The Ethereum Foundation has announced a reorganization of its protocol development efforts for 2026, consolidating its work into three new tracks: Scale, Improve UX, and Harden the L1. The update, published on February 18, outlines how the foundation's Protocol team will build on the momentum of last year's major network upgrades.

A Look Back at 2025

According to the foundation, 2025 was one of Ethereum's most productive years at the protocol level, with two major network upgrades shipped. Pectra launched on mainnet in May, introducing EIP-7702, which allows externally owned accounts (EOAs) to temporarily execute smart contract code, enabling features like transaction batching, gas sponsorship, and social recovery. The upgrade also doubled blob throughput and raised the maximum effective validator balance to 2,048 ETH.

In December, Fusaka brought PeerDAS to mainnet, allowing validators to sample blob data rather than downloading it in full. This change significantly reduced bandwidth requirements and enabled an 8x increase in theoretical blob capacity. Two Blob Parameter Only (BPO) forks shipped alongside Fusaka, beginning the ramp from 6 blobs per block toward higher targets.

The community also raised the mainnet gas limit from 30 million to 60 million, the first significant increase since 2021. History expiry removed pre-Merge data from full nodes, saving hundreds of gigabytes of disk space. On the user experience front, the Open Intents Framework reached production, and interoperability standards such as ERC-7930, ERC-7828, and ERC-7888 progressed.

The New Track Structure

The Scale track, led by Ansgar Dietrichs, Marius van der Wijden, and Raúl Kripalani, merges the previous Scale L1 and Scale Blobs initiatives. The foundation said this reflects the intertwined nature of increasing L1 execution capacity and expanding data availability throughput. The track will focus on continuing to raise the gas limit toward and beyond 100 million, delivering scaling components of the Glamsterdam upgrade, advancing the zkEVM attester client, and state scaling efforts.

The Improve UX track, led by Barnabé Monnot and Matt Garnett, will focus on native account abstraction and interoperability. The foundation said EIP-7702 was an important step, but the end goal is smart contract wallets as the default without bundlers, relayers, or extra gas overhead. Proposals like EIP-7701 and EIP-8141 are pushing toward embedding smart account logic directly into the protocol, which also intersects with post-quantum readiness.

The new Harden the L1 track, led by Fredrik Svantes, Parithosh Jayanthi, and Thomas Thiery, is dedicated to preserving Ethereum's core properties as it scales. This includes security hardening through the Trillion Dollar Security Initiative, post-quantum readiness, censorship resistance research including FOCIL (EIP-7805), and network resilience testing.

Looking Ahead

The next major network upgrade, Glamsterdam, is targeted for the first half of 2026, with Hegotá planned to follow later in the year. The foundation said the ambition includes parallel execution, significantly higher gas limits, enshrined PBS, continued blob scaling, and progress on censorship resistance, native account abstraction, and post-quantum security.