Ethereum 2026: EF Outlines Protocol Roadmap, Enters 'Engineering Upgrade' Era

On February 18, the Ethereum Foundation (EF) released the "Protocol Priorities Update for 2026." Unlike previous fragmented updates centered on EIPs, this roadmap resembles a strategic schedule, clearly defining the upgrade cadence, priority allocation, and the three core pillars around which the protocol layer will focus over the coming year: Scale, Improve UX, and Harden the L1.

Behind this, from the successful delivery of two hard forks in 2025—Pectra and Fusaka—to the early planning of the dual mainnets, Glamsterdam and Hegotá, in 2026, we see a deeper shift in Ethereum development toward “predictable engineering delivery,” which may be the most significant protocol-level signal in recent years.

If you’ve been following Ethereum, you know that 2025 has been a year of contradictions for this protocol—ETH’s price may have lingered at lower levels, but the protocol layer underwent an unprecedented wave of changes.

In particular, Ethereum at the beginning of 2025 went through a particularly turbulent period, during which the EF found itself at the center of public controversy—community criticism surged, with some even calling for the introduction of a so-called "wartime CEO" to drive change. Ultimately, a series of internal power struggles came to light, forcing the EF to undertake its most significant power restructuring since its founding:

• In February, Executive Director Aya Miyaguchi was promoted to President, and Vitalik Buterin pledged to restructure the leadership;
• Subsequently, Hsiao-Wei Wang and Tomasz K. Stańczak were appointed as co-executive directors;
• The new marketing narrative agency Etherealize, led by former researcher Danny Ryan, has been established;
• At the same time, EF further restructured its board and clarified its cypherpunk values orientation;
• By mid-year, the foundation restructured its research and development department, consolidated teams, and made personnel adjustments to ensure focus on core protocol priorities;

It has become clear that this series of actions has significantly strengthened Ethereum's execution capability. Especially with the successful implementation of the Fusaka upgrade just seven months after the May Pectra upgrade, it demonstrates that the Ethereum Foundation, despite major leadership changes, still has the capacity to drive major updates—marking Ethereum's official transition into an accelerated development rhythm of two hard forks per year.

Since the network transitioned to PoS via The Merge in September 2022, the Ethereum network has essentially targeted only one major upgrade per year, such as the Shapella upgrade in April 2023 and the Dencun upgrade in March 2024: the former enabled staking withdrawals, completing a crucial step in the PoS transition; the latter introduced EIP-4844, officially launching the Blob data channel and significantly reducing L2 costs.

In 2025, two major hard fork upgrades, Pectra and Fusaka, were completed, and more importantly, for the first time, a systematic plan was established for the next two years' naming upgrades: Glamsterdam and Hegotá.

Although not officially documented, it is interesting that at the end of last year, The Block cited ConsenSys sources stating that since The Merge, Ethereum researchers aimed to conduct one major upgrade per year, but are now planning to “accelerate the pace of hard forks to every six months,” with Fusaka explicitly marking the start of Ethereum’s biannual upgrade cycle.

This institutional change regarding the upgrade schedule is truly milestone-worthy. The reason is simple: previously, release timelines were largely dependent on development readiness, resulting in an unstable expected window for developers and infrastructure providers—and as many of you know, delays were not uncommon.

This also means that the successful delivery of two major upgrades in 2025 validated the feasibility of "upgrades every six months." In 2026, the first systematic planning of two named upgrades (Glamsterdam and Hegotá) was carried out, with three development tracks organized around these milestones to prioritize efforts—marking a further institutionalization of this approach.

Theoretically, similar to the release cadence of iOS or Android, this aims to reduce developer uncertainty and is expected to bring three positive impacts: enhanced predictability for L2s, allowing Rollups to plan parameter adjustments and protocol adaptations in advance; clear windows for wallet and infrastructure adaptation, enabling product teams to schedule compatibility and feature rollouts systematically; and stable risk assessment cycles for institutions, since upgrades become a routine engineering practice rather than unexpected events.

This structured rhythm is essentially an embodiment of engineering management, and it also highlights Ethereum’s transition from scientific exploration to engineering delivery.

Looking more closely at the 2026 protocol priority roadmap, you’ll see that the EF no longer simply lists isolated EIPs, but has reorganized protocol development into three strategic pillars: Scale, Improve UX, and Harden the L1.

First is Scale, which combines the former "Scale L1" and "Scale blobs," as the EF recognized that scaling the L1 execution layer and expanding the data availability layer are two sides of the same coin.

Therefore, in the upcoming Glamsterdam upgrade this first half of the year, the most notable technology is "Block-level Access Lists," designed to fundamentally transform Ethereum’s current transaction execution model—essentially shifting from a sequential, single-lane process to a parallel, multi-lane one:

Block producers will pre-calculate and label which transactions can run simultaneously without conflicts, allowing clients to distribute these transactions across multiple CPU cores for parallel processing, significantly improving efficiency; meanwhile, ePBS (embedded proposer-builder separation) will be integrated into the upgrade, embedding the current MEV-Boost workflow, which relies on external relays, directly into the protocol itself—reducing centralization risks and providing validators with a longer time window to verify ZK proofs.

