I sometimes find the Ethereum roadmap a bit unclear.

Not because there isn’t a plan. There clearly is.

It’s that everything seems to be happening at once. Multiple teams spinning up. New initiatives. Core protocol work. L1 scaling. Institutional pushes. Treasury changes.

And it’s all moving in parallel.

What I struggle with is the timing. What actually lands first? What meaningfully compounds? What matters this year versus three years from now?

I saw this clip from TBPN the other day with the Collison brothers and it made me pause for a second:

Will Ethereum scale fast enough?

Now to be clear, they’re building Tempo, a high-throughput chain designed around exactly that narrative. And crypto has seen this play before. The road of “Ethereum killers” is littered with ambitious projects that were supposed to replace it.

Tempo isn’t even live yet, so comparing it to a network that has been running since 2015 is a bit premature.

Still, the broader question is a fair one.

Where does Ethereum actually stand today? And where is it going?

Over the past year Ethereum has quietly undergone one of the biggest structural shifts in its history. Leadership changed, the protocol roadmap tightened, and several long standing debates about scaling and L2 architecture were resolved.

2025 was a defining year for the Ethereum Foundation.

After a stretch that felt stagnant, something shifted. When Tomasz Stanczak and Hsiao-Wei Wang were appointed co-Executive Directors, the tone changed quickly. There was urgency. There was clarity. It felt like Ethereum was trying to win again.

The messaging became sharper. Execution accelerated. Priorities tightened.

New teams formed. Research aligned more closely with shipping. The foundation felt coordinated again.

Our podcast with Tomasz:

After a supercharged year of execution, Tomasz stepped down, leaving behind an organization that looks materially different from the one he inherited. Now Bastion Aue joins Wang as co-lead.

If 2025 restored focus, 2026 is about compounding it.

One of the biggest structural shifts was the commitment to two upgrades per year going forward. Instead of cramming everything into one massive annual fork, Ethereum moved to a more predictable cadence with smaller, focused upgrades.

2025 was the first real proof point of that strategy working in practice, with two successful hard forks: Pectra and Fusaka.

On May 7, 2025 Ethereum activated the Pectra Upgrade, a significant network hard fork that:

This upgrade was one of the biggest structural changes since Dencun and laid groundwork for better L2 performance and UX improvements.

On December 3, 2025 Ethereum rolled out its second major 2025 hard fork, Fusaka. It introduced powerful scaling and infrastructure improvements, including:

This upgrade was aimed at making Ethereum more scalable and easier to participate in as a validator, especially for rollup ecosystems.

Ethereum was in real danger of losing Wall Street.

For a while, it wasn’t even in the room.

That started to change with the formation of Etherealize.

The team, led by Vivek Raman, Danny Ryan, Zach Obront, and Grant Hummer, began with a clear mandate: bring institutional focus and credibility back to Ethereum.

But it quickly became clear this wasn’t just about better messaging to banks.

The scope expanded.

Part of what they’re working on remains undisclosed, and there are strong signals that something more structural is being built. They have not been explicit about it yet, but this feels less like outreach and more like infrastructure.

If tokenization becomes the next serious battleground for crypto’s relevance to capital markets, Etherealize looks increasingly positioned to play a central role.

This is one of my favorite blog posts from Vivek Raman called: Etherealize The World.

We also did a podcast with Vivek and Danny about a year ago if you want to check it out:

DATs were one of the wildest crypto arcs to emerge in 2025.

Sharplink, led by Joe Lubin, was first out of the gate with a clear mandate: accumulate and hold ETH as a strategic treasury asset.

Shortly after, Tom Lee acquired Bitmine and effectively turned it into an ETH black hole.

As of today:

Combined, that is 5,341,836 ETH.

That represents roughly 4.4% of the total ETH supply. I’ll say it again, Tom and Joe accumulated 4.4% of all ETH in under a year.

Tom Lee aims to have 5% of ETH. At first, this seemed unlikely, but now I'm wondering if he'll go beyond 5%. 👀

We also had BlackRock’s former digital asset architect and now Sharplink CEO, Joe Chalom, on our podcast:

Lean Ethereum was officially unveiled in July of 2025 on Ethereum’s 10th anniversary. Lean is basically a formal long-term design philosophy.

