Original Author: Jang Hyuk-soo
Original Translation: Chopper, Foresight News
Ethereum launched in 2015 and is now entering its eleventh year. Along the way, it transitioned its consensus mechanism from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake through The Merge, followed by subsequent upgrades like Shapella, Dencun, Pectra, and Fusaka. Ethereum has always been in a state of continuous iteration. If you plan to invest in Ethereum or build applications on it, understanding its long-term evolution goals is crucial.
On July 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 the various scattered research directions within Ethereum, retaining only the core necessary modules to form a unified development blueprint. You can think of it like 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 materialized into a draft document named "Strawmap." As the name suggests, this is just a framework draft, not the final confirmed plan. The community continues to discuss it, and the document is constantly updated, with another revision on June 26. The latest version outlines hard forks from the second half of 2026 with the Glamsterdam upgrade until 2029, clearly stating that all upgrades ultimately point towards five overarching development goals, referred to in the article as North Star goals.
This article focuses on these five North Star goals to depict the prospects of Ethereum four years from now, in 2030.
Fast L1: Further Accelerating the Mainnet
The first North Star goal is the speed of the Ethereum L1 network itself. Currently, Ethereum transactions take about 15 minutes to achieve finality, meaning the transaction results cannot be rolled back. The roughly 880,000 validators across the network cannot uniformly vote on each block; collecting and processing a massive number of signatures at once exceeds the network's capacity. Therefore, Ethereum divides validators into 32 committees that vote in rotation, and achieving finality requires completing two full voting cycles.
The lean consensus mechanism will utilize zero-knowledge proofs (ZK proofs) to eliminate this bottleneck. Hundreds of thousands of vote 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 time will also be shortened. Ethereum currently produces a block every 12 seconds. This 12 seconds is divided into three segments of 4 seconds each: the block proposer broadcasting the block to the network, validators voting, and aggregating the vote information.
This time standard was established in 2020 when the Beacon Chain (the Proof-of-Stake Ethereum consensus layer) was designed primarily for home devices and low-speed networks. Today, client software and the global network environment have improved significantly, with actual measurements showing each segment takes far less time than the preset upper limit. Based on this, plans are in place to reduce the block time from 12 seconds to 6 seconds in 2027–2028. In 2029–2030, the lean consensus mechanism will be implemented, paired with a new generation of peer-to-peer communication protocols, significantly improving the propagation efficiency of blocks and vote information, and further reducing the block time to 4 seconds.
With a 4-second block interval, the average waiting time for a user from initiating a transaction to its execution will be about 2 seconds. Combined with the 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 lower 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 being more decentralized, involving more people in the consensus process.
Billion-Gas L1: Ten Billion Gas per Second Throughput
The second North Star goal is throughput capacity. Gas is the unit Ethereum uses to measure computational effort. The current Ethereum L1 network processes about 5 million Gas per second, with a long-term goal of reaching 1 billion Gas (Gigagas) per second, increasing the mainnet's throughput by approximately 200 times.
The biggest obstacle comes from the repeated execution mechanism, a fundamental verification model for blockchains. After a new block is produced, thousands of nodes globally need to independently re-run all transactions within the block. It's like a student working out an answer, and then the entire class re-calculating from scratch to check the result. This mechanism ensures the trustworthiness of a decentralized network but also creates a long-standing dilemma: decentralization and high performance are difficult to combine. For ordinary people to be able 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 is again zero-knowledge proofs. The node packing the block also submits a mathematical proof, verifying 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 a 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 traditional repeated execution and ZK proof verification in parallel, with the proof mechanism being optional. In 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 will no longer increase accordingly. This provides the foundation for continuously raising the Gas limit, ultimately targeting 1 billion Gas per second.
For ordinary users, this means wallets (on 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 Channels Supporting Massive Rollups
The third North Star goal is aimed at Layer-2 networks (L2). L2s execute transactions outside the Ethereum mainnet, only uploading the final transaction data to L1, inheriting L1's security. The dedicated space on L1 for storing this type of data is called Blob, and 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 verify only part of the Blob data, laying the groundwork for massively scaling the number of Blobs. The candidate plan for the Glamsterdam upgrade will further optimize Blob network transmission and storage efficiency. The "Strawmap" plans to steadily increase data-bearing capacity year by year, ultimately reaching 1 GB per second data bandwidth, supporting an L2 ecosystem at a trillion-Gas scale. The bandwidth will be sufficient to transmit data equivalent to an HD video every few seconds.
