Ethereum Foundation Maps 2026 Protocol Priorities as Major Upgrades Near

The Ethereum Foundation’s protocol track leads published a new “Protocol Priorities Update for 2026” on Feb. 18, outlining how core R&D will be organized this year and what the next upgrade cycle is expected to emphasize.

Ethereum’s Priorities In 2026

The update looks back at 2025 as a high-throughput year for mainnet changes, anchored by two network upgrades. Pectra shipped in May, Fusaka followed in December with PeerDAS on mainnet. Alongside those upgrades, the community increased the mainnet gas limit from 30 million to 60 million, calling it the first significant jump since 2021.

The main change is organizational. “Now that those milestones are behind us, we have the opportunity to think about how we organize our work at a slightly higher level,” the authors wrote. For 2026, Protocol work is grouped into three tracks: Scale, Improve UX, and Harden the L1, each with named leads.

The Scale track, led by Ansgar Dietrichs, Marius van der Wijden, and Raúl Kripalani, merges last year’s “Scale L1” and “Scale Blobs” initiatives into one effort. The foundation frames this as a pragmatic consolidation, because execution capacity, networking, and consensus changes tend to land in the same client code and influence each other.

On the roadmap, the update highlights continued gas limit increases “toward and beyond 100M,” supported by block-level access lists via EIP-7928 and ongoing client benchmarking. It also flags “the scaling components of Glamsterdam,” including enshrined PBS through EIP-7732, repricings, and further blob parameter increases.

Beyond that, the Scale track includes pushing a zkEVM attester client from prototype toward production readiness, and longer-run state scaling work that spans near-term repricing and history expiry through to binary trees and statelessness.

The Improve UX track, led by Barnabé Monnot and Matt Garnett, narrows in on two areas the foundation calls the most leverage for 2026 usability: native account abstraction and interoperability.

On account abstraction, the update positions EIP-7702 as a step toward an endpoint where smart contract wallets become the default without bundlers, relayers, or extra gas overhead. It points to proposals including EIP-7701 and EIP-8141, described as “Frame Transactions,” as work that moves smart account logic deeper into the protocol itself.

That UX roadmap is also tied to security direction. The foundation argues native account abstraction provides a cleaner migration path away from ECDSA-based authentication, and says parallel proposals aim to make quantum-resistant signature verification meaningfully cheaper inside the EVM.

Interoperability work builds on the Open Intents Framework with the stated goal of “seamless, trust-minimized cross-L2 interactions,” supported by faster L1 confirmations and shorter L2 settlement times.

The new Harden the L1 track, led by Fredrik Svantes, Parithosh Jayanthi, and Thomas Thiery, is framed as insurance policy work that preserves Ethereum’s core properties while scaling continues.

The update ties security efforts to Svantes’ Trillion Dollar Security Initiative, including post-quantum readiness and execution-layer safeguards like post-execution transaction assertions and “trustless RPCs.”

On censorship resistance, Thiery’s scope includes FOCIL via EIP-7805 and extensions that touch censorship resistance for blobs, statelessness work labeled VOPS, and the development of measurable censorship-resistance metrics. Jayanthi’s remit covers devnets, testnets, and client interoperability testing, which the foundation says becomes more critical if Ethereum moves into a faster fork cadence.

Looking ahead, the foundation targets Glamsterdam for the first half of 2026, with Hegotá planned later in the year. The stated ambition bundles parallel execution, significantly higher gas limits, enshrined PBS, continued blob scaling, and progress on censorship resistance, native account abstraction, and post-quantum security, with more track-level updates promised as the year unfolds.

At press time, Ethereum traded at $1,968.