A new first-part research report by ShirleyLi, a researcher at Web3Caff Research, places Ethereum’s 2026 development outlook inside a nearly twelve-year historical arc. Since Vitalik Buterin and his team 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 platforms in the Web3 world. The report argues that Ethereum’s central tension has remained consistent: it must preserve stability for a large ecosystem while continuing to define new technical directions for that same ecosystem.
From Frontier to a ten-year Strawmap
The report traces Ethereum’s early planning to the 2014–2016 period, when the network’s staged roadmap took shape around Frontier, Homestead, Metropolis and Serenity. The first three stages are usually treated as Ethereum 1.0, focused on basic functionality and network stability. Serenity represented a longer-term goal: a reconstruction of consensus and underlying architecture to improve scalability and performance.
In 2020, Ethereum clarified the technical path of Serenity by formally establishing its transition to proof of stake and introducing the logic of sharding. In 2022, Ethereum published a more complete medium- and long-term roadmap and confirmed a Rollup-centered scaling path. Under that approach, execution would move to Layer 2 networks, while the main chain would increasingly focus on security and data availability. In February 2026, the Ethereum Foundation released a draft “Strawmap” for the next decade, setting more specific optimization objectives across the consensus layer, data layer and execution layer.
Web3Caff Research frames each roadmap as a temporary structural balance among scalability, security, decentralization and ecosystem interest distribution. The report also revisits earlier concerns discussed in a previous 2024 year-end report, including whether some projects align themselves with Vitalik Buterin’s technical preferences or Ethereum Foundation grant directions, whether distributed technical teams slow execution, and how token sales by the Ethereum Foundation and Vitalik Buterin have been discussed by the market. Foundation members have said those funds mainly support ecosystem development and project grants, but the actions still generated debate.
Foundation leadership and grant mechanisms are reshaped
According to the report, Ethereum’s pace of development appeared relatively slow in early 2025 even as the broader market environment recovered and new narratives emerged. Some community voices criticized the Ethereum Foundation and core developers for lagging in execution, market communication and ecosystem expansion. The Foundation then made a series of important adjustments.
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 from daily operations and executive management toward external cooperation, institutional relationships and cultural communication. Tomasz Stańczak, founder of Nethermind, and Hsiao-Wei Wang became co-executive directors.
Under the new management structure, the Foundation simplified its organization, laid off 19 employees and moved strategic emphasis back from Layer 2 to Layer 1. It also increased the transparency of technical roadmaps, development direction and resource use in order to strengthen community trust. In June 2025, its internal research and development structure was reorganized as well: “Protocol Research & Development,” or PR&D, was shortened to “Protocol,” with near-term goals of scaling L1 performance, scaling Blobs and improving user experience. The report describes this as a shift from research orientation toward engineering implementation and delivery.
In February 2026, Tomasz Stańczak announced that he would step down as co-executive director. Bastian Aue and Hsiao-Wei Wang took over the role. During his tenure, Stańczak promoted exploration in privacy protection, quantum computing security and the combination of AI and 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 latest internal structure lists Vitalik Buterin, Aya Miyaguchi, Patrick Storchenegger and Hsiao-Wei Wang as board members responsible for governance and strategic direction, while management and functional teams handle execution and operations.
The Foundation’s grant system was also changed. In August 2025, it paused the open grants program that had operated since 2018, then restarted a new Ecosystem Support Program, or ESP, in November. After the adjustment, funding allocation moved from passively receiving applications to actively guiding resources. The first grant areas covered cryptography, privacy, the application layer, security and community growth. The Foundation also decided to reduce annual spending from about 15% of treasury funds to 5% in order to slow the consumption of ETH reserves. The report presents this as a move away from broad ecosystem funding toward more refined resource allocation centered on infrastructure and core technologies.
In May 2026, Ethereum Foundation researchers Carl Beek and Julian Ma announced departures. Former Ethereum Foundation researcher Dankrad Feist publicly said the Ethereum ecosystem needed a new organization with economic interests more aligned with Ethereum in order to “save” Ethereum. Vitalik Buterin and Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin both responded that the disputes reflect the friction between Ethereum’s long-term technical construction orientation and the current process of commercialization, and that such friction is a stage of development.
Pectra, staking design and the expansion of Blob capacity
The report next reviews proof-of-stake trade-offs. Ethereum’s move to PoS ended its high-energy consensus model, but the 32 ETH staking threshold raised the entry barrier for validators and created concerns about concentration of validating power. Vitalik Buterin previously proposed increasing the participation threshold required for block finality, such as raising the current roughly two-thirds threshold signature to 75% or higher, as a way to strengthen security while addressing decentralization concerns.
