In the first part of a long-form research report, ShirleyLi, a researcher at Web3Caff Research, reviews Ethereum’s nearly twelve-year development path and asks how far the network still has to go before it moves from being core infrastructure to becoming a more integrated ecosystem center. Since Vitalik Buterin and his team introduced Ethereum to global users at international conferences in 2014, the network has grown from a niche experiment into one of the most influential base-layer platforms in Web3. The report also notes that the same growth has made Ethereum heavier to coordinate, while external challengers continue to amplify its internal pressures.
The report frames Ethereum’s history as a constant balance between maintaining stability and pursuing change. Between 2014 and 2016, Ethereum’s early staged plan took shape around Frontier, Homestead, Metropolis and Serenity. The first three are generally viewed as Ethereum 1.0, focused on improving core functions and network stability, while Serenity represented the longer-term goal of rebuilding consensus and the underlying architecture. In 2020, Ethereum further clarified the technical path of Serenity, formally moving toward Proof of Stake and introducing sharding logic. In 2022, Ethereum published a more complete medium- and long-term roadmap and confirmed a Rollup-centered scaling path, with execution expanding to Layer 2 networks and the main chain focusing on security and data availability. In February 2026, the Ethereum Foundation released a ten-year “Strawmap” draft, giving more specific optimization targets for the consensus layer, data layer and execution layer.
Web3Caff Research also revisits issues raised in the author’s late-2024 report, “Ethereum’s Future Path: Development Amid Controversy, Can the Ecosystem Giant Withstand Potential Crisis?” The newer review says that by early 2025, as the broader market environment recovered and new narratives continued to emerge, Ethereum’s development pace was seen by some community voices as relatively slow. Criticism focused on execution efficiency, market communication and ecosystem expansion by the Ethereum Foundation and core developers.
In response, the Ethereum Foundation made a series of governance changes. In February 2025, Aya Miyaguchi, who had served as executive director since 2018, moved into the newly created role of President. Her responsibilities shifted from daily operations and executive management to external cooperation, institutional relationships and cultural communication. Nethermind founder Tomasz Stańczak and Hsiao-Wei Wang then became co-executive directors. Under the new structure, the foundation streamlined its organization, cut 19 employees and moved its strategic focus from Layer 2 back to Layer 1. It also placed more emphasis on external communication and transparency around technical direction, development priorities and resource use.
In June 2025, the foundation reorganized its internal research and development system. “Protocol Research & Development,” or PR&D, was shortened to “Protocol,” with 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 work on privacy protection, quantum-computing security and the combination of AI with Ethereum. After leaving the role, he planned to devote more effort to products and infrastructure related to the integration of AI and blockchain.
The latest internal structure listed in the report shows the Ethereum Foundation board members as Vitalik Buterin, Aya Miyaguchi, Patrick Storchenegger and Hsiao-Wei Wang. The board is responsible for governance and strategic direction, while management and functional teams share execution and operations. The foundation also made a major adjustment to its grant system in August 2025, pausing the open grant program that had operated since 2018 and restarting a new Ecosystem Support Program, or ESP, in November. After the change, funding shifted from passively accepting applications to actively guiding resource allocation. The first batch of grant directions covered cryptography, privacy, the application layer, security and community growth. At the same time, the foundation decided to reduce annual spending from about 15% to 5% of funds, slowing the consumption of ETH reserves.
The report also records personnel debates around the foundation. In May, Ethereum Foundation researchers Carl Beek and Julian Ma announced their 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 controversies reflected the friction between Ethereum’s long-term technical construction orientation and the current commercialization process, describing it as a stage of development that had to be experienced.
