The Ethereum Basis's head of protocol monitoring launched a brand new “2026 Protocol Precedence Replace” on February 18, outlining how key R&D can be structured this yr and what can be emphasised within the subsequent improve cycle.
Ethereum’s priorities in 2026
The replace seems to be again on 2025 as a yr of excessive throughput for mainnet modifications, with two community upgrades. Pectra launched in Might and Fusaka launched PeerDAS on mainnet in December. Together with this improve, the group took its first main leap ahead since 2021 by rising the mainnet fuel restrict from 30 million to 60 million.
The most important modifications are organizational. “Now that this milestone has handed, now we have the chance to consider find out how to set up our work at a better stage,” the authors wrote. Protocol work in 2026 is grouped into three tracks: Extensions, UX Enhancements, and L1 Enhancements, with every observe having a named lead.
The Scale observe, led by Ansgar Dietrichs, Marius van der Wijden and Raúl Kripalani, combines final yr's “Scale L1” and “Scale Blobs” initiatives into one effort. As a result of executable, networking, and consensus modifications are likely to belong to the identical consumer code and have an effect on one another, the Basis organizes this as a sensible integration.
The updates within the roadmap spotlight block-level entry lists by way of EIP-7928 and ongoing fuel restrict will increase “towards 100M,” supported by ongoing consumer benchmarking. It additionally exhibits “prolonged parts for Glamsterdam”, together with protected PBS, value changes, and extra blob parameter will increase by way of EIP-7732.
Moreover, the dimensions observe contains pushing the zkEVM prover consumer from prototype to production-ready state and scaling the long-running state via short-term value changes and historical past expiration to binary bushes and stateless.
The UX Enchancment observe, led by Barnabé Monnot and Matt Garnett, narrows down to 2 areas that the muse calls the most important leverage for usability in 2026: fundamental account abstraction and interoperability.
On account abstraction, the replace positions EIP-7702 as a step towards endpoints the place sensible contract wallets default to bundlers, relayers, or with out extra fuel overhead. It factors to proposals together with EIP-7701 and EIP-8141, described as “framed transactions,” as work that strikes sensible account logic deeper into the protocol itself.
The UX roadmap can also be related to the safety path. The muse argues that default account abstraction gives a cleaner migration path away from ECDSA-based authentication, and says the parallel proposal goals to make quantum-resistant signature verification inside the EVM meaningfully cheaper.
The interoperability work builds on the Open Intents Framework with the acknowledged objective of “seamless, trust-minimized L2-to-L2 interplay” enabled by quicker L1 affirmation and shorter L2 settlement occasions.
Led by Fredrik Svantes, Parithosh Jayanthi, and Thomas Thiery, the brand new Harden the L1 observe consists of engaged on an insurance coverage coverage that preserves Ethereum's core properties whereas its enlargement continues.
This replace hyperlinks safety efforts with Svantes' trillion-dollar safety initiatives, together with post-quantum preparation and execution layer protections comparable to post-execution transaction assertions and “untrusted RPC.”
Relating to censorship resistance, Thiery's scope contains expansions to handle censorship resistance for FOCIL and Blob by way of EIP-7805, stateless operations referred to as VOPS, and growth of measurable censorship resistance metrics. Jayanthi's duties cowl devnet, testnet, and consumer interoperability testing, which the muse says will develop into much more vital as Ethereum transitions to a quicker fork circulate.
The muse is focusing on Glamsterdam within the first half of 2026, with Hegota deliberate for later this yr. Acknowledged ambitions embody parallel execution, a lot larger fuel limits, enshrined PBS, ongoing blob enlargement, censorship resistance, default account abstraction, and progress on post-quantum safety, with extra track-level updates promised because the yr approaches.
At press time, Ethereum was buying and selling at $1,968.
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