Think this image of the evolution of SpaceX Raptor engine. Doing more with less:

Core themes:

This is effectively a 5 to 10 year directional reset.

A small shoutout to the new Ethereum Foundation media team, especially Lou3e. The quality of content they’re putting out lately has been exceptional.

I nearly gave the media team its own category. That’s how strong it’s been.

Example below showcasing the genesis of Lean Ethereum:

The Official Treasury Policy, published on June 4, 2025, felt like another major momentum shift.

For years, the Ethereum Foundation had operated more like a passive steward. This policy signaled something different. It signaled intent.

Key changes included:

This was culturally significant.

The EF stopped behaving like a static foundation and more like a capital allocator aligned with the ecosystem it supports.

And they’ve already begun executing.

At roughly a 3% staking yield, 70,000 ETH would generate about $4.4 million annually at current prices. That won’t materially change the foundation’s operating budget. It likely funds a small team, not the institution.

But the number itself isn’t the story.

The story is that the EF is no longer treating its ETH as inert reserves. It’s treating it as productive capital.

What may become even more interesting over time is whether the EF ever borrows modestly against that staked ETH to fund operations. That would signal a deeper evolution: not just staking for yield, but actively managing a balance sheet in a capital-efficient way. 👀

In June 2025 the EF streamlined into a tighter Protocol team with focused goals.

Why it matters:

This was one of the biggest internal shifts in years.

The original goals from this were:

The EF now has a dedicated DeFi team and is engaging much more actively at the app layer to support founders. It also feels like a meaningful shift, with DeFi finally being validated by the EF as one of Ethereum’s core areas of product market fit.

There are now so many strong DeFi operators inside the EF, from Ivan (former Gearbox), Charles (Delv/Maker) and James, who we’ve had on the pod:

With AI advancing exponentially, any timeline for a meaningful quantum computing threat now feels like a best guess.

Thankfully, the EF is treating this as a strategic priority rather than a distant research topic, establishing a dedicated post-quantum team in January 2026 to address the risks head on.

Vitalik outlines the key vulnerabilities and the concrete steps being taken to mitigate them:

Here’s a recent clip of Vitalik addressing the urgency for quantum:

On October 1, 2025 a lot of the messaging around privacy evolved and it was clear that privacy was going to be a major focus for the future of Ethereum.

Here’s an excerpt straight from their blog:

Ethereum is positioning itself for an agentic future.

Davide Crapis recently stepped in as the Ethereum Foundation’s AI lead, helping drive early work around decentralized AI and agent coordination on Ethereum. The broader goal is straightforward: ensure Ethereum remains a credible base layer for the kinds of autonomous systems and machine-to-machine commerce many believe are coming.

It’s still early, but it’s another signal that Ethereum is thinking about how its infrastructure fits into an increasingly AI-driven world. We’ll be digging into this much deeper in an upcoming podcast with Davide.

Recently, on January 3, 2026 Vitalik himself stated that the trilemma has been solved:

What is the Trilemma?

The blockchain trilemma is the idea that a blockchain can only strongly optimize for two out of three of these properties at the same time: Decentralization, Security and Scalability.

This was Vitalik signaling that Ethereum now has the pieces in place to scale the L1 without sacrificing security or decentralization.

One morning Vitalik seemed to rip the band-aid off: the original L2 roadmap was not progressing as intended, at least not in a way fully aligned with Ethereum’s long term values.

This ties back to his tweet a month earlier claiming the trilemma had effectively been solved. With a clearer path to scaling L1 faster than expected while preserving decentralization, the assumptions underpinning the rollup-centric vision no longer held in the same way.

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Now that we’re caught up on the innovations of the past year and change, we can shift our focus forward.

What is actually on the near term horizon? And what sits further out? When will things get noticeably faster.

Because not everything compounds at the same speed.

But first, let’s take stock of where Ethereum currently stands within the broader blockchain ecosystem.