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 stresses that 32 ETH remains the minimum staking threshold to become a validator. The proposal mainly raises the amount of ETH that can count toward a single validator’s consensus weight, allowing one validator to represent more ETH in voting. Large stakers no longer need to split into many validator nodes to receive corresponding incentives, which can reduce the number of validator nodes controlled by the same entity and lower communication and coordination costs across the network.
EIP-7002 optimized the staking withdrawal mechanism by introducing execution-layer-triggered withdrawals. Under specified conditions, stakers can complete withdrawals without an active validator signature. This improves stakers’ control over assets, lowers operational complexity for entering and exiting staking, and increases the flexibility of the PoS system. The Foundation has also explored Distributed Validator Technology, or DVT, to improve staking structure by splitting a single validator’s private key and signing ability across several cooperating nodes. To reduce deployment and operational complexity, it has been trying lighter implementations such as DVT-lite. Information disclosed by the Ethereum Foundation in March 2026 said that 72,000 ETH had participated in staking through related mechanisms.
Data availability is another major section of the report. EIP-4844, implemented in the Dencun upgrade, introduced a low-cost temporary data availability space called Blob. 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. A floating fee mechanism raises the base fee when Blob usage exceeds the target and lowers it when usage is below the target. As Layer 2 demand for Blob space grew, actual block usage approached or frequently reached the target, repeatedly triggering fee increases and leading to episodic cost rises.
Pectra included two proposals aimed at relieving Blob capacity pressure. EIP-7691 increased the target number of Blobs per block from 3 to 6 and the maximum from 6 to 9. EIP-7623 attempted to raise the cost of using Calldata and guide Layer 2 networks toward Blobs, thereby reducing pressure on mainnet data publication. With the Fusaka upgrade in December 2025, Ethereum further introduced a set of key data-availability mechanisms. On December 11, 2025, the Ethereum Foundation said that Blob capacity per block had increased to 15. The report also explains that Blobs are part of Ethereum’s shift from execution sharding toward data sharding: rather than splitting execution across many shards, Ethereum first expands data availability so Rollups can post batched data to mainnet at lower cost, with PeerDAS improving how Blob data is verified through data availability sampling.
Rollup fragmentation, EEZ and Native Rollups
The report says the relationship between Rollups and Ethereum mainnet is undergoing structural change. Rollups reduce mainnet execution load by moving execution to Layer 2, but they also change fee distribution. More user transaction fees flow to Layer 2, while the main chain mainly provides data publication and settlement. Different Rollups are also relatively independent in architecture and ecosystem, creating parallel sub-ecosystems and increasing the complexity of cross-Rollup interaction. Interoperability mechanisms continue to evolve in terms of security and implementation complexity.
Developers in the ecosystem have proposed several responses to Rollup fragmentation. LayerZero and Hyperlane attempt to use standardized message-passing mechanisms to connect different Rollups. Astria and Espresso approach the issue from transaction ordering by offering shared sequencers for multiple Rollups. The report notes that such “Rollup — third-party infrastructure — Rollup” communication remains a non-native Ethereum extension path. It introduces additional trust assumptions and can create new security issues, while shared sequencers can also affect the distribution structure of Layer 1 MEV.
Different Rollup technology stacks are meanwhile building their own ecosystems. Arbitrum uses its Nitro and Orbit stack to promote Orbit chains, with Plume Network and ApeChain listed as examples. zkSync uses the Elastic Chain architecture to support multi-chain expansion, with Abstract and ZERO Network cited as representative projects. Optimism builds 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 and toward a unified Base Stack maintained by itself. Since Base was originally built with OP Stack, the report describes the move as a customized extension on top of an open-source framework rather than a complete break from Optimism. Base also said it would continue cooperating with the Optimism ecosystem and follow related open-source standards.
The Ethereum Foundation has begun to address this relationship directly. While continuing to optimize Rollup data availability, it created a Platform Team under the Protocol framework as a coordination unit between protocol research and ecosystem development. On March 23, 2026, the Foundation again published a systematic explanation of the evolving roles of Layer 1 and Layer 2. In that definition, Layer 2 is no longer limited to scaling. It is also meant to meet needs that Layer 1 cannot provide, such as stronger privacy, lower latency and compliance adaptation for specific scenarios. At the same time, Ethereum mainnet is positioned as the core settlement layer and liquidity layer for a multi-chain ecosystem.