On staking and validator design, the report explains that Ethereum’s transition to Proof of Stake ended the high-energy-consumption consensus model, but the 32 ETH staking requirement raised the entry threshold for validators and introduced risks around concentration of validation power. Vitalik Buterin had previously suggested increasing the participation ratio required for block finality, for example from the current threshold signature level of about two-thirds to 75% or higher, to strengthen security. In May 2025, the Pectra upgrade was activated on mainnet. EIP-7251 raised the maximum effective balance of a validator from 32 ETH to 2,048 ETH, while 32 ETH remained the minimum stake required to become a validator. The proposal mainly increased the amount of ETH that a single validator could represent in consensus, reducing the need for large stakers to split funds across many validator nodes and lowering communication and coordination overhead.
Pectra also included EIP-7002, which optimized staking withdrawals by introducing withdrawals triggered from the execution layer. Under specified conditions, stakers can withdraw without requiring an active validator signature. The foundation has also explored Distributed Validator Technology, or DVT, to improve staking structures. DVT splits the private key and signing capability of a single validator across multiple nodes, reducing single-point failure risk. Because multi-node collaboration adds system complexity, the foundation has been trying 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.
Data availability is another major thread. EIP-4844, implemented in the Dencun upgrade, introduced Blob space as a lower-cost data availability area for temporary data. Layer 2 networks can submit batches of transaction data to Blobs, reducing on-chain data publication costs. The original design targeted 3 Blobs per block and capped the number at 6. A floating fee mechanism raises the base fee when Blob usage exceeds the target and lowers it when usage falls below the target. As Layer 2 demand grew, real usage approached or frequently reached the target level, triggering fee increases and raising Blob costs at certain stages.
To ease Blob capacity pressure, Pectra included EIP-7691 and EIP-7623. EIP-7691 raised the target number of Blobs per block from 3 to 6 and the upper limit to 9. EIP-7623 sought to raise the cost of Calldata and guide Layer 2 networks toward greater Blob use, reducing data publication pressure on the mainnet. With the Fusaka upgrade progressing in December 2025, Ethereum further introduced a series of key mechanisms at the data availability layer. On December 11, 2025, the Ethereum Foundation said Blob capacity per block had risen to 15. The report places Blob development in the longer shift from execution sharding to data sharding, with PeerDAS and data availability sampling improving how Blob data is verified.
The Rollup section argues that the relationship between Rollups and Ethereum mainnet has changed structurally as the number of Rollup solutions has grown. Rollups move execution to Layer 2 and reduce the mainnet’s execution load, but user transaction fees flow more to Layer 2 while the mainnet mainly provides data publication and settlement. This affects the mainnet fee structure and validator revenue. Different Rollups have also become relatively independent in architecture and ecosystems, increasing the complexity of cross-Rollup interaction. LayerZero and Hyperlane try to standardize messaging across Rollups, while Astria and Espresso explore shared sequencing. The report describes this “Rollup — third-party infrastructure — Rollup” model as a non-native Ethereum extension path that introduces extra trust assumptions and new security questions, while shared sequencers can also reshape Layer 1 MEV distribution.
Several Rollup technology stacks are building their own ecosystems. Arbitrum uses Nitro and Orbit to promote Orbit chains, with Plume Network and ApeChain given as examples. zkSync supports multi-chain expansion through Elastic Chain, with Abstract and ZERO Network as representative projects. Optimism has built Superchain around OP Stack, including OP Mainnet, Base, BOB and Soneium. In late February this year, the Base team announced that it would gradually move away from Optimism’s OP Stack architecture and toward a Base Stack maintained by Base itself. Because Base was originally built using OP Stack, the report describes the process as a customized extension on top of an open-source framework rather than a complete break. Base also said it would continue to collaborate with the Optimism ecosystem and follow relevant open-source standards.
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 coordinate protocol research and ecosystem development. On March 23, the foundation published another systematic explanation of the evolving roles of Layer 1 and Layer 2. In the new definition, Layer 2 is no longer only a scaling tool. It is also positioned to meet needs that Layer 1 cannot provide, such as stronger privacy, lower latency and compliance adaptation for specific scenarios. The mainnet, meanwhile, is positioned as the core settlement layer and liquidity layer for a multi-chain ecosystem.
