We introduced Protocol last June. This organized our efforts around three strategic initiatives: scale L1, scale blobs, and improve UX. A lot has happened since then! In this post, I want to share what we accomplished last year, how our thinking has evolved, and where we see the Protocol heading in 2026.
TL;DR
- Last year we made great progress on tracks, including scaling L1, scaling blobs in L2, and building a strong foundation for UX improvements.
- Announcing 3 new songs:
- Scale (led by Ansgar, Marius, and Raúl) focused on consensus, execution, and blob scaling.
- UX improvements (led by Barnabé and Matt) double down on last year’s work.
- Strengthen L1 (led by Fredrik, Pari, and Thomas) and ensure that Ethereum’s core properties are maintained throughout.
A quick look back at 2025
2025 was one of the most productive years for Ethereum on a protocol level. We shipped two major network upgrades and made meaningful progress on every front we started working on.
Pectra came to mainnet in May with EIP-7702, which allows EOA to temporarily execute smart contract code, unlocking transaction batching, gas sponsorship, and social recovery. Pectra also doubled its blob throughput, raised the maximum active validator balance to 2,048 ETH, and significantly reduced validator onboarding time.
Fusaka followed suit in December and introduced PeerDAS to mainnet. Validators now sample blob data instead of downloading it completely, significantly reducing bandwidth requirements and increasing theoretical blob capacity by 8x. Two BPO (blob parameters only) forks are shipped with Fusaka and start ramping towards higher targets from 6 blobs per block.
Between the two upgrades, the community steadily increased the mainnet gas limit from the original 30M to the current 60M. This is the first significant increase since 2021. History expiration removed unmerged data from the full node, saving hundreds of gigabytes of disk space. And on the UX side, the Open Intents Framework has reached production, advancing the implementation of L1 fast confirmation rules across consensus clients, and advancing interoperability standards such as ERC-7930 + ERC-7828: Interoperable Addresses and Names and ERC-7888: Crosschain Broadcaster.
It was a strong year. However, as we look to the road ahead, it becomes clear that the track structure needs to evolve to suit the needs of the Ethereum community.
An impactful 2026
When we launched Protocol, we organized around three initiatives that closely aligned with short-term outcomes: increasing gas limits, shipping PeerDAS, and improving UX. That framing served us well through Pectra and Fusaka. Now that we’ve passed these milestones, we have an opportunity to think about how we organize our work at a slightly higher level.
From 2026 onwards, work on the protocol will be organized as follows: three tracks:
scale
Led by Ansgar Dietrichs, Marius van der Weyden and Raul Kripalani
The Scale track brings together what was previously split between Scale L1 and Scale Blobs into one unified effort. This reflects the actual reality. Increasing L1 execution capacity and increasing data availability throughput are deeply intertwined. The increase in gas limit depends on the performance of the running engine. Scaling blobs relies on network and consensus changes that affect the same client code. Coordinating these efforts under one roof speeds up work, reduces surface area, and provides a more holistic view.
Specifically, this track focuses on:
- Supported by block-level access lists (EIP-7928) and ongoing client benchmarking, we continue to push gas limits further towards 100M.
- Delivery of Gramsterdam scaling components, including ePBS (EIP-7732), price revisions, and further blob parameter increases
- Taking the zkEVM attestor client from prototype to production readiness
- Scaling state with repricing and history expiration in the short term, moving to a binary tree and becoming stateless in the long term
Improved UX
Led by Barnabe Monot and Matt Garnett
The UX Improvement track continues many of our efforts from last year, with an increased focus on two areas that we believe will have the biggest impact on Ethereum’s usability in 2026. Native account abstraction and interoperability.
EIP-7702 was an important step when it comes to account abstraction, but the end state is a default smart contract wallet with no bundler, relayer, or additional gas overhead. Proposals such as EIP-7701 and the more recent EIP-8141 (Frame Transactions) push for embedding smart account logic directly into the protocol. This effort also intersects with post-quantum readiness, as native AA provides a natural migration path from ECDSA-based authentication. Complementary to this, several proposals are underway to make quantum-resistant signature verification in EVM more gas-efficient.
When it comes to interoperability, it builds on the foundation laid by the Open Intents Framework. The goal is seamless, trust-minimized L2-to-L2 interaction, and it’s getting closer every day. Continuing advances in faster L1 confirmations and shorter L2 settlement times directly support this.
Strengthen L1
Led by Fredrik Svantes, Parisosh Jayanti and Thomas Thierry
Harden the L1 is a new track and reflects what we think is especially worth focusing on. It’s about ensuring that as Ethereum scales and evolves, it retains the properties that make it valuable in the first place.
This includes several areas.
- safety: Fredrik continues to lead the Trillion Dollar Security Initiative, driving security enhancements including post-quantum readiness and execution layer protections such as post-execution transaction assertions and trustless RPC.
- Resistance to censorship: Thomas is leading this track’s protocol resiliency research, which spans FOCIL (EIP-7805) and its extensions to censorship resistance for BLOBs, statelessness (VOPS), and the development of measurable censorship resistance metrics across the ecosystem.
- Network resiliency and testing: Parithosh’s work on Devnet, testnet, and client interop testing was integral to every upgrade we shipped. As the pace of forking accelerates, the infrastructure for securely validating and deploying changes becomes even more important.
Looking to the future
Gramsterdam is the next major network upgrade targeted for the first half of 2026, with Hegota expected to follow in the second half of the same year. Its ambitions are evident with parallel execution, significantly higher gas limits, the introduction of PBS, continued blob scaling, censorship resistance, native account abstraction, and advances in post-quantum security.
As we did last year, we will continue to publish track-level updates. We hope to have more information soon. If you’d like to follow or get involved, protocol.ethereum.foundation is a great starting point.
Let’s keep shipping.
