Ethereum's 11th Year: Why 2026 Is a Pivotal Year for Protocol and Organization

Original author: KarenZ, Foresight News

In 2015, Ethereum brought the vision of a "world computer" on-chain; in 2026, it is simultaneously reorganizing the network of organizations maintaining this machine and reshaping the underlying architecture for years to come.

Over the past year, Fusaka laid the groundwork for Ethereum to support more L2 data; the Ethereum Foundation completed a major restructuring, with portions of its research, institutional outreach, and privacy initiatives transitioned to independent entities such as Ethlabs, Ethereum Institutional, and EthSystems; Lean Ethereum and Strawmap have placed the next round of protocol upgrades on the table, potentially redesigning consensus, validation methods, cryptography, and state over the coming years.

On July 30, 2015, the Frontier mainnet went live. Ethereum transformed from a concept in the whitepaper into a public network where anyone could deploy and run smart contracts.

In the following decade, in 2016, The DAO was attacked, triggering a hard fork of Ethereum; the side that did not accept the fork continued as Ethereum Classic; in 2020, the Beacon Chain launched; in 2022, The Merge transitioned the mainnet from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake; in 2023, Shapella enabled staking withdrawals; in 2024, Dencun introduced blobs via EIP-4844, providing Rollups with cheaper data space.

In May 2025, Pectra enhanced account functionality through EIP-7702 and increased the maximum effective balance per validator to 2048 ETH.

This path has never progressed neatly according to a fixed blueprint. Ethereum’s defining characteristic is that it replaces its core components while running.

The past decade laid the foundation for Ethereum, while the last year has redefined where it is headed next.

On December 3, 2025, Fusaka activates on mainnet. This is the second major mainnet upgrade completed by Ethereum in 2025, following Pectra.

The most important change in Fusaka is PeerDAS. Previously, nodes needed to download the entire blob data to verify its availability; PeerDAS allows nodes to sample and verify only a portion of it, and through collaboration and erasure coding among different nodes, collectively confirm that the full data indeed exists.

It's like inspecting a massive shipment of goods: instead of requiring each inspector to recount every box, many inspectors each sample a portion, and their results are combined to form a reliable assessment of the entire shipment.

After the upgrade, Ethereum increased the target number of blobs per block from 6 to 14 and the cap from 9 to 21 through two BPOs that only adjusted blob parameters; the default block Gas Limit was also raised from 45 million to 60 million.

Fusaka is more like laying the foundational infrastructure, and we are still far from reaching the endpoint of performance scaling. Users may not immediately feel dramatic changes, but future increases in Blob capacity and reductions in L2 costs will all be built upon this foundational layer.

The protocol upgrade occurred on-chain, while another adjustment took place at the organizational level. Over the past year, the Ethereum Foundation underwent an organizational restructuring of unusual scale.

In March 2026, the foundation released Mandate, establishing user autonomy as a core objective and summarizing censorship resistance, open source, privacy, and security as the non-negotiable CROPS principles.

On June 23, the foundation announced the completion of a months-long restructuring, during which 54 people left, accounting for approximately 20% of the original team.

The restructured foundation has established five working areas: the protocol layer, access layer, user layer, community layer, and institutional layer, along with operational clusters and management and support teams. It no longer attempts to consolidate protocol development, product access, ecosystem communication, and institutional expansion into a single organization, but instead focuses its limited resources on the tasks that the foundation believes only it can sustainably undertake over the long term.

This round of restructuring also continues the foundation’s previously announced treasury policy. The EF’s treasury policy begins with an annual operating expenditure of approximately 15% of the treasury in 2025, planning to decline roughly linearly over five years to a long-term level of 5%. It chooses to concentrate resources on core protocols, self-custody, privacy, and security, while transitioning more ecosystem functions to independent organizations.

