Ethereum's 2030 Vision: Faster, More Scalable, and Quantum-Resistant

Original author: Jang Hyuk-soo

Chopper, Foresight News

Ethereum launched in 2015 and has now entered its eleventh year. Along the way, it transitioned its consensus mechanism from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake through The Merge, followed by subsequent upgrades including Shapella, Dencun, Pectra, and Fusaka. Ethereum continues to evolve continuously. If you plan to invest in Ethereum or build applications on it, understanding its long-term evolution goals is essential.

On the day after the tenth anniversary of Ethereum’s launch in July 2025, Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake proposed the vision of Lean Ethereum. “Lean” means eliminating redundant designs. This roadmap consolidates Ethereum’s disparate research directions, retaining only core essential modules to create a unified development blueprint. You can think of it like a ten-year-old house: the exterior remains unchanged, but the foundation, plumbing, and wiring have all been replaced.

In February 2026, this vision materialized into a draft document titled "Strawmap." As the name suggests, this was merely a framework draft, not a finalized plan; the community continued discussing it, and the document was regularly updated, with the latest revision occurring on June 26. The most recent version outlines all planned hard forks from the second half of 2026’s Glamsterdam upgrade through 2029, clearly identifying that all upgrades ultimately aim toward five overarching goals, referred to in the document as the North Star objectives.

This article outlines Ethereum’s prospects for 2030, centered around five north star goals.

The first north star goal is the speed of the Ethereum L1 network itself. Currently, Ethereum transactions require approximately 15 minutes to achieve finality, at which point the transaction results cannot be reverted. With around 880,000 validators across the network, it is beyond the network’s capacity to collectively vote on every block and process massive volumes of signatures simultaneously. Therefore, Ethereum divides validators into 32 groups that vote in rotation, requiring two full voting cycles to complete finality.

The streamlined consensus mechanism will eliminate this bottleneck using zero-knowledge proofs (ZK proofs). Hundreds of thousands of votes can be compressed into a single short mathematical proof, allowing all validators to vote on every block with instant aggregation of results. The ultimate goal is to achieve finality in a single voting round.

The block interval will also be shortened. Ethereum currently produces a block every 12 seconds. These 12 seconds are divided into three phases, each lasting 4 seconds: the block proposer broadcasts the block to the network, validators cast their votes, and the votes are aggregated.

This timing standard was established in 2020, when the beacon chain (the proof-of-stake consensus layer of Ethereum) was primarily designed for consumer-grade devices and low-speed networks. Today, client software and global network conditions have significantly improved, and real-world measurements show that each step takes far less time than the original upper limits. Based on this, plans are in place to reduce the block time from 12 seconds to 6 seconds between 2027 and 2028. Between 2029 and 2030, a streamlined consensus mechanism will be implemented alongside a next-generation peer-to-peer communication protocol, greatly improving the propagation efficiency of blocks and votes, further reducing block time to 4 seconds.

After the block interval reaches 4 seconds, the average time users wait for a transaction to be executed is approximately 2 seconds. With the addition of a faster finality mechanism, the entire process—from transaction initiation to execution and irreversible confirmation—is compressed to just a few seconds.

Another goal of the simplified consensus mechanism is to reduce the minimum staking requirement for validators from 32 ETH to 1 ETH. By lowering the entry barrier, more users can directly participate in network governance. Ethereum’s goal for 2030 is to be faster and more decentralized, enabling greater participation in the consensus process.

The second North Star goal is throughput. Gas is Ethereum’s unit for measuring computational work. The current Ethereum L1 network processes approximately 5 million gas per second, with a long-term target of 1 billion gas per second (gigagas), representing a roughly 200-fold increase in mainnet throughput.

The main obstacle comes from the repetition mechanism, which is the foundational verification model of blockchain. After a new block is generated, thousands of nodes worldwide must independently re-execute all transactions within the block. It’s like one student arriving at an answer, and the entire class then working through the entire calculation again to verify it. This mechanism ensures the trustworthiness of a decentralized network, but it also creates a long-standing challenge: achieving both decentralization and high performance is difficult. If ordinary users are to run nodes, throughput must be limited; to increase throughput, reliance on a small number of high-performance nodes becomes necessary.

The technology that breaks the impasse is zero-knowledge proof. Nodes that package blocks simultaneously submit mathematical proofs verifying that all transactions within the block were executed correctly. Other nodes do not need to re-execute the transactions; they merely verify the proofs. The computational power required to verify these proofs is extremely low—capable of being performed even on mobile devices. Applying this solution to L1 block validation results in an L1 ZK-EVM, for which the Ethereum Foundation has already released an official roadmap as of February 2026.

According to the Strawmap roadmap, the first phase will run traditional re-execution in parallel with ZK proofs, with the proof mechanism as an optional feature. From 2028–2029, it will transition to a mandatory proof mode, where blocks are verified solely through ZK proofs. By this stage, node verification burden will no longer increase regardless of the number of transactions in a block, enabling sustained increases in the gas limit and ultimately achieving the goal of 1 billion gas per second.

For ordinary users, this means wallets (on mobile or browser) can directly and fully verify the entire blockchain without trusting third-party RPC nodes. With this verification system, Ethereum moves from “decentralized” to “trustless.”

The third north star goal targets Layer 2 (L2). L2 executes transactions outside the Ethereum mainnet, uploading only the final transaction data to L1, thereby inheriting L1’s security. The space on L1 specifically reserved for storing this data is called a Blob; the total capacity of Blobs determines the maximum throughput of all L2 networks.