Along with these underlying optimizations, the competition for gas limits will intensify by 2026, with the EF currently targeting "over 100 million"; radicals even predict that after ePBS, gas limits could double to 200 million or higher. For L2s, increasing the number of blobs is equally critical, with the potential for blob count per block to rise above 72, enabling L2 networks to process hundreds of thousands of transactions per second.

Second is improving UX, aiming to eliminate cross-chain barriers and popularize cross-chain interoperability and native account abstraction. As mentioned earlier, the EF believes that solving L2 fragmentation hinges on making Ethereum "feel like one chain again," a vision that depends on the maturation of intent-based architecture.

For example, the Open Intents Framework, launched by EF in collaboration with multiple teams, is emerging as a universal standard that allows users to simply declare their desired outcome when transferring assets between L2s, while the underlying solver network handles complex path calculations (see further reading: “When Intent Becomes Standard: How OIF Ends Cross-Chain Fragmentation and Returns Web3 to User Intuition?”); further still, the Ethereum Interoperability Layer (EIL) aims to build a trustless transport layer, with the goal of making cross-L2 transactions feel as seamless as single-chain transactions (see further reading: “The Ethereum Interop Roadmap: How to Unlock the ‘Last Mile’ of Mass Adoption?”).

At the wallet level, native account abstraction will remain a key focus this year. Following the first step taken by EIP-7702 in Pectra 2025, the EF plans to advance proposals such as EIP-7701 or EIP-8141 in 2026, with the ultimate goal of making every wallet on Ethereum a smart contract wallet by default, eliminating the complexity of EOA wallets and third-party gas payment intermediaries.

In addition, the implementation of the L1 fast confirmation rule will significantly reduce confirmation time from the current 13–19 minutes to just 15–30 seconds, directly benefiting all cross-chain applications that rely on L1 finality—this is highly significant for cross-chain bridges, stablecoin settlements, and RWA asset trading.

Finally, Harden the L1, which aims to target a trillion-dollar security barrier, a priority made possible by the growing value locked in the Ethereum ecosystem, elevating L1 security resilience to a strategic level.

Among these, FOCIL (Fork Choice with Inclusion List, EIP-7805) is emerging as the core solution for censorship resistance. It empowers multiple validators to enforce the inclusion of specific transactions in blocks, ensuring that user transactions ultimately make it onto the chain—even if block producers attempt censorship—as long as a portion of the network remains honest.

In response to the long-term threat posed by quantum computing, EF formed a new Post-Quantum (PQ) research team earlier this year. Work in 2026 will focus on studying quantum-resistant signature algorithms and begin exploring how to seamlessly migrate them to the Ethereum mainnet, ensuring the security of billions of dollars in future assets against potential quantum algorithm attacks.

Overall, if one word were to summarize Ethereum in 2026, it might be “collaboration.”

Upgrades are no longer centered around a single breakthrough innovation, but rather on the coordinated advancement of three core pillars: Scale handles throughput and cost; Improve UX focuses on usability and adoption; Harden the L1 ensures security and neutrality—collectively determining whether Ethereum can support the on-chain economy of the next decade.

Meanwhile, more noteworthy than the technical roadmap is the strategic shift reflected by this "three-track" structure.

As mentioned above, when the Fusaka upgrade was successfully completed by the end of 2025 and the biannual hard fork cadence was established, Ethereum effectively underwent an institutionalized leap in its development model. The priority update released in early 2026 further extended this institutionalization to the planning of technical direction: previously, Ethereum upgrades were often centered around a single "star proposal" (such as EIP-1559, the Merge, or EIP-4844), whereas now, upgrades are no longer defined by individual proposals but by the coordinated progress of three parallel tracks.

From a broader perspective, 2026 is also a pivotal year for the reconstruction of Ethereum’s value narrative. Over the past few years, market pricing of Ethereum has largely revolved around “fee growth driven by L2 scaling.” However, as mainnet performance improves and the role of L2s shifts from “sharding” to “a spectrum of trust,” Ethereum’s core value is being reanchored to its irreplaceable position as “the world’s most secure settlement layer.”

What does this mean? In simple terms, Ethereum is transitioning from a platform reliant on “transaction fee revenue” to an asset anchor based on “security premium.” The far-reaching impact of this shift may unfold over the coming years—as stablecoin issuers, RWA tokenization firms, and sovereign wealth funds choose their settlement layer, they will prioritize the most secure network, not the cheapest one.

Ethereum is genuinely evolving from a "technical proving ground" into an "engineered delivery platform," and the institutionalization of Ethereum protocol governance may truly mature by 2026.

And we may now be at a remarkable juncture: underlying technologies are becoming increasingly complex (such as parallel execution and PQ algorithms), yet user experiences are growing simpler—maturity in account abstraction and intent frameworks is bringing Ethereum closer to its ideal endpoint: returning Web3 to user intuition.

If truly achievable, Ethereum in 2026 could indeed transform from a blockchain proving ground into a global financial infrastructure capable of supporting trillions in assets, without requiring users to understand the underlying protocol.