Ethereum 2026: Deciphering the Latest Protocol Roadmap of EF, Officially Entering the Era of "Engineering Upgrades"?

Written by: imToken

On February 18, the Ethereum Foundation (EF) released the "Protocol Priorities Update for 2026". Compared with the previous fragmented updates centered on EIPs, this roadmap is more like a strategic schedule, which clarifies the upgrade pace, priority allocation, and the three main lines that the protocol layer will revolve around in the coming year: Scale, Improve UX, and Harden the L1 .

Behind this, from the successful delivery of the two hard forks (Pectra/Fusaka) in 2025 to the early planning of the dual mainlines Glamsterdam and Hegotá in 2026, we have also seen a profound shift in Ethereum development toward "predictable engineering delivery", which may be the most important protocol layer signal in recent years.

I. Ethereum in 2025: Volatility and Institutionalization Go Hand in Hand

If you've been following Ethereum closely, you'll know that 2025 was a year of mixed emotions for the protocol. While the price of ETH may have been hovering at a low level, the protocol layer underwent unprecedented and intensive changes.

Ethereum, especially in early 2025, experienced a rather awkward period. At that time, EF was at the center of a media storm—community criticism was rampant, and some even called for the introduction of a so-called "wartime CEO" to drive change. Ultimately, a series of internal power struggles became public, forcing the highest-level power restructuring in EF's history.

• In February, Executive Director Aya Miyaguchi was promoted to President, and Vitalik Buterin pledged to restructure the leadership team;
• Hsiao-Wei Wang and Tomasz K. Stańczak subsequently became joint executive directors;
• Furthermore, Etherealize, a new marketing narrative agency led by former researcher Danny Ryan, was founded;
• At the same time, EF further restructured its board of directors and clarified its cypherpunk values.
• By mid-year, the foundation had also restructured its research and development department, integrating teams and making personnel adjustments to ensure that core protocol priorities remained focused.

As it turns out, this combination of measures has indeed significantly strengthened Ethereum's execution capabilities. In particular , the successful implementation of the Fusaka upgrade at the end of the year, just seven months after the Pectra upgrade in May, proves that EF, despite undergoing a major leadership reshuffle, still has the ability to drive significant updates. It also marks Ethereum's official entry into an accelerated development pace of "two hard forks per year."

After all, since the network transitioned to PoS through The Merge in September 2022, the Ethereum network has basically only aimed for one major upgrade per year, such as the Shapela upgrade in April 2023 and the Dencun upgrade in March 2024: the former opened up staking withdrawals, completing a key step in the PoS transition; the latter launched EIP-4844, officially opening the Blob data channel, which significantly reduced L2 costs.

In 2025, two important hard fork upgrades, Pectra and Fusaka, were completed. More importantly, in 2025, the naming upgrades for the next two years were systematically planned for the first time, namely Glamsterdam and Hegotá.

Although there is no official written rule, it is interesting that at the end of last year, The Block cited a Consensys source as saying that since The Merge, Ethereum researchers have been aiming for a major upgrade every year, but now they are planning to "speed up the pace of hard forks and switch to once every six months", and stated that Fusaka has started Ethereum's twice-yearly upgrade cycle.

This "institutional" change regarding the pace of upgrades is arguably a landmark achievement. The reason is simple: previously, the release schedule depended more on the readiness of R&D, and the expected window was unstable for both developers and infrastructure. Moreover, as those familiar with the process know, delays were not uncommon.

This also means that the successful delivery of the two major upgrades in 2025 verified the feasibility of "upgrades every six months". The first systematic planning of two naming upgrades (Glamsterdam and Hegotá) in 2026, and the prioritization of these two nodes with three development tracks, is a further institutionalization.

In theory, it's somewhat similar to the release schedule of Apple or Android systems, aiming to reduce uncertainty for developers and potentially bringing three positive impacts: enhanced L2 predictability, such as allowing rollups to plan parameter adjustments and protocol adaptations in advance; clear adaptation windows for wallets and infrastructure, enabling product teams to plan compatibility and feature launches according to schedule; and stable institutional risk assessment cycles, as this means upgrades are no longer unexpected events but a regular part of engineering.

This structured rhythm is essentially a manifestation of engineering management, and it also highlights Ethereum's transformation from scientific research to engineering delivery.

II. The "Three Legs" of the 2026 Protocol Development

A closer look at the 2026 protocol priority update plan reveals that EF no longer simply lists scattered EIPs, but reorganizes protocol development into three strategic directions: Scale, Improve UX, and Harden the L1.

First is Scale, which merges the original "Scale L1" and "Scale blobs" because EF realized that scaling up the L1 execution layer and widening the data availability layer are two sides of the same coin.

Therefore, the most eye-catching technology in the upcoming Glamsterdam upgrade in the first half of the year is "Block-level Access Lists," which aims to completely change Ethereum's existing transaction execution model—which can be understood as changing from a sequential "single lane" to a parallel "multi-lane" model.

Block producers will pre-calculate and mark which transactions can run simultaneously without conflict, and clients can then allocate transactions to multiple CPU cores for parallel processing, thereby greatly improving efficiency. At the same time, ePBS (built-in proposer-builder separation) will also be included in the upgrade, which will embed the MEV-Boost process, which currently relies on external relays, into the protocol itself. This not only reduces the risk of centralization but also provides validators with a more ample time window to verify ZK proofs.

