Author:Jang Hyuk-soo
Compiled by:Chopper,Foresight News
Ethereum 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, followed by successive upgrades including Shapella, Dencun, Pectra, and Fusaka. Ethereum has been in a state of continuous iteration. If you plan to invest in Ethereum or build applications on it, understanding its long-term evolutionary goals is crucial.
On July 1, 2025, the day after Ethereum's tenth anniversary, Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake proposed the Lean Ethereum vision. "Lean" means eliminating redundant design. This roadmap integrates Ethereum's various fragmented research directions, retaining only the core essential modules to form a unified development blueprint. You can imagine it as a ten-year-old house, where the exterior remains the same, but the foundation, plumbing, and wiring have all been replaced.
In February 2026, this vision was concretized into a draft document named 'Strawmap.' As the name suggests, this is just a framework draft, not a finalized plan. Community discussion continues, and the document is constantly updated. On June 26, the document was revised again. The latest version outlines hard forks from the Glamsterdam upgrade in the second half of 2026 through 2029, and clarifies that all upgrades ultimately point towards five development goals, referred to in the article as the North Star goals.
This article revolves around these five North Star goals, depicting the prospects of Ethereum in four years, by 2030.
Fast L1: Further Accelerating the Mainnet
The first North Star goal is the speed of the Ethereum L1 network itself. Currently, Ethereum transactions require about 15 minutes to achieve finality, meaning the transaction results cannot be rolled back. The entire network, consisting of approximately 880,000 validators, cannot vote uniformly on each block; collecting and processing massive amounts of signatures at once exceeds the network's capacity. Therefore, Ethereum divides validators into 32 groups that vote in rotation, and achieving finality requires completing two full voting cycles.
The lean consensus mechanism will leverage zero-knowledge proofs (ZK proofs) to eliminate this bottleneck. Hundreds of thousands of voting results can be compressed into a short mathematical proof, allowing all validators to participate in voting on each block, with results aggregated instantly. The ultimate goal is to achieve single-slot finality.
The block interval will also be shortened. Ethereum currently produces a block every 12 seconds. These 12 seconds are divided into three segments of 4 seconds each: the block proposer broadcasting the block to the network, validators voting, and aggregating the votes.
This timing standard was established in 2020 when the Beacon Chain (the Proof-of-Stake Ethereum consensus layer) design was primarily adapted for consumer devices and low-speed networks. Today, client software and the global network environment have greatly improved, and actual measurements show each stage takes far less time than the preset limits. Based on this, plans are to reduce the block time from 12 seconds to 6 seconds in 2027–2028. In 2029–2030, the lean consensus mechanism will be implemented, accompanied by a new generation of peer-to-peer communication protocol, significantly improving the efficiency of block and vote propagation, further reducing the block time to 4 seconds.
Once the block interval reaches 4 seconds, the average waiting time from a user initiating a transaction to its execution will be about 2 seconds. Coupled with a faster finality mechanism, the entire process from transaction initiation, execution, to irreversible confirmation will be compressed to within a few seconds.
Another goal of the lean consensus mechanism is to reduce the minimum staking requirement for validators from 32 ETH to 1 ETH. Lowering the entry barrier allows more users to directly participate in network governance. Ethereum's goal for 2030 is to be faster while also becoming more decentralized, enabling broader participation in the consensus process.
Billion Gas L1: 1 Billion Gas per Second Throughput
The second North Star goal is throughput capacity. Gas is Ethereum's unit for measuring computational load. Currently, the Ethereum L1 network processes about 5 million Gas per second. The long-term goal is to reach 1 billion Gas per second (Gigagas), increasing mainnet throughput by approximately 200 times.
The biggest obstacle comes from the re-execution mechanism, a fundamental verification model for blockchains. After a new block is produced, thousands of nodes globally need to independently re-execute all transactions within the block. It's like one student solving a problem, and the entire class redoing the calculation from scratch to verify the result. This mechanism ensures trust in a decentralized network but also creates a long-standing dilemma: decentralization and high performance are difficult to achieve simultaneously. To allow ordinary people to run nodes, throughput must be limited; to increase throughput, reliance on a few high-performance nodes is necessary.
The technology to break this deadlock remains zero-knowledge proofs. The node that packages the block also submits a mathematical proof confirming that all transactions within the block were executed correctly. Other nodes do not need to re-execute the transactions; they only need to verify the proof. The computational power required to verify the proof is extremely low, achievable even on mobile devices. Applying this solution to L1 block verification is L1 ZK-EVM, for which the Ethereum Foundation released an official roadmap in February 2026.
According to the 'Strawmap' plan, the first phase will run the traditional re-execution and ZK proof mechanisms in parallel, with the proof mechanism as an optional scheme. From 2028–2029, it will transition to a mandatory proof mode, where blocks are verified solely by ZK proofs. At this stage, regardless of how many transactions a block contains, the verification burden on nodes no longer increases accordingly. This provides support for continuously raising the Gas limit, ultimately aiming for the 1 billion Gas per second target.
For ordinary users, this means wallets (phones, browsers) can directly and fully verify the entire blockchain without trusting third-party RPC nodes. Relying on this verification system, Ethereum moves from 'decentralized' to 'trustless'.
Trillion Gas L2: High-Speed Data Channel Supporting Massive Rollups
The third North Star goal targets Layer 2 networks (L2). L2s execute transactions outside the Ethereum mainnet, only uploading final transaction data to L1, thereby inheriting L1's security. The space on L1 specifically used to store this type of data is called Blob. The total Blob capacity determines the upper throughput limit for all L2 networks.
