The Ethereum Foundation has provided a comprehensive update on its "Protocol" initiative, detailing a year of significant advancements in 2025 and outlining a strategic evolution for its development priorities in 2026. Launched in June of the previous year, the Protocol initiative was initially structured around three core pillars: scaling the Layer 1 (L1) blockchain, enhancing blob capacity for data availability, and improving the overall user experience (UX). The latest report highlights the successful completion of major network upgrades and substantial progress across all designated areas, setting the stage for a more refined approach to Ethereum’s future development.
A Retrospective: 2025 – A Year of Transformative Upgrades
The year 2025 is being characterized as one of Ethereum’s most productive periods at the protocol level, marked by the successful deployment of two major network upgrades: Pectra and Fusaka. These upgrades represent a culmination of extensive research, development, and community consensus, significantly advancing Ethereum’s capabilities and laying crucial groundwork for future scaling solutions.
The Pectra upgrade, deployed in May 2025, introduced a suite of impactful EIPs (Ethereum Improvement Proposals). Foremost among these was EIP-7702, which grants Externally Owned Accounts (EOAs) the ability to temporarily execute smart contract code. This innovation unlocks a cascade of new functionalities, including transaction batching – allowing users to combine multiple operations into a single transaction – and gas sponsorship, enabling third parties to cover transaction fees for users. Furthermore, EIP-7702 paves the way for enhanced social recovery mechanisms, bolstering account security and accessibility. Beyond UX enhancements, Pectra also delivered a significant boost to data availability by doubling blob throughput, a critical component for Layer 2 scaling solutions. The upgrade also raised the maximum effective validator balance to 2,048 ETH, a move designed to optimize validator economics and network security. Additionally, Pectra dramatically reduced validator onboarding times by shortening the required historical data sync, making it more accessible for new participants to join the consensus layer.
Following Pectra, the Fusaka upgrade arrived in December 2025, bringing the highly anticipated PeerDAS (Data Availability Sampling) to the mainnet. This groundbreaking technology fundamentally alters how validators interact with blob data. Instead of downloading entire blobs, validators now sample pieces of the data, a process that drastically reduces bandwidth requirements. This efficiency gain is projected to enable an eight-fold increase in theoretical blob capacity, a vital step towards accommodating the ever-growing data needs of decentralized applications and Layer 2 rollups. Fusaka was also accompanied by two Blob Parameter Only (BPO) forks, initiating a phased rollout from the current six blobs per block towards significantly higher targets, signaling a sustained commitment to expanding data availability.
These upgrades were complemented by a series of other crucial developments throughout 2025. The mainnet gas limit saw its first substantial increase since 2021, rising from an initial 30 million gas to 60 million gas, a direct outcome of the performance improvements facilitated by Pectra and Fusaka. This increase provides more room for complex transactions and smart contract execution, enhancing the network’s capacity. The introduction of history expiry, a feature that removes pre-Merge historical data from full nodes, has led to substantial disk space savings, estimated to be in the hundreds of gigabytes, thereby reducing the operational burden on node operators.
On the user experience front, the Open Intents Framework reached a production-ready stage, offering a more flexible and powerful way for users to express their desired actions on the blockchain. Progress was also made on L1 fast confirmation rule implementations across various consensus clients, aiming to reduce the time it takes for transactions to be finalized. Furthermore, interoperability standards saw significant advancements, with the progression of ERC-7930 and ERC-7828, which aim to standardize interoperable addresses and names, and ERC-7888, designed to facilitate cross-chain broadcasting of transactions. These developments collectively underscore a year of focused execution and substantial achievement for the Ethereum protocol.
A Strategic Realignment: The Protocol Initiative for 2026
While 2025 was a period of achieving specific, near-term goals, the Ethereum Foundation’s leadership has recognized the need to adapt its organizational structure to meet the evolving demands of the Ethereum community. The initial framing of the Protocol initiative, focused on immediate deliverables like gas limit increases and the deployment of PeerDAS, served its purpose effectively. However, as these milestones are now behind them, there is a strategic opportunity to organize development efforts at a higher, more cohesive level.
Beginning in 2026, the Protocol initiative will be structured around three distinct, overarching tracks, reflecting a more holistic and interconnected approach to Ethereum’s development: Scale, Improve UX, and Harden the L1.
Scale: Unifying Execution and Data Availability Efforts
The "Scale" track, spearheaded by Ansgar Dietrichs, Marius van der Wijden, and Raül Kripalani, represents a significant consolidation of previous efforts. It merges the formerly separate "Scale L1" and "Scale Blobs" initiatives into a single, unified endeavor. This integration acknowledges a fundamental reality: the work of increasing L1 execution capacity and expanding data availability throughput are deeply intertwined.
Historically, efforts to increase the gas limit on L1 execution have been dependent on the performance of the execution engine. Similarly, scaling blob capacity, crucial for Layer 2 solutions, relies on networking and consensus changes that often impact the same underlying client codebases. By coordinating these efforts under a single track, the Ethereum development team aims to accelerate progress and foster a more holistic approach to scaling. This unified track will focus on optimizing the entire stack, from transaction processing and smart contract execution on L1 to the efficient storage and retrieval of data via blobs. The anticipated outcomes include further substantial increases in the L1 gas limit, enabling more complex decentralized applications, and a dramatic expansion of blob capacity, directly supporting the growth and efficiency of Layer 2 scaling solutions. The overarching goal is to create a more robust and performant Ethereum network capable of supporting a vastly larger user base and a more diverse ecosystem of applications.
