Original author: Jang Hyuk-soo
Original 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 upgrades such as Shapella, Dencun, Pectra, and Fusaka. Ethereum is constantly iterating. If you plan to invest in Ethereum or build applications on it, it is crucial to understand its long-term evolution goals.
In 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 Ethereum's scattered research directions, retaining only the core necessary modules to form a unified development blueprint. Think of it as a ten-year-old house: the exterior remains unchanged, but the foundation, pipes, and wiring have been replaced.
In February 2026, this vision materialized into a draft document called "Strawmap." As the name suggests, it is only a framework draft, not a final plan. The community continues to discuss, and the document is constantly updated; it was revised again on June 26. The latest version plans hard forks from the Glamsterdam upgrade in the second half of 2026 through 2029, and clarifies that all upgrades ultimately point to five development goals, referred to as the North Star goals.
This article revolves around the five North Star goals, depicting the outlook for Ethereum four years later, 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 result cannot be rolled back. The approximately 880,000 validators on the network cannot vote uniformly on each block; collecting and processing massive signatures at once exceeds the network's capacity. Therefore, Ethereum divides validators into 32 groups that vote in turns, and finality requires completing two full voting cycles.
The lean consensus mechanism will eliminate this bottleneck using zero-knowledge proofs (ZK proofs). 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 votes 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. The 12 seconds are 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 set in 2020, when the beacon chain (Ethereum's proof-of-stake consensus layer) was designed primarily for home devices and low-speed networks. Now, client software and global network conditions have greatly improved, and actual measurements show that each phase takes much less time than the preset upper limit. Based on this, the plan is to shorten the block time from 12 seconds to 6 seconds in 2027–2028. In 2029–2030, the lean consensus mechanism will be implemented, along with a new generation of peer-to-peer communication protocols, greatly improving the efficiency of block and vote information propagation, further reducing the block time to 4 seconds.
With a block interval of 4 seconds, the average waiting time from user transaction initiation to execution completion is about 2 seconds. Combined with faster finality, the entire process of transaction initiation, execution, and 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. Lowering the barrier allows more users to directly participate in network governance. Ethereum's goal in 2030 is to be faster while being more decentralized, enabling more people to participate in the consensus process.
Gigagas L1: 1 Billion Gas Throughput Per Second
The second North Star goal is throughput capacity. Gas is the unit of computation on Ethereum. Currently, the Ethereum L1 network processes about 5 million gas per second, with a long-term goal of reaching 1 billion gas per second (gigagas), increasing mainnet throughput by about 200 times.
The biggest obstacle comes from the re-execution mechanism, a basic verification mode for blockchains. After a new block is produced, thousands of nodes worldwide need to independently re-run all transactions in the block. It's like a student calculating an answer, and the entire class redoing the calculation to verify the result. This mechanism ensures the trustworthiness of a decentralized network but also creates a long-standing problem: 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 is again zero-knowledge proofs. The node that packages the block also submits a mathematical proof confirming that all transactions in 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, and even a mobile device can do it. Applying this scheme to L1 block verification is the 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 re-execution in parallel with ZK proofs, with the proof mechanism as an option. In 2028–2029, it will switch to mandatory proof mode, where blocks are verified solely by ZK proofs. At this stage, no matter how many transactions a block contains, the verification burden on nodes will no longer increase. This supports continuously raising the gas limit, ultimately sprinting toward the goal of 1 billion gas per second.
For ordinary users, this means that wallets (on phones or 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: A High-Speed Data Channel Supporting Massive Rollups
The third North Star goal targets Layer 2 networks (L2). L2 executes transactions outside the Ethereum mainnet, only uploading the final transaction data to L1, inheriting L1's security. The space on L1 specifically used to store such data is called Blob, and the total Blob capacity determines the throughput limit of 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 foundation for large-scale expansion of Blob capacity. The Glamsterdam upgrade candidate will further optimize Blob network transmission and storage efficiency. The "Strawmap" plans to steadily expand data capacity year by year, ultimately achieving a data bandwidth of 1 GB per second, supporting a trillion-gas-scale L2 ecosystem. The bandwidth is sufficient to transmit data equivalent to a high-definition video every few seconds.
