Ethereum 2029 Upgrade Roadmap: Full Rebuild Without Stopping the Chain

Author: James/Snapcrackle

Compiled by Deep潮 TechFlow

Deep潮 Summary: Ethereum researcher Justin Drake has released "Strawmap"—the first-ever structured upgrade roadmap for Ethereum with clear timelines and performance targets. Vitalik has called it "very important" and described its overall impact as a "Ship of Theseus"-style reconstruction. This article is the clearest and most comprehensive explanatory piece on Strawmap to date, covering everything from how it works, its five key goals, to all seven planned upgrades—all explained in a way that non-technical readers can easily understand.

The full text is as follows:

Ethereum has just released its most detailed upgrade plan ever: seven upgrades, five goals, one major rebuild.

If you're wondering who this guide is written for... it's me.

Ethereum researcher Justin Drake has released what he calls the "Strawmap," a timeline of seven proposed upgrades extending to 2029. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin described it as "very important" and characterized its cumulative impact as a "Ship of Theseus"-style reconstruction of Ethereum's core.

This analogy is worth understanding.

The Ship of Theseus is an ancient Greek thought experiment: if you replace each plank of a ship one by one until every piece has been substituted, is it still the same ship?

This is Strawmap's proposal for Ethereum.

By 2029, every major component of the system will be replaced—yet there is no planned “big bang” shutdown. The goal is backward-compatible upgrades that keep the chain running while replacing the planks, though each upgrade still requires node operators to update their software, and edge cases may shift. It’s a full rebuild disguised as incremental improvement. Strictly speaking, while the logic of both the consensus and execution layers is being rebuilt, the state (user balances, contract storage, and history) is preserved across all forks. “The ship is being rebuilt while carrying its cargo.” Board the ship!

"Why not just start from scratch?" Because you can't restart without losing what gives Ethereum its value: the applications already running on it, the funds already in circulation, and the trust already established. You have to replace the planks while the ship is still sailing.

The name "Strawmap" is a blend of "strawman" and "roadmap." A strawman is an initial proposal, intentionally imperfect, designed to invite feedback and criticism. Therefore, this is not a commitment, but rather a starting point for discussion. However, it marks the first time Ethereum builders have laid out a structured upgrade path with clear timelines and specific performance goals.

The work involves the world’s top cryptographers and computer scientists—and it’s fully open source. No licensing fees, no vendor contracts, no enterprise sales teams. Any company, any developer, any country can build on it. JPMorgan will benefit from these upgrades in exactly the same way as a three-person startup in São Paulo.

Imagine if an alliance of the world’s top engineers were rebuilding the financial infrastructure of the internet from scratch—and you could connect directly.

Before talking about where it’s going, let’s start with what it is today.

Ethereum is essentially a shared global computer. Instead of a single company operating one server, thousands of independent operators around the world each run their own copy of the same software.

These operators independently verify transactions. Some of them, known as validators, also stake their own ETH as collateral. If a validator attempts to cheat, their staked ETH will be slashed. Every 12 seconds, validators reach consensus on which transactions occurred and in what order. This 12-second window is called a "slot." Every 32 slots (approximately 6.4 minutes) form an "epoch."

True finality—the moment when a transaction becomes irreversible—takes approximately 13 to 15 minutes, depending on where your transaction falls within the cycle.

Ethereum processes approximately 15 to 30 transactions per second, depending on the complexity of each transaction. In comparison, the Visa network can handle over 65,000 transactions per second. This gap is why most Ethereum applications today operate on “Layer 2” networks—separate systems that bundle large volumes of transactions and submit summaries back to the Ethereum main layer for security.

The system that enables all operators to reach agreement is called a "consensus mechanism." Ethereum's current consensus mechanism operates reliably and has been battle-tested, but it was designed for an earlier era and limits the network's upper capacity.

Strawmap aims to solve all these issues, one upgrade at a time.

The roadmap organizes everything around five goals. Ethereum is already operational, with billions of dollars flowing through it daily. But it has real limitations on what can be built. These five goals aim to remove those limitations.

1. Fast L1: Second-level finality

Sending a transaction on Ethereum today takes approximately 13 to 15 minutes to be fully confirmed—meaning it becomes irreversible, complete, and non-reversible.

