Ethereum Foundation Drops Most Ambitious Roadmap in Years

The Ethereum Foundation roadmap unveiled on February 26 charts the most sweeping set of protocol upgrades the network has proposed in years, spanning seven hard forks through 2029 and targeting transaction finality in seconds. Dubbed the "strawmap," the plan was published by EF researcher Justin Drake and is structured around five guiding objectives the team calls "north stars." They range from compressing finality times and scaling throughput on both Layer 1 and Layer 2, to deploying post-quantum cryptography and enabling private transactions through shielded ETH transfers.

What Is the Ethereum Strawmap Roadmap?

The Ethereum strawmap is a strawman roadmap published by the Ethereum Foundation on Wednesday, laying out a technical blueprint for the network's evolution through 2029. The document, hosted at strawmap.org, is aimed at researchers and advanced readers, according to EF researcher Justin Drake. It represents the Foundation's most detailed public commitment to a multi-year upgrade schedule since the Merge transitioned Ethereum to proof-of-stake in 2022.

Five north star goals anchor the plan: transaction finality in seconds rather than the current 16 minutes; Layer 1 throughput at gigagas scale, translating to roughly 10,000 transactions per second; Layer 2 networks reaching teragas levels at approximately 10 million TPS; post-quantum cryptography across the protocol; and built-in privacy via shielded ETH transfers. Each goal is mapped to specific hard fork milestones, giving developers and validators a clear sequence of deadlines.

Hard forks are network-wide software upgrades that require every node to update in lockstep or risk being left behind. They represent the highest-stakes type of change Ethereum can undergo, making a plan for seven of them a major commitment of engineering and coordination resources.

Finality in Seconds Through Minimmit Consensus

The most tangible improvement in the strawmap is the plan to compress Ethereum's transaction finality from roughly 16 minutes down to as few as 8 seconds. Finality refers to the point at which the network collectively agrees a transaction occurred and cannot be reversed. Today, that confirmation window makes Ethereum slower than many competing chains for time-sensitive applications.

A new consensus mechanism called Minimmit would achieve agreement in a single voting round rather than the multiple rounds the current system requires. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin described the strawmap as "very important" and walked through the finality improvements in detail. Buterin explained that Ethereum's slot time, the fixed interval at which the network produces new blocks, currently stands at 12 seconds. The plan would reduce it incrementally through 8, 6, 4, and potentially down to 2 seconds, with each step gated by confidence in network safety.

Buterin compared the approach to how Ethereum already adjusts other network parameters, treating slot time as a dial rather than a fixed number. He characterized the broader upgrade philosophy as a "ship of Theseus" rebuild, where individual consensus components get swapped out one by one until the entire system is new, without any single upgrade proving too disruptive.

I expect that we'll reduce slot time in an incremental fashion.

— Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum Co-Founder

Post-Quantum Cryptography and Shielded Transfers

Post-quantum cryptography refers to replacing the mathematical schemes securing a blockchain today with algorithms that would remain unbreakable even if quantum computers reach sufficient scale. The Ethereum Foundation treats this as a concrete engineering problem with a specific hard fork target rather than a distant hypothetical, according to the strawmap. The plan calls for hash-based signatures, a cryptographic technique that does not rely on the mathematical problems quantum computers are expected to crack.

The timing is notable. Strategy's Michael Saylor dismissed quantum threats to Bitcoin earlier this month, characterizing them as more than a decade away. The Ethereum Foundation's inclusion of post-quantum protections as a near-term milestone signals a markedly different risk assessment.

Shielded ETH transfers, the roadmap's privacy goal, would let users send ETH without broadcasting the transaction amount, sender, or recipient on the public blockchain. Currently, every Ethereum transfer is fully transparent, a feature valued by auditors but problematic for users who prefer financial privacy.

What Does This Mean for Ethereum's Market Outlook?

The gap between the ambition in the strawmap and the market's current sentiment toward ether remains wide heading into the second half of 2026. Whether the roadmap's engineering milestones can translate into renewed investor confidence is the central question facing the ecosystem. Hard fork execution risk, coordination challenges across thousands of validators, and competition from rival Layer 1 chains all weigh on the outlook.

Still, the specificity of the strawmap sets it apart from previous Ethereum Foundation communications. Concrete fork targets, measurable throughput goals, and a defined timeline for post-quantum protections give the market something tangible to price in. The next hard fork in the sequence will serve as the first real test of whether the Foundation can deliver on the most ambitious upgrade plan Ethereum has seen in years.