For all the “ETH killers” and endless predictions of Ethereum’s demise over the years, it certainly seems to be doing pretty well as the bulk of TVL still resides on Ethereum L1:

Daily transactions are going parabolic:

All while gas prices are currently near the lowest levels in the network’s history and most actions can now be done for sub $0.5:

Ethereum is already emerging as the early leader in tokenization, but the race is only beginning:

There’s more metrics to point to, but there’s also intangibles that are very hard to measure. We did a podcast with William Mougayar called You’re valuing Ethereum Wrong (and here’s why) that dives deeper into this. We discuss this in more detail in our podcast with the Electric Capital team, where we talk about Ethereum’s nearly 10 years of uninterrupted uptime and its unique multi-client architecture.

Ethereum has already won the most foundational vertical in finance: borrowing and lending. The deepest credit markets in crypto continue to live on Ethereum and its ecosystem.

But other categories, particularly trading and the emerging world of agentic commerce, demand far higher throughput and much lower latency.

If Ethereum wants to compete across those fronts, it will need to become significantly faster and cheaper.

Let’s look at how that might evolve over the coming years.

As mentioned earlier, Ethereum now has two updates every year.

The updates planned for 2026 are Glamsterdam and Hegota but what are they and what do they do? Why should we care as users or possibly holders of the ETH token?

If you have 3 minutes to spare, this is a great primer breaking down both Glamsterdam and Hegota:

TL;DR

What This Actually Means (And What Users Will Notice)

• Blocks are built directly on Ethereum
Today many blocks are built using outside relay networks. Glamsterdam moves this process into Ethereum itself.
→ Result: fewer dependencies on third parties and a more decentralized network.

• Transactions can be verified in parallel
Instead of checking transactions one-by-one, validators can verify parts of a block at the same time.
→ Result: faster processing and higher throughput.

• Ethereum can use more of each block’s time window
Each block has about 12 seconds to be created and verified. Glamsterdam makes it safer to use more of that time.
→ Result: more transactions can fit into each block.

• Gas pricing gets smarter
Actions that grow Ethereum’s permanent database become more expensive, while normal computation becomes relatively cheaper.
→ Result: leaner smart contracts and more room for execution capacity.

• Ethereum begins separating different types of gas costs
Instead of one single gas bucket, Ethereum starts splitting costs between computation and state growth.
→ Result: Ethereum can scale activity without the network’s database exploding in size.

• Lower gas fees
Efficiency improvements mean transactions should cost significantly less.
→ Result: cheaper transfers and cheaper DeFi interactions.

• Lower hardware requirements to run nodes
Running validators and nodes will require less bandwidth.
→ Result: more people can participate in securing the network.

What It Sets Up Long-Term

Glamsterdam also lays groundwork for future scaling upgrades:

• ZK-based validation to verify blocks faster
• Better blob scaling for rollups and L2s
• A path to scaling Ethereum’s base layer significantly while staying decentralized

TL;DR

What This Actually Means (And What Users Will Notice)

• Ethereum reorganizes how it stores data
Ethereum currently stores a massive database of accounts, smart contracts, and balances that grows every year. Hegota introduces Verkle Trees, a much more efficient way to structure that data.
→ Result: faster verification and lower storage requirements for nodes.

• Old blockchain data can eventually be archived
Today Ethereum’s state grows indefinitely. Hegota introduces mechanisms that allow old data to be expired or archived.
→ Result: the network does not become impossibly large over time.

• Running a node becomes easier
Because the database becomes more efficient, nodes require less storage and hardware.
→ Result: more people can run nodes, improving decentralization.

• Faster syncing for new nodes
New nodes will be able to verify the chain without downloading the full historical state.
→ Result: nodes can sync much faster.

• Additional execution optimizations
Developers are also exploring improvements that make smart contract execution more efficient.
→ Result: better performance for apps and DeFi.

What It Sets Up Long Term

Hegota is primarily about fixing Ethereum’s long term data scaling problem.

