Ethereum Sets New 2026 Roadmap With Three Core Tracks

The Ethereum Foundation has unveiled its 2026 protocol priorities, outlining a structural shift in how development efforts are organized.

After a highly productive 2025 that delivered major upgrades and scaling breakthroughs, the Foundation is now consolidating its strategy around three new tracks: Scale, Improve UX, and Harden the L1.

The update signals a move beyond short-term milestone delivery toward deeper structural coordination between execution scaling, data availability, user experience, and long-term network resilience. With gas limits already doubled in 2025 and blob throughput expanded, 2026 focuses on pushing Ethereum toward higher capacity while preserving its core security guarantees.

A Productive 2025 Sets the Stage

Last year marked one of the most technically active periods in Ethereum’s history.

The Pectra upgrade went live in May, introducing EIP-7702. This upgrade allowed externally owned accounts (EOAs) to temporarily execute smart contract code, enabling transaction batching, gas sponsorship, and social recovery features. Pectra also doubled blob throughput, raised the maximum effective validator balance to 2,048 ETH, and significantly reduced validator onboarding time.

In December, Fusaka brought PeerDAS to mainnet. Validators began sampling blob data instead of downloading it in full, lowering bandwidth demands and increasing theoretical blob capacity eightfold. Additional Blob Parameter Only (BPO) forks began increasing the target from 6 blobs per block toward higher limits.

During the same period, the community steadily raised Ethereum’s gas limit from 30 million to 60 million, the first major increase since 2021. History expiry removed pre-Merge data from full nodes, reducing storage requirements by hundreds of gigabytes. Meanwhile, UX progress continued with the Open Intents Framework and new interoperability standards.

With those milestones achieved, the Foundation concluded that its structure needed to evolve.

The Three Tracks for 2026

1. Scale

Led by Ansgar Dietrichs, Marius van der Wijden, and Raúl Kripalani, the Scale track merges previous efforts to scale L1 execution and blob data availability.

Key priorities include:

• Raising the gas limit toward and beyond 100 million
• Implementing Block-level Access Lists (EIP-7928)
• Delivering ePBS (EIP-7732) as part of the Glamsterdam upgrade
• Further blob parameter increases
• Advancing a zkEVM attester client toward production readiness
• State scaling via repricing, history expiry, binary trees, and long-term statelessness

The consolidation reflects the technical reality that execution scaling and blob throughput improvements are deeply interconnected at the client and consensus levels.

2. Improve UX

Led by Barnabé Monnot and Matt Garnett, this track sharpens focus on account abstraction and interoperability.

EIP-7702 was described as an intermediate step. The long-term goal is making smart contract wallets the default, without requiring bundlers or relayers. Proposals like EIP-7701 and EIP-8141 (Frame Transactions) aim to embed smart account logic directly into the protocol.

This work intersects with post-quantum readiness, as native account abstraction provides a migration path away from ECDSA-based authentication. Additional proposals aim to reduce gas costs for verifying quantum-resistant signatures.

On interoperability, efforts build on the Open Intents Framework, targeting seamless cross-L2 interactions and faster settlement.

3. Harden the L1

A newly introduced track, led by Fredrik Svantes, Parithosh Jayanthi, and Thomas Thiery, focuses on preserving Ethereum’s core properties as scaling accelerates.

This includes:

• Advancing the Trillion Dollar Security Initiative
• Post-quantum security readiness
• Execution-layer safeguards such as post-execution assertions
• Trustless RPC development
• Censorship resistance research, including FOCIL (EIP-7805)
• Blob censorship resistance extensions
• Statelessness via VOPS
• Expanded devnet and client interoperability testing

The Foundation emphasized that as Ethereum increases capacity and complexity, resilience and decentralization must remain intact.

What Comes Next

The next major network upgrade, Glamsterdam, is targeted for the first half of 2026. It will include parallel execution research, higher gas limits, enshrined PBS, additional blob scaling, and further progress on censorship resistance and native account abstraction.

Later in the year, Hegotá is expected to follow.

The overarching ambition for 2026 is clear: expand Ethereum’s throughput and usability while reinforcing its security foundations. Rather than treating scaling and resilience as separate goals, the new structure integrates them under a unified framework designed to support long-term network sustainability.

As Ethereum continues evolving, the Foundation plans to publish ongoing updates at the track level, signaling a more transparent and modular approach to protocol development.

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