For years, the party line was simple: let Layer-2s handle the chaos, keep the base layer slow but safe. That era is ending. Ethereum\u2019s brain trust quietly released a rough, ambitious internal blueprint\u200a\u2014\u200anicknamed the \u201cStrawmap\u201d\u200a\u2014\u200athat pulls resources from external networks back to the heart of the\u00a0machine.<\/p>\n
Between 2026 and 2029, seven major hard forks could hit the network roughly every six months. The goal isn\u2019t just incremental improvement.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a fundamental identity shift: from a sleepy settlement layer to a high-velocity engine capable of 10,000 transactions per second (TPS) on Layer-1 alone. If it succeeds, finality will shrink from a quarter-hour to the time it takes to\u00a0blink.<\/p>\n
Early this year, Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake dropped<\/a> a rough-cut development sketch. It pointed to roughly seven hard forks launching between 2026 and\u00a02029.<\/p>\n Ethereum\u2019s \u2018strawmap.\u2019 Source:\u00a0X<\/a><\/p>\n These upgrades are expected to hit about every six months. They aim to turn Ethereum into a high-speed settlement layer where finality drops from a current ~16-minute wait down to just seconds. The target is 1 gigagas per second directly on Layer\u00a01.<\/p>\n If you\u2019re wondering, a gigagas<\/a> is one billion units of gas per second. That\u2019s an astronomical jump from today\u2019s limits, translating into real-world transactions per second (TPS) that would blow current numbers out of the\u00a0water.<\/p>\n Layer-2s were a band-aid, not a cure. They helped, sure, but for real financial flows\u200a\u2014\u200athe kind that move billions\u200a\u2014\u200athe base chain needs serious muscle. Vitalik Buterin himself has noted that rollups can only hit millions of TPS if the L1 doesn\u2019t become a bottleneck.<\/p>\n Simply put: Ethereum wants to be the ultimate settlement hub where traffic jams don\u2019t exist. The upcoming forks are designed to crank up transaction flow, slash confirmation windows, and make the whole engine run smoother.<\/p>\n Hitting 10,000 TPS on Layer 1 used to be a pipe dream. Right now, you wait about 15 minutes for a transaction to truly finalize<\/a>. According to the Strawmap, zkEVMs paired with real-time proving could unblock that 1 gigagas per second mark, shrinking finality to between 6 and 16\u00a0seconds.<\/p>\n Slot times (the gaps between blocks) could tighten from 12 seconds to 8, and eventually drop to single seconds. That changes the game for DeFi, dApps, and especially blockchain payment systems, making them feel as snappy as a credit card\u00a0swipe.<\/p>\n All of this acceleration depends on these hard forks landing without a hitch. Miss a step, and Ethereum risks falling\u00a0behind.<\/p>\n Ethereum throughput projection. Source: GrowThePie (Reddit<\/a>)<\/p>\n Make no mistake: L2 scaling continues. But now, L1 is finally turning up the heat to eliminate its own bottlenecks. With near-instant finality, an agile Ethereum makes room for wild new use cases driven by\u00a0AI.<\/p>\n Think about autonomous AI agents that need to execute complex, on-chain strategies in real time. They can\u2019t wait 15 minutes. Faster finality and lower latency unlock entirely new categories like algorithmic trading, decentralized automation, and AI-powered financial rails.<\/p>\n Facing fierce rivals, Ethereum is drilling down on data propagation and raw network efficiency. This evolution will either cement it as a high-speed settlement giant\u200a\u2014\u200aor hand the \u201cfast chain\u201d crown to more centralized competitors.<\/p>\n A recent paper<\/a> from Google Quantum AI turned heads. It warned that large-scale quantum computers\u200a\u2014\u200acapable of breaking Ethereum\u2019s 256-bit elliptic curve cryptography\u200a\u2014\u200amight arrive by 2029, using 20x fewer physical qubits than previously estimated.