This roadmap clearly delineates the division of labor within Ethereum. 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 access the Ethereum ecosystem via independent L2 networks.
Robinhood Chain is a typical case. Robinhood launched its self-developed Ethereum L2 network to handle tokenized stock trading, fully inheriting Ethereum's security while autonomously processing various business requirements on the L2, including compliance and regulatory arrangements.
Therefore, by 2030, Ethereum will form a large-scale settlement network pattern: L1 is responsible for final settlement and security, while multiple L2 networks each perform their own duties, deeply optimized for different business scenarios.
Quantum-Resistant L1 Network: Unafraid of Quantum Computing Threats
The fourth North Star goal is achieving resistance to quantum attacks. Ethereum's current signature schemes—ECDSA for wallets and BLS for validators—would 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 from 2030 and completely banned by 2035; Google has set 2029 as the deadline for switching its internal systems to quantum-resistant encryption technologies. The arrival timeline for quantum technology capable of breaking Ethereum's encryption algorithms is faster than previously expected by the market.
The core solution is to replace the current signature algorithms with hash-based cryptographic systems, which can resist quantum attacks. Additionally, hash-based signatures have good compatibility with ZK proofs, aligning with the technical 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 to verify the security of hash functions.
According to the "Strawmap" plan, the transition will span multiple hard forks. First, support for pre-registering quantum-resistant public keys will be added, followed by sequential upgrades to validator voting signatures, the transaction layer, and the data layer. It is projected that by 2029, an L1 network based on hash-based cryptography will be established. If the plan is successfully implemented, Ethereum will still be able to secure assets 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 publicly visible on the network; anyone can query an account's balance and complete transaction history via its address. For individuals, this poses a privacy risk; for companies wanting to distribute salaries or pay suppliers on-chain, the public transaction information directly hinders application adoption.
The L1 privacy solution aims to achieve shielded transfers, putting currently fully public transactions, which are like postcards, into sealed envelopes. The sender, receiver, and transaction amount are hidden from the public, while relying on ZK proofs to demonstrate to the network that the transaction complies with the rules. ZK proofs run throughout Ethereum's entire upgrade roadmap, and the privacy overhaul is also an extremely significant part of it.
According to the "Strawmap," privacy infrastructure could potentially land as early as the Hegotá hard fork, with the next phase upgrade focusing on transforming the transaction mempool to encrypt transaction content before it is included in a block. Among the five goals, the privacy-related plans are the most vague in detail and are also 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 shortened from 15 minutes to a few seconds, block interval reduced from 12 seconds to 4 seconds.
- Billion-Gas L1: ZK proofs replace the repeated execution mechanism, L1 processes 1 billion Gas per second, throughput increased by approximately 200 times.
- Trillion-Gas L2: L2 data-bearing capacity expanded to 1 GB per second, supporting the parallel operation of a large number of Rollups.
- Quantum-Resistant L1: Signature system switched to hash-based cryptography, calmly facing the impact of quantum computing.
- Privacy-Native L1: Hiding transaction information while proving transaction compliance becomes a standard Ethereum feature.
The entities driving the roadmap's implementation are also changing. The Ethereum Foundation recently laid off about 20% of its staff, gradually contracting its functions, with many emerging institutions filling the ecosystem gaps. In June 2026, Ethlabs was officially established. This non-profit R&D institution received support from Ethereum ecosystem enterprises and Ethereum co-founder Joseph Lubin; a week later, Ethereum Institutional, founded by former members of the Foundation's enterprise team, emerged. Ethereum is evolving towards a purer open-source system, with a small foundation uniting numerous independent institutions to jointly drive development.
Of course, there is no guarantee all plans will land on schedule. "Strawmap" is only 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 require longer security audits, and which features are included in each hard fork will also be adjusted continuously through discussions among researchers and the community.
Regardless of the final implemented form, Ethereum will remain the world's most neutral, trustless general-purpose computing network. "Strawmap" has clearly set the goal: to become faster, more capable, and more secure while retaining its core positioning.
