Ethereum's Strawmap: Seven Hard Forks, One Radical Vision for 2029

Ethereum's finality currently takes about 16 minutes. By 2029, the Ethereum Foundation wants that number down to 8 seconds — a 120x improvement. That ambition, along with 10,000 TPS on Layer 1, native privacy, and quantum-resistant cryptography, is now spelled out in a single document: the Strawmap.

Released in late February 2026 by EF researcher Justin Drake, the strawmap lays out seven hard forks over roughly three and a half years. It is the most comprehensive upgrade plan Ethereum has produced since The Merge. Here is what it contains, why it matters, and what developers need to watch.

What Is the Strawmap?

The name is a portmanteau of "strawman" and "roadmap." Drake chose it deliberately: in a decentralized ecosystem with thousands of contributors, no single entity can dictate an official roadmap. The strawmap is a coordination tool — one coherent path among many possible futures, maintained by the EF Architecture team (Ansgar, Barnabe, Francesco, and Justin) with at least quarterly updates.

Vitalik Buterin characterized the approach as a "Ship of Theseus style rebuild where individual components get replaced one by one." Each hard fork targets a specific set of improvements, but the cumulative effect is a network that would be almost unrecognizable from today's Ethereum by the end of the decade.

Five North Stars

The strawmap organizes its ambitions around five "north star" objectives:

1. Fast L1 — Transaction inclusion and chain finality in seconds, not minutes.
2. Gigagas L1 — 1 gigagas/sec (approximately 10,000 TPS) at L1, powered by zkEVMs and real-time proving.
3. Teragas L2 — 1 gigabyte/sec of data bandwidth (approximately 10,000,000 TPS) at L2, enabled by data availability sampling.
4. Post-Quantum L1 — Centuries-long cryptographic security via hash-based signature schemes.
5. Private L1 — Privacy as a first-class citizen through native shielded ETH transfers.

These are not incremental improvements. Gigagas throughput would place Ethereum's L1 in the same performance tier as high-throughput chains like Solana — while teragas data bandwidth for rollups would push L2 capacity into territory no blockchain has ever approached.

The Seven Forks

The strawmap envisions a cadence of one hard fork roughly every six months through 2029. Here is the sequencing as currently drafted:

Glamsterdam (2026)

The first post-Fusaka upgrade carries two headliners: ePBS (enshrined proposer-builder separation) on the consensus side and BALs (block-level access lists) on the execution side. ePBS moves the proposer-builder separation logic from an out-of-protocol relay system into the consensus layer itself, reducing MEV centralization risks. BALs improve execution efficiency by specifying which storage slots a transaction will access upfront.

Hegota (Late 2026)

Hegota introduces smart account capabilities with native key delegation and protocol-level account abstraction. This fork advances Ethereum's usability story — enabling features like session keys, social recovery, and gas sponsorship directly at the protocol level rather than through external smart contract wallets.

I* and J* (2027-2028)

Placeholder-named forks where the most dramatic changes land. The slot time reduction begins here, with Ethereum's current 12-second slots progressively shrinking: 12 to 8 to 6 to 4 to 3 to 2 seconds, each step gated by network safety confidence. The shift from Gasper consensus to the single-round BFT Minimmit design is also expected in this window.

Later Forks (2028-2029)

The final forks complete the transition to post-quantum hash-based signatures, introduce a STARK-friendly hash function, and bring native shielded ETH transfers to production. By the end of the sequence, Ethereum's cryptographic foundation will have been entirely replaced — providing what the EF calls "centuries-long" security against quantum computing threats.

Minimmit: Single-Round Finality

The consensus mechanism upgrade is perhaps the most technically significant item on the strawmap. Today, Ethereum uses Gasper, which requires multiple rounds of voting across validators to reach finality — a process that takes roughly 16 minutes (two epochs of 32 slots each).

Minimmit replaces this with a single-round BFT (Byzantine Fault Tolerant) design. Instead of waiting for two full epochs of attestations, the network reaches agreement in one round of voting. Under aggressive configurations, this could compress finality to as low as 8 seconds.

The implications extend beyond raw speed:

• DeFi becomes safer. Shorter finality windows reduce the time during which transactions can be reorganized, cutting the attack surface for MEV extraction and sandwich attacks.
• Cross-chain bridges improve. Bridges that wait for finality before releasing funds on the destination chain become dramatically faster.
• User experience closes the gap with Web2. An 8-second confirmation provides the kind of responsiveness that mainstream users expect from payment systems.

Gigagas and Teragas: The Throughput Revolution

The throughput targets use gas — Ethereum's unit of computational work — as the measuring stick.

Gigagas L1 targets 1 billion gas per second on the base layer. Today, Ethereum processes roughly 15 million gas per block every 12 seconds, or about 1.25 million gas per second. Gigagas represents an 800x increase, achieved through zkEVM technology that proves execution in real time. Instead of re-executing every transaction to verify state, validators can verify a succinct cryptographic proof — unlocking massively parallel processing.