With these underlying optimizations, the race to increase the gas limit will intensify in 2026. EF has already set a clear goal of "moving toward 100 million and above". Optimists even predict that after ePBS, the gas limit could double to 200 million or even higher. For L2, increasing the number of blobs is also crucial. The number of data blocks per block is expected to increase to more than 72, supporting the L2 network to process hundreds of thousands of transactions per second.

Secondly, there's Improve UX, which aims to eliminate cross-chain barriers and popularize cross-chain interoperability and native account abstraction. As mentioned earlier, EF believes that the core of solving L2 fragmentation lies in making Ethereum "feel like a chain again," a vision that relies on the maturity of the intent architecture.

For example, the Open Intents Framework, launched by EF in collaboration with multiple teams, is becoming a universal standard. It allows users to simply declare their "desired result" when transferring assets between L2 blockchains, while the underlying solver network performs the complex path calculations (further reading: " When 'Intent' Becomes the Standard: How Does OIF End Cross-Chain Fragmentation and Make Web3 Return to User Intuition? "). The Ethereum Interoperability Layer (EIL) goes a step further, attempting to build a trustless transport layer, aiming to provide cross-L2 transactions with an experience indistinguishable from single-chain transactions (further reading: " Ethereum Interop Roadmap: How to Unlock the 'Last Mile' for 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 in 2025, EF plans to promote proposals such as EIP-7701 or EIP-8141 in 2026. The ultimate goal is to make every wallet on Ethereum a smart contract wallet by default, completely eliminating complex EOA wallets and additional gas payment intermediaries.

Furthermore, the implementation of the L1 fast confirmation rule will significantly reduce the confirmation time from the current 13-19 minutes to 15-30 seconds. This will directly benefit all cross-chain applications that rely on L1 finality, which is of great significance to cross-chain bridges, stablecoin settlement, and RWA asset trading.

Finally, there's Harden the L1, which aims to provide a trillion-dollar security defense. This is thanks to the fact that as the value locked in the Ethereum ecosystem continues to grow, the security resilience of the L1 layer has been elevated to a strategic level.

In terms of censorship resistance, FOCIL (Fork Selective Include List, EIP-7805) is becoming a core solution. It empowers multiple validators to force specific transactions to be included in blocks, ensuring that user transactions are eventually recorded on the blockchain as long as a portion of the network is honest, even if the block producer attempts to censor them.

In response to the long-term threat of quantum computing, EF has formed a new post-quantum (PQ) research team at the beginning of the year. The work in 2026 will focus on researching quantum-resistant signature algorithms and begin to consider how to seamlessly migrate them to the Ethereum mainnet to ensure that the security of billions of dollars of assets in the future is not threatened by quantum algorithms.

III. Ethereum, which emphasizes "collaboration," has arrived.

Overall, if one word could summarize Ethereum in 2026, it would be "coordination".

The upgrade no longer revolves around a single explosive innovation, but rather around the coordinated advancement of three main lines: Scale is responsible for throughput and cost; Improve UX is responsible for usability and accessibility; Harden the L1 is responsible for security and neutrality. These three together determine whether Ethereum can support the on-chain economy for the next decade.

At the same time, what deserves more attention than the technology roadmap is the strategic shift reflected behind this "three-track" structure.

As mentioned above, when the Fusaka upgrade was successfully completed at the end of 2025 and the rhythm of two hard forks per year was established, Ethereum actually completed a "systematic" leap in its development model. The priority update released in early 2026 further extended this institutionalization to the planning level of technical direction. In the past, Ethereum upgrades often revolved around a "star proposal" (such as EIP-1559, merge, EIP-4844). Now, upgrades are no longer defined by a single proposal, but are composed of the coordinated advancement of three tracks.

From a broader perspective, 2026 is also a pivotal year for the reconstruction of Ethereum's "value narrative." In the past few years, the market's pricing of Ethereum has revolved more around the "fee increase brought about by L2 scaling." However, with the improvement of mainnet performance and the shift of L2's positioning from "sharding" to "trust spectrum," Ethereum's core value is being re-anchored to its irreplaceable position as "the world's most secure settlement layer."

What does this mean? Simply put, Ethereum is transforming from a platform that relies on "transaction fee revenue" into an asset anchor that relies on "security premium." The profound impact of this transformation may gradually become apparent in the coming years— when stablecoin issuers, RWA tokenization institutions, and sovereign wealth funds choose settlement layers, they will not choose the cheapest network, but the most secure one.

Ethereum is truly evolving from a "technical testing ground" into an "engineering delivery platform," and the institutionalization of Ethereum protocol governance may truly mature in 2026.

We may be at a peculiar juncture: the underlying technologies are becoming increasingly complex (such as parallel execution and the PQ algorithm), but the user experience is becoming increasingly simple. The maturity of account abstraction and intent frameworks is pushing Ethereum toward that ideal endpoint—bringing Web3 back to user intuition.

If this can be achieved, Ethereum in 2026 could very well transform from a blockchain testing ground into a global financial foundation capable of supporting trillions of dollars in assets, where users do not need to understand the underlying protocol.