward engineering implementation and delivery.
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, he promoted exploration of privacy protection, quantum-computing security and the combination of AI with Ethereum. After stepping down, he said he would devote more energy to products and infrastructure related to the integration of AI and blockchain. The report reads his departure statement as reflecting a handover after recognizing that he was no longer the central driving force, and uses the episode to discuss the tension between Ethereum as a decentralized open ecosystem and the Ethereum Foundation as a centralized coordination body.
The latest internal structure cited in 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, while execution and operations are handled by management and functional teams. Resource allocation also changed. In August 2025, the foundation paused the open grant program that had been operating since 2018, and in November restarted a new Ecosystem Support Program, or ESP. After the adjustment, funding moved from passively accepting applications to actively guiding capital. The first batch of supported areas covered cryptography, privacy, the application layer, security and community growth. The foundation also decided to reduce annual spending from about 15% of funds to 5%, slowing the consumption of ETH reserves.
The report also records personnel and organizational debate in 2026. In May, Ethereum Foundation researchers Carl Beek and Julian Ma announced their departures one after another. Former Ethereum Foundation researcher Dankrad Feist publicly said the Ethereum ecosystem needed a new organization with interests more aligned with Ethereum’s economics in order to ‘save’ Ethereum. Vitalik Buterin and Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin responded that the disputes essentially reflected the friction between Ethereum’s long-term technical construction orientation and the current commercialization process, and described the tension as a stage of pain in development.
PoS staking and Blob capacity moved through Pectra and Fusaka
The move to proof of stake ended Ethereum’s high-energy consensus model, but the 32 ETH staking threshold raised the barrier for validators and introduced risks of concentration in validation power. The report notes that if the single-validator threshold is lowered, a higher number of validators would create another question: how to reduce communication and coordination costs while increasing the attack cost for malicious behavior. Vitalik Buterin had proposed raising the participation ratio required for finality, for example from the current threshold of about two-thirds signatures to 75% or higher, as a way to strengthen network security while balancing decentralization and safety.
In May 2025, the Pectra upgrade was activated on Ethereum mainnet. EIP-7251 raised the maximum effective validator balance from 32 ETH to 2048 ETH. The report stresses that 32 ETH remained the minimum staking threshold to become a validator; the proposal mainly increased the amount of ETH that could be counted toward consensus weight for a single validator. This allows a large staker to represent more ETH directly in voting without splitting the stake into many validator nodes, which can reduce cases where the same entity controls numerous validators and can lower communication and coordination overhead across the network.
EIP-7002 optimized staking withdrawals by introducing withdrawals triggered from the execution layer. Under specific conditions, a staker can complete a withdrawal without an active signature from the validator. The report says this strengthens stakers’ control over their assets, reduces some operational complexity when entering or exiting staking and improves the flexibility of the proof-of-stake system. The Ethereum Foundation has also explored the use of Distributed Validator Technology, or DVT, to optimize staking structure. DVT splits a single validator’s private key and signing capacity across several nodes, reducing single points of failure. Because multi-node cooperation also adds system complexity, the foundation has been testing lighter implementations such as DVT-lite. Information disclosed by the Ethereum Foundation in March 2026 showed that 72,000 ETH had participated in staking through related mechanisms.
On data availability, EIP-4844, implemented in the Dencun upgrade, introduced Blob space as a lower-cost temporary data availability area. Layer 2 networks can submit batched 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 to avoid excessive use: if Blob usage in a block is above the target, the base fee rises; if it is below the target, the base fee falls to encourage use. As Layer 2 demand for Blob space grew rapidly, actual usage moved close to or repeatedly reached the target, triggering fee increases and raising Blob costs during some periods.
Pectra included two related proposals to ease the Blob capacity shortage. EIP-7691 raised the target number of Blobs per block from 3 to 6 and lifted the maximum from 6 to 9. EIP-7623 attempted to increase the cost of Calldata and guide Layer 2 networks toward greater use of Blobs, easing data publication pressure on mainnet. With the Fusaka upgrade in December 2025, Ethereum further introduced key mechanisms at the data availability layer. The report explains that Blob design is not isolated. Ethereum had first proposed Sharding, aiming to split the network into multiple subchains for parallel transaction and data processing, but execution sharding faced high engineering complexity and security challenges. The route therefore moved from execution sharding toward data sharding, with Blobs serving as a transitional implementation. PeerDAS and data availability sampling further optimize Blob verification. On December 11, 2025, the Ethereum Foundation said each block’s Blob capacity had been raised to 15.
