In a long-form research report written by ShirleyLi of Web3Caff Research, Ethereum’s development is placed on a nearly twelve-year timeline. Since Vitalik Buterin and his team formally introduced 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-layer platforms in the Web3 ecosystem. The report frames Ethereum’s current challenge as a tension between maintaining stability and continuing to change: it must keep the network reliable enough for a large ecosystem, while still defining new technical directions for the next phase of growth.
The report starts by revisiting Ethereum’s early roadmap. Between 2014 and 2016, Ethereum formed a staged development plan consisting of Frontier, Homestead, Metropolis and Serenity. The first three stages are commonly treated as Ethereum 1.0, focused mainly on basic functionality and network stability. Serenity represented the longer-term target, centered on rebuilding consensus and the underlying architecture. In 2020, Ethereum further clarified the technical path of Serenity by formally setting the transition to Proof of Stake and introducing sharding logic. In 2022, it released a more complete medium- and long-term roadmap and established a Rollup-centric scaling path, 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 ten-year “Strawmap,” adding more specific optimization goals for the consensus layer, data layer and execution layer.
According to the report, each roadmap revision reflects Ethereum’s stage-by-stage balancing of scalability, security, decentralization and ecosystem value distribution. ShirleyLi also follows up on questions raised in her late-2024 report, “Ethereum’s Future Path: Development Amid Controversy, Can the Ecosystem Giant Withstand Potential Crises?” The new report tracks what changed over the following year across governance, development efficiency, communication with the market, treasury use, staking structure, Layer 2 relations and mainnet performance.
Governance is one of the central topics. In early 2025, while the broader market environment improved and new narratives emerged, Ethereum’s development pace was seen by parts of the community as comparatively slow. Some views argued that the Ethereum Foundation and core developers were lagging in execution, public communication and ecosystem expansion. The Foundation responded with a series of organizational changes. In February 2025, Aya Miyaguchi, who had served as executive director since 2018, moved into the newly created President role. Her responsibilities shifted 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 Ethereum Foundation streamlined its organization, cut 19 employees, and moved its strategic focus back from Layer 2 to Layer 1 itself. In June 2025, the internal R&D structure was also reorganized. The former Protocol Research & Development, or PR&D, was simplified to “Protocol,” with three short-term goals: scaling L1 performance, scaling Blobs and improving user experience. The report treats this change as a move away from a research-heavy orientation and toward engineering execution 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 the role. During his tenure, Stańczak promoted exploration in privacy protection, quantum-computing security and the combination of AI with Ethereum. After stepping down, he planned to devote more effort to products and infrastructure related to AI and blockchain integration. The latest internal structure listed Ethereum Foundation board members as Vitalik Buterin, Aya Miyaguchi, Patrick Storchenegger and Hsiao-Wei Wang, responsible for governance and strategic direction, while management and functional teams handle execution and operations.
The grant system also changed. In August 2025, the Ethereum Foundation paused the open grant program that had been running since 2018, and in November restarted a new Ecosystem Support Program, or ESP. After the adjustment, funding moved from passively receiving applications to actively guiding resource allocation. The first supported areas included cryptography, privacy, the application layer, security and community growth. The Foundation also decided to reduce annual spending from about 15% to 5% in order to slow the consumption of ETH reserves. In May 2026, Ethereum Foundation researchers Carl Beek and Julian Ma announced departures, while former 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 the controversy reflected the friction between Ethereum’s long-term technical building orientation and the current commercialization process.
The report then moves to staking. Ethereum’s transition to Proof of Stake ended the previous high-energy consensus model, but the 32 ETH staking threshold raised the entry bar for validators and led to concerns about concentration of validation power. Vitalik Buterin had proposed increasing the participation threshold required for block finality, for example from the current roughly two-thirds threshold signature level to 75% or higher, as a way to strengthen network security. 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, while 32 ETH remained the minimum required stake to become a validator. The change allows one validator to directly represent more ETH in voting weight, reducing the need for large stakers to split funds across many validator nodes. EIP-7002 optimized staking withdrawals by introducing execution-layer-triggered withdrawals, allowing stakers under certain conditions to withdraw without an active validator signature.
