Author: Rejamong, Four Pillars
Compilation: 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 a series of subsequent upgrades such as Shapella, Dencun, Pectra, and Fusaka. Ethereum has always been in a state of continuous iteration. If you plan to invest in Ethereum or choose to build applications on it, understanding its long-term evolution goals is crucial.
On the day after Ethereum's tenth anniversary in July 2025, Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake proposed the vision for Lean Ethereum. "Lean" signifies the removal of redundant design. This roadmap integrates the various dispersed research directions within Ethereum, retaining only the core essential modules to form a unified development blueprint. You can think of it as a ten-year-old house where the exterior remains unchanged, 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 merely a framework draft, not a finalized plan. Community discussions continue, and the document is constantly updated, with another revision on June 26th. The latest version outlines a series of hard forks from the Glamsterdam upgrade in the second half of 2026 to 2029, clarifying that all upgrades ultimately point towards five development goals, referred to in the text as North Star goals.
This article revolves around these five North Star goals, painting a picture of Ethereum's prospects in 2030, four years from now.
Fast L1: Further Accelerating the Mainnet
The first North Star goal is the speed of the Ethereum L1 network itself. Currently, Ethereum transactions require approximately 15 minutes to achieve finality, meaning transaction results cannot be reversed. With around 880,000 validators, it's impossible for the network to handle collecting and processing a massive number of signatures for every block in a unified vote. Therefore, Ethereum divides validators into 32 committees that vote in rotation, requiring two full voting cycles to complete finalization.
The lean consensus mechanism will leverage zero-knowledge proofs (ZK proofs) to eliminate this bottleneck. Tens of thousands of voting results can be compressed into a short mathematical proof, allowing all validators to participate in voting on each block, with voting 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. This 12 seconds is divided into three phases, each taking 4 seconds: the block proposer broadcasts the block to the network, validators vote, and voting information is aggregated.
This time standard was established in 2020, when the Beacon Chain (the proof-of-stake Ethereum consensus layer) design was primarily adapted for home devices and low-speed networks. Today, client software and global network environments have significantly improved, with tests showing each phase takes far less time than the preset limit. Based on this, the plan is to reduce the block time from 12 seconds to 6 seconds in 2027-2028. With the lean consensus mechanism implemented in 2029-2030, paired with a new generation peer-to-peer communication protocol, block and voting information propagation efficiency will greatly increase, further reducing the block time to 4 seconds.
When the block interval reaches 4 seconds, the average wait time from a user initiating a transaction to its execution will be about 2 seconds. Combined with the faster finalization 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 threshold for validators from 32 ETH to 1 ETH. With a lowered entry barrier, more users can 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.
1 Billion Gas L1: Ten Billion Gas Per Second Throughput
The second North Star goal is throughput capacity. Gas is the unit used to measure computational load on Ethereum. 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 of blockchains. After a new block is generated, thousands of nodes globally need to independently re-run all transactions within the block. It's like one student calculating an answer, and everyone in the 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. For ordinary people to be able to run nodes, throughput must be limited; to increase throughput, reliance on a few high-performance nodes becomes necessary.
The technology to break this deadlock is, once again, zero-knowledge proofs. The node that packages a block also submits a mathematical proof confirming that all transactions within the block 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 and can be done on mobile devices. Applying this solution to L1 block validation is L1 ZK-EVM, for which the Ethereum Foundation released an official roadmap in February 2026.
According to the "Strawmap" plan, the first stage involves running traditional re-execution and ZK proofs in parallel, with the proof mechanism as an optional scheme. In 2028-2029, it will transition to a mandatory proof mode where blocks are validated solely by ZK proofs. At this stage, regardless of how many transactions a block contains, the validation 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 (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: Data Highway Supporting Massive Rollups
The third North Star goal is aimed at layer-2 networks (L2). L2s execute transactions off the Ethereum mainnet, only uploading the final transaction data to L1, thereby inheriting L1's security. The space on L1 specifically used for storing this type of data is called a Blob. The total Blob capacity determines the throughput ceiling 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 Glamsterdam upgrade candidate will further optimize Blob network transmission and storage efficiency. The "Strawmap" plan outlines a steady annual increase in data carrying capacity, ultimately reaching 1 GB per second of data bandwidth, supporting a trillion-Gas scale L2 ecosystem. This bandwidth is sufficient to transmit data equivalent to a high-definition video every few seconds.
