Ethereum's Roadmap, Explained: The "Strawmap" and Its Five North Stars

For most of its life, Ethereum's future has lived in scattered places — research forums, developer calls, conference talks, a hundred separate proposals. If you wanted to know where the protocol was actually heading, you had to assemble the picture yourself. In 2026 the Ethereum Foundation's protocol team did something simpler: they drew the whole thing on one page.

They call it the strawmap — a blend of "strawman" and "roadmap" — and it is published openly at strawmap.org. This article walks through it in plain English: what it is, what it deliberately is not, and what its goals actually mean for anyone trying to understand Ethereum.

First, what the strawmap is not

Before reading a roadmap this ambitious, it helps to be clear about its status, because the team is unusually careful about it. The word "strawman" is doing real work. It signals two things.

The first is honesty about how Ethereum decides things. There is no chief executive who can approve a roadmap and make it so. Ethereum is maintained by thousands of independent people, and agreement among them is a slow, emergent, genuinely uncertain process. So any single roadmap — however well-informed — is one coherent sketch among many possible paths, not a plan handed down from the top. The team states plainly that the strawmap is "not authoritative or representative" and "not a prediction."

The second is that it is a work in progress. It came out of an internal Foundation workshop in early 2026 as a way to start a conversation, and it is shared publicly in that same spirit. It will change as research advances and as the community pushes back. Expect updates roughly every quarter, with the revision date printed on the document.

So read it the way its authors intend: as a serious, informed picture of one plausible direction — not a promise, and not a schedule you should hold anyone to.

How to read the diagram

Once you know the layout, the whole thing becomes legible. Four simple rules unlock it.

• Time flows left to right. The columns are dates, running from 2026 out past 2029.
• There are three coloured rows. Each is a layer of the protocol: the Consensus Layer (orange), the Data Layer (green), and the Execution Layer (blue). More on what each does below.
• The black boxes on the far right are the destinations. These are the north stars — the long-range goals everything else is working toward.
• Within each row, the boldest, most saturated boxes are the flagship upgrades. These are the headliners, the single most prominent feature of each release. Paler boxes are smaller or behind-the-scenes changes, and arrows show which upgrades depend on which.

That is the entire key. The rest is detail hung on that frame.

The five north stars, in plain English

The north stars are the best place to start, because they are the durable part — the destinations that stay put even as the route to them keeps being redrawn. There are five.

1. A fast base layer

Today, when you send an Ethereum transaction, it takes a short while to be included and then a while longer to become truly final — locked in beyond any realistic chance of reversal. The "fast L1" goal is to shrink both of those to a matter of seconds. In everyday terms: using Ethereum directly should stop feeling like waiting.

2. A high-throughput base layer (gigagas)

Ethereum meters work in units of "gas." The "gigagas" goal is to let the base layer process on the order of a billion gas per second — roughly 10,000 transactions a second — a large multiple of today. The tools that make this plausible without sacrificing decentralization are advanced cryptographic proofs (zk-proofs) that let ordinary machines verify an enormous amount of work quickly. In short: far more capacity, on the base layer itself.

3. Enormous capacity on the layers above (teragas)

Most everyday Ethereum activity is moving onto "layer 2" networks (rollups) that run on top of Ethereum and lean on it for security. The "teragas L2" goal aims for those layers to collectively handle on the order of 10 million transactions a second, using a technique called data availability sampling that lets the network confirm huge volumes of data were published without every computer downloading all of it. In plain terms: near-unlimited room for applications, one level up.

4. Long-term ("post-quantum") security

The cryptography protecting Ethereum today could, in principle, be broken by a sufficiently powerful quantum computer — a machine that does not yet exist at the required scale and may not for many years. The "post-quantum L1" goal is to move Ethereum onto cryptography believed to hold up even against such machines, well before they arrive. For an asset people intend to hold for a decade, preparing early is the responsible move.

5. Built-in privacy

On Ethereum today, nearly everything is public: every balance and every payment sits on an open ledger anyone can read. The "private L1" goal is to make privacy a first-class feature — letting people shield the details of a transfer while still proving it followed the rules. Think of running payroll on-chain without broadcasting every salary to the world.

Put together, the five describe an Ethereum that is faster, far larger in capacity, secure against a future threat, and private by choice — while keeping the openness and neutrality it is known for.

Forks: how Ethereum ships change

Ethereum does not update continuously. It ships in coordinated releases called forks, roughly one every six months. Each fork bundles a set of upgrades that the whole network adopts together. The strawmap lays out about seven of them through 2029.

The forks have names. Consensus-layer releases follow a star-themed naming scheme with advancing initials — you may have heard of past ones like Deneb or Electra. The next two on the strawmap have finalized names, Glamsterdam and Hegotá; the ones after that carry placeholders like "I★" and "J★" (pronounced "I star") until they are named. The columns get less certain the further right you look, which is exactly as it should be.

A useful word of caution the team includes: these dates deserve "healthy skepticism." The current draft assumes human-paced development, and the authors note that AI-accelerated research could compress the schedule meaningfully.

Headliners: one big feature at a time

To keep releases shipping on a steady rhythm, the modern process limits each fork to a small number of headliners — the flagship upgrades — typically one for the consensus layer and one for the execution layer. Everything else in a release is smaller or works behind the scenes.

The next fork, Glamsterdam, is a good example. Its two headliners are known by the abbreviations ePBS and BALs. You do not need the engineering detail, but in plain terms: ePBS bakes the roles of "who orders transactions" and "who builds the block" more cleanly into the protocol itself, which is good for fairness and resilience; BALs restructure how a block describes what it touches, which helps the network process blocks faster and more predictably. Both are steps toward the speed and throughput north stars above. The underlined labels on the diagram link out to the technical write-ups for anyone who wants them.

The three layers, briefly

The strawmap's three rows correspond to the three jobs Ethereum's software is split into.

• Consensus layer: how the network agrees on the next block and defends itself. This is where "fast finality" and much of the security work lives.
• Data layer: how the network stores and makes available the data that rollups post. This is where the enormous "teragas" capacity for the layers above is unlocked.
• Execution layer: where transactions actually run and fees are paid. This is where raw base-layer throughput ("gigagas") is won.

Running underneath several of these is a broader, multi-year effort the community calls lean Ethereum — a push to simplify and harden the protocol's foundations so it stays secure and maintainable for decades. It is less a single feature than a design philosophy threaded through the whole map.

What a roadmap can and can't tell you

The strawmap is a genuinely useful thing to have: a coherent, honest picture of where Ethereum's builders are trying to take the protocol, framed as durable destinations rather than a rigid timetable. It tells you the network is being actively developed along stable, long-term goals, with security treated as the line that is never crossed for the sake of a feature.

What it cannot tell you is what ETH is worth. A roadmap describes ambition and direction. It does not, on its own, tell you whether the network's actual use justifies today's price, or whether the asset is cheap or expensive right now. Those are questions of measurement, and they are answered not by a diagram of the future but by reading what the network is doing in the present.

That is the work we do at MAJOR KEY. If the strawmap shows you where Ethereum is heading, our research asks a different and more immediate question — what the network's own on-chain activity says its coin is worth today. You can read the open working paper behind that method on our paper page, check Ethereum's live implied fair value for free, or explore the full instrument in the Ethereum Valuation Terminal.

For the roadmap itself, the primary source is always best. The full, technical, regularly-updated strawmap lives at strawmap.org, and a gentler introduction to Ethereum's direction sits at ethereum.org/roadmap.