The Ethereum Foundation just released a roadmap that says it is building for the next decade, not surviving the current quarter.
The document, called a “straw map” and published Wednesday by EF researcher Justin Drake, lays out a plan for seven hard forks through 2029. Hard forks are network-wide software upgrades where each node must upgrade or fall behind, making them the highest risk type of change Ethereum can make.
Introducing the Straw Map, a roadmap from EF Protocol.
Believe in something. Believe in an Ethereum straw map.
Who is this for?
The document, available on Strawmap.[.]org, is intended for advanced readers. It is a dense and technical resource mainly for researchers,… pic.twitter.com/gIZh5I8Not
-Justin Drake (@drakefjustin) February 25, 2026
The plan is organized around five goals that the team describes as “northern stars.” These include a faster Layer 1 with transaction finality in seconds; dramatically higher Layer 1 performance, capable of around 10,000 transactions per second (known as “gigabyte” scale); Layer 2 networks achieving “teragas” performance levels, or approximately 10 million TPS; post-quantum cryptography; and built-in privacy through protected ETH transfers.
L1 refers to the base layer of Ethereum, the main blockchain. L2s are networks like Arbitrum and Optimism that run on top of Ethereum, processing transactions more cheaply before returning them to L1. “Gigagas” and “teragas” describe performance targets measured in gas, Ethereum’s unit of computational work.
Think of gas as fuel. Right now the network burns a limited amount per second. The roadmap wants to increase that by orders of magnitude, pushing L1 to handle 10,000 transactions per second and giving L2s the data bandwidth to reach 10 million.
Finality is where things become most tangible. When a transaction is “final” on Ethereum, it means that the network has collectively agreed that it happened and that it cannot be reversed.
Today, that process takes approximately 16 minutes. The roadmap plans to compress that to just 8 seconds through a new consensus mechanism called Minimmit, a type of algorithm that reaches an agreement in a single round of voting instead of the multiple rounds used today.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin called the document “very important” and discussed the final improvements in detail.
Ethereum’s slot time, the fixed interval at which the network produces new blocks, is currently 12 seconds. The plan would reduce that step by step to 8, 6, 4 and potentially even 2 seconds, with each reduction determined by confidence in the network’s security.
Buterin compared the approach to how Ethereum already adjusts other network parameters, treating slot time as a dial to turn rather than a fixed number.
A very important document. Let’s go over this “goal” at once. We will start with fast slots and a fast finality.
I hope we reduce slot time incrementally, for example. I like the “sqrt(2) at a time” formula (12 -> 8 -> 6 -> 4 -> 3 -> 2, although the last two… https://t.co/ni9wIF2BgJ
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) February 25, 2026
The overall architectural change, Buterin said, amounts to a “ship of Theseus”-style rebuild, where individual components of the Ethereum consensus are replaced one by one until the entire system is new, with no update being too disruptive.
Quantum Considerations and Privacy-First Infrastructure
The post-quantum boost stands out given the timing in which it occurred. Post-quantum cryptography means replacing the mathematics that secures the network today with schemes that would remain unbreakable even if quantum computers reached sufficient scale. Strategy’s Michael Saylor dismissed quantum threats to bitcoin earlier this month as being more than a decade away.
The Ethereum roadmap treats it as a concrete engineering problem with a specific fork target, not a hypothetical problem. The plan would introduce hash-based signatures, a cryptographic approach that does not rely on the mathematical problems that quantum computers are expected to solve.
Shielded transfers, the privacy goal, would allow ETH to be sent without the transaction details being publicly visible on the blockchain. Today, every transfer on Ethereum is fully transparent, meaning anyone can see how much was sent, from where, and to whom. This is a feature for auditors, but a problem for users who don’t want their financial activity exposed.
The disconnect between the ambition shown and the current market reading on ether could not be greater. The open question heading into the second half of 2026 is whether that gap closes due to the roadmap driving the price up or if the price drags sentiment down further.