This roadmap clearly delineates Ethereum's division of labor. Even if all upgrades are implemented, the L1 network's throughput will still have a structural limit compared to high-performance public chains like Solana. Applications pursuing ultra-high performance will connect to the Ethereum ecosystem through independent L2 networks.
Robinhood Chain is a typical case study. 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 L2, including regulatory compliance arrangements.
Therefore, Ethereum in 2030 will form a large-scale settlement network pattern: L1 handles final settlement and security guarantees, while multiple L2 networks each serve their purpose, 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—will be broken once sufficiently powerful quantum computers arrive. The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) advises that the ECDSA algorithm should be phased out starting in 2030 and fully deprecated by 2035; Google has set 2029 as the deadline for its internal systems to switch to quantum-resistant encryption technology. The arrival of quantum technology capable of breaking Ethereum's encryption algorithms is faster than previously anticipated by the market.
The core solution is to replace the existing signature algorithms with hash-based cryptography, which can resist quantum attacks. Furthermore, 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 offered a $1 million prize for verifying the security of hash functions.
According to the "Strawmap" plan, the transition will span multiple hard forks. It starts with supporting pre-registration of quantum-resistant public keys, followed sequentially by updating validator voting signatures, the transaction layer, and the data layer. The goal is to build an L1 network based on hash cryptography by 2029. If the plan proceeds smoothly, Ethereum will still be able to safeguard assets when 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 full transaction history via its address. For individuals, this poses a privacy risk; for companies wanting to issue salaries or pay suppliers on-chain, public transaction information directly hinders application adoption.
The L1 privacy solution aims to implement shielded transfers, putting currently completely public transactions—like postcards—into sealed envelopes. The sender, receiver, and transaction amount are hidden from external view, 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, with privacy transformation being a particularly significant part of it.
According to "Strawmap," privacy infrastructure could be implemented as early as the Hegotá hard fork. The next upgrade phase will transform the transaction mempool, encrypting transaction content before it goes on-chain. Among the five goals, the privacy-related plans are the most vague in detail and are highly subject to regulatory environmental influences, making them the most uncertain. Even so, Ethereum including native L1 privacy in its official roadmap for the first time is a significant shift in itself.
Conclusion: Ethereum Four Years From Now
The five North Star goals are summarized concisely as follows:
- Fast L1: Transaction finality time reduced from 15 minutes to a few seconds; block interval decreased from 12 seconds to 4 seconds.
- 1 Billion Gas L1: ZK proofs replace the re-execution mechanism; L1 processes 1 billion Gas per second, throughput increased by ~200x.
- Trillion-Gas L2: L2 data carrying capacity scaled to 1 GB per second, supporting numerous Rollups running in parallel.
- Quantum-Resistant L1: Signature system switched to hash-based cryptography, calmly facing quantum computing impact.
- Privacy-Native L1: Hiding transaction information while proving compliance, becoming a standard feature of Ethereum.
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 gap. In June 2026, Ethlabs was formally established, a non-profit R&D institution supported by Ethereum ecosystem companies and Ethereum co-founder Joseph Lubin; a week later, Ethereum Institutional, founded by former Foundation corporate team members, emerged. Ethereum is evolving towards a purer open-source system, with a small foundation collaborating with numerous independent organizations to jointly drive development.
Of course, none of these plans are guaranteed to be implemented 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 continue to be adjusted through discussions between researchers and the community.
Regardless of the final implementation form, Ethereum will still be the world's most neutral, trustless, general-purpose computation network. "Strawmap" clearly sets the goal: to become faster, more capable, and more secure while preserving its core positioning.
