L1 acceleration, L2 expansion, quantum resistance, and native privacy are being comprehensively advanced.

Written by: Jang Hyuk-soo

Translated by: Chopper, Foresight News

Ethereum was launched in 2015 and has now entered its eleventh year. Along the way, it transitioned its consensus mechanism from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake through The Merge, and subsequently completed upgrades including Shapella, Dencun, Pectra, and Fusaka. Ethereum is constantly iterating. If you plan to invest in Ethereum or choose to build applications on Ethereum, it is crucial to clarify its long-term evolution goals.

On July 30, 2025, the day after Ethereum's tenth anniversary, Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake proposed the vision of Lean Ethereum. “Lean” means eliminating redundant designs. This roadmap integrates various decentralized research directions of Ethereum, retaining only the core necessary modules to form a unified development blueprint. You can think of it as a ten-year-old house; the exterior remains unchanged, but the foundation, plumbing, and wiring have all been replaced.

In February 2026, this vision materialized into a draft document titled "Strawmap." As the name suggests, this is just a framework draft, not a finalized proposal; the community continues to discuss, and the document is constantly updated, with the latest revision on June 26. The latest version outlines the planned hard forks from the Glamsterdam upgrade in the second half of 2026 to 2029, clearly indicating that all upgrades ultimately point to five development goals, referred to as the North Star goals.

This article revolves around the five North Star goals, envisioning the prospects of Ethereum in 2030, four years from now.

Fast L1: Further Accelerating the Main Network

The first North Star goal is the speed of the Ethereum L1 network itself. Currently, Ethereum transactions take about 15 minutes to achieve final confirmation, and transaction results cannot be rolled back. The approximately 880,000 validators on the network cannot vote uniformly on each block; the process of collecting and processing massive signatures exceeds the network's capacity. Therefore, Ethereum divides validators into 32 groups that vote in turn; final confirmation requires completing two full voting cycles.

The lean consensus mechanism will eliminate this bottleneck through zero-knowledge proofs (ZK proofs). Hundreds of thousands of voting results can be compressed into a short mathematical proof, allowing all validators to participate in voting for each block, with voting results aggregated instantly. The ultimate goal is to achieve final confirmation in a single voting round.

Block production intervals will also be shortened. Currently, Ethereum produces a block every 12 seconds. These 12 seconds are divided into three segments, each lasting 4 seconds: block proposers broadcast the block to the entire network, validators conduct voting, and voting information is summarized.

This timing standard was set in 2020, at which time the Beacon Chain (the proof-of-stake Ethereum consensus layer) was designed mainly to accommodate home devices and low-speed networks. Now, client software and the global network environment have significantly improved, and actual measurements show that each phase takes far less time than the preset limit. Based on this, it is planned to shorten the block production time from 12 seconds to 6 seconds during 2027-2028. By 2029-2030, the lean consensus mechanism will be implemented along with a new generation of peer-to-peer communication protocols, dramatically improving the efficiency of block and voting information dissemination, further reducing the block production time to 4 seconds.

Once the block interval reaches 4 seconds, the average waiting time from when a user initiates a transaction to its execution is about 2 seconds. Coupled with a faster final confirmation mechanism, the entire process of initiating, executing, and irreversibly confirming transactions will be compressed to just a few seconds.

Another goal of the lean consensus mechanism is to lower the minimum staking threshold for validators from 32 ETH to 1 ETH. By reducing the entry barrier, more users can directly participate in network governance. Ethereum's goal for 2030 is to be faster while also being more decentralized, allowing more people to participate in the consensus process.

1 Billion Gas L1: One Billion Gas Throughput Per Second

The second North Star goal is throughput capacity. Gas is the unit by which Ethereum measures computational effort. Currently, the Ethereum L1 network processes about 5 million Gas per second, with a long-term goal of reaching 1 billion Gas per second (teragassy), increasing the main net's throughput approximately 200 times.

The biggest obstacle comes from the repetitive execution mechanism, which is the foundational verification model of blockchain. After a new block is generated, thousands of nodes worldwide need to independently re-run all transactions in the block. It’s like a student calculating an answer, and the entire class re-evaluates it from scratch to check the result. This mechanism ensures a decentralized network's credibility but has also created a long-term dilemma: it is challenging to reconcile decentralization with high performance. If ordinary people are to run nodes, throughput must be limited; to improve throughput, reliance on a few high-performance nodes is necessary.

The technology that breaks this deadlock is still zero-knowledge proofs. The node packaging blocks will also submit a mathematical proof that certifies all transactions in the block were executed correctly. Other nodes will not need to repeat transaction executions; they only verify the proof. The computational power required to validate the proof is very low, and even mobile devices can achieve this. Applying this solution to L1 block verification is known as L1 ZK-EVM, and the Ethereum Foundation officially released the roadmap in February 2026.

According to the Strawmap plan, the first phase will run traditional repetitive execution and ZK proofs in parallel, with the proof mechanism being optional. Between 2028-2029, it will transition to a mandatory proof mode, where blocks will only be verified through ZK proofs. By this stage, regardless of how many transactions a block contains, the node's verification burden will no longer increase. This supports sustainably increasing the Gas limit, ultimately sprinting to the goal of 1 billion Gas per second.

For ordinary users, this means that wallets (mobile phones, browsers) can directly and completely verify the entire blockchain without the need to trust third-party RPC nodes. Relying on this verification system, Ethereum will move from “decentralized” to “trustless.”

Trillions of Gas L2: High-Speed Channel to Support Massive Rollups

The third North Star goal targets Layer 2 networks (L2). L2 executes transactions outside the Ethereum mainnet, uploading only the final transaction data to L1, inheriting L1's security. The space in L1 designated for storing such data is called Blob, and the total capacity of the Blob determines the throughput limit for all L2 networks.

