Last June, Ethereum introduced "Protocol," a strategic framework designed to accelerate development across three critical pillars: Scaling Layer 1 (L1), Scaling Blob Throughput, and Improving User Experience (UX). In the year since its inception, the Ethereum network has witnessed a period of unprecedented progress, marked by significant network upgrades and substantial advancements across all outlined initiatives. This report details the accomplishments of the past year, illuminates the evolving strategic thinking within the Ethereum development community, and outlines the ambitious trajectory for Protocol in 2026.
A Landmark Year for Ethereum: 2025 Protocol Achievements
The year 2025 stands out as one of Ethereum’s most productive periods at the protocol level. The network successfully implemented two major upgrades, Pectra and Fusaka, while simultaneously achieving meaningful progress on nearly every strategic objective. These upgrades represent not just incremental improvements but fundamental shifts designed to enhance scalability, efficiency, and user accessibility.
The Pectra upgrade, deployed to mainnet in May 2025, introduced a suite of groundbreaking EIPs (Ethereum Improvement Proposals). Notably, EIP-7702 empowers Externally Owned Accounts (EOAs) with the temporary ability to execute smart contract code. This innovative feature unlocks a range of powerful capabilities, including transaction batching, enabling users to bundle multiple operations into a single transaction, thereby reducing gas fees and transaction times. It also facilitates gas sponsorship, allowing third parties to cover transaction costs for users, and significantly enhances the potential for social recovery mechanisms, making account recovery more robust and user-friendly.
Beyond EIP-7702, Pectra delivered a substantial doubling of blob throughput, a critical component for the network’s data availability layer. This enhancement directly supports the growing demand for decentralized applications and data-intensive services. Furthermore, the upgrade raised the maximum effective validator balance to 2,048 ETH, a move designed to optimize validator participation and network security. Perhaps most impactfully for network decentralization and accessibility, Pectra dramatically shortened validator onboarding times, reducing the friction for new participants to secure the network.
Following closely in December 2025, the Fusaka upgrade brought PeerDAS (Data Availability Sampling) to the Ethereum mainnet. This revolutionary technology fundamentally changes how validators interact with blob data. Instead of downloading entire blobs, validators now sample chunks of data. This dramatically reduces bandwidth requirements, a key bottleneck for scalability, and paves the way for an eightfold theoretical increase in blob capacity. Accompanying Fusaka were two BPO (Blob Parameter Only) forks, initiating a gradual ramp-up from the initial six blobs per block towards significantly higher targets, a crucial step in the long-term blob scaling roadmap.
Beyond these major upgrades, the Ethereum ecosystem experienced organic growth and optimization throughout 2025. The mainnet gas limit saw its first significant increase since 2021, climbing from an initial 30 million to 60 million. This expansion directly enhances the network’s transaction processing capacity. Additionally, the implementation of history expiry removed pre-Merge data from full nodes, resulting in a saving of hundreds of gigabytes of disk space for node operators, thus reducing the hardware requirements for running a node.
On the user experience front, significant strides were made. The Open Intents Framework reached production, aiming to streamline how users interact with decentralized applications by allowing them to express their intentions rather than specific transaction details. Progress was also observed in L1 fast confirmation rule implementations across consensus clients, a development that promises quicker transaction finality. Interoperability standards also saw advancement, with progress on ERC-7930 + ERC-7828 (Interoperable addresses and names) and ERC-7888 (Crosschain Broadcaster), laying the groundwork for more seamless interaction between different L2s and other blockchain networks.
These achievements underscore a year of focused execution and significant technical breakthroughs. However, as the Ethereum community looked toward the future, it became evident that the existing organizational structure for protocol development needed to evolve to better address the burgeoning needs and future aspirations of the ecosystem.
Realigning for the Future: The Protocol Framework for 2026
The foundational "Protocol" framework, launched with its three initial strategic initiatives, served its purpose admirably in guiding the development and successful deployment of Pectra and Fusaka. These initiatives—Scale L1, Scale Blobs, and Improve UX—were instrumental in achieving near-term, tangible goals such as increasing the gas limit, deploying PeerDAS, and enhancing user experience. Now, with these milestones behind us, the Ethereum development community is poised to adopt a more refined and comprehensive organizational structure.
Starting in 2026, Protocol’s work will be strategically organized into three distinct, yet interconnected, tracks, reflecting a higher-level approach to tackling the multifaceted challenges and opportunities facing Ethereum.
The Scale Track: Unifying Execution and Data Availability
The newly defined Scale track, spearheaded by Ansgar Dietrichs, Marius van der Wijden, and Raül Kripalani, represents a crucial consolidation of previous efforts. It brings together the work previously divided between "Scale L1" and "Scale Blobs" into a single, unified initiative. This strategic realignment acknowledges a fundamental reality: the efforts to increase L1 execution capacity and expand data availability throughput are deeply intertwined and mutually dependent.