In December 2025, the Fusaka hard fork will introduce PeerDAS technology, enabling nodes to verify only partial Blob data, laying the foundation for massive scaling of Blob quantities. The Glamsterdam upgrade candidate will further optimize Blob network transmission and storage efficiency. The "Strawmap" roadmap plans for gradual, annual increases in data capacity, ultimately reaching 1 GB per second of data bandwidth to support a Layer 2 ecosystem with trillions of Gas. This bandwidth is sufficient to transmit data equivalent to a high-definition video every few seconds.

This roadmap clearly defines Ethereum’s division of responsibilities. Even if all upgrades are fully implemented, the L1 network’s throughput will still face structural limits compared to high-performance blockchains like Solana. Applications requiring ultra-high performance will connect to the Ethereum ecosystem through independent L2 networks.

Robinhood Chain is a prime example: Robinhood has launched its proprietary Ethereum L2 network to support tokenized stock trading, fully inheriting Ethereum’s security while autonomously handling various business requirements on L2, including compliance and regulatory arrangements.

Thus, Ethereum in 2030 will establish a large-scale settlement network structure: L1 will handle final settlement and security, while multiple L2 networks will each specialize and be deeply optimized for different use cases.

The fourth North Star goal is to achieve quantum resistance. Ethereum’s current signing scheme uses ECDSA for wallets and BLS for validators; should sufficiently powerful quantum computers emerge, today’s cryptographic systems would be compromised. The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) advises phasing out ECDSA starting in 2030 and fully retiring it by 2035; Google has set 2029 as its internal deadline for transitioning to quantum-resistant cryptography. The arrival of quantum technology capable of breaking Ethereum’s cryptographic algorithms is occurring faster than the market previously anticipated.

The core solution involves replacing the existing signature algorithm with a hash-based cryptographic system, which is resistant to quantum attacks. Hash-based signatures are also highly compatible with ZK proofs and align seamlessly with the technical roadmap of gigabyte Gas L1 networks. In January 2026, the Ethereum Foundation established a dedicated post-quantum research team and set aside a $1 million prize to validate the security of hash functions.

According to the Strawmap plan, the transition will span multiple hard forks. First, pre-registration of post-quantum public keys will be supported, followed by sequential upgrades to validator voting signatures, the transaction layer, and the data layer, with the goal of launching a hash-based L1 network by 2029. If successfully implemented, Ethereum will continue to secure assets even after the advent of quantum computing.

The final North Star goal is a capability that Ethereum has never had. Currently, all Ethereum transactions are publicly visible; anyone can query account balances and the entire history of transactions using an address. For individuals, this poses a privacy risk; for businesses seeking to distribute salaries or pay suppliers on-chain, publicly visible transaction data directly hinders real-world adoption.

The L1 privacy solution aims to shield transactions, enclosing today’s fully public, postcard-like transactions in sealed envelopes. The sender, recipient, and transaction amount are hidden from outsiders, while ZK proofs verify to the network that the transaction complies with the rules. ZK proofs are integral throughout Ethereum’s entire upgrade roadmap, and privacy enhancements represent a crucial component of this journey.

According to "Strawmap," privacy infrastructure could first be implemented with the Hegotá hard fork, with the next phase upgrading the transaction mempool to encrypt transaction content before it is finalized on-chain. Among the five goals, the privacy-related planning details are the most ambiguous and highly dependent on the regulatory environment, making them the most uncertain. Nevertheless, Ethereum’s inclusion of native L1 privacy in its official roadmap for the first time represents a significant shift.

The five north star goals are summarized as follows:

• Fast L1: Transaction finality reduced from 15 minutes to just a few seconds; block interval decreased from 12 seconds to 4 seconds;
• Billion-gas L1: ZK proofs replace repetitive execution, enabling the L1 to process one billion gas per second, increasing throughput by approximately 200x;
• Trillion-dollar-scale Gas L2: L2 data capacity expanded to 1 GB per second, enabling massive parallel operation of Rollups;
• Quantum-resistant L1: Transitioned signature system to hash-based cryptography to gracefully withstand quantum computing threats;
• Privacy-native L1: Hide transaction information while proving compliance, becoming a standard feature of Ethereum.

The entities driving the roadmap forward are also changing. The Ethereum Foundation recently cut approximately 20% of its staff and has gradually narrowed its scope, with numerous new organizations stepping in to fill the ecological gaps. In June 2026, Ethlabs was officially established—a nonprofit research and development organization backed by Ethereum ecosystem companies and Ethereum co-founder Joseph Lubin. A week later, Ethereum Institutional emerged, founded by former members of the Foundation’s enterprise team. Ethereum is evolving toward a more purely open-source system, with smaller foundations collaborating alongside numerous independent institutions to advance development.

Of course, no roadmap is guaranteed to be delivered on schedule. "Strawmap" is an ongoing, evolving draft, not a finalized plan. The upcoming Glamsterdam hard fork has been delayed from the first half of 2026 to the second half. Development timelines may slip, cryptographic algorithms require extended security audits, and the specific features included in each hard fork will continue to be adjusted based on ongoing discussions among researchers and the community.

Regardless of its final form, Ethereum will remain the world’s most neutral, trustless general-purpose computing network. 'Strawmap' has clearly set its goal: to become faster, more scalable, and more secure while preserving its core identity.