Two paths are highlighted for achieving that goal. The first is strengthening 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, which seeks to build an L1<>L2 framework that places mainnet-to-Rollup and Rollup-to-Rollup interactions inside a unified execution framework. The second path is Native Rollup, introduced in EIP-8079. The proof-of-concept prototype attempts to make Ethereum’s state transition function available as an open interface for Rollups. Instead of each Rollup maintaining a complex proof system based on fraud proofs or zero-knowledge proofs, Rollups would submit transactions for the mainnet to compute under unified rules, reducing verification and maintenance overhead. The report notes that both directions depend heavily on continued progress in ZK proofs and ZK-EVM technology.
The report then turns to MEV and proposer-builder separation. After Ethereum moved to Proof of Stake, validators staking ETH are randomly selected as block proposers. A proposer can extract value beyond standard block rewards and Gas fees by changing transaction ordering. To separate control over transaction ordering and value extraction, Ethereum proposed PBS, under which builders package transactions and proposers select from candidate blocks. In practice, PBS has been implemented through off-chain middleware such as MEV-Boost, where validators outsource block construction to third-party builders and relays transmit information. This improved block-building efficiency, but it still depends on trusted relays and leaves MEV allocation without full on-chain transparency and constraints.
Glamsterdam is planned to restructure duties among network participants. Its core directions include introducing parallel processing capability, preparing for faster transaction execution, separating the workflows of block creation and block verification to create more time for data propagation, and adjusting fee mechanisms so that on-chain data storage costs better reflect long-term node resource use such as bandwidth and storage. A key part is EIP-7732, Enshrined Proposer-Builder Separation, or ePBS. This proposal writes PBS into the Ethereum protocol, formally introduces builders as participants, requires them to stake first and submit block commitments, and decouples consensus verification from execution verification. The report compares the process to a teacher first confirming that students have handed in papers, then taking them back to the office to grade.
Competition from other Layer 1 designs is also covered. Solana and Sui are presented as examples of different infrastructure paths. Solana uses parallel execution and local fee markets to improve processing capacity, while Sui relies on 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. Compared with Ethereum’s Layer 1 plus Layer 2 system, ordinary public chains can provide a more integrated development environment and execution model, while Ethereum developers must handle cross-chain communication and fragmented liquidity between Layer 1 and different Layer 2 networks.
For confirmation speed, Ethereum has proposed Single Slot Finality, or SSF, as a long-term goal. In Ethereum, validators reach consensus about the transactions and ordering in a block roughly every 12 seconds, a period called a Slot. Every 32 Slots, about 6.4 minutes, form an Epoch. Under the current mechanism, a block must receive two rounds of voting from at least two-thirds of validators, across two Epochs, before it is considered finalized and irreversible. That usually takes about 12 to 15 minutes. SSF aims to compress finality that currently spans two Epochs into one Slot. The bottleneck is not simply reducing scale or raising hardware requirements, because those paths would weaken decentralization. The challenge is improving verification and communication so nodes can process more signatures and validations within the same time window. The community has discussed mechanisms such as a temporary “super committee” randomly selected within a Slot to vote quickly.
Before SSF is fully implemented, the Ethereum Foundation has proposed the Fast Confirmation Rule, or FCR, as an interim optimization. Its goal is to reduce deposit confirmation time from Ethereum L1 to L2 networks and centralized exchanges from several minutes to about 13 seconds. FCR does not change the existing finality mechanism. Instead, it uses the first round of voting earlier to judge safety. When the first round of votes reaches a high level, 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 relies on most validators behaving honestly and on stable, low-latency network communication. If the network is congested or attacked, a quickly confirmed block can still be reorganized and fall back to the original rules.
The report ends 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 trends and support responsible development in the Web3 new economy and blockchain industry. They should not be interpreted as formal legal views or as the position of Web3Caff Research. Readers decide for themselves whether to rely on the information and should comply with the laws and regulations of their own country or region.