Ethereum Unveils 2026 Protocol Roadmap Focused on Scale, UX, and Security

• Ethereum’s Protocol development team has published its 2026 roadmap, focused on scaling, improving the user interface and boosting L1 security.
• In the first half, it will channel its resources to the Glamsterdam upgrade, before switching focus to the proposed Hegota upgrade.

2026 is shaping up to be a landmark year for Ethereum, with plenty of developments and upgrades scheduled for this year. Last month, founder Vitalik Buterin unveiled the Ethereum Foundation’s strategy for the year, with decentralization and self-sovereignty as the major themes, as we reported. A week ago, another researcher from the Foundation unveiled yet another roadmap focused on zkEVM proofs. Now, the Protocol team under the Foundation has published its roadmap for the year.

The Protocol team is the Foundation’s research and development unit that drives its core blockchain efforts, founded mid-last year. Its roadmap is built on three pillars: improving the user experience, scaling and hardening the network.

On scale, the Protocol team has unified two tracks that previously separately focused on scaling the Layer 1 and scaling the blobs. It believes that both efforts are closely intertwined and are better off addressed together, stating:

This year, the team plans to raise the gas limit beyond 100 million. Currently, the average gas limit per block is around 60 million, and although it has almost doubled in the past seven months, the Protocol team is aiming for 100 million.

Still on scale, the team wants to get the zkEVM attester client into production readiness from the current prototype. It also intends to deliver the scaling components of Glamsterdam, the Ethereum upgrade scheduled for the first half of the year, as we have reported.

Improving Ethereum UX and Hardening L1 Security

Next on the roadmap is improving Ethereum’s user interface. The focus will be on interoperability and enabling native account abstraction. The latter got a big boost with last year’s Pectra upgrade which implemented EOP-7702, but there remains more work to be done to enable smart contract wallets without the relayers and bundlers.

Interoperability is just as critical in an increasingly multi-chain world.

“The goal remains seamless, trust-minimized cross-L2 interactions and we’re getting closer day by day. Continued progress on faster L1 confirmations and shorter L2 settlement times directly supports this,” the team says.

The third pillar is on security, being spearheaded by the Trillion Dollar Security Initiative announced in May last year. The initiative taps development from within Ethereum and beyond to enable one billion people transacting at least $1,000 onchain (hence the 1 trillion name) without any concerns for the asset security.

The Protocol team is also contributing to some improvements in the proposed Hegota upgrade that it believes will boost security. This includes FOCIL, which, as we reported, would make Ethereum censorship-resistant as block builders would no longer have the power to block any valid transactions submitted by the validators.

Ether trades at $1,926, dropping 2.4% in the past day for a $232.35 billion market cap.