The Ethereum Foundation has published a draft “Strawmap” that sketches roughly seven protocol forks running through 2029, with goals that include faster slot times, Layer-1 throughput moving toward 10,000 transactions per second, and the integration of privacy and post-quantum protections. Importantly, the Foundation presents it as a coordination document—built after an internal January 2026 workshop—rather than a locked-in delivery calendar. In other words, it is meant to align client teams and researchers on direction and dependencies, not to promise exact dates.
The Strawmap sets out five “north star” objectives that the Foundation expects to roll into successive hard forks, roughly on a six-month cadence. The immediate signal is that Ethereum wants a more predictable rhythm of upgrades, even while keeping implementation details flexible. The first two 2026 targets are named—Glamsterdam and Hegotá—while later forks are explicitly labeled as placeholders as the work matures.
Introducing strawmap, a strawman roadmap by EF Protocol.
Believe in something. Believe in an Ethereum strawmap.
Who is this for?
The document, available at strawmap[.]org, is intended for advanced readers. It is a dense and technical resource primarily for researchers,… pic.twitter.com/gIZh5I8Not
— Justin Drake (@drakefjustin) February 25, 2026
The five objectives that anchor the plan
At the performance layer, the Strawmap focuses on time-to-confirmation and time-to-finality. Slot times are targeted down from the current baseline toward 2 seconds, and full finality is targeted in roughly the 6–16 second range. The intent is to make Ethereum feel materially more responsive without compromising its role as the chain of record. For users and market infrastructure, that kind of latency improvement is not cosmetic; it changes how quickly risk can be reduced after a trade, a bridge action, or a treasury movement.
On throughput, the plan draws a sharp line between L1 capacity and L2 scale. The L1 target—“Gigagas”—aims for about 10,000 TPS, described as enabled by zkEVMs and real-time proving. The Foundation is basically saying L1 should become meaningfully more capable, but not at the expense of the rollup-centric architecture. On L2, the “Teragas” ambition points to millions of TPS through data availability sampling and a rollup-first design, keeping the base layer as the canonical settlement and neutrality anchor.
Two objectives shift the conversation from speed to long-horizon risk. The Strawmap calls for “native privacy,” including protocol-level support for shielded ETH transfers and other privacy primitives rather than leaving privacy entirely to application layers. That is a deliberate reframe: privacy would become part of the protocol’s core toolset, not just an app-level optional feature. Alongside that, the plan outlines a phased move toward post-quantum security, starting with slot-level protections and progressing toward finality-level defenses.
Dependencies, coordination costs, and what markets will track
A key practical feature of the Strawmap is that it tries to map dependencies across consensus, data, and execution changes so implementers can plan multi-cycle integrations. It explicitly references linked workstreams such as danksharding-style data sampling and post-quantum transitions. This is less about inspiring a vision and more about reducing coordination failure—helping client teams understand what must land first before later pieces can safely ship. The Foundation also describes it as a living document, with quarterly revisions intended to reflect research progress and community feedback.
For investors and institutional participants, the biggest benefit is clarity about direction, even if the details remain provisional. Making long-range objectives explicit reduces one form of uncertainty: not “what will Ethereum try to become,” but “how will it likely get there.” Faster finality and higher L1 throughput are framed as improvements to native activity and on-chain UX, while the rollup-centric posture preserves the base layer’s positioning as settlement and neutrality anchor.
At the same time, the inclusion of native privacy and post-quantum cryptography raises new strategic trade-offs. Privacy primitives can intensify regulatory and compliance scrutiny, while quantum resistance targets a deferred but potentially material security vector. The Foundation’s incremental, component-by-component approach effectively admits the operational reality: every fork adds coordination, testing, and upgrade overhead for node operators, client teams, and market infrastructure.
Ultimately, the Strawmap sets a multi-year technical horizon that can influence capital allocation decisions, client roadmaps, and risk models across the ecosystem. The quarterly updates and the evolving sequence of forks through 2029 are likely to become the main signals custodians and market participants watch to recalibrate operational exposure and upgrade planning. If the document stays “live” as promised, the story won’t be a single roadmap moment—it will be an ongoing cadence of revisions, dependencies, and delivery checkpoints.