Increases in the gas limit, for instance, are directly contingent on the performance and efficiency of the execution engine. Similarly, advancements in blob scaling are heavily reliant on network and consensus layer changes that often involve modifying the same core client codebases. By coordinating these efforts under a single track, the Ethereum development teams aim to accelerate progress and reduce the potential for friction, fostering a more holistic and integrated approach to scaling the network.
The concrete objectives of the Scale track include:
- Maximizing L1 Execution Capacity: This involves ongoing research and implementation of techniques to process more transactions per block, including further gas limit increases and optimizations within the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM).
- Expanding Data Availability: Building upon the success of PeerDAS, this track will focus on increasing blob capacity and exploring further innovations in data availability solutions, crucial for supporting L2 rollups and other data-intensive applications.
- Optimizing Network and Consensus Layer Performance: This encompasses improvements to peer-to-peer networking, validator efficiency, and consensus mechanisms to ensure the smooth and robust operation of the Ethereum network at scale.
- Enshrined PBS (Proposer-Builder Separation): A key long-term goal within this track is the implementation of enshrined PBS, a critical component for future scaling and decentralization, which separates the roles of block proposers and block builders.
The Improve UX Track: Pioneering Native Account Abstraction and Interoperability
The Improve UX track, led by Barnabé Monnot and Matt Garnett, carries forward the vital work from the previous year but with a sharpened focus on two areas identified as having the highest leverage for enhancing Ethereum’s usability in 2026: native account abstraction and interoperability.
On the front of account abstraction, the introduction of EIP-7702 was a significant step, but the ultimate vision is to establish smart contract wallets as the default user experience, without the need for external bundlers, relayers, or 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 integration promises a more seamless and secure user experience, abstracting away the complexities of traditional EOA management.
Furthermore, this work has significant intersections with the ongoing efforts towards post-quantum readiness. Native account abstraction provides a natural and robust migration path away from current ECDSA-based authentication, which is vulnerable to quantum computing attacks. Complementary to these protocol-level changes are numerous proposals in development aimed at making it significantly more gas-efficient to verify quantum-resistant signatures within the EVM, a critical step in securing Ethereum’s future.
In the realm of interoperability, the Improve UX track is building upon the foundational work of the Open Intents Framework. The overarching goal remains to facilitate seamless, trust-minimized interactions across various Layer 2 (L2) solutions and other blockchain networks. Continued progress in reducing L1 confirmation times and accelerating L2 settlement periods directly supports this objective, enabling faster and more reliable cross-chain communication. The development of standards like ERC-7930 + ERC-7828 and ERC-7888 is crucial in establishing a common language and infrastructure for these interactions.
The Harden the L1 Track: Fortifying Ethereum’s Core Strengths
Representing a new and vital focus area, the Harden the L1 track, led by Fredrik Svantes, Parithosh Jayanthi, and Thomas Thiery, is dedicated to ensuring that as Ethereum scales and evolves, it steadfastly retains the fundamental properties that constitute its value proposition. This track acknowledges that rapid innovation must be balanced with an unwavering commitment to security, decentralization, and censorship resistance.
This track encompasses several critical areas:
- Censorship Resistance: Developing mechanisms and protocols to ensure that transactions cannot be arbitrarily blocked or censored, maintaining the open and permissionless nature of the network.
- Decentralization: Implementing and supporting features that encourage a diverse and robust validator set, preventing concentration of power and enhancing network resilience. This includes ongoing research into validator economics and client diversity.
- Security Enhancements: Continuously evaluating and implementing improvements to the core protocol and consensus mechanisms to defend against existing and emerging threats, including post-quantum cryptography.
- MEV (Maximal Extractable Value) Mitigation: Exploring strategies and protocol-level changes to mitigate the negative impacts of MEV, ensuring a fairer and more efficient transaction ordering process for all users.
- Protocol Robustness and Auditing: Rigorous testing, formal verification, and comprehensive auditing of all protocol changes to ensure stability and security.
Looking Ahead: The Ambitious Roadmap for 2026 and Beyond
The immediate future of Ethereum protocol development is marked by two significant network upgrades targeted for 2026: Glamsterdam and Hegotà. Glamsterdam is slated for the first half of the year, with Hegotà planned to follow later. These upgrades collectively represent an ambitious push towards achieving parallel execution, enabling significantly higher gas limits, integrating enshrined PBS, continuing the trajectory of blob scaling, and making substantial progress on censorship resistance, native account abstraction, and post-quantum security.
The Ethereum community’s commitment to transparency and collaborative development remains paramount. Regular track-level updates, akin to those provided in the past year, will continue to be published, offering detailed insights into ongoing progress and upcoming milestones. For individuals and organizations interested in following these developments or contributing to the ecosystem, the dedicated resource at protocol.ethereum.foundation serves as the primary starting point.
The journey of Ethereum is one of continuous innovation and relentless pursuit of its foundational vision. With a clear strategic framework, a dedicated community, and a bold roadmap for the future, the momentum behind Ethereum’s evolution is stronger than ever. The focus remains steadfast: to keep shipping, to build a more scalable, secure, and user-friendly decentralized future.
