2026 Ethereum Future Outlook: A 22,000-Word Research Report (Part 1): How Far Is It From "Infrastructure" to "Ecological Center"?

As one of the most important smart contract platforms today, Ethereum has built the richest on-chain ecosystem and continues to lead the direction of Web3 technological innovation. However, as the ecosystem continues to expand, a series of problems accumulated in Ethereum's underlying architecture and development path are gradually emerging and becoming more complex. For example, the ecological governance and interest distribution mechanisms remain controversial; during the scaling process, it is difficult to balance consensus security, verification efficiency, and decentralization; uncertainties persist in data availability and expansion paths (such as sharding and the Blob mechanism); the Rollup-centric architectural transformation is impacting the main chain's value capture and ecosystem structure; the power distribution and sequencing mechanisms centered around MEV are reshaping the block production system; and competition from high-performance public chains creates external pressure on Ethereum's performance and ecosystem appeal.

Against this backdrop, the Ethereum Foundation and core developers have intensively promoted a series of key adjustments and innovative attempts over the past year. These include restructuring the Foundation's organizational structure, clarifying the responsibilities of the Protocol team, redefining the functions of L1 and L2, adjusting the Foundation's positioning within the ecosystem, exploring Ethereum's commercialization path, and participating in the development of agent economy standards. These changes signify that Ethereum is evolving from a single technical system into a comprehensive infrastructure system encompassing execution, verification, coordination, and capital allocation.

Based on this, this research report takes the core problems currently facing Ethereum as a starting point, systematically reviews its latest progress in technology, architecture, and ecosystem layers, and interprets Ethereum's medium- to long-term development direction. Simultaneously, it will further analyze the strategic direction of the Ethereum Foundation in conjunction with its exploration of funding mechanisms and potential commercialization paths, and evaluate potential risks that may arise during its development, to help you fully understand the logic behind Ethereum's frequent moves.

Author: ShirleyLi, Researcher at Web3Caff Research

Cover: Photo by Unsplash+, Typography by Web3Caff Research

Word Count: Nearly 22,000 characters in total

Note: Due to length constraints, this research report is published in two parts. This is the first part (including sections: Background, Review of Ethereum's Core Problems), while the remaining sections (Detailed Analysis of the Strawmap Draft, Exploring Compliant Commercialization Paths, Market Competition and Risk Assessment, Other Directions Worth Noting, Ethereum Foundation's Support Directions, New Risks Ethereum Ecosystem May Face, Future Outlook) will be updated and completed in the second part.

Table of Contents

• Background
• Review of Ethereum's Core Problems
• Criticisms Surrounding the Ethereum Foundation and Vitalik Buterin
• PoS Technical Improvements
• Blob Capacity Crunch
• The Rollup-Centric Future
• The Battle Over MEV
• Impact from Layer1s like Solana, Sui
• Detailed Analysis of the Strawmap Draft
• Gigagas L1
• Post Quantum L1
• Private L1
• 7 Upgrades Planned in the Strawmap Draft
• Exploring Compliant Commercialization Paths
• Commercialization Attempts
• Compliance
• Other Directions Worth Noting
• Adjustments to the Gas Mechanism
• From DeFi to Defipunk
• AI
• Ethereum Foundation's Support Directions
• New Risks the Ethereum Ecosystem May Face
• Future Outlook
• Key Points Structure Diagram
• References

Background

Since Vitalik Buterin and his team formally introduced Ethereum to global users at international conferences in 2014, the network has undergone nearly twelve years of development. From early niche experiments to the core infrastructure supporting a diverse ecosystem today, Ethereum has grown into one of the most influential underlying platforms in the Web3 world. However, as the ecosystem continues to expand, the "behemoth" that is Ethereum has grown larger, and its pace has become increasingly ponderous. Under the harsh law of the jungle, this inherent burden is constantly amplified by external challengers — it must not only cope with its own operational pressures but also contend with ambitious newcomers.

For Ethereum, "maintaining stability" and "seeking change" have always been contradictory yet tightly interwoven directions. On one hand, it needs to maintain network stability to ensure the steady progress of the entire ecosystem; on the other hand, it must constantly chart new directions for the ecosystem. To this end, Ethereum continuously confirms and revises its development coordinates by releasing phased roadmaps.

Between 2014 and 2016, Ethereum gradually formed an early phased development plan during its advancement, divided into four stages: Frontier, Homestead, Metropolis, and Serenity. The first three stages are generally considered Ethereum 1.0, primarily focused on basic functionality improvements and network stability enhancements. Serenity, meanwhile, represents its long-term evolutionary goal, centered on achieving scalability and performance leaps through the restructuring of consensus mechanisms and underlying architecture.

In 2020, Ethereum further clarified the technical path for the Serenity stage, formally establishing the transition to the Proof-of-Stake (PoS) mechanism and introducing sharding logic, marking the beginning of a systematic architectural restructuring phase for Ethereum.