It lays the groundwork for:

• Stateless clients that can verify Ethereum with far less data
• Lower hardware requirements for validators and nodes
• A network that can scale for decades without becoming too heavy to run

To summarize:

Here it is. At first glance it can feel a bit confusing and intimidating, partly because it’s designed for a more technical audience.

If you’re like me, you might have wondered what this even is or how a normal person is supposed to make sense of a chart like this.

I went to 3 sources to try to make sense of it:

TL;DR

On February 25th Ethereum researcher Justin Drake published something called the Strawmap. It’s essentially a rough roadmap for how Ethereum could evolve through the rest of the decade.

From what I’ve read it’s not an official plan, and it’s not guaranteed to happen exactly as written. The idea is more to show one plausible path forward. Ethereum upgrades itself through forks roughly every six months, and the Strawmap sketches out how those upgrades could gradually replace major parts of the system while the network continues operating.

If it plays out even partially as envisioned, Ethereum could look very different by the end of the decade.

So the natural question becomes:

When does Ethereum actually get faster?

Here’s the simplified timeline.

Forks:
Glamsterdam
Hegotá

The first steps of the Strawmap begin with Glamsterdam and Hegotá, which start improving how Ethereum builds and processes blocks.

As discussed earlier, these upgrades focus on efficiency, block construction, and preparing the protocol for larger scaling improvements down the road.

From a performance standpoint, Ethereum still looks similar to today:

• ~15–30 TPS on mainnet
• ~12 second block times
• ~13–15 minute finality

The real speed improvements come later.

Forks:
I*
J*

If curious about I* and J* see here from Justin’s original X post:

This is where Ethereum starts speeding up how quickly the network produces blocks and reaches consensus.

Slot times begin compressing, moving from today’s 12 seconds toward roughly 8 seconds and eventually closer to 6 seconds.

Blocks arrive faster, transactions confirm more quickly, and the network begins to feel more responsive.

Execution capacity on mainnet could start moving toward something like:

~100–300 transactions per second equivalent capacity

Still not massive, but clearly an improvement over today.

Forks:
K*
L*

This is where the roadmap becomes much more ambitious.

Ethereum begins leaning more heavily on zero knowledge proofs to verify blocks and improve execution efficiency.

At the same time, consensus continues to speed up and block times shrink further.

If these upgrades land successfully, Ethereum could start pushing toward something like:

~1,000+ transactions per second on mainnet

For many applications, this is where Ethereum begins to feel fast enough for large scale financial infrastructure.

Fork:
M*

This stage aims to reach the Strawmap’s major targets.

Ethereum could reach roughly:

• ~10,000 TPS on mainnet (1 gigagas per second)
• Finality measured in seconds instead of minutes
• Massive Layer 2 scaling into the millions of TPS
• Post-quantum cryptography upgrades
• Native private transactions

At that point, Ethereum would operate very differently under the hood even though it’s still the same network that has been running since 2015.

The Strawmap isn’t about launching a brand new version of Ethereum.

It’s about rebuilding the system while it’s still running.

If the roadmap plays out even partially as planned, the Ethereum of the late 2020s could be dramatically faster, more scalable, and more capable than the network we use today.

At times the Ethereum Foundation has faced criticism for the pace of its upgrades and for behaving more like a research institution than a fast-moving startup. When Justin Drake first introduced the concept of the Beam Chain (now often referred to as Lean Ethereum), the timeline quickly became a topic of debate on X. Some of that criticism was probably unfair. But to be fair, the EF has also historically leaned into long research cycles, which at times made it an easy target.

Then again, that may simply be the price you pay for building a system that has now run for over a decade without interruption.

What people often miss, though, is how much development is happening in parallel, and how much progress comes through incremental improvements rather than one giant leap.

Ethereum is not waiting until some distant milestone to suddenly become better. The protocol improves continuously. Ethereum in 2026 will be better than it was in 2025. Ethereum in 2027 will be better than 2026, and so on.

All of these upgrades stack.

Execution becomes more efficient. Data availability expands. Validator operations get streamlined. Block construction improves. Each upgrade compounds the previous one.