Solution: Replace the engine with one that all operators can agree on. The goal is to achieve finality within a single slot through a single round of voting. Minimmit is a leading candidate under research—a protocol designed for ultra-fast consensus, though its specific design is still being refined. The key objective is achieving finality within a single slot. Following this, the slot time itself will be reduced: the proposed path is 12 seconds → 8 → 6 → 4 → 3 → 2.

Finality isn’t just about speed—it’s about certainty. Consider wire transfers: the time between “sent” and “settled” is the window during which things can still go wrong. If you’re completing a million-dollar payment, bond trade settlement, or real estate transaction on a blockchain, 13 minutes of uncertainty is a problem. Reducing it to seconds fundamentally changes what this network can do—not just for crypto-native applications, but for anything involving the transfer of value.

2. Gigagas L1: 300 times faster

The Ethereum mainnet processes approximately 15 to 30 transactions per second, which is the bottleneck.

Solution: Strawmap aims for an execution capacity of 1 gigagas per second, equivalent to approximately 10,000 transactions per second for typical transactions (the exact number depends on the complexity of each transaction, as different operations consume varying amounts of gas). The core technology is "zero-knowledge proofs" (ZK proofs).

The simplest way to understand it: Right now, every operator on the network must recalculate every operation to verify its correctness—like having every employee in a company independently redo every problem their colleague solved. Secure? Yes. Extremely inefficient? Also yes. ZK proofs let you verify that an operation is correct by checking a compact mathematical receipt, offering the same trust with minimal effort.

The software that generates these proofs is currently too slow. The current version requires minutes to hours for complex work. Reducing this to the seconds range—about a 1,000-fold speedup—is an active area of research, not just an engineering challenge. Teams like RISC Zero and Succinct are making rapid progress, but this remains at the frontier.

Mainnet throughput of 10,000 TPS combined with fast finality means a simpler system with fewer moving parts and fewer potential points of failure.

3. Teragas L2: 10 million transactions per second across the fast lane

For truly large-scale trading volumes (and customized requirements), you still need a Layer 2 network. Today, the capacity of Layer 2 networks is limited by the amount of data the Ethereum mainnet can process for them.

Solution: A technology called "Data Availability Sampling" (DAS). Instead of every operator downloading all the data to verify its existence, each one checks random samples and uses mathematics to confirm that the full dataset is complete. It’s like checking whether a 500-page book is truly on the shelf—randomly flipping to 20 different pages; if all are present, you can statistically be confident the rest are too.

PeerDAS has been launched in the Fusaka upgrade, laying the foundation for everything Strawmap aims to build. Expanding from there to the full target means iterative scaling: each fork increases data capacity, with network stability stress tests conducted at every step.

L2 ecosystems capable of 10 million transactions per second open doors impossible on any existing blockchain. Imagine global supply chains where every product and shipment is represented by a digital token; millions of connected devices generating verifiable data; or micropayment systems handling fractions of a cent. These workloads are too heavy for any existing network—but with 10 million TPS, they’re not just feasible, they’re effortless.

4. Post-Quantum L1: Preparing for Quantum Computers

Ethereum's security relies on mathematical problems that are extremely difficult to solve with today's computers. This applies to the entire system—including the signatures used when users send transactions and the signatures used by validators to reach consensus. Once quantum computers become powerful enough, they could potentially break both, allowing someone to forge transactions or steal funds.

Solution: Migrate to new cryptographic methods (hash-based schemes) that are considered resistant to quantum attacks. This is a later-stage upgrade because it impacts nearly every component of the system, and the new methods require significantly more data (kilobytes instead of bytes), altering the economics of network block size, bandwidth, and storage.

Quantum attacks may still be years, even decades away from threatening today’s cryptography. But if you’re building infrastructure designed to last—infrastructure that could hold trillions of dollars in value—"we’ll deal with it later" isn’t a real answer.

5. Private L1: Keep Transactions Confidential

Everything on Ethereum is public by default. Unless you use a privacy-focused application like Railgun, or Layer 2 networks such as ZKsync or Aztec, every transaction, amount, and counterparty is visible to anyone.

