The long-term plan proposes a series of upgrades aimed at faster transactions, higher capacity, and new privacy features.
The Ethereum Foundation (EF) has shared a long-term plan, dubbed the “strawmap,” that outlines how Ethereum could evolve over the rest of the decade, with goals including faster transactions and higher capacity.
The roadmap lays out several possible changes across Ethereum’s core layers. If completed, it would mark the biggest evolution of the network since The Merge in 2022, which moved Ethereum from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake.
The plan underscores how Ethereum developers are preparing the network for more users and more activity by gradually improving speed, security, and reliability. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin described the roadmap as a “very important document” in a post on X.
Ethereum is currently the world’s largest smart contract blockchain, with more than $56 billion in total value locked (TVL) across decentralized finance, according to DefiLlama. Following the news, Ether (ETH) briefly moved higher. The token is currently trading at $2,030 – down about 2% on the day but still up more than 4% over the past week.
The Details
The strawmap outlines a long-term path with around seven forks through 2029. Justin Drake, a member of the EF Architecture team, explained in a post on X that the roadmap is built around five “north stars.”
These include making the main network faster through shorter block times and near-instant finality, increasing capacity to roughly 10,000 transactions per second on Layer 1, scaling Layer 2 networks to as much as 10 million transactions per second, introducing post-quantum cryptography, and adding native privacy through shielded ETH transfers.
“The strawmap is an invitation to view L1 protocol upgrades through a holistic lens,” Drake said. “By placing proposals on a single visual, it provides a unified perspective on Ethereum L1 ambitions.”
Meanwhile, Buterin described the roadmap as a gradual revamp of Ethereum’s core systems, in which slot times, consensus, and cryptography are replaced bit by bit rather than through a single large overhaul.
The new roadmap builds on Ethereum’s recent upgrades, including Fusaka, which launched in December 2025. That upgrade introduced the PeerDAS data availability system to help the network process more transactions while keeping fees low.
However, while the upgrade marked a major step in the network’s scaling strategy, cheaper transactions have also coincided with a rise in spam and address-poisoning attacks, The Defiant previously reported.
