Protocol Priorities Update for 2026

We introduced Protocol last June which organized our work around three strategic initiatives: Scale L1, Scale Blobs, and Improve UX. A lot has happened since then! In this post, we want to share what we accomplished last year, how our thinking has evolved, and where Protocol is headed in 2026.

TL;DR

• Great progress with tracks last year as we scaled L1, scaled blobs for L2, and built a strong foundation for UX improvements.
• Announcing three new tracks:
  • Scale (led by Ansgar, Marius, Raúl) focused on consensus, execution, and blob scaling.
  • Improve UX (led by Barnabé and Matt) doubling down on the work from last year.
  • Harden the L1 (led by Fredrik, Pari and Thomas) ensuring the core properties of Ethereum are preserved through it all.

A quick look back at 2025

2025 was one of Ethereum’s most productive years at the protocol level. We shipped two major network upgrades and made meaningful progress on every front we set out to tackle.

Pectra landed on mainnet in May, delivering EIP-7702 that lets EOAs temporarily execute smart contract code, unlocking transaction batching, gas sponsorship, and social recovery. Pectra also doubled blob throughput, raised the max effective validator balance to 2,048 ETH, and dramatically shortened validator onboarding times.

Fusaka followed in December, bringing PeerDAS to mainnet. Validators now sample blob data rather than downloading it in full, significantly reducing bandwidth requirements and enabling an 8x increase in theoretical blob capacity. Two BPO (Blob Parameter Only) forks shipped alongside Fusaka, beginning the ramp from 6 blobs per block toward higher targets.

Between the two upgrades, the community steadily raised the mainnet gas limit from an initial 30M to today’s 60M which is the first significant increase since 2021. History expiry removed pre-Merge data from full nodes, saving hundreds of gigabytes of disk space. And on the UX side, the Open Intents Framework reached production, the L1 fast confirmation rule implementations progressed across consensus clients, and interoperability standards such as ERC-7930 + ERC-7828: Interoperable addresses and names and ERC-7888: Crosschain Broadcaster moved forward.

It was a strong year. But as we looked at the road ahead, it became clear that our track structure needed to evolve to match the needs of the Ethereum community.

An impactful 2026

When we launched Protocol, we organized around three initiatives that mapped closely to near-term deliverables: get the gas limit up, get PeerDAS shipped, and improve UX. That framing served us well through Pectra and Fusaka. Now that those milestones are behind us, we have the opportunity to think about how we organize our work at a slightly higher level.

Starting in 2026, Protocol’s work is organized into three tracks:

Scale

Led by Ansgar Dietrichs, Marius van der Wijden, and Raúl Kripalani

The Scale track brings together what was previously split across Scale L1 and Scale Blobs into a single, unified effort. This reflects a practical reality: the work of increasing L1 execution capacity and expanding data availability throughput is deeply intertwined. Gas limit increases depend on execution engine performance. Blob scaling depends on networking and consensus changes that touch the same client code. Coordinating these efforts under one roof makes us faster and reduces the surface area for a more holistic view.

Concretely, this track is focused on:

• Continuing to raise the gas limit toward and beyond 100M, supported by Block-level Access Lists (EIP-7928) and ongoing client benchmarking
• Delivering the scaling components of Glamsterdam, including ePBS (EIP-7732), repricings, and further blob parameter increases
• Advancing the zkEVM attester client from prototype toward production readiness
• State scaling involving repricing and history expiry in the short term, and a move to binary trees and statelessness in the long term

Improve UX

Led by Barnabé Monnot and Matt Garnett

The Improve UX track carries forward much of the initiative from last year, with a sharper focus on two areas that we believe are highest-leverage for Ethereum’s usability in 2026: native account abstraction and interoperability.

On account abstraction, EIP-7702 was an important step, but the end state is smart contract wallets as the default without bundlers, relayers, or extra gas overhead. Proposals like EIP-7701 and the more recent EIP-8141 (Frame Transactions) are pushing toward embedding smart account logic directly into the protocol. This work also intersects with post-quantum readiness, since native AA provides a natural migration path away from ECDSA-based authentication. Complementary to this are a number of proposals in the works that could make it much more gas-efficient to verify quantum-resistant signatures in the EVM.

On interoperability, we’re building on the foundation laid by the Open Intents Framework. The goal remains seamless, trust-minimized cross-L2 interactions and we’re getting closer day by day. Continued progress on faster L1 confirmations and shorter L2 settlement times directly supports this.

Harden the L1

Led by Fredrik Svantes, Parithosh Jayanthi, and Thomas Thiery

Harden the L1 is a new track, and it reflects something we think deserves dedicated focus: making sure that as Ethereum scales and evolves, it retains the properties that make it valuable in the first place.

This covers several areas:

• Security: Fredrik continues to lead the Trillion Dollar Security Initiative and is driving security hardening including post-quantum readiness, and execution-layer safeguards like post-execution transaction assertions and trustless RPCs.
• Censorship resistance: Thomas leads the track’s protocol resilience research, spanning FOCIL (EIP-7805) and its extensions: censorship resistance for blobs, statelessness (VOPS), and the development of measurable censorship resistance metrics across the ecosystem.
• Network resilience and testing: Parithosh’s work on devnets, testnets, and client interop testing has been essential to every upgrade we’ve shipped. As we move toward an accelerated fork cadence, the infrastructure for safely validating and deploying changes becomes even more critical.

Looking ahead

Glamsterdam is the next major network upgrade, targeted for the first half of 2026, with Hegotá planned to follow later in the year. The ambition is clear with parallel execution, significantly higher gas limits, enshrined PBS, continued blob scaling, and progress on censorship resistance, native account abstraction, and post-quantum security.

We’ll continue publishing track-level updates as we did last year; expect more information soon. If you want to follow along or get involved, protocol.ethereum.foundation is the best starting point.

Let’s keep shipping.