Rollups were redefined from scaling tools to coordinated ecosystem components
As the number of Rollup solutions keeps increasing, their relationship with Ethereum mainnet has changed structurally. Rollups reduce mainnet execution load by moving transaction execution to Layer 2, but they also change fee distribution. Users’ transaction fees flow more to Layer 2, while mainnet primarily provides data publication and settlement. This affects Ethereum mainnet’s fee structure and validator income. At the same time, different Rollups are relatively independent in architecture and ecosystem, gradually forming multiple parallel sub-ecosystems. This fragmentation increases the complexity of cross-Rollup interaction, even though interoperability mechanisms continue to evolve.
Developers in the Ethereum ecosystem have proposed several paths to handle Rollup fragmentation. LayerZero and Hyperlane attempt to enable communication among Rollups through standardized message-passing mechanisms. Astria and Espresso, as shared sequencer projects, start from the transaction-ordering layer and try to offer unified sequencing services for multiple Rollups. The report notes that this ‘Rollup—third-party infrastructure—Rollup’ communication pattern is still not an Ethereum-native expansion route. It introduces additional trust assumptions and can create new security issues. Shared sequencers also participate in value capture, which can again affect the MEV distribution structure of Layer 1.
Different Rollup technical routes are also accelerating their own ecosystems. Arbitrum promotes Orbit chains based on the Nitro and Orbit stack, with Plume Network and ApeChain cited as examples under that path. zkSync uses its Elastic Chain architecture to support multi-chain expansion, with Abstract and ZERO Network as representative projects. Optimism builds the Superchain around OP Stack, with members including OP Mainnet, Base, BOB and Soneium. In mid-to-late February, the Base team announced that it would gradually move away from Optimism’s OP Stack architecture toward its own maintained Base Stack unified technology stack. Because Base was originally built using OP Stack, the report describes the process as customized expansion based on an open-source framework rather than a complete break from Optimism. Base also said it would continue working with the Optimism ecosystem and follow relevant open-source norms.
The Ethereum Foundation has begun to address this relationship directly. While continuing to optimize Rollup data availability, it created the Platform Team under the Protocol team framework to connect protocol research and ecosystem development. Its role is to reorganize and improve the relationship between Ethereum mainnet and Layer 2, turning a delicate alliance into a more coordinated and mutually reinforcing platform. On March 23 this year, the foundation published another systematic explanation of the evolving roles of Layer 1 and Layer 2. In the latest definition, Layer 2 is no longer positioned only as a scaling tool. It is also meant to satisfy differentiated needs that Layer 1 cannot provide, including stronger privacy protection, lower latency and compliance adaptation for specific scenarios. Ethereum mainnet, meanwhile, takes the role of the core settlement layer and liquidity layer for a multi-chain ecosystem.
To pursue this goal, Ethereum is moving along two paths. The first is to strengthen the connection between Rollups and mainnet. 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, and among Rollups themselves, are brought into a unified execution framework. Under EEZ, cross-chain interaction would not rely entirely on traditional asynchronous message passing. The design aims for stronger composability, where contract calls across execution environments can occur in the same execution flow with atomicity, meaning all related actions succeed together or roll back together.
The second path is Native Rollup, proposed in EIP-8079, for which ecosystem developers recently released a proof-of-concept prototype. Today, both Optimistic Rollups and ZK Rollups execute transactions, generate state and then prove correctness to Ethereum mainnet through additional mechanisms such as fraud proofs or zero-knowledge proofs. EIP-8079 tries to expose Ethereum’s state transition function as an interface that Rollups can call. In that model, a Rollup can submit transactions to mainnet, and mainnet performs state calculation under unified rules. This reduces reliance on an independent proof system and lowers the Rollup’s own maintenance cost. The report compares the current model to a student solving a problem and submitting proof of the work for a teacher to check; under Native Rollup, the student submits the organized problem information and the teacher calculates directly under common rules.
ePBS, Glamsterdam, SSF and FCR target MEV structure and confirmation experience
After Ethereum’s transition to proof of stake, the network randomly selects block proposers from validators who have staked ETH. The proposer is responsible for the final publication of a block. During this process, a proposer can extract value beyond standard block rewards and gas fees by changing transaction order, which is MEV. To reduce a single validator’s control over transaction ordering and value extraction, Ethereum previously proposed proposer-builder separation, or PBS. PBS separates block packaging from final confirmation: specialized builders package transactions, while proposers choose from candidate blocks and submit the final block.
