In the first part of a long-form research report on Ethereum’s future development, Web3Caff Research researcher ShirleyLi reviews Ethereum as a network that has moved from an early experiment into one of the most influential base-layer platforms in Web3. Since Vitalik Buterin and his team formally promoted Ethereum to global users at an international conference in 2014, the network has operated for nearly twelve years. The report frames the current debate around a central tension: Ethereum must keep the existing ecosystem stable while also defining new technical directions for a system that has become larger, heavier and more complex.
From Frontier and Serenity to the 2026 Strawmap
The report traces Ethereum’s early staged roadmap between 2014 and 2016. Frontier, Homestead, Metropolis and Serenity formed the initial development sequence. Frontier, Homestead and Metropolis are usually treated as the Ethereum 1.0 phase, focused mainly on core functions and network stability. Serenity represented the longer-term evolutionary target, with the aim of rebuilding the consensus mechanism and underlying architecture to improve scalability and performance. In 2020, Ethereum further clarified the technical path of the Serenity phase by formally committing to a transition to Proof of Stake and introducing sharding logic.
In 2022, Ethereum released a more complete medium- and long-term roadmap and confirmed a Rollup-centric scaling path. Under this design, execution would expand to Layer 2 networks, while the main chain would focus on security and data availability. The report notes that this change set a new tone for Ethereum’s ecosystem development, but also created new structural tensions. In February 2026, the Ethereum Foundation released a draft “Strawmap” for the next decade, setting more specific optimization goals across the consensus layer, data layer and execution layer. Each roadmap is presented as a temporary balance among scalability, security, decentralization and the allocation of economic interests inside the ecosystem.
Governance changes inside the Ethereum Foundation
The new report follows issues previously discussed by the author in a late-2024 research note titled “The Future Road of Ethereum: Development Accompanied by Controversy, Can the Ecosystem Giant Resist Potential Crises?” It revisits concerns around the Ethereum Foundation’s decision-making, funding priorities, execution speed and communication with the market. Some views cited in the source argued that projects could lean toward Vitalik Buterin’s technical preferences or the foundation’s grant direction, leading to temporary concentration of resources and even excess capacity in specific tracks. The distributed nature of Ethereum’s technical teams also made it difficult for overall progress to match expectations for rapid iteration and innovation. The report also mentions that selling activity by Vitalik Buterin and the Ethereum Foundation once generated discussion, although Vitalik Buterin and related foundation members stated that the funds were mainly used to support ecosystem development and project grants.
In early 2025, when the overall market environment had improved and new narratives were emerging, Ethereum’s development pace was viewed as relatively slow by parts of the community. Some criticism focused on the foundation and core developers being behind the broader industry rhythm in execution efficiency, public communication and ecosystem expansion. 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 President role. Her responsibilities shifted away 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 management structure, the foundation streamlined its organization, cut 19 employees and shifted strategic emphasis from Layer 2 back to Layer 1 itself. It also began to place more weight on external communication and transparency around technical routes, development direction and resource use. In June 2025, the internal R&D structure was reorganized as well. “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 change marked a move from research orientation 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, Stańczak promoted exploration in privacy protection, quantum-computing security and the combination of AI and Ethereum. After leaving the role, he planned to devote more attention to products and infrastructure related to the integration of AI and blockchain. According to the latest internal structure cited by the report, the Ethereum Foundation board includes Vitalik Buterin, Aya Miyaguchi, Patrick Storchenegger and Hsiao-Wei Wang. The board is responsible for governance and strategic direction, while execution and operations are shared by management and functional teams.
The foundation also changed its grant system. In August 2025, it paused the open grant program that had operated since 2018. In November, it restarted a new Ecosystem Support Program, or ESP. After the change, the funding allocation model shifted from passively receiving applications to actively guiding priorities. The first grant directions covered cryptography, privacy, application layer work, 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 2026, foundation researchers Carl Beek and Julian Ma announced 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 the controversy reflected the adjustment between Ethereum’s long-term technical construction and its current commercialization process, and described it as a phase the ecosystem has to pass through.
PoS staking, Pectra and the validator structure
The report then turns to Ethereum’s Proof-of-Stake system. The transition to PoS ended the high-energy consensus model, but the 32 ETH staking threshold also raised the entry barrier for validators and created concerns around concentration of validation power. If the staking threshold for individual validators is lowered, the network then needs to reduce communication and coordination costs after the validator count increases, while also raising the attack cost for malicious behavior. Vitalik Buterin had previously suggested that the required participation ratio for block finalization could be raised, for example from the current roughly two-thirds threshold signature level to 75% or higher, as a way to strengthen security.
In May 2025, the Pectra upgrade was activated on the 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 threshold to become a validator. The proposal mainly increased the upper limit of the consensus weight that a single validator can represent. In practice, a large staker no longer needs to split funds across many validator nodes to receive corresponding incentives. This helps reduce the number of validator nodes controlled by the same entity and lowers communication and coordination overhead during consensus.