Teragas L2 targets 1 gigabyte per second of data availability bandwidth. This is the fuel for rollups: the more data L1 can make available, the more transactions rollups can batch and settle. At teragas scale, L2s collectively could process an estimated 10 million TPS — approaching the throughput of traditional financial clearing systems like Visa and Mastercard combined.

The progression builds on work already underway. The Fusaka upgrade (activated December 2025) introduced PeerDAS (EIP-7594), expanding blob throughput for rollups. The strawmap extends this trajectory by orders of magnitude through full data availability sampling.

Privacy as a Protocol Feature

The strawmap's "Private L1" north star introduces native shielded ETH transfers at the base layer. Unlike existing privacy solutions that operate as overlays (Tornado Cash, Railgun, or zkSync's optional privacy mode), shielded transfers would be a standard feature of the protocol itself.

This means:

• Sender addresses, recipient addresses, and transfer amounts could be hidden by default.
• Privacy would not require users to opt into a separate system or pay premium fees.
• The compliance conversation shifts from "should privacy exist?" to "how should privacy coexist with regulatory requirements?"

The timing is significant. As institutions increase their on-chain activity and regulatory frameworks mature (the EU's MiCA, the US GENIUS Act), embedding privacy at the protocol level gives Ethereum a positioning advantage: it can offer confidential transactions that meet institutional needs while maintaining the public verifiability that regulators require for anti-money-laundering compliance.

Post-Quantum Cryptography: Future-Proofing for Decades

Ethereum currently relies on elliptic curve cryptography (ECDSA) for transaction signing. While no quantum computer can break ECDSA today, the cryptographic community widely agrees that sufficiently powerful quantum machines will eventually emerge — potentially within the next 10-20 years.

The strawmap bundles the biggest cryptographic change with the switch to post-quantum hash-based signatures and a STARK-friendly hash function. This is not a distant aspiration — the EF has already assembled a dedicated post-quantum team, and the NIST standardization of CRYSTALS-Kyber and CRYSTALS-Dilithium in 2024 provides proven primitives to build on.

The transition is designed to be non-disruptive: existing accounts would migrate to new signature schemes through a phased process, maintaining backward compatibility while the network hardens its cryptographic foundations.

Challenges and Skepticism

The strawmap is ambitious by any measure, and it arrives at a time when Ethereum faces legitimate competitive pressure. Solana processes transactions in 400 milliseconds. Sui and Aptos offer sub-second finality. Even Ethereum's own L2 ecosystem processes roughly double the daily transactions of L1.

Several challenges stand out:

• Coordination complexity. Seven hard forks in three and a half years demands exceptional coordination across client teams (Geth, Nethermind, Besu, Erigon, Reth on execution; Prysm, Lighthouse, Teku, Nimbus, Lodestar on consensus). Historical precedent suggests forks often slip.
• Validator requirements. Shorter slot times and higher throughput may increase hardware requirements for validators, potentially centralizing the validator set.
• Ecosystem disruption. Each fork requires every dapp, wallet, bridge, and infrastructure provider to update. Seven forks mean seven update cycles.
• Privacy regulation risk. Native shielded transfers could attract regulatory scrutiny, particularly in jurisdictions that have targeted privacy-preserving technologies.

Drake has acknowledged these tensions. The strawmap is explicitly a "strawman" — a starting point for debate, not a mandate. Community feedback is encouraged via the EF Architecture team's direct channels or strawmap@ethereum.org.

What This Means for Builders

For developers and infrastructure providers, the strawmap signals several strategic shifts:

• L1 becomes competitive again. If gigagas throughput materializes, applications that migrated to L2s for performance reasons may find L1 viable. The calculus of where to deploy changes.
• Privacy-first design. Native shielded transfers mean privacy features will move from "optional add-on" to "default expectation." Applications should plan for privacy-aware architectures.
• Post-quantum readiness. Any protocol storing long-lived secrets or using cryptographic commitments should begin evaluating hash-based alternatives now, not when the fork lands.
• Account abstraction goes native. Hegota's protocol-level account abstraction eliminates the need for external smart account infrastructure, simplifying wallet development.

The Road Ahead

The strawmap is not a promise — it is a proposal. Its value lies not in any individual fork but in the coherent vision it presents: an Ethereum that is fast enough for real-time applications, private enough for institutional finance, and secure enough to outlast the quantum computing era.

Whether the EF can execute seven hard forks in three and a half years is an open question. But the direction is clear. Ethereum is not content to be a slow, expensive settlement layer for rollups. It wants to be a high-performance platform — and it has published the blueprint to get there.

The next quarterly update to the strawmap is expected in mid-2026. The first test of execution arrives with Glamsterdam.

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