In 2022, Ethereum released a relatively complete medium- to long-term roadmap, establishing the Rollup-centric scaling path. This meant shifting the execution layer to Layer 2 networks, while the main chain's positioning began to focus on security and data availability. This change set a new tone for subsequent ecosystem development but also laid the groundwork for potential pitfalls.

In February 2026, the Ethereum Foundation once again released the "Strawmap" roadmap draft for the next ten years, proposing more specific optimization goals for multiple dimensions such as the consensus layer, data layer, and execution layer. This further refined Ethereum's long-term optimization direction, reflecting the continuous thinking of Ethereum's mature stage regarding the evolutionary direction of its overall architecture.

Review of Ethereum's Core Problems

However, the adjustment and refinement of the development path itself also reflect Ethereum's dynamic trade-offs among multiple goals—scalability, security, decentralization, and ecological interest distribution—based on actual development progress. Each version of the plan or roadmap can be seen as a phased balancing of the system's overall structure.

In a research report from late 2024, "Ethereum's Future Path: Development Amid Controversy, Can the Ecosystem Giant Withstand Potential Crises?", the author discussed some of the problems Ethereum was facing, including:

• Controversies remain over ecological governance and interest distribution mechanisms;
• During the scaling process, it is difficult to balance consensus security, verification efficiency, and decentralization;
• Uncertainties persist regarding data availability and expansion paths (such as sharding and Blob mechanism);
• The Rollup-centric architectural transformation impacts the main chain's value capture and ecosystem structure;
• The power distribution and sequencing mechanisms centered around MEV are reshaping the block production system;
• Competition from high-performance public chains creates external pressure on Ethereum's performance and ecosystem appeal.

So, over a year later, what is the latest progress on the aforementioned issues? The author will review them one by one in the following content.

Criticisms Surrounding the Ethereum Foundation and Vitalik Buterin

Since the establishment of the Ethereum Foundation, the team centered around Vitalik Buterin has undergone multiple rounds of personnel changes. Due to Vitalik Buterin's prominent influence in the Ethereum ecosystem, the power structure of the Foundation has also been subject to long-term external attention and discussion.

In this context, some believe that certain projects may tend to align with Vitalik Buterin's technical preferences or the Foundation's funding directions, leading to periodic resource concentration and even overcapacity in specific tracks. At the same time, the distributed nature of the technical team makes it difficult for Ethereum's overall progress speed to meet expectations for iteration and innovation speed.

Furthermore, selling activities by the Ethereum Foundation and Vitalik Buterin have also sparked market concerns. Although Vitalik Buterin and related Foundation members have stated that these funds are primarily used to support ecosystem development and project funding, such actions have still triggered discussion and interpretation at the market level.

Latest Developments:

In early 2025, amid a general market recovery and the emergence of new narratives, Ethereum's development pace was relatively slow, which also triggered dissatisfaction within the community to some extent. Some believe that the Ethereum Foundation and core developers lagged in efficiency, market communication, and ecosystem expansion, showing a certain disconnect from the overall industry pace.

In response to these criticisms, the Ethereum Foundation made a series of significant adjustments.

In February 2025, Aya Miyaguchi, who had served as Executive Director of the Ethereum Foundation since 2018, transitioned to the newly created role of President. Her responsibilities shifted from daily operations and executive management to external partnerships, institutional relations, and cultural communication. Concurrently, Nethermind founder Tomasz Stańczak and Hsiao-Wei Wang jointly assumed the role of Co-Executive Director.

Under the new management structure, the Ethereum Foundation streamlined its operations, laying off 19 employees and shifting its strategic focus from Layer 2 back to Layer 1 itself. Simultaneously, the Foundation began to place greater emphasis on external communication, further enhancing transparency regarding technical roadmaps, development directions, and resource usage to build community trust.

In June 2025, the Ethereum Foundation also restructured its internal R&D system. The former department name "Protocol Research & Development (PR&D)" was simplified to "Protocol", aiming to achieve three goals in the short term: scaling L1 performance; scaling Blobs; and improving user experience. This adjustment signified a shift in R&D focus from a research-oriented approach towards engineering implementation and actual delivery. Earlier this year, the Protocol team further upgraded its objectives, explicitly stating them as:

• Scale: Expanding L1 performance by increasing the Gas limit, advancing proposer-builder separation, introducing zkEVM to the mainnet, and optimizing the Blob mechanism;
• Improve UX: Enhancing user experience by continuing to promote native account abstraction and cross-chain interoperability;
• Harden the L1: Strengthening L1 security and censorship resistance through strategies like enhancing post-quantum security preparations, reducing node burdens, and lessening reliance on centralized infrastructure.