EIP-7002 optimized the staking withdrawal mechanism. It introduced withdrawals triggered from the execution layer, allowing stakers to complete withdrawals under certain conditions without active validator signatures. This increases stakers’ control over their assets, reduces some complexity in entering and exiting staking, and improves the flexibility of the PoS system. The Ethereum Foundation has also explored Distributed Validator Technology, or DVT, as a way to optimize staking structures. DVT divides a single validator’s private key and signing capacity across multiple cooperating nodes, reducing single-point-of-failure risk. Because multi-node cooperation also introduces additional system complexity, the foundation has been testing lighter approaches such as DVT-lite. According to information disclosed by the foundation in March 2026, 72,000 ETH had participated in staking through related mechanisms.
Blob capacity and the move from execution sharding to data availability
On data availability, the report reviews EIP-4844, implemented in the Dencun upgrade. It introduced Blob space as a low-cost temporary data availability area. Layer 2 networks can submit batched transaction data to Blobs, reducing the cost of publishing data on-chain. The initial design set the target at 3 Blobs per block and the maximum at 6. Ethereum uses a floating fee model: if the number of Blobs 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, the actual number of Blobs used per block approached and frequently reached the target, and the fee mechanism was triggered upward multiple times.
To relieve pressure on Blob capacity, Ethereum included two related proposals in Pectra. EIP-7691 raised the target number of Blobs per block from 3 to 6 and lifted the maximum per block to 9. EIP-7623 sought to raise the cost of using Calldata, guiding Layer 2 networks to use Blobs more and reducing pressure on mainnet data publication. With the Fusaka upgrade in December 2025, Ethereum further introduced a series of mechanisms at the data availability layer. On December 11, 2025, the Ethereum Foundation wrote that Blob capacity per block had increased to 15.
The report places Blobs inside Ethereum’s longer-term scaling path. Ethereum originally proposed sharding, which attempted to split the network into multiple subchains to process transactions and data in parallel. Execution sharding, however, faced high engineering complexity and security challenges. Ethereum therefore shifted from execution sharding toward data sharding, prioritizing expansion of data availability. Blobs serve as a transitional implementation of that direction, while PeerDAS and data availability sampling improve the way Blob data is verified. In this framing, Blob capacity is not an isolated feature but a central component of Ethereum’s scaling system.
Rollups, fragmentation and the search for a unified Ethereum platform
The report describes a structural change in the relationship between Rollups and Ethereum mainnet. Rollups reduce the execution load on mainnet by moving transaction execution to Layer 2. At the same time, they change the fee distribution structure: more user transaction fees flow to Layer 2 networks, while mainnet mainly provides data publication and settlement. This affects Ethereum mainnet’s fee structure and validator revenue. Different Rollups also remain relatively independent in architecture and ecosystem, forming multiple parallel sub-ecosystems and increasing the complexity of cross-Rollup interactions. Existing interoperability attempts continue to evolve in terms of security and implementation complexity.
Several technical paths have emerged. LayerZero and Hyperlane attempt to standardize message transmission between Rollups. Astria and Espresso explore shared sequencer designs, trying to provide a common ordering service for multiple Rollups. The report notes that this “Rollup—third-party infrastructure—Rollup” model is still not an Ethereum-native extension path. It introduces additional trust assumptions, can create new security issues, and affects the MEV allocation structure at Layer 1 when shared sequencers participate in value capture.
Different Rollup stacks are also building their own ecosystems. Arbitrum promotes Orbit chains through its Nitro/Orbit technology stack, with Plume Network and ApeChain cited as examples. zkSync supports multi-chain expansion through the Elastic Chain architecture, with Abstract and ZERO Network as representative projects. Optimism has built the Superchain around OP Stack, with members including OP Mainnet, Base, BOB and Soneium. In late February 2026, the Base team announced that it would gradually move away from Optimism’s OP Stack architecture system and toward a Base Stack unified technology stack maintained by Base itself. Because Base was originally built with OP Stack, the report describes the process as more of a customized extension based on an open-source framework than a full separation from the Optimism system. Base also said it would continue to cooperate with the Optimism ecosystem and follow related open-source norms.
The Ethereum Foundation has begun to address this issue directly. While continuing to improve Rollup data availability, it created a Platform Team under the Protocol team structure. This team acts as a coordination unit between protocol R&D and ecosystem development, aiming to reorganize and optimize the relationship between Ethereum 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 the new definition, Layer 2 is no longer limited to scaling. It also serves 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.
Two paths are being explored to reach that goal. The first is stronger linkage between Rollups and Ethereum 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 attempts to build an L1<>L2 framework that brings interactions between Rollups and mainnet, as well as Rollup-to-Rollup interactions, into a unified execution framework. Under the EEZ design, cross-chain interactions would not rely entirely on traditional asynchronous message transmission. Contract calls between different execution environments could be completed within the same execution process and with atomicity, so related operations either all succeed or all roll back. The report states that the concrete implementation path still needs further clarification.
The second path is Native Rollup, introduced in EIP-8079. Ethereum ecosystem developers recently released a proof-of-concept prototype. Current 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 need to follow Ethereum’s underlying rules for processing transactions and updating state, which requires maintaining complex execution and verification systems. EIP-8079 attempts to expose Ethereum’s state transition function as an open interface for Rollups. Rollups could submit transactions to mainnet, and mainnet would perform state computation under unified rules, reducing reliance on independent proof systems and lowering maintenance costs.