The Fusaka hard fork in December 2025 introduced PeerDAS technology, allowing nodes to only verify part of the Blob data, laying the foundation for large-scale Blob capacity expansion. Candidate proposals for the Glamsterdam upgrade will further optimize Blob network transmission and storage efficiency. The 'Strawmap' plans a steady, yearly expansion of data-carrying capacity, ultimately reaching 1GB per second data bandwidth, supporting a trillion-Gas-scale L2 ecosystem. This bandwidth would be sufficient to transmit data equivalent in size to a high-definition video every few seconds.
This roadmap clearly delineates Ethereum's division of labor. Even after all upgrades are implemented, the L1 network's throughput will still have a structural upper limit compared to high-performance public chains like Solana. Applications pursuing ultra-high performance will connect to the Ethereum ecosystem via independent L2 networks.
Robinhood Chain is a typical case. Robinhood launched its self-developed Ethereum L2 network to carry tokenized stock trading, fully inheriting Ethereum's security while autonomously handling various business needs, including compliance-related arrangements, on the L2.
Therefore, Ethereum in 2030 will take shape as a large-scale settlement network landscape: L1 is responsible for final settlement and security, while multiple L2 networks specialize, deeply optimized for different business scenarios.
Quantum-Resistant L1 Network: Unafraid of Quantum Computing Threats
The fourth North Star goal is to achieve resistance to quantum attacks. Ethereum's current signature schemes—ECDSA for wallets and BLS for validators—could be broken once sufficiently powerful quantum computers emerge. The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) suggests that the ECDSA algorithm should be phased out starting in 2030 and completely deprecated by 2035; Google has set 2029 as the deadline for switching its internal systems to quantum-resistant encryption. The arrival of quantum technology capable of breaking Ethereum's encryption algorithms may be faster than previously expected by the market.
The core solution is to replace the existing signature algorithms with hash-based cryptography, which can resist quantum attacks. Additionally, hash signatures are well compatible with ZK proofs, aligning with the technological path of the Gigagas L1 network. The Ethereum Foundation established a dedicated post-quantum research team in January 2026 and set up a $1 million prize fund to verify the security of hash functions.
According to the 'Strawmap' plan, the transition work spans multiple hard forks. First, support for pre-registering quantum-resistant public keys will be added, followed by sequential updates to validator voting signatures, the transaction layer, and the data layer. It is expected that by 2029, an L1 network based on hash cryptography will be established. If the plan proceeds smoothly, Ethereum will still be able to protect asset security even after the quantum computing era arrives.
Privacy-Native L1 Network: Transaction Privacy as a Foundational Capability
The final North Star goal is a capability Ethereum has never possessed. Currently, all Ethereum transactions are public; anyone can query an account's balance and entire transaction history via an address. For individuals, this constitutes a privacy risk; for companies wanting to issue salaries on-chain or pay suppliers, public transaction information directly hinders adoption.
The L1 privacy solution aims to implement shielded transfers, placing currently fully public transactions, akin to postcards, into sealed envelopes. Sender, receiver, and transaction amount are hidden from external view, while ZK proofs are used to confirm to the network that the transaction complies with the rules. ZK proofs run throughout Ethereum's entire upgrade roadmap, with privacy transformation being an extremely significant component.
According to the 'Strawmap', privacy infrastructure could be implemented as early as the Hegotá hard fork. The next phase upgrade would transform the transaction mempool, encrypting transaction content before it is included in a block. Among the five goals, the privacy-related plans are the most ambiguous in detail and are highly influenced by the regulatory environment, making them the most uncertain. Nonetheless, Ethereum including L1 native privacy in its official roadmap for the first time is itself a significant shift.
Conclusion: Ethereum Four Years from Now
The five North Star goals are succinctly summarized as follows:
- Fast L1: Transaction finality time reduced from 15 minutes to seconds; block interval lowered from 12 seconds to 4 seconds.
- Billion Gas L1: ZK proofs replace the re-execution mechanism; L1 processes 1 billion Gas per second, increasing throughput by ~200x.
- Trillion Gas L2: L2 data capacity expanded to 1GB per second, supporting massive parallel operation of Rollups.
- Quantum-Resistant L1: Signature system switched to hash-based cryptography, calmly confronting quantum computing impact.
- Privacy-Native L1: Hiding transaction information while proving compliance becomes a standard Ethereum feature.
The entities driving the roadmap's implementation are also changing. The Ethereum Foundation recently reduced its staff by about 20%, gradually scaling back its functions, with numerous new institutions filling the ecosystem gaps. In June 2026, Ethlabs was formally established. This non-profit R&D institution received support from Ethereum ecosystem companies and Ethereum co-founder Joseph Lubin. A week later, Ethereum Institutional, founded by former Enterprise Team members of the Foundation, was launched. Ethereum is evolving towards a purer open-source system, with a smaller foundation jointly promoting development alongside numerous independent organizations.
Of course, no plan is guaranteed to be completed on schedule. 'Strawmap' is just a continuously revised draft, not a finalized roadmap. The upcoming Glamsterdam hard fork has already been postponed from the first half to the second half of 2026. Development progress may be delayed, cryptographic algorithms may require longer security audits, and which features are included in each hard fork will be continuously adjusted through researcher and community discussion.
Regardless of the final implemented form, Ethereum will remain the world's most neutral, trustless general-purpose computing network. 'Strawmap' clearly sets the goal: to become faster, more capable, and more secure while retaining its core positioning.
