2030年，以太坊会是什么样？

Original Author: Jang Hyuk-soo

Original Translation: Chopper, Foresight News

Launched in 2015, Ethereum is now entering its eleventh year. Along the way, it transitioned its consensus mechanism from Proof-of-Work to Proof-of-Stake through The Merge, followed by the Shapella, Dencun, Pectra, and Fusaka upgrades. Ethereum is in a state of continuous iteration. Whether you plan to invest in Ethereum or build applications on it, understanding its long-term evolution goals is crucial.

In July 2025, the day after Ethereum's tenth anniversary, Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake proposed the "Lean Ethereum" vision. "Lean" means eliminating redundant design. This roadmap consolidates Ethereum's various scattered research directions, retaining only the core necessary modules to form a unified development blueprint. Think of it as a ten-year-old house whose exterior remains unchanged, but whose foundation, plumbing, and wiring have all been replaced.

In February 2026, this vision materialized into a draft document called "Strawmap." As the name suggests, it is merely a framework draft, not a finalized plan. The community continues to discuss, the document is constantly updated, and it was revised again on June 26. The latest version outlines the hard forks from the Glamsterdam upgrade in the second half of 2026 through 2029, clarifying that all upgrades ultimately point towards five major development goals, referred to as the "North Star" goals in the text.

This article revolves around these five North Star goals, painting a picture of Ethereum's prospects in 2030, four years from now.

Fast L1: Further Accelerating the Mainnet

The first North Star goal is the speed of the Ethereum L1 network itself. Currently, Ethereum transactions take about 15 minutes to reach finality, meaning the transaction result cannot be reversed. The approximately 880,000 validators on the network cannot vote uniformly on every single block, as collecting and processing massive signatures in one go exceeds the network's capacity. Therefore, Ethereum divides validators into 32 groups that vote in turns, requiring two full voting periods to achieve finality.

The streamlined consensus mechanism will leverage zero-knowledge proofs (ZK proofs) to eliminate this bottleneck. Hundreds of thousands of votes can be compressed into a single, concise mathematical proof. All validators can participate in voting on every block, and the vote results are aggregated instantly. The ultimate goal is to achieve single-slot finality.

The block interval will also be shortened. Ethereum currently produces a block every 12 seconds. This 12 seconds is divided into three phases, each taking 4 seconds: the block proposer broadcasts the block to the network, validators vote, and voting information is aggregated.

This time standard was set in 2020, when the beacon chain (Ethereum's Proof-of-Stake consensus layer) was primarily designed for home devices and slow networks. Today, with significant improvements in client software and global network conditions, actual measurements show that each phase takes far less time than the preset upper limit. Based on this, the plan is to reduce the block time from 12 seconds to 6 seconds during 2027–2028. With the streamlined consensus mechanism and a new generation of peer-to-peer communication protocol implemented in 2029–2030, the efficiency of block and vote information propagation will be greatly enhanced, further reducing the block time to 4 seconds.

With a block interval of 4 seconds, the average waiting time from when a user initiates a transaction to its execution will be about 2 seconds. Combined with a faster finality mechanism, the entire process of initiating, executing, and irreversibly confirming a transaction will be compressed to within a few seconds.

Another goal of the streamlined consensus mechanism is to lower the minimum staking threshold from 32 ETH to 1 ETH. Lowering the barrier to entry allows more users to directly participate in network governance. Ethereum's goal for 2030 is to be faster while also being more decentralized, enabling more people to participate in the consensus process.

Giga-Gas L1: Throughput of 1 Billion Gas Per Second

The second North Star goal is throughput capacity. Gas is the unit for measuring computational work on Ethereum. The current Ethereum L1 network processes around 5 million Gas per second. The long-term goal is to reach 1 billion Gas (Giga Gas) per second, an approximately 200-fold increase in mainnet throughput.

The biggest obstacle comes from the redundant execution mechanism, a fundamental verification model for blockchains. When a new block is generated, thousands of nodes worldwide need to independently re-execute all transactions within the block. It's like one student arriving at an answer, and the entire class redoing the calculation from scratch to check the result. This mechanism ensures the trustworthiness of a decentralized network but creates a persistent challenge: the difficulty of achieving both decentralization and high performance. To allow ordinary people to run nodes, throughput must be limited; to increase throughput, it requires reliance on a few high-performance nodes.

The technology to break this deadlock is again zero-knowledge proofs. The node packaging the block also submits a mathematical proof verifying that all transactions within the block were executed correctly. Other nodes don't need to re-execute the transactions; they only need to verify the proof. Verifying proofs requires extremely low computational power, achievable even on mobile devices. Applying this scheme to L1 block verification is known as L1 ZK-EVM, for which the Ethereum Foundation published an official roadmap in February 2026.

According to the "Strawmap" plan, the first phase involves running traditional redundant execution alongside ZK proofs in parallel, with the proof mechanism being optional. This transitions to a mandatory proof mode in 2028–2029, where blocks are verified solely by ZK proofs. At this stage, no matter how many transactions a block contains, the verification burden on nodes will not increase correspondingly. This provides support for continuously raising the Gas limit, ultimately aiming for the 1 billion Gas per second target.

For ordinary users, this means wallets (on phones or browsers) can directly and fully verify the entire blockchain without needing to trust third-party RPC nodes. With this verification system, Ethereum moves from being just "decentralized" to being "trustless."

Trillion-Gas L2: High-Speed Data Channels Supporting Massive Rollups

The third North Star goal targets Layer 2 networks (L2). L2s execute transactions outside the Ethereum mainnet, uploading only the final transaction data to L1, thereby inheriting L1's security. The dedicated space on L1 for storing this type of data is called a Blob. The total capacity of Blobs determines the throughput limit for all L2 networks.