MEV, ePBS and the Glamsterdam upgrade
After Ethereum moved to PoS, the network randomly selects block proposers from validators who stake ETH. A proposer is responsible for final block publication and can obtain value beyond standard block rewards and gas fees by changing the order of transactions inside a block. This is MEV. To reduce a single validator’s control over transaction ordering and value extraction, Ethereum previously proposed proposer-builder separation, or PBS. The idea is to split block packaging from final confirmation: specialized builders package transactions, while proposers choose from multiple candidate blocks and submit the selected one. This improves block-building efficiency while reducing the complexity and threshold for validators to participate in block production.
The division also introduced a new structural issue. As specialization increased, block-building capacity moved toward a smaller number of builders, increasing their influence over transaction ordering and MEV distribution. In practice, PBS was not originally written directly into the protocol. It was implemented through third-party middleware such as MEV-Boost. Validators could outsource block building to third-party builders, with relays transmitting information. While this improved efficiency, it remained an off-chain market, depended on trusted relays and lacked full on-chain transparency and constraints in MEV distribution.
Glamsterdam is planned around a restructuring of responsibilities among different network participants. Its directions include adding parallel processing capability to prepare for faster transaction execution, redefining the workflow for creating and verifying blocks to give the network more data propagation time, and adjusting fee mechanisms so that on-chain data storage costs better reflect long-term node resource use such as bandwidth and storage. One of the most important planned changes is EIP-7732, or enshrined proposer-builder separation. EIP-7732 formally writes PBS into the Ethereum protocol. It introduces builders as official participants, requires them to stake first, and asks them to submit block commitments to the network. It also decouples consensus verification from execution verification, allowing the network to complete consensus-layer verification first during the critical block propagation stage and defer full execution-layer verification to a later stage. This reduces dependence on relays and gives nodes more time to propagate block data, helping Ethereum support larger data loads, especially Blob writes, while maintaining network stability.
Competition from high-performance Layer 1s and the road to faster confirmation
The report also compares Ethereum’s Rollup-centric future with high-performance Layer 1 designs. Solana represents a classic high-performance blockchain, while Sui represents a newer generation of public chain. Solana improves overall processing capacity through parallel execution and local fee markets. Sui uses an object model and DAG architecture to support more efficient concurrent processing in specific scenarios. These characteristics can fit applications such as high-frequency trading and on-chain games. High-performance Layer 1s can provide low-cost, high-throughput execution directly on a single chain, reducing user dependence on cross-Layer 2 operations and weakening some Ethereum ecosystem advantages. They also offer more integrated development environments and execution models, while Ethereum developers need to manage cross-chain communication and fragmented liquidity between Layer 1 and multiple Layer 2s. The report adds that the relationship is not simple confrontation; these systems reflect different infrastructure exploration directions.
To improve Ethereum’s own performance and user experience, the report discusses Single Slot Finality, or SSF. In Ethereum, validators reach consensus roughly every 12 seconds on the transactions and ordering in a block. This window is a Slot. Every 32 Slots, about 6.4 minutes, form an Epoch that organizes validator votes and pushes blocks toward finality. Under the current mechanism, a block needs at least two-thirds of validators to complete two rounds of voting, or two Epochs, before it is considered finally confirmed and irreversible. The process generally takes about 12 to 15 minutes. This design balances security and decentralization, but confirmation time remains long from a user-experience perspective.
SSF aims to compress the finality logic that now spans two Epochs into a single Slot. Directly achieving this under the existing architecture could be done by reducing the validator count or increasing node hardware requirements, but either route would weaken decentralization to varying degrees. The key bottleneck is therefore not shrinking the network but optimizing validation and communication so nodes can complete more verification and signature processing inside the same time window. The Ethereum community has discussed approaches such as a temporary “super committee” randomly selected within a single Slot, or changes to validator participation mechanisms and weight distribution. However, collecting, aggregating and verifying large-scale signatures in a very short time brings additional technical complexity.
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 L2s and centralized trading platforms from several minutes to about 13 seconds. It does not change the existing finality mechanism. Instead, it uses the first round of voting earlier to assess safety. When the first-round vote reaches a high proportion, for example clearly above two-thirds, the system can judge that the probability of rollback is already low and treat the block as basically confirmed. The report stresses that FCR is not true finality. Its safety relies 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. For that reason, FCR is described as better suited to scenarios that are sensitive to confirmation speed and can tolerate a small probability of risk.
The source report closes with a disclaimer from Web3Caff Research. It states that the information is for reference only and does not constitute any forecast, investment advice, proposal or offer. The terms and views are intended to help readers understand industry developments and support responsible development in the Web3 new economy and blockchain industry. The views reflect the author’s personal opinions as of the stated date and do not represent 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 that all data is covered or that the information is accurate. Readers decide for themselves whether to rely on the report and should comply with applicable laws and regulations in their countries or regions.