The Ethereum Foundation 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 cooperating nodes, lowering single-point failure risk. Because multi-node cooperation adds system complexity, the Foundation has been testing lighter implementations such as DVT-lite to simplify deployment and operations. 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 section. 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, with a floating fee mechanism: if Blob use in a block exceeds the target, the base fee rises; if usage is below the target, the base fee falls to encourage use. As Layer 2 demand for Blob space grew, actual Blob use approached or reached the target more often, repeatedly triggering fee increases.
To address this capacity pressure, Pectra included two related proposals. EIP-7691 raised the target number of Blobs per block from 3 to 6 and the maximum from 6 to 9. EIP-7623 attempted to increase the cost of Calldata use, guiding Layer 2s toward greater Blob usage and reducing mainnet data-publishing pressure. With the Fusaka upgrade in December 2025, Ethereum introduced further mechanisms at the data availability layer. On December 11, 2025, the Ethereum Foundation said the Blob capacity per block had been raised to 15. The report emphasizes that Blobs are not an isolated design but part of Ethereum’s broader shift from execution sharding toward data sharding, with mechanisms such as PeerDAS improving how Blob data is verified through data availability sampling.
The relationship between Ethereum and Rollups receives extended treatment. As the number of Rollup solutions increases, their relationship with the mainnet has structurally changed. Rollups move execution to Layer 2 and reduce mainnet execution load, but they also change fee distribution: more transaction fees paid by users flow to Layer 2, while the mainnet mainly handles data publication and settlement. Different Rollups are architecturally and economically independent, forming parallel sub-ecosystems and increasing the complexity of cross-Rollup interaction. LayerZero and Hyperlane attempt to enable communication through standardized messaging, while Astria and Espresso approach the problem through shared sequencing. The report notes that these “Rollup–third-party infrastructure–Rollup” paths remain non-native to Ethereum, introduce extra trust assumptions and can create new security concerns. Shared sequencers participating in value capture can also reshape Layer 1 MEV distribution.
Rollup ecosystems are also becoming more distinct. Arbitrum is expanding through its Nitro / Orbit stack and Orbit chains, with Plume Network and ApeChain named as examples. zkSync supports multi-chain expansion through Elastic Chain, with Abstract and ZERO Network as representative projects. Optimism built 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 and toward its own Base Stack. Because Base was originally built on OP Stack, the process is closer to customized extension on top of an open-source framework than a full break from Optimism. Base also said it would continue to cooperate with the Optimism ecosystem and follow relevant open-source standards.
The Ethereum Foundation has started addressing this issue directly. Within the Protocol team framework, it formed a Platform Team to connect protocol R&D with ecosystem development and to optimize the relationship between the mainnet and Layer 2. On March 23, 2026, the Foundation published a systematic explanation of the evolving roles of Layer 1 and Layer 2. In this newer definition, Layer 2 is no longer only a scaling tool. It should also meet differentiated needs that Layer 1 cannot provide, such as stronger privacy, lower latency and compliance adaptation for specific scenarios. Ethereum mainnet, in turn, is positioned as the core settlement layer and liquidity layer for a multi-chain ecosystem.
To reach that goal, Ethereum is moving along two tracks. The first is to strengthen the connection between Rollups and the mainnet. With Ethereum Foundation co-funding, Gnosis co-founder Friederike Ernst and Zisk founder Jordi Baylina announced the Ethereum Economic Zone, or EEZ. The plan aims to build an L1<>L2 framework that brings interactions between Rollups and mainnet, and between Rollups themselves, into a unified execution framework. Under EEZ, cross-chain interaction would not rely entirely on traditional asynchronous message passing. Contract calls across execution environments could be completed in the same execution process with atomicity, meaning operations either all succeed or all roll back.