<\/p>\n To get ahead of that threat, Ethereum developers are digging into hash-based cryptography across four key\u00a0areas:<\/p>\n Consensus signatures (BLS)Data availability (KZG)Account signatures (ECDSA)ZK-proofs at the app\u00a0layer<\/p>\n By early 2026, the Ethereum Foundation had already assembled a Post-Quantum Security Team, sharing open research at pq.ethereum.org<\/a>. They\u2019re collaborating with client teams and research groups to hammer out the transition strategy.<\/p>\n The standout here is EIP-8141<\/a>, a proposal that introduces native account abstraction\u200a\u2014\u200alikely landing in the Hegota fork (more on that later). This means everyday users will eventually choose their own signature verification method, without waiting for a clumsy network-wide migration.<\/p>\n Today, privacy is mostly a bolt-on feature. The new goal is to bake it directly into the protocol. That\u2019s huge for enterprises, financial institutions, and decentralized identity\u00a0systems.<\/p>\n Proposals for shielded ETH transfers are moving forward in 2026. Leading the pack is EIP-8182, drafted by developer Tom Lehman and backed by the Foundation\u2019s Strawmap. It uses zero-knowledge proofs to hide sender, receiver, and\u00a0amount.<\/p>\n EIP-8182. Source:\u00a0X<\/a><\/p>\n The clever twist: a single, unified pool for everyone. That solves the classic \u201canonymity set chicken-and-egg\u201d problem\u200a\u2014\u200awhere small pools offer weak privacy. With one big pool, the anonymity set is massive from day\u00a0one.<\/p>\n Users could eventually deposit ETH or ERC-20s, move them around privately, and withdraw them\u200a\u2014\u200aall while keeping their existing wallet and ENS name. Native, protocol-level privacy might finally turn crypto from \u201cinternet money\u201d into real global financial infrastructure.<\/p>\n Rollups cut costs by batching transactions, but until Dencun (March 2024), Ethereum stored that rollup data permanently. That was expensive.<\/p>\n Dencun introduced temporary blobs via proto-danksharding, slashing fees. Now the team is prepping Danksharding<\/a>, which ramps blobs from 6 to 64+ and introduces data availability sampling\u00a0(DAS).<\/p>\n DAS is a game-changer: nodes no longer need to download a whole block just to confirm data is there. But it also demands new infrastructure\u200a\u2014\u200anew ways to verify rollup data, split block building from proposal duties, and cryptographically prove tiny data subsets were\u00a0checked.<\/p>\n Ethereum is already the most secure decentralized smart contract platform, but there\u2019s always room to harden it. Planned upgrades include better handling of competing blocks and shorter times to \u201cfinality\u201d (making blocks unchangeable without a fortune in penalties).<\/p>\n Also coming: stronger censorship resistance<\/strong>. New staking tech aims to balance decentralization with protection against hardware, software, and network failures.<\/p>\n Key technologies here:<\/p>\n Distributed Validator Technology (DVT)<\/strong>: Validators register multiple independent keys that act as a single group identity. That slashes the risk of one failure or hack taking a validator offline. A threshold of participants must sign off on any proposal or attestation.Proposer-Builder Separation (PBS)<\/strong>: One validator creates a block, another broadcasts it. That makes censorship economically irrational\u200a\u2014\u200aa rogue proposer would have to pick a less profitable block, which other validators would instantly spot.Secret Leader Election (SLE<\/strong>): Stops attackers from pre-targeting block proposers through denial-of-service attacks. Cryptographic commitments are constantly reshuffled, so only the validators themselves know the order in\u00a0advance.<\/p>\n Plus, profits from professional block-building algorithms get split more fairly, preventing big institutional stakers from hoarding all the\u00a0stake.<\/p>\n For mass adoption, Ethereum needs to feel like a Web2 app. That means wallet and key management, transaction triggers, everything\u200a\u2014\u200adrastically simplified.<\/p>\n Right now, private keys are like master passwords. Lose them, lose the account. Smart contract wallets (via account abstraction) offer safeguards, fraud defense, and recovery options\u200a\u2014\u200abut Ethereum doesn\u2019t fully support them yet. That extra support is what account abstraction delivers.