Solution: Build confidential transfers directly into Ethereum’s core. The technical goal is to enable the network to verify that a transaction is valid (the sender has sufficient funds, the mathematics is correct) without exposing actual details. You can prove “this is a legitimate $50,000 payment” without revealing who paid whom or the purpose of the payment.

Today, there are workarounds. In February 2026, EY and StarkWare announced Nightfall on Starknet, bringing privacy-preserving transactions to the L2 environment. However, these workarounds add complexity and cost. Building privacy into the base layer eliminates the need for middleware entirely.

This is also where post-quantum work converges: any privacy solution built must simultaneously be quantum-resistant. Two challenges that must be solved together. Solving this would remove a major barrier to large-scale adoption.

Strawmap proposed seven upgrades, approximately every six months, starting with Glamsterdam. Each upgrade was intentionally limited to changing only one or two major things at a time, so that if issues arose, you would know exactly what caused them.

The first upgrade after Fusaka (now live, laying the foundation with PeerDAS and data optimization) is Glamsterdam, which restructures how transaction blocks are assembled.

Hegetá then introduced further structural improvements. The remaining forks (I to M) extend through 2029, gradually rolling out faster consensus, ZK proofs, expanded data availability, quantum-resistant cryptography, and privacy features.

Because some of these issues haven't actually been resolved yet.

Replacing the consensus mechanism is the hardest. Imagine changing an airplane’s engine mid-flight while requiring thousands of co-pilots to agree on every change. Each modification requires months of testing and formal verification. And compressing the cycle time to under four seconds eventually hits physical limits: a signal traveling around the Earth and back takes about 200 milliseconds—beyond a certain point, you’re racing against the speed of light.

Making ZK provers fast enough is another frontier challenge. The current speed (on the order of minutes) is about 1,000 times slower than the target speed (on the order of seconds), requiring mathematical breakthroughs and specialized hardware.

Expanding data availability is less difficult but more operational. The mathematics checks out; the challenge lies in carefully operating on a live network holding hundreds of billions in value.

Post-quantum migration is an operational nightmare because the new signatures are much larger, altering the economics of everything.

Native privacy carries not only technical challenges but also political sensitivity. Regulators fear that privacy tools facilitate money laundering. Engineers must build solutions that are private enough to be useful, yet transparent enough to meet compliance requirements—and they must also be quantum-resistant.

These cannot be advanced simultaneously. Some upgrades depend on others—you cannot scale to 10,000 TPS without mature ZK proofs, and you cannot scale L2s without data availability solutions. These dependencies determine the timeline.

Given what was being attempted, three and a half years is actually quite aggressive.

First, there is a variable. Strawmap explicitly states: "The current draft assumes human-led development. AI-driven development and formal verification could significantly compress the timeline."

In February 2026, a developer named YQ bet that an AI agent could program the entire Ethereum system for the 2030+ roadmap. Within weeks, he released ETH2030: an experimental Go execution client claiming approximately 713,000 lines of code, implementing all 65 entries of Strawmap, and labeled as operational on testnets and mainnet.

Is it production-ready? No. As Vitalik pointed out, there are almost certainly critical vulnerabilities throughout, and in some cases, only stub implementations exist—the AI didn’t even attempt a full version. But Vitalik’s response is worth reading carefully: “Six months ago, something like this was far beyond the realm of possibility; what matters is the direction of the trend… People should remain open to this possibility (not certainty!—possibility): that the Ethereum roadmap will be completed much faster than expected, with security standards far higher than anticipated.”

Vitalik’s key insight is that the right way to use AI isn’t just to go faster, but to allocate half of the gains toward speed and half toward security: more testing, more mathematical verification, and more independent implementations of the same thing.

The Lean Ethereum project is conducting machine-checked formal verification of certain cryptographic and proof components. Vulnerability-free code—long considered an idealistic fantasy—may soon become a basic expectation.

Strawmap is a coordination document, not a commitment. Its goals are ambitious, its timeline is visionary, and execution depends on hundreds of independent contributors.

But the real question isn't whether each goal is met on time—it's whether you want to build on the platform of this trajectory or compete against it.

And all of this—research, breakthroughs, cryptographic migration—is happening openly, freely, and available to anyone... this is the part of the story that deserves far more attention than it has received.