Meanwhile, a new group of entities, involving former foundation members, began operating independently:

• Ethlabs is an independent nonprofit research and development organization, with a team including several former Ethereum Foundation researchers, focused on Ethereum protocol, scaling, interoperability, and infrastructure development.
• Ethereum Institutional is a nonprofit organization that was previously incubated within the foundation and has since become independent. It serves as a neutral entry point for banks, asset management firms, and public institutions seeking to engage with the Ethereum ecosystem, focusing on education, demand aggregation, and ecosystem coordination. On July 29, Ethereum Institutional announced the completion of its first ecosystem funding round and the formation of a supporters alliance, garnering support from over 100 ecosystem participants, with lead investments from BitMine, SharpLink, and Ethereum co-founders Joseph Lubin and Mihai Alisie. The amount raised was not disclosed.
• EthSystems builds on the work of the Institutional Privacy Task Force but operates as an independent for-profit company, designing privacy, compliance, and confidential trading systems for institutions.

Strictly speaking, these three should not be broadly described as a legal “spin-off” of the Ethereum Foundation: Ethlabs was created by former foundation researchers, Ethereum Institutional was incubated internally before becoming independent, and EthSystems took over related teams and work. A more accurate description is that the Ethereum Foundation is enabling certain talent, funding sources, and specialized functions to leave the foundation and form multiple organizations capable of independent fundraising and decision-making.

It does not directly alter the governance of the Ethereum protocol, but it changes the organizational structure around protocol research, institutional communication, and product development. Related work no longer needs to be consolidated under a single balance sheet.

Behind this round of organizational adjustments lies a longer technical thread.

On July 31, 2025, the day after Ethereum’s tenth anniversary, Justin Drake released Lean Ethereum Vision, proposing a more aggressive technical roadmap for the protocol’s next decade.

At the consensus layer, Lean Ethereum aims to reduce finality time to just a few seconds; at the data layer, it plans to expand blob capacity through next-generation data availability sampling; at the execution layer, it proposes adopting a more streamlined instruction set better suited for SNARK proofs, while preserving EVM compatibility and existing network effects.

Beyond these upgrades, the protocol must gradually replace signature and cryptographic components vulnerable to quantum computing threats to ensure long-term security.

Lean Ethereum's long-term goals include approximately 1 gigagas/s on L1 and 1 teragas/s on L2, corresponding to an estimated 10,000 TPS and 10 million TPS, respectively. It should be emphasized that this document was explicitly labeled as Justin Drake's personal vision at the time of publication, intended to spark community discussion and not as a committed upgrade approved through governance.

In February 2026, Strawmap, maintained by EF Architecture, was launched. Justin Drake, Vitalik Buterin, and others contributed to its maintenance and curation. Strawmap is a portmanteau of “strawman” and “roadmap,” and can be understood as a draft roadmap open for further community refinement.

On July 4, Vitalik Buterin posted an update following the Berlin Researchers Meeting 解读: He expects the core components of Lean Ethereum to take three to four years to roll out incrementally through multiple upgrades; recursive STARKs, post-quantum cryptography, consensus and finality rearchitecture, multidimensional gas, new state types, and client architecture are all under discussion. He refers to this phase as the "third major iteration" following early Ethereum and The Merge, and emphasizes that privacy has become a first-class goal.

Strawmap’s five “directional goals” are Fast L1, Gigagas L1, Teragas L2, Post-Quantum L1, and Private L1. In plain terms, that means faster confirmation, higher mainnet throughput, larger L2 data capacity, quantum-resistant cryptography, and native protocol privacy.

These are research directions and engineering goals; there is still a significant amount of design, implementation, testing, and community coordination work required before full deployment.

The first set of data comes from stablecoins.

As of July 31, 2026, RWA.xyz estimates the total value of stablecoins on the Ethereum mainnet at approximately $155.9 billion, representing about 52.5% of the global total of approximately $296.9 billion.

DeFiLlama uses a different methodology for asset coverage and network categorization, estimating the total value of stablecoins on Ethereum at approximately $146.9 billion, accounting for about 49.0% of the overall $300.1 billion.

Source: DeFiLlama

The two sets of data differ primarily due to variations in token coverage, cross-chain assets, and statistical methods. However, both point to the same conclusion: the Ethereum mainnet still holds nearly half of the world’s stablecoin supply.

The second set of data comes from tokenized real-world assets.

According to RWA.xyz, as of July 31, 2026, there were 1,552 RWAs on the Ethereum mainnet, with the on-chain tokenized asset value reaching approximately $17.15 billion—about 3.3 times that of BNB Chain, which ranks second, and the highest among the 38 networks tracked. On-chain tokenized assets refer to tokens that can leave their issuance platform and be transferred between wallets meeting whitelist or investor eligibility requirements.

