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Ethereum is currently at an inflection point that has little to do with price and everything to do with execution.
After years of shipping transformational upgrades on timelines that stretched far beyond original estimates, the network delivered two hard forks in a single calendar year for the first time since the Merge. It restructured its foundation, replaced its leadership, and quietly began rebuilding the institutional credibility it had spent much of 2024 and 2025 losing.
On Feb. 26, 2026, Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake published a document called “Strawmap” on X. It introduces what he described as a strawman roadmap for Ethereum’s Layer-1 (L1) future. The document maps seven protocol upgrades through the end of 2029 along a single visual timeline, listing dependencies, headliner features, and five long-term technical north stars.
Drake was quick to clarify what it is not: an official roadmap, a binding commitment, or a consensus view. Even within the EF Protocol team, competing perspectives exist. What the Strawmap does offer is something Ethereum has rarely had: a single, honest picture of how the next four years of base-layer development could fit together.
Introducing strawmap, a strawman roadmap by EF Protocol.
Believe in something. Believe in an Ethereum strawmap.
Who is this for?
The document, available at strawmap[.]org, is intended for advanced readers. It is a dense and technical resource primarily for researchers,… pic.twitter.com/gIZh5I8Not
— Justin Drake (@drakefjustin) February 25, 2026
The timing matters. Ethereum enters 2026 having survived its most turbulent institutional year since the DAO hack, shipped two hard forks, and with ETH still trading far below its late-2021 highs. The Strawmap lands in that environment as a signal: the protocol is building, even when the price is not cooperating.
Drake named the document by combining the words “strawman” and “roadmap.” The strawman label does real work here. It signals that the EF Protocol team published a coherent but explicitly provisional path, one they expect the community to interrogate, challenge, and ultimately reshape through open debate. The document originates from an EF workshop held in Jan. 2026, and the EF Architecture team plans to update it at least quarterly.
The Strawmap structures itself around five long-term north stars:
Together, these five goals describe a version of Ethereum that is substantially faster, massively more scalable, quantum-resistant, and privacy-native.
Buterin publicly endorsed the document, calling it “a very important document” and adding detailed technical commentary on the slot-time reduction path, which he described as following a square root of two formula: 12 to 8 to 6 to 4 to 3 seconds, with the final steps toward 2 seconds depending on further research and network propagation improvements.
The Strawmap assumes the biannual upgrade cadence Ethereum established in 2025 holds through the end of the decade, producing seven hard forks from now through 2029.
The two immediate forks in the Strawmap are Glamsterdam, targeted for H1 2026, and Hegota, targeted for H2 2026. Both are already in active planning by Ethereum’s All Core Developers.
Glamsterdam’s headliner Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) include key features like:
Hegota, whose name combines “Bogota” for the execution layer and “Heze” for the consensus layer, remains in the early scoping stage. Verkle Trees have emerged as the leading candidate for its headliner EIP.
Verkle Trees replace Ethereum’s current Merkle Patricia Tree structure with a more efficient cryptographic data structure that dramatically reduces the amount of data validators need to store and verify, making it easier for solo stakers and smaller operators to run nodes. This directly supports the Strawmap’s vision of a healthier, more decentralized validator set.
The Strawmap visualizes forks three through seven as spanning 2027 through 2029. These later forks carry the heaviest technical ambitions, including the slot time reductions. Buterin described the shift to post-quantum cryptography via hash-based signature schemes and the introduction of native privacy features.
The Strawmap does not exist in isolation. It represents the clearest public synthesis yet of where multiple parallel threads in Ethereum’s ecosystem are heading simultaneously.
The Ethereum Foundation entered 2025 under significant community pressure. Critics accused the organization of strategic drift, slow execution, and a leadership that lacked urgency. The debate spilled into public view under the framing of calls for a “wartime CEO” to replace then-executive director Aya Miyaguchi.
The resulting restructuring was the most significant since the EF’s founding. Miyaguchi moved into the role of president, and the foundation appointed Hsiao-Wei Wang and Tomasz K. Stańczak as co-executive directors. The foundation also established Etherealize, a new narrative and marketing unit led by former EF researcher Danny Ryan.
That restructuring produced a noticeably more output-oriented EF. Pectra shipped in May 2025, delivering EIP-7702, account abstraction that lets regular wallets behave like smart contract wallets, and expanded blob throughput. Fusaka followed in December 2025, shipping PeerDAS and expanding the block gas limit to 150 million. For the first time since the Merge, Ethereum shipped two major hard forks in a single year. The Strawmap is the clearest statement yet that the EF intends to hold that pace through 2029.
The Teragas L2 north star speaks directly to one of the sharpest criticisms Ethereum faced through 2024 and 2025: that its rollup-centric scaling strategy produced massive throughput on L2 networks but at the cost of a fragmented user experience.
Moving between Arbitrum, Optimism, Base, and other rollups currently requires bridges, distinct wallets, and mismatched tooling. The EF responded in 2025 with the Ethereum Interoperability Layer (EIL) and the Open Intents Framework, which allow users to declare a desired outcome across rollups while solvers handle the routing complexity underneath.
The Strawmap’s L2 north star reinforces this direction. Teragas-scale data availability sampling at L1 gives L2 networks the data throughput they need to scale to millions of TPS. At the same time, the interoperability work aims to make all of that feel like a single coherent chain to end users.
The Post-Quantum L1 north star stands out as Ethereum moves closer to active quantum policy discussions. While Bitcoin’s BIP-360 debate questions whether quantum resistance is premature or urgent, the Strawmap treats it as a concrete engineering problem with a defined fork window.
Ethereum’s current cryptography relies on elliptic-curve signatures (secp256k1), a known target for quantum attacks via Shor’s algorithm. By anchoring a shift to hash-based schemes within specific forks, the EF frames post-quantum readiness as a sequenced upgrade, not a theoretical debate. With NIST finalizing standards in 2024 and the US mandating ECDSA phase-out by 2035, Ethereum is positioning ahead of the curve.
The Private L1 north star carries weight beyond its technical specification. Every transaction on Ethereum today is fully public: amounts, senders, and recipients are permanently visible on-chain. Shielded ETH transfers would let users send value without broadcasting those details to the world, treating privacy as a first-class protocol primitive rather than something layered on through application-level mixing solutions.
Drake framed the private L1 goal explicitly as a values statement. Ethereum can choose to make privacy native at the base layer if the ecosystem accepts the trade-offs that entail it. The Strawmap makes that choice visible and forces the community to have the conversation now rather than later.
Ethereum has spent the past two years answering critics with shipped code, not promises. Pectra and Fusaka showed the foundation can execute on a biannual cadence. The real question now is whether it can sustain that pace across seven forks, amid market pressure, L2 competition, and constant scrutiny.
The five north stars define what Ethereum is building toward, but delivering 2-second slots, tera-scale data, quantum resistance, and native privacy by 2029 depends entirely on execution.
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