The Ethereum Foundation’s protocol monitor leads revealed a brand new “Protocol Priorities Update for 2026” on Feb. 18, outlining how core R&D will likely be organized this 12 months and what the following improve cycle is anticipated to emphasise.
Ethereum’s Priorities In 2026
The update seems to be again at 2025 as a high-throughput 12 months for mainnet modifications, anchored by two community upgrades. Pectra shipped in May, Fusaka adopted in December with PeerDAS on mainnet. Alongside these upgrades, the neighborhood elevated the mainnet fuel restrict from 30 million to 60 million, calling it the primary vital leap since 2021.
The principal change is organizational. “Now that those milestones are behind us, we have the opportunity to think about how we organize our work at a slightly higher level,” the authors wrote. For 2026, Protocol work is grouped into three tracks: Scale, Improve UX, and Harden the L1, every with named leads.
The Scale monitor, led by Ansgar Dietrichs, Marius van der Wijden, and Raúl Kripalani, merges final 12 months’s “Scale L1” and “Scale Blobs” initiatives into one effort. The basis frames this as a realistic consolidation, as a result of execution capability, networking, and consensus modifications are inclined to land in the identical shopper code and affect one another.
On the roadmap, the replace highlights continued fuel restrict will increase “toward and beyond 100M,” supported by block-level entry lists through EIP-7928 and ongoing shopper benchmarking. It additionally flags “the scaling components of Glamsterdam,” together with enshrined PBS by way of EIP-7732, repricings, and additional blob parameter will increase.
Beyond that, the Scale monitor consists of pushing a zkEVM attester shopper from prototype towards manufacturing readiness, and longer-run state scaling work that spans near-term repricing and historical past expiry by way of to binary bushes and statelessness.
The Improve UX monitor, led by Barnabé Monnot and Matt Garnett, narrows in on two areas the muse calls essentially the most leverage for 2026 usability: native account abstraction and interoperability.
On account abstraction, the replace positions EIP-7702 as a step towards an endpoint the place good contract wallets turn into the default with out bundlers, relayers, or additional fuel overhead. It factors to proposals together with EIP-7701 and EIP-8141, described as “Frame Transactions,” as work that strikes good account logic deeper into the protocol itself.
That UX roadmap can also be tied to safety course. The basis argues native account abstraction supplies a cleaner migration path away from ECDSA-based authentication, and says parallel proposals intention to make quantum-resistant signature verification meaningfully cheaper contained in the EVM.
Interoperability work builds on the Open Intents Framework with the said aim of “seamless, trust-minimized cross-L2 interactions,” supported by sooner L1 confirmations and shorter L2 settlement occasions.
The new Harden the L1 monitor, led by Fredrik Svantes, Parithosh Jayanthi, and Thomas Thiery, is framed as insurance coverage coverage work that preserves Ethereum’s core properties whereas scaling continues.
The replace ties safety efforts to Svantes’ Trillion Dollar Security Initiative, together with post-quantum readiness and execution-layer safeguards like post-execution transaction assertions and “trustless RPCs.”
On censorship resistance, Thiery’s scope consists of FOCIL through EIP-7805 and extensions that contact censorship resistance for blobs, statelessness work labeled VOPS, and the event of measurable censorship-resistance metrics. Jayanthi’s remit covers devnets, testnets, and shopper interoperability testing, which the muse says turns into extra essential if Ethereum strikes right into a sooner fork cadence.
Looking forward, the muse targets Glamsterdam for the primary half of 2026, with Hegotá deliberate later within the 12 months. The said ambition bundles parallel execution, considerably increased fuel limits, enshrined PBS, continued blob scaling, and progress on censorship resistance, native account abstraction, and post-quantum safety, with extra track-level updates promised because the 12 months unfolds.
At press time, Ethereum traded at $1,968.
Featured picture created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com
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