<\/p>\n Today, running your own node requires serious technical chops. Most people trust third parties instead. Upgrades coming down the\u00a0pike:<\/p>\n Verkle Trees<\/strong> for space-efficient storage.Statelessness<\/strong> to slash disk space\u00a0needs.Light nodes<\/strong> that run on phones or browsers.<\/p>\n When those land, the barriers drop to near zero. Permissionless access without third-party trust becomes real. Smart contract wallets are already live (EIP-4337), and Verkle Tree testnets are running. Full statelessness? Still likely a few years\u00a0away.<\/p>\n As of May 2026, only two upcoming forks have official names. The rest have working titles, locked in as R&D progresses.<\/p>\n Glamsterdam<\/strong> (a blend of Amsterdam and Gloas\u200a\u2014\u200aan execution + consensus layer upgrade) This fork aims to \u201cclear the path for next-gen scaling.\u201d It builds on Fusaka\u2019s foundation in three directions:<\/p>\n Faster parallel processingBigger capacityPreventing database bloat for long-term sustainabilityVitalik Buterin\u2019s post on Glamsterdam. Source:\u00a0X<\/a><\/p>\n Glamsterdam reshuffles how blocks are created and verified, locking in speed and affordability as activity rises. Gas becomes more predictable, costing users less for state-heavy apps.<\/p>\n Fusaka introduced blobs; Glamsterdam pushes them further and draws a harder line between block proposers and builders. The bar for home node operators stays reasonable.<\/p>\n The next fork, Hegota<\/strong> (named after two upgrades: Heze and Bogota\u200a\u2014\u200aconsensus and execution layers respectively), is planned for the second half of 2026. Proposals are still being hammered\u00a0out.<\/p>\n Seven hard forks in three years is aggressive by any measure. But the stakes are huge: faster finality, native privacy, quantum resistance, and account abstraction will decide whether Ethereum remains the smart contract leader or slowly cedes ground to faster, flashier\u00a0rivals.<\/p>\n Ethereum is done waiting for Layer-2s to fix its problems. The base layer is getting a serious upgrade. If this roadmap holds, by 2029, Ethereum will be faster, tougher, harder to censor, and ready for whatever comes next\u200a\u2014\u200awhether that\u2019s AI agents trading on-chain, global financial rails, or something nobody has even imagined\u00a0yet.<\/p>\n Inside Ethereum\u2019s \u2018strawmap\u2019 \u2014 hard forks to 10,000 TPS by 2029<\/a> was originally published in Coinmonks<\/a> on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" For years, the party line was simple: let Layer-2s handle the chaos, keep the base layer slow but safe. That era is ending. Ethereum\u2019s brain trust quietly released a rough, ambitious internal blueprint\u200a\u2014\u200anicknamed the \u201cStrawmap\u201d\u200a\u2014\u200athat pulls resources from external networks back to the heart of the\u00a0machine. Between 2026 and 2029, seven major hard forks could […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":164813,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-164812","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164812"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=164812"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164812\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/164813"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=164812"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=164812"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=164812"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Why push so hard right\u00a0now?<\/h3>\n
The big number: 10,000 TPS and blink-and-you-miss-it finality<\/h3>\n
Balancing L1 muscle with L2 flexibility<\/h3>\n
Looking ahead: Quantum\u00a0defense<\/h3>\n
Built-in privacy: No more app-level band-aids<\/h3>\n
Other key fixes on the\u00a0table<\/h3>\n
High transaction costs<\/h4>\n
Security boosts<\/h4>\n
Easing complexity<\/h4>\n
Running a node should be\u00a0easy<\/h4>\n
Confirmed hard forks (so\u00a0far)<\/h3>\n
The road\u00a0ahead<\/h3>\n