The PeerDAS technology, deployed in the Fusaka hard fork in December 2025, allows nodes to verify only a portion of Blob data, laying the foundation for massively scaling the number of Blobs. The proposed Glamsterdam upgrade will further optimize the network transmission and storage efficiency of Blobs. "Strawmap" plans a steady year-over-year expansion of data carrying capacity, eventually achieving 1 GB of data bandwidth per second, supporting a trillion-Gas scale L2 ecosystem. This bandwidth would be sufficient to transmit data equivalent to a high-definition video every few seconds.

This roadmap clearly defines the division of labor within Ethereum. Even after all upgrades are implemented, the L1 network's throughput will still have structural limitations compared to high-performance blockchains like Solana. Applications pursuing extreme performance will connect to the Ethereum ecosystem through independent L2 networks.

Robinhood Chain is a typical example. Robinhood launched its own Ethereum L2 network to handle tokenized stock trading, fully inheriting Ethereum's security while autonomously managing various business needs on L2, including compliance and regulatory arrangements.

Therefore, by 2030, Ethereum will form a large-scale settlement network structure: L1 is responsible for final settlement and security, while multiple L2 networks each perform their specific functions, deeply optimized for different business scenarios.

Quantum-Resistant L1 Network: Facing the Quantum Computing Threat

The fourth North Star goal is achieving quantum resistance. Ethereum's current signature schemes—wallets use the ECDSA algorithm and validators use the BLS algorithm—would be broken once a sufficiently powerful quantum computer emerges. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has indicated that the ECDSA algorithm should be phased out starting in 2030, with a complete ban by 2035. Google has set 2029 as the deadline for switching its internal systems to quantum-resistant cryptography. The arrival of quantum technology capable of breaking Ethereum's encryption may be sooner than the market previously anticipated.

The core solution is to replace the existing signature algorithms with hash-based cryptography, a technology resistant to quantum attacks. Furthermore, hash signatures are highly compatible with ZK proofs, aligning with the technical path of the Giga Gas L1 network. The Ethereum Foundation established a dedicated post-quantum research team in January 2026 and set up a $1 million prize to verify the security of hash functions.

According to the "Strawmap" plan, the transition spans multiple hard forks. It begins by supporting pre-registered quantum-resistant public keys, followed by upgrades to validator voting signatures, the transaction layer, and the data layer. It is expected to build a hash-based cryptographic L1 network by 2029. If the plan is implemented successfully, Ethereum will still be able to secure assets even after the advent of the quantum computing era.

Privacy-Native L1 Network: Transaction Privacy as a Foundational Capability

The final North Star goal is a capability Ethereum has never possessed. Currently, all Ethereum transactions are publicly visible on the network. Anyone can check an account's balance and entire transaction history using just an address. For individuals, this poses a privacy risk. For enterprises wanting to distribute salaries or pay suppliers on-chain, the public nature of transaction information directly hinders application adoption.

An L1 privacy solution aims to implement shielded transactions, essentially putting the currently fully public transactions, akin to a postcard, into a sealed envelope. The sender, receiver, and transaction amount are hidden from public view, while ZK proofs assure the network that the transaction complies with the rules. ZK proofs are woven throughout Ethereum's entire upgrade path, and this privacy transformation is a very significant part of it.

According to "Strawmap," privacy infrastructure could potentially be implemented as early as the Hegotá hard fork. A subsequent upgrade phase will modify the transaction memory pool so that transaction content is encrypted before being submitted on-chain. Among the five goals, the details of the privacy-related plans are the most vague and are highly susceptible to the regulatory environment, making them the most uncertain. Even so, Ethereum including native L1 privacy in its official roadmap for the first time represents a major shift.

Conclusion: Ethereum Four Years From Now

The five North Star goals are summarized concisely below:

• Fast L1: Transaction finality time reduced from 15 minutes to a few seconds; block interval decreased from 12 seconds to 4 seconds.
• Giga Gas L1: ZK proofs replace redundant execution; L1 processes 1 billion Gas per second, boosting throughput by approximately 200x.
• Trillion-Gas L2: L2 data carrying capacity expanded to 1 GB per second, supporting the parallel operation of a massive number of Rollups.
• Quantum-Resistant L1: Signature scheme switched to hash-based cryptography to confidently face the impact of quantum computing.
• Privacy-Native L1: Hiding transaction information while proving transaction compliance becomes a standard feature of Ethereum.

The entities driving the roadmap's implementation are also changing. The Ethereum Foundation recently laid off about 20% of its staff, with its functions gradually shrinking, and numerous new organizations filling the gaps in the ecosystem. In June 2026, Ethlabs was formally established, a non-profit research and development institution supported by ecosystem enterprises and Ethereum co-founder Joseph Lubin. A week later, Ethereum Institutional, founded by former members of the Foundation's enterprise team, emerged. Ethereum is evolving towards a more purely open-source system, with a smaller foundation collaborating with multiple independent institutions to jointly advance development.

Of course, no plan is guaranteed to be delivered on schedule. "Strawmap" is only a continuously revised draft, not a finalized roadmap. The upcoming Glamsterdam hard fork has already been postponed from the first half of 2026 to the second half. Development progress may be delayed, cryptographic algorithms may require longer security audits, and the features included in each hard fork will continue to be adjusted based on discussions among researchers and the community.

Regardless of the final form it takes, Ethereum will remain the world's most neutral and trustless general-purpose computing network. "Strawmap" clearly sets the goal: while preserving its core positioning, become faster, more capable, and more secure.