The mistake many critics make is anchoring on the final destination. They look at a roadmap that stretches to something like 2029 and assume nothing meaningful happens until then.

But that is not how Ethereum evolves.

If you only focus on the endpoint, sure, it can feel far away. But zoom out for a second. 2029 is only ~3 years away, and between now and then there are multiple protocol upgrades, each pushing throughput higher, lowering costs, and improving decentralization.

The reality is that Ethereum is not moving slowly. It is moving deliberately, and in many cases multiple parts of the system are improving simultaneously.

By the time the full vision materializes, the network will already have been meaningfully better for years.

I know this is crypto and we are technically not allowed to suggest anything might arrive earlier than scheduled. The running joke in the industry is that every roadmap slips and every timeline stretches. But I do think there are legitimate reasons to believe that the Ethereum Foundation could deliver parts of this roadmap either on time or potentially faster than what has been laid out.

Why do I think that?

For one, the progress around zk upgrades seems to have surprised even the people closest to the roadmap. If you have followed the conversations from both Vitalik and Justin Drake, it almost feels like the zk timeline itself got pulled forward. Depending on who you talk to, some pieces of the roadmap look like they may have moved ahead by two to five years compared to what people originally expected.

And then there is the broader environment we are operating in.

We are now firmly in the age of exponential AI progress, and that is not going unnoticed inside the Ethereum ecosystem. The people designing these systems are very aware that the development environment they are building in today looks very different from even a couple years ago.

A good example of this came from an experiment someone ran with the proposed 2030 roadmap, shortly before the Strawmap discussions circulated.

Using AI assisted coding, they built an experimental Ethereum client that attempted to implement the entire proposed 2030+ roadmap inside a single codebase just to see if all of the pieces actually work together. You can check out the full piece here.

Think of it as a proof of concept stress test for Ethereum’s future architecture. The goal was not to ship production software, but to see whether all of the proposed upgrades technically compose together and where the major engineering risks might appear before teams spend years building full clients.

Why is that relevant to speed?

Because tools like this did not really exist a few years ago. The ability to rapidly prototype complex systems, test assumptions, and surface design conflicts early is improving dramatically. That shortens feedback loops, and shorter feedback loops often translate into faster development cycles.

Vitalik himself responded to the experiment and dropped a pretty interesting comment:

That is a pretty notable statement. The person who spends more time thinking about Ethereum’s long term architecture than almost anyone is openly acknowledging that the roadmap could move faster than expected.

And it is not just Vitalik hinting at this.

Justin Drake, who helped architect the Strawmap itself, also left the door open to a compressed timeline. The current version of the roadmap assumes development primarily driven by humans, but the tooling environment is clearly changing:

Put those pieces together and a reasonable possibility starts to emerge.

The roadmap we are looking at today may actually be the conservative version.

My personal view is that a lot of this gets delivered faster than people currently anticipate. Not because Ethereum suddenly abandons its careful approach to security, but because the tools available to researchers and developers are improving at an incredible pace.

And if that continues, the distance between today and Ethereum’s long term vision may turn out to be shorter than it looks.

If you zoom out, Ethereum doesn’t really evolve through one big breakthrough. It evolves through a steady series of upgrades that gradually reshape the system.

New teams form. People from all over the world come together to help contribute. Research turns into code. Hard forks land every six months. Each one improves a different piece of the protocol. On their own the changes can seem incremental, but over time they begin to compound.

The Ethereum we use today already looks very different from the one that launched in 2015. And if the current roadmap unfolds the way many of its architects expect, the network running later this decade will look very different again.

Not because of one dramatic moment, but because years of upgrades quietly stacking on top of each other. Possibly arriving sooner than many people expect.

DISCLAIMER: Nothing written in The Edge Newsletter or said on The Edge Podcast is a recommendation to buy or sell tokens or securities. This content is for educational and entertainment purposes only. Nothing shared here is financial advice. Any views expressed in our content are solely the opinion of that writer, host, or guest. Always do your own research. DeFi Dad, Nomatic, and guests may have positions in the assets or other matters discussed in this content.