This division improves efficiency but introduces structural issues. As specialization increases, block-building ability can concentrate among a small number of builders, increasing their influence over transaction ordering and MEV distribution. In practice, PBS was not written directly into the protocol at first. It was implemented through third-party middleware such as MEV-Boost, allowing validators to outsource block construction to builders and use relays for information transmission. Although this improved block-building efficiency, it remained an off-chain market that relied on trusted relays and lacked on-chain transparency and constraints around MEV distribution.
The planned Glamsterdam upgrade will restructure the responsibilities of network participants. Its core directions include introducing parallel processing capability for future transaction execution speed improvements, separating the workflow for creating blocks and verifying blocks to provide more data propagation time, and adjusting fee mechanisms so that on-chain storage costs better reflect long-term resource use such as bandwidth and storage. One of the most important changes is EIP-7732, Enshrined Proposer-Builder Separation, or ePBS.
EIP-7732 writes proposer-builder separation formally into the Ethereum protocol. It introduces builders as official participants in the Ethereum network, requires them to stake first and submit block commitments to the network. It also decouples consensus verification from execution verification, allowing the network to prioritize consensus-layer verification during the critical block propagation phase 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, and then grading the papers later in the office. In this way, ePBS reduces reliance on relays and gives nodes more time when propagating block data, which helps Ethereum support larger data loads, especially Blob writes, while maintaining network stability.
The report also places Ethereum’s roadmap beside high-performance Layer 1 competitors. Solana uses parallel execution and local fee markets to improve overall processing capacity, while Sui uses an object model and DAG architecture to achieve more efficient concurrent processing in specific scenarios. These features can serve applications such as high-frequency trading and on-chain games. High-performance Layer 1 chains can provide low-cost and high-throughput execution directly on a single chain, reducing user dependence on cross-Layer 2 operations. Compared with an integrated public-chain environment, Ethereum’s Layer 1 plus Layer 2 system requires developers to handle cross-chain communication and fragmented liquidity, increasing the complexity of application deployment.
Ethereum’s answer on confirmation speed includes the long-term idea of Single Slot Finality, or SSF. In Ethereum, validators reach consensus about the transactions and ordering in a block roughly every 12 seconds. This time window is a Slot. Every 32 Slots, or about 6.4 minutes, form an Epoch, which organizes validator votes and advances finality. Under the current mechanism, a block needs at least two-thirds of validators to complete two rounds of voting, or the confirmation process of two Epochs, before it is considered finally confirmed and irreversible. A block therefore usually takes about 2 Epochs, or around 12 to 15 minutes, to reach final confirmation. SSF aims to compress finality that currently spans 2 Epochs into a single Slot.
Directly achieving SSF by reducing the number of validators or raising hardware requirements would weaken decentralization to different degrees. The key bottleneck is therefore not simply scale reduction, but optimization of validation and communication so that nodes can process more signatures and verification within the same time window. The community has discussed paths such as a temporary supercommittee selected within a Slot, or adjusted participation mechanisms and weight distribution, but large-scale signature collection, aggregation and verification in a very short period introduces further technical complexity.
Before SSF is fully implemented, the Ethereum Foundation has proposed a transitional optimization called the Fast Confirmation Rule, or FCR. FCR aims to reduce confirmation time for deposits 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 first round of voting to judge safety earlier. When the first vote reaches a high proportion, for example clearly above two-thirds, the system can judge that the chance of reorganization is already low and treat the block as basically confirmed in advance. FCR is not true finality. Its safety depends on two premises: most validators remain honest, and network communication remains stable and low latency. If the network becomes congested or is attacked, a quickly confirmed block can still be reorganized under the original rules.
The report ends with a disclaimer that it was prepared by Web3Caff Research for reference only. It does not constitute a forecast, investment advice, proposal or offer, and readers should not rely on it to buy or sell securities or cryptocurrencies or to adopt any investment strategy. The views reflect the author’s personal opinions as of the stated date and are independent of Web3Caff Research’s position. The report also states that readers decide on their own whether to rely on the information and should comply with the laws and regulations of their country or region.