Improve UX: Deepening Account Abstraction and Interoperability
The "Improve UX" track, led by Barnabé Monnot and Matt Garnett, builds upon the momentum generated in the previous year, with a refined focus on two high-leverage areas critical for Ethereum’s usability in 2026: native account abstraction and interoperability.
The introduction of EIP-7702 in 2025 was a significant step towards making smart contract wallets the default user experience. However, the ultimate vision is to achieve this without the reliance on external bundlers or relayers, and crucially, without incurring additional gas overhead. Proposals such as EIP-7701 and the more recent EIP-8141 (Frame Transactions) are actively pushing towards embedding smart account logic directly into the protocol. This approach aims to streamline the user experience by making it more intuitive and cost-effective to manage accounts and execute transactions.
Furthermore, this focus on native account abstraction has a crucial intersection with post-quantum readiness. As the cryptographic landscape evolves and the threat of quantum computing becomes more pronounced, native account abstraction offers a natural and robust migration path away from current ECDSA-based authentication methods. This transition is vital for ensuring the long-term security and resilience of the Ethereum network. Complementary to these advancements, a number of proposals are in development that could significantly improve the gas efficiency of verifying quantum-resistant signatures within the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). This is a critical step in ensuring that Ethereum can securely transition to post-quantum cryptography without prohibitive transaction costs.
On the interoperability front, the "Improve UX" track continues to build upon the foundation laid by the Open Intents Framework. The primary objective remains the enablement of seamless, trust-minimized interactions between different Layer 2 solutions. This goal is progressively being realized through ongoing development and the increasing maturity of cross-chain communication protocols. Continued progress in achieving faster L1 confirmations and shorter L2 settlement times directly supports this objective, as it reduces the latency and increases the reliability of inter-rollup communication. The aim is to create an Ethereum ecosystem where users can move assets and interact with applications across different Layer 2s as effortlessly as they would on a single chain.
Harden the L1: Ensuring Core Network Resilience and Security
A notable addition to the structured approach is the "Harden the L1" track, led by Fredrik Svantes, Parithosh Jayanthi, and Thomas Thiery. This new track reflects a dedicated focus on ensuring that as Ethereum scales and evolves, it retains and strengthens the fundamental properties that underpin its value proposition: security, decentralization, and censorship resistance.
This track encompasses several critical areas. One key focus is on enhancing the L1’s resilience against various attack vectors and network disruptions. This includes ongoing research and development into more robust consensus mechanisms, improved network security protocols, and advanced threat detection capabilities. Ensuring the integrity and immutability of the L1 blockchain remains paramount, especially as the network’s capacity and complexity increase.
Another significant area of focus within "Harden the L1" is censorship resistance. As Ethereum aims to support a global and permissionless ecosystem, it is crucial that the network remains resistant to attempts to block or censor transactions. This involves exploring and implementing technical solutions that minimize the ability of any single entity or group to control or interfere with transaction processing.
The track also addresses the ongoing need for protocol stability and predictable performance. As new features and scaling solutions are integrated, it is essential to rigorously test and audit these changes to prevent unintended consequences or regressions that could compromise the network’s stability. This includes thorough performance analysis, stress testing, and the development of robust monitoring tools. Furthermore, "Harden the L1" will likely oversee the implementation of safeguards to ensure that the L1 blockchain remains decentralized, preventing any undue concentration of power or influence among network participants. This might involve exploring mechanisms to encourage broader validator participation and to maintain a diverse set of client implementations.
Looking Ahead: The Ambitious Roadmap for 2026 and Beyond
The Ethereum Foundation has set its sights on an ambitious schedule for 2026, with the "Glamsterdam" network upgrade targeted for the first half of the year, followed by "Hegotà" later in the year. These upcoming upgrades are designed to build upon the successes of Pectra and Fusaka, further pushing the boundaries of Ethereum’s capabilities.
The roadmap for these upgrades includes the implementation of parallel execution, a technique that allows for multiple transaction processing threads to run concurrently, significantly boosting throughput. This is expected to lead to substantially higher gas limits, providing ample capacity for a burgeoning ecosystem. A pivotal component will be the introduction of enshrined proposer-builder separation (PBS), a mechanism aimed at improving decentralization and economic security by separating the roles of block proposers and block builders. Further blob scaling efforts will continue, reinforcing Ethereum’s data availability layer.
In parallel, significant progress is anticipated in the areas of censorship resistance, a key focus of the new "Harden the L1" track. The development of native account abstraction, as outlined in the "Improve UX" track, is expected to mature, making smart contract wallets the default and more secure option for users. Critically, the groundwork for post-quantum security will be solidified, ensuring Ethereum’s long-term resilience against future cryptographic threats.
The Ethereum Foundation has committed to providing regular updates on the progress of each track, similar to their reporting in the previous year. Interested parties are encouraged to visit protocol.ethereum.foundation for the most up-to-date information and to find opportunities for involvement. The overarching sentiment from the Foundation is one of continued momentum and a commitment to relentless execution, encapsulated in their closing remark: "Let’s keep shipping." This signifies a proactive and results-oriented approach to the ongoing development and scaling of the Ethereum protocol, aiming to solidify its position as the leading platform for decentralized innovation.
