The Ethereum Foundation has published its 2026 protocol priorities and split core work into three tracks: Scale, Improve UX, and Harden the L1. The plan guides what client teams and researchers will focus on after Pectra, with upgrades named Glamsterdam and Hegotá expected to deliver many of these changes.
Scaling Ethereum and Improving User Experience
Due to the tight interdependence of execution and data availability, the Scale track combines previous “Scale L1” and “Scale Blobs” work. To maintain dependable blocks and healthy clients, developers want to continue increasing Ethereum’s gas cap toward and beyond 100 million. In order for consensus to directly check zkEVM proofs, they will also shift the zkEVM attester client toward production, modify gas pricing, and increase blob capacity for rollups.
The Improve UX track focuses on making Ethereum easier and safer to use for everyday users, wallets, and apps. A central goal is native account abstraction, so smart contract wallets can behave like normal accounts without extra gas or external bundlers.
Proposals like EIP‑7701 and EIP‑8141, also called Frame Transactions, move more account logic into the protocol and help prepare for a future move away from ECDSA to post‑quantum secure signatures. The track also expands the Open Intents Framework so users can move assets and liquidity across rollups with fewer steps and less trust in bridges, backed by faster L1 finality and shorter L2 settlement windows.
Hardening the L1 and Roadmap for 2026
The Harden the L1 track targets long‑term security, censorship resistance, and robustness of Ethereum’s base layer. It includes the “Trillion Dollar Security Initiative,” which focuses on post‑quantum readiness and new protections like post‑execution transaction checks and more trust‑minimized RPC patterns. Researchers will work on protocol‑level tools such as FOCIL to deal with misbehaving validators and extend censorship resistance to blobs and future stateless designs, while defining metrics that let clients and stakers measure progress.
Two upgrades, Glamsterdam in the first half of 2026 and Hegotá later in the year, will ship many of these priorities in stages. Together, they aim to increase throughput, make smart accounts and intents feel native, and harden Ethereum against censorship and future cryptographic threats. The Foundation says organizing work into the three tracks should shorten the path from research to mainnet and give the community a clearer picture of where Ethereum is heading
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