Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake has unveiled “strawmap,” a strawman roadmap that sketches seven possible protocol forks for Ethereum through the end of 2029. The document offers a long‑term view of Layer‑1 upgrades but frames itself as a coordination tool rather than a final promise.
Seven Forks and Five Long-term Goals
Strawmap outlines roughly 7 hard forks on a 6-month cadence, starting with Glamsterdam and Hegotá in 2026 and ending around 2029. Each fork group changes across the consensus, data, and execution layers, so upgrades move the entire protocol forward together rather than in isolation.
The roadmap anchors around five “north star” goals for Ethereum’s base layer. These targets include fast Layer‑1 finality in seconds, a “gigagas” L1 that can process about 10,000 transactions per second, “teragas” L2 scaling via high data availability, post‑quantum cryptography, and native privacy for shielded ETH transfers on mainnet.
Drake says the plan grew out of an internal Ethereum Foundation workshop in January 2026 and aims to give researchers and client teams a shared mental model of how today’s ideas might fit together over several years. Vitalik Buterin has since commented publicly on the roadmap, focusing on faster slots, incremental block‑time cuts, and the path to quantum‑resistant signatures.
What Strawmap Could Mean for Ethereum Users and Builders
For developers, strawmap is the most detailed Layer‑1 roadmap since the Merge, consolidating separate upgrade threads into a single picture that stretches to 2029. Client teams can use it to plan work on features such as danksharding‑style data sampling, zk‑verified execution, and post‑quantum schemes across multiple forks, rather than one‑off releases.
Ethereum aims to appear faster and more private for users and app developers, but it still relies on rollups for most of its execution scalability, according to the plan. As shown by targets such as 10,000 L1 TPS and massive L2 capacity, DeFi, gaming, and real-world asset initiatives can anticipate significantly higher throughput later this decade.
The document repeatedly warns that timelines are tentative and depend on research results, testing, and coordination across many client teams. Still, analysts say strawmap sends a clear message: Ethereum’s core researchers are willing to attempt more protocol upgrades between now and 2029 than in the network’s first ten years combined, in order to reach high throughput, quantum safety, and built‑in privacy.
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