This roadmap clearly defines Ethereum's division of labor. Even if all upgrades are implemented, the L1 network throughput will still have structural limits compared to high-performance blockchains like Solana. Applications pursuing ultra-high performance will access the Ethereum ecosystem through independent L2 networks.
Robinhood Chain is a typical example. Robinhood launched its own Ethereum L2 network to host tokenized stock trading, fully inheriting Ethereum's security while independently handling various business needs on L2, including compliance-related arrangements.
Therefore, Ethereum in 2030 will form a large settlement network landscape: L1 is responsible for final settlement and security, while multiple L2 networks each perform their own functions, deeply optimized for different business scenarios.
Quantum-Resistant L1 Network: Unfazed by Quantum Computing Threats
The fourth North Star goal is to achieve quantum resistance. Ethereum's current signature schemes—wallets use the ECDSA algorithm, and validators use the BLS algorithm—will be broken once a sufficiently powerful quantum computer emerges. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has indicated that the ECDSA algorithm should be phased out starting in 2030 and fully banned by 2035; Google has set 2029 as the deadline for switching internal systems to quantum-resistant encryption. The arrival of quantum technology capable of breaking Ethereum's encryption algorithms is faster than the market previously expected.
The core solution is to replace existing signature algorithms with hash-based cryptography, which can resist quantum attacks. Additionally, hash signatures are highly compatible with ZK proofs, aligning with the technical route 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 spans multiple hard forks. First, pre-registered quantum-resistant public keys will be supported, followed by transformations of validator voting signatures, the transaction layer, and the data layer. It is expected that by 2029, an L1 network based on hash-based cryptography will be built. If the plan goes smoothly, Ethereum will still be able to protect asset security in the era of quantum computing.
Privacy-Native L1 Network: Transaction Privacy as a Basic Capability
The last North Star goal is a capability Ethereum has never had. Currently, all Ethereum transactions are publicly visible on the network; anyone can query account balances and all historical transfer records through an address. For individuals, this poses a privacy risk; for enterprises wanting to pay salaries or supplier payments on-chain, public transaction information directly hinders application adoption.
The L1 privacy solution aims to achieve shielded transfers, putting transactions that are currently as open as postcards into sealed envelopes. The sender, receiver, and transaction amount are hidden, while ZK proofs confirm to the network that the transaction complies with rules. ZK proofs run through Ethereum's entire upgrade path, and privacy transformation is a significant part of it.
According to the "Strawmap," privacy infrastructure could be implemented as early as the Hegotá hard fork, with the next phase upgrading the transaction mempool to encrypt transaction content before it goes on-chain. Among the five goals, the privacy-related plan is the most vague and highly influenced by the regulatory environment, making it the most uncertain. Nevertheless, Ethereum's inclusion of L1 native privacy in the official roadmap for the first time is a major shift.
Conclusion: Ethereum Four Years Later
The five North Star goals are summarized as follows:
- Fast L1: Transaction finality reduced from 15 minutes to seconds, block interval decreased from 12 seconds to 4 seconds;
- Billion-level Gas L1: ZK proofs replace repeated execution, L1 processes 1 billion Gas per second, throughput increased by about 200 times;
- Trillion-level Gas L2: L2 data capacity expanded to 1GB per second, supporting parallel operation of numerous Rollups;
- Quantum-resistant L1: Signature scheme switched to hash-based cryptography, resilient to quantum computing threats;
- Privacy-native L1: Transaction information hidden while proving compliance, becoming a standard Ethereum feature.
The entities driving the roadmap are also changing. The Ethereum Foundation recently laid off about 20% of its staff, with functions gradually shrinking, and many new institutions filling the ecosystem gaps. In June 2026, Ethlabs was officially established, a non-profit R&D organization supported by Ethereum ecosystem enterprises and Ethereum co-founder Joseph Lubin; a week later, Ethereum Institutional, founded by former foundation enterprise team members, emerged. Ethereum is evolving towards a purer open-source system, with a small foundation and numerous independent institutions jointly driving development.
Of course, all plans are not guaranteed to be implemented 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 of 2026 to the second half. 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 form, Ethereum will remain the world's most neutral, trustless general-purpose computing network. "Strawmap" clearly sets the goal: to become faster, more scalable, and more secure while retaining its core positioning.