Two technical paths are highlighted. The first is to strengthen the connection between Rollups and Ethereum mainnet. With Ethereum Foundation funding, Gnosis co-founder Friederike Ernst and Zisk founder Jordi Baylina announced the Ethereum Economic Zone, or EEZ. The plan tries to build an L1<>L2 framework in which Rollup-mainnet and Rollup-Rollup cross-chain interactions are incorporated into a unified execution framework. Instead of relying entirely on asynchronous messaging, the design aims for stronger composability, including contract calls across execution environments within the same execution flow and atomic behavior in which related actions either all succeed or all roll back. The specific implementation path remains to be clarified.
The second path is Native Rollups, proposed in EIP-8079. Developers recently released a proof-of-concept prototype that attempts to reconstruct Rollup verification. Today, both Optimistic Rollups and ZK Rollups execute transactions and produce state, then use mechanisms such as fraud proofs or zero-knowledge proofs to prove correctness to Ethereum mainnet. EIP-8079 tries to make Ethereum’s state transition function an open interface that Rollups can call. In that model, Rollups submit transactions to mainnet and mainnet performs state calculation under unified rules, reducing dependence on independent proof systems and lowering the maintenance burden for Rollups.
ePBS, high-performance Layer 1 competition and faster confirmation
MEV and proposer-builder separation form another core section. After Ethereum’s PoS transition, the network randomly selects a proposer from staked ETH validators to publish a block. A proposer can extract value beyond standard block rewards and gas fees by changing transaction ordering. Ethereum previously proposed proposer-builder separation, or PBS, to divide block packing from final confirmation. Builders package transactions, while proposers choose and submit from multiple candidate blocks. This reduces the burden on validators but can also concentrate block-building capacity among a smaller number of specialized builders.
The Glamsterdam upgrade is planned around a restructuring of responsibilities among network participants. Its directions include introducing parallel processing capacity for future execution speed improvements, separating the workflows for creating and validating blocks to give the network more data propagation time, and adjusting fees so on-chain storage costs better reflect their long-term use of node resources such as bandwidth and storage. One of the most important changes is EIP-7732, Enshrined Proposer-Builder Separation, or ePBS.
Before PBS, validators had to propose blocks and also complete transaction packaging and ordering themselves. This raised the participation threshold and allowed stronger ordering nodes to concentrate. In practice, PBS has not been directly embedded in the protocol; it has been implemented through off-chain middleware such as MEV-Boost, where validators outsource block building to third-party builders and relays transmit information. EIP-7732 writes proposer-builder separation into the Ethereum protocol. It introduces builders as formal participants, requires them to stake, and has them submit block commitments. It also decouples consensus validation from execution validation, allowing the network to complete consensus-layer checks first during the critical propagation stage and finish full execution-layer verification later. The report says this reduces reliance on relays and gives nodes more time to propagate block data, supporting larger data loads, especially Blob writes.
The report then compares Ethereum’s Rollup-centered path with high-performance Layer 1 chains represented by Solana and Sui. 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 features serve use cases such as high-frequency trading and on-chain games, and they can provide low-cost, high-throughput execution directly on a single chain. Compared with an L1 plus L2 structure, ordinary public chains can also provide a more integrated development environment and execution model, while Ethereum developers must deal with cross-chain communication and fragmented liquidity across Layer 1 and different Layer 2 networks.
Ethereum’s long-term response includes Single Slot Finality, or SSF. In Ethereum, validators reach consensus roughly every 12 seconds on the transactions and ordering included in a block; this window is a Slot. Every 32 Slots, or about 6.4 minutes, form an Epoch. Under the current mechanism, a block generally needs at least two-thirds of validators to complete two rounds of voting, across two Epochs, before it is treated as final. That usually takes about 12–15 minutes. SSF aims to compress the finality logic that currently spans two Epochs into one Slot. The difficulty is not simply reducing the number of validators or raising hardware requirements, because those approaches would weaken decentralization. The key bottleneck is optimizing validation and communication so nodes can complete more signature collection, aggregation and verification inside the same time window.
Before SSF is fully implemented, the Ethereum Foundation has proposed the Fast Confirmation Rule, or FCR, as a transitional optimization. FCR aims to reduce the deposit confirmation time from Ethereum L1 to L2 networks 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 judge security. If the first vote already reaches a high ratio, for example clearly above two-thirds, the system can treat the block as basically confirmed before full finality. The report stresses that FCR is not true finality. Its safety depends on most validators remaining honest and network communication remaining stable and low-latency. If the network is congested or attacked, a fast-confirmed block can still be reorganized under the original rules.
The report ends with a disclaimer that its content is for reference only and does not constitute any forecast, investment advice, proposal or offer. It says readers should not rely on the information to buy or sell securities or cryptocurrencies or to adopt any investment strategy, and should comply with the laws and regulations of their jurisdictions.