In December 2025, the Fusaka hard fork will launch the PeerDAS technology, allowing nodes to verify only part of the Blob data, laying the groundwork for a massive expansion of the number of Blobs. The Glamsterdam upgrade candidate will further optimize the Blob network's transmission and storage efficiency. The Strawmap plans to steadily expand the data storage capacity year by year, ultimately reaching 1GB of data bandwidth per second to support a trillion Gas-scale L2 ecosystem. The bandwidth is sufficient to transmit the amount of data equivalent to a high-definition video every few seconds.

This roadmap clearly delineates Ethereum's division of labor. Even if all upgrades are fully implemented, L1 network throughput will still face structural limits compared to high-performance public chains like Solana. Applications that pursue ultra-high performance will connect to the Ethereum ecosystem through independent L2 networks.

Robinhood Chain is a typical example; Robinhood launched its self-developed Ethereum L2 network to carry tokenized stock trading, fully inheriting Ethereum's security while autonomously handling various business needs within L2, including compliance arrangements.

Therefore, by 2030, Ethereum will form a large-scale settlement network pattern: L1 will be responsible for final settlements and security guarantees, while multiple L2 networks will perform their respective roles, optimized deeply for different business scenarios.

Quantum-Resistant L1 Network: Fearless of Quantum Computing Threats

The fourth North Star goal is to achieve resistance to quantum attacks. Currently, Ethereum's signature scheme uses the ECDSA algorithm for wallets and the BLS algorithm for validators. Once sufficiently powerful quantum computers are developed, existing cryptographic systems will be compromised. The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has suggested that the ECDSA algorithm should be gradually phased out by 2030 and completely banned by 2035; Google has set 2029 as the cutoff date for internally switching to quantum-resistant encryption technology. The arrival of quantum technologies capable of breaking Ethereum's cryptographic algorithms is faster than the market previously expected.

The core solution is to replace the existing signature algorithms with hash-based cryptographic systems, which can resist quantum attacks. At the same time, hash signatures and ZK proofs are well compatible, creating a seamless technical pathway with the teragassy L1 network. The Ethereum Foundation established a dedicated post-quantum research team in January 2026 and set up a $1 million bounty to verify the security of hash functions.

According to the Strawmap plan, the switch will occur over several hard forks. Initially, it will support pre-registration of quantum-resistant public keys, followed by upgrading validator voting signatures, transaction layers, and data layers in succession, with the target to build an L1 network based on hash encryption systems by 2029. If this plan is successfully implemented, Ethereum will still be able to ensure asset security after the advent of the quantum computing era.

Native Privacy L1 Network: Transaction Privacy Becomes a Fundamental Capability

The last North Star goal is a capability that Ethereum has never possessed before. Currently, all Ethereum transactions are publicly available on the network, and anyone can query account balances and all historical transfer records through addresses. For individuals, this poses privacy risks; for enterprises wanting to issue salaries or pay suppliers on-chain, publicly accessible transaction information directly hinders application implementation.

The L1 privacy solution aims to obscure transfers, putting transactions that are currently as fully public as postcards into sealed envelopes. The transfer parties, recipient, and transaction amounts will be hidden from view, while still using ZK proofs to demonstrate to the network that the transaction complies with the rules. ZK proofs are integrated throughout Ethereum's entire upgrade route, and privacy transformation is one of its most weighty components.

According to the Strawmap, privacy infrastructure is expected to land as early as the Hegotá hard fork, with the next phase upgrading the transaction memory pool and encrypting contents before transactions go on-chain. Among the five goals, the details regarding privacy-related planning are the most ambiguous and are also highly influenced by regulatory environments, making the uncertainty the highest. Nevertheless, Ethereum is the first to include native L1 privacy in its official roadmap, which itself represents a significant shift.

Conclusion: Ethereum Four Years From Now

The five North Star goals can be summarized as follows:

• Fast L1: The time for final transaction confirmation is reduced from 15 minutes to a few seconds, and block intervals are decreased from 12 seconds to 4 seconds;
• 1 Billion Gas L1: ZK proofs replace the repetitive execution mechanism, with L1 processing 1 billion Gas per second, increasing throughput by approximately 200 times;
• Trillions of Gas L2: The data capacity of L2 is expanded to 1GB per second, supporting massive parallel operations of Rollups;
• Quantum-Resistant L1: The signature system is switched to hash cryptography, comfortably addressing challenges from quantum computing;
• Native Privacy L1: Transaction information is hidden while proving compliance, becoming a standard feature of Ethereum.

The entities driving the roadmap’s rollout are also changing. The Ethereum Foundation recently laid off about 20% of its staff, gradually scaling back its functions, while many emerging organizations fill the ecological gap. In June 2026, Ethlabs was officially established, a non-profit research organization that has received support from Ethereum ecosystem enterprises and Ethereum co-founder Joseph Lubin; a week later, Ethereum Institutional was launched by former firm team members of the Foundation. Ethereum is evolving towards a more pure open-source system, with smaller foundations collaborating with many independent institutions to jointly promote development.

Of course, all these plans cannot guarantee timely implementation. The Strawmap is merely a continuously revised draft, not a finalized roadmap. The upcoming Glamsterdam hard fork has already been postponed from the first half of 2026 to the second half. Development progress may be delayed, cryptographic algorithms may require longer security audits, and which functions to include in each round of hard forks will continue to be adjusted through discussions among researchers and the community.

Regardless of the final implementation form, Ethereum will still be the most neutral, trustless general computing network in the world. The Strawmap clearly sets the goals: to become faster, have stronger capacity, and ensure higher security while retaining its core positioning.