The Ethereum Foundation (EF) has publicly released a comprehensive new long-term roadmap for the Ethereum mainnet, dubbed "Strawmap" (strawman + roadmap). Announced by EF Protocol researcher Justin Drake, the document is designed as a technical coordination tool for researchers, developers, and governance stakeholders.
Justin Drake stated, "Strawmap aims to provide a holistic view of Ethereum Layer 1 (L1) upgrades. It’s not a guess; it’s a coordination tool that outlines a reasonable and consistent path from millions of possible outcomes." The roadmap takes a holistic approach, not limiting its scope to the next hard fork but outlining a vision extending to 2029.
The framework is based on an assumption of a hard fork approximately every six months, resulting in seven major upgrade processes through 2029. However, the document specifically cautions that this timeline should be treated with care. While the current draft assumes a human-driven development pace, it notes that processes could accelerate significantly with the adoption of AI-powered development and formal verification tools.
At the core of Strawmap are five ambitious "north-star" goals:
1. Fast L1: Aims to achieve finality in seconds with shorter slot times, delivering a near-instantaneous finality experience on the mainnet to dramatically improve user experience.
2. Gigagas L1: Envisions reaching a transaction capacity of 1 gigagas per second (approximately 10,000 transactions), leveraging zkEVMs and real-time proof-of-work generation. This is described as one of Ethereum's most ambitious L1 scaling steps to date.
3. Teragas Layer 2 (L2): Targets second-layer performance of 1 gigabyte per second (approximately 10 million TPS) through data availability sampling, allowing L2 solutions to offer vastly higher bandwidth while maintaining mainnet security.
4. Post-Quantum L1: Focuses on building mainnet resilience against quantum computers through the implementation of hash-based cryptography.
5. Hidden L1: Aims to provide built-in privacy at the mainnet level via shielded ETH transfers.
The roadmap also visualizes upgrades on a color-coded timeline across three core layers: the consensus layer (CL), data layer (DL), and execution layer (