However, in February 2026, Tomasz Stańczak announced his resignation as Co-Executive Director of the Ethereum Foundation, with Bastian Aue and Hsiao-Wei Wang jointly taking over the role. During his tenure, Tomasz Stańczak promoted exploration in areas including privacy protection, quantum computing security, and the integration of AI with Ethereum. After stepping down, he will focus more on developing AI and blockchain integration products and infrastructure.[1]

Interestingly, in his resignation statement, Tomasz Stańczak expressed a sentiment of "realizing he was no longer the core driving force, it was better to gracefully pass the baton." This also reflects the gradual decentralization of power within the Ethereum Foundation's governance layer. This change essentially embodies the friction and balance between "Ethereum," the decentralized open ecosystem, and the "Ethereum Foundation," the centralized core coordination body. This contradiction actually exists throughout the entire Web3 system and is one of the key issues all projects in the industry must continuously face.

According to the latest internal organizational structure, the board members of the Ethereum Foundation include Vitalik Buterin, Aya Miyaguchi, Patrick Storchenegger, and Hsiao-Wei Wang, who are primarily responsible for Ethereum's governance and strategic direction adjustments, while specific execution and operations are jointly undertaken by management and various functional teams. The Ethereum Foundation divides its overall work into multiple directions based on function, mainly including:

• Protocol Team: Responsible for advancing the design and implementation of Ethereum's underlying protocol, covering multiple sub-areas such as zkEVM, post-quantum, and dAI;
• Privacy Team: Responsible for driving the research and implementation of on-chain privacy-related technologies, such as private transactions and zero-knowledge proof systems;
• Ecodev Team: Responsible for promoting Ethereum ecosystem development, including developer support, project incubation, and ecological collaboration;
• Ecosystem Unblocking Team: Responsible for facilitating ecosystem development through fund coordination, research support, and public goods infrastructure construction;
• Operations Team: Responsible for the day-to-day functioning of the organization, including finance, legal, human resources, and internal management.

Source: Ethereum Foundation

At the same time, to adapt to changes in the ecological development stage and resource allocation needs, the Ethereum Foundation also made key adjustments to its grant system in August 2025, pausing the open grant program that had been running since 2018. It relaunched the new Ecosystem Support Program (ESP) in November. After the adjustment, the fund allocation model shifted from "passive application processing" to "active guidance." Its initial funding directions covered multiple areas including cryptography, privacy, application layer, security, and community growth. Additionally, the Foundation decided to reduce its annual expenditure rate from approximately 15% to 5% to slow the depletion rate of its ETH reserves.[2] This adjustment marks the Ethereum Foundation's shift from a broad-coverage ecosystem funding model to a refined resource allocation strategy focused on infrastructure and core technologies.

In May of this year, Ethereum Foundation researchers Carl Beek and Julian Ma announced their departures one after another, while former EF researcher Dankrad Feist even publicly stated that the Ethereum ecosystem needs a new organization more closely aligned with Ethereum's economic interests to "save" Ethereum. In response, Vitalik Buterin and Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin sequentially responded, both stating that these controversies essentially reflect the friction between Ethereum's "long-term technology building" orientation and the current commercialization process, which is a necessary "growing pain" in the development journey.

PoS Technical Improvements

While transitioning to the PoS mechanism allowed Ethereum to move away from energy-intensive consensus, the 32 ETH staking threshold effectively raised the barrier to entry for validators, also introducing a risk of validator centralization. To lower the staking threshold for individual validators while the number of validators increases, reducing the communication and coordination costs for network consensus and increasing the cost of malicious attacks becomes a key issue.

In response, Vitalik Buterin proposed enhancing network security by increasing the participation ratio required for block finality (e.g., from the current ~2/3 threshold signature to 75% or higher).[3] The core idea is to hedge against potential security risks by raising the consensus threshold, potentially balancing decentralization and security to some extent.

Latest Developments:

In May 2025, the Pectra upgrade was activated on the Ethereum mainnet.

In this upgrade, EIP-7251 increased the maximum effective balance limit for validators from 32 ETH to 2048 ETH. It's important to note that 32 ETH remains the minimum staking threshold to become a validator; this proposal primarily increases the upper limit of consensus weight a single validator can represent, meaning one validator can now directly vote with more ETH. Through this adjustment, large stakers no longer need to split their stake across multiple validator nodes to receive corresponding incentives, thus helping to reduce the number of validator nodes controlled by a single entity, and consequently lowering the communication and coordination overhead among nodes during the network-wide consensus process.

Furthermore, EIP-7002 optimized the withdrawal mechanism for staking. This proposal introduced an execution layer-triggered withdrawal method, allowing stakers to complete withdrawals under specific conditions without requiring the validator's active signature. This mechanism enhances stakers' control over their assets, reduces the operational complexity of entering and exiting staking, and further improves the overall flexibility of the PoS system.

Additionally, the Ethereum Foundation has explored applying Distributed Validator Technology (DVT) to optimize the staking structure. This technology essentially splits the private key and signing capability of a single validator across multiple nodes for collaborative completion, reducing the risk of a single point of failure. In traditional models, systems require high stability and private key management capability from validator nodes, whereas in multi-node collaboration, the validation duty is shared, potentially lowering requirements for single node uptime and operational maintenance. However, multi-node collaboration also introduces additional system complexity. To address this, the Ethereum Foundation is experimenting with implementing lighter versions (like DVT