The Ethereum Foundation has released a long-range technical roadmap dubbed the “Strawmap,” outlining a potential sequence of seven protocol forks extending through 2029. Introduced by Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake, the document is designed as a coordination tool for Ethereum’s developer ecosystem rather than a binding or official roadmap.
Drake described the Strawmap as a “strawman roadmap,” deliberately emphasizing its provisional nature. In a decentralized system like Ethereum, he argued, an official roadmap reflecting all stakeholders is effectively impossible. Rough consensus, he noted, is emergent and continuously evolving. The Strawmap therefore sketches one reasonably coherent path forward rather than predicting a fixed outcome.
The document is aimed primarily at advanced readers, including client developers, researchers, and participants in Ethereum governance. It presents a dense technical overview of Layer 1 ambitions across consensus, execution, and data layers, placing multi-year upgrade proposals onto a single visual timeline. The horizon stretches beyond the short-term focus of All Core Developers calls, mapping forks through the end of the decade.
Five north stars guide Ethereum’s long-term upgrades
Under its current draft, the Strawmap outlines seven forks through 2029, based on a working assumption of roughly one upgrade every six months. Upcoming forks such as Glamsterdam and Hegotá carry finalized names, while later entries remain placeholders. Drake cautioned that these timelines should be treated with skepticism, noting that accelerated development through AI tooling or formal verification could significantly compress schedules.
At the center of the Strawmap are five long-term “north stars” that anchor Ethereum’s technical ambitions. These include fast Layer 1 performance through shorter slot times and finality measured in seconds, a “gigagas” Layer 1 target of roughly 10,000 transactions per second enabled by zkEVM integration and real-time proving, and a “teragas” Layer 2 vision supporting up to 10 million transactions per second via data availability sampling. The roadmap also prioritizes post-quantum cryptography through hash-based signature schemes and introduces first-class privacy at the protocol level through shielded ETH transfers.
One of the most consequential objectives involves reducing transaction finality from roughly 15 minutes today to confirmation in mere seconds. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has previously outlined phased changes to slot times and consensus mechanics that would gradually push block production from 12 seconds toward as low as 2 seconds, alongside redesigned finality systems that maintain security guarantees.
The Strawmap originated as a discussion starter at an Ethereum Foundation workshop in January 2026, partly motivated by efforts to align longer-term research initiatives with shorter-term upgrade planning. By mapping upgrade dependencies and fork constraints visually, the framework surfaced coordination challenges and strategic trade-offs. It was later shared publicly as part of what Drake described as a spirit of proactive transparency and acceleration.