Ethereum Institutional, an institutional-grade Ethereum ecosystem service provider, cites the ecosystem口径 from RWA.xyz as follows: Ethereum and its L2s support over 60% of stablecoin supply and over 75% of tokenized RWAs. This口径 includes L2s and a broader range of asset categories and cannot be directly compared with or combined with RWA.xyz’s single L1 data.

The third set of data comes from DeFi.

According to DeFiLlama, Ethereum L1's DeFi TVL is approximately $41.2 billion, accounting for nearly 55% of the total TVL across all networks, with BSC and Tron each hovering around $4.9 billion. As a single network, Ethereum's TVL is roughly eight times that of the second-place network.

Another set of data comes from L2.

Growthepie data shows that as of July 31, 2026, the Ethereum L2 networks it tracks process approximately 24.61 million transactions daily, 13.9 times the mainnet’s 1.77 million; about 159.9 million weekly, 9.76 times the mainnet’s 16.38 million; and approximately 661.46 million monthly, 10.4 times the mainnet’s 63.51 million.

This data set is sufficient to show that a significant amount of activity has shifted to scaling layers. Meanwhile, stablecoins, RWA, and DeFi TVL remain highly concentrated on L1.

Beyond this data, Robinhood Chain provides a more specific use case.

On July 1, 2026, Robinhood Chain launches on mainnet public. Built on the Arbitrum tech stack, it is an EVM-compatible L2 that uses ETH for gas fees and settles finality on Ethereum, primarily targeting tokenized stocks and other financial assets. A securities brokerage platform with a large retail user base is beginning to move part of its future financial infrastructure into the Ethereum ecosystem.

The above data and cases cannot alone prove that Ethereum has become a "global financial settlement layer." What they do demonstrate is that Ethereum has already established significant存量 in stablecoins, DeFi, tokenized assets, and L2 execution activity, and is beginning to attract traditional financial platforms to build on-chain infrastructure for real users.

The next Ethereum mainnet upgrade is Glamsterdam, a name derived from the combination of the execution layer upgrade Amsterdam and the consensus layer upgrade Gloas.

As of July 30, 2026, the official planning window is the second half of 2026, but the mainnet activation date has not yet been announced.

Glamsterdam has two core features. The first is ePBS, which formalizes the separation between proposers and block builders into the Ethereum protocol, reducing the network’s reliance on external relay services and providing more time for block propagation; the second is Block-level Access Lists (BAL), which allows nodes to know in advance which accounts and storage locations a block will read from and modify, enabling parallel execution and faster synchronization.

Developers believe that combining ePBS, BAL, and EIP-8037 repricing can provide a technical foundation for the upgraded 200 million Gas Limit baseline.

Further reading: “Ethereum’s Next Stop: Glamsterdam — Core Upgrades You Must Know”

The next upgrade is Hegotá, for which the mainnet date has not yet been announced and may occur in 2027, largely depending on the progress of Glamsterdam in the coming months.

Hegetá has selected FOCIL (EIP-7805) as the core feature of the consensus layer. By using an in-protocol transaction inclusion list, it enables more validators to participate in deciding which transactions should be included in blocks, reducing the ability of individual block builders to continuously filter transactions and enhancing the network's censorship resistance.

Frame Transaction (EIP-8141) is currently in the "Consider for Inclusion" state. This proposal aims to separate transaction validation, execution, and Gas payment into distinct Frames, providing a foundation for native account abstraction, flexible signing, and future quantum-resistant account migration. However, "Consider for Inclusion" does not guarantee inclusion in the upgrade; client teams may still modify the design or choose alternative solutions.

The most profound changes to Ethereum over the past year have unfolded along two parallel lines:

On a technical level, Lean Ethereum and Strawmap advance the goal toward a systematic rearchitecture of consensus, validation methods, cryptography, and state structure.

At the organizational level, the Ethereum Foundation has proactively narrowed its scope, with some tasks previously handled internally now being advanced by multiple independent entities.

Eleven years ago, Frontier’s first block brought the “world computer” from the whitepaper online. Eleven years later, Ethereum faces a harder question: how to rebuild itself while keeping a public network—already carrying massive assets, applications, and users—running continuously.