The second track is Native Rollups. Ethereum ecosystem developers recently released a proof-of-concept prototype for Native Rollups, introduced in EIP-8079, to restructure the way Rollups are verified. Today, both Optimistic Rollups and ZK Rollups execute transactions and produce state, then prove correctness to Ethereum through additional mechanisms such as fraud proofs or zero-knowledge proofs. EIP-8079 tries to expose Ethereum’s state transition function as an open interface that Rollups can call. In this model, a Rollup can submit transactions to the mainnet, and the mainnet can compute state according to unified rules, reducing dependence on independent proof systems and lowering maintenance costs. The report links both EEZ and Native Rollups to ongoing progress in ZK proofs and ZK-EVM technology.
MEV and block production are another key area. After Ethereum moved to Proof of Stake, the network randomly selects block proposers from validators staking ETH. A proposer publishes the final block and can extract value above standard block rewards and gas fees by changing transaction ordering. To reduce a single validator’s control over ordering and value extraction, Ethereum previously proposed Proposer-Builder Separation, or PBS. Under PBS, builders collect, order and package transactions into candidate blocks, while proposers choose from several candidate blocks and submit the final block.
In practice, PBS has not yet been written directly into the protocol. It has been implemented through third-party middleware such as MEV-Boost, which allows validators to outsource block construction to third-party builders and pass information through relays. This improved block-building efficiency, but it remains an off-chain market that depends on trusted relays and lacks full on-chain transparency and constraint in MEV distribution. The Glamsterdam upgrade includes a crucial proposal, EIP-7732, known as Enshrined Proposer-Builder Separation or ePBS. It would formally write PBS into the Ethereum protocol, introduce builders as formal network participants, require them to stake in advance and submit block commitments, and decouple consensus validation from execution validation. That gives nodes more time during block propagation and supports larger data loads, especially Blob writes.
The report also compares Ethereum’s Rollup-centric future with high-performance Layer 1 networks such as Solana and Sui. Solana improves throughput through parallel execution and local fee markets, while Sui uses an object model and DAG architecture to support more efficient concurrent processing in certain scenarios, including high-frequency trading and on-chain games. These chains can provide low-cost, high-throughput execution directly on a single chain, reducing users’ need for cross-Layer 2 operations. By contrast, Ethereum’s Layer1+Layer2 system requires developers to handle cross-chain communication and fragmented liquidity. The report treats this not as a simple confrontation, but as different infrastructure directions within blockchain development.
Finally, the report discusses confirmation speed. Ethereum’s long-term vision includes Single Slot Finality, or SSF. In Ethereum today, validators reach consensus roughly every 12 seconds on a Slot, and every 32 Slots, about 6.4 minutes, form an Epoch. A block needs at least two-thirds of validators to complete two rounds of voting, over about two Epochs or roughly 12 to 15 minutes, before it is treated as finalized and irreversible. SSF aims to compress finality logic that currently spans two Epochs into one Slot. The report explains that the bottleneck is not simply reducing validator scale, because doing so would weaken decentralization, but improving validation and communication so that nodes can handle 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. Its goal is to reduce the confirmation time for deposits from Ethereum L1 to L2s and centralized exchanges from several minutes to about 13 seconds. FCR does not alter the existing finality mechanism. Instead, it uses the first round of voting earlier to assess safety. When the first round reaches a high percentage, for example clearly above two-thirds, the system can treat the block as basically confirmed. The report stresses that FCR is not true finality. Its security depends on most validators behaving honestly and network communication remaining stable and low-latency. If the network becomes congested or is attacked, a quickly confirmed block can still be reorganized under the original rules.
Web3Caff Research closes with a disclaimer: the report is for reference only and does not constitute a forecast, investment advice, proposal or offer. Its terms and views are intended to help readers understand industry dynamics and should not be interpreted as a definitive legal opinion or as the position of Web3Caff Research. The views reflect the author’s personal opinions as of the stated date and may change with later developments. The information comes from proprietary and non-proprietary sources that Web3Caff Research considers reliable, but it does not guarantee completeness or accuracy. Readers decide independently whether to rely on the information and should comply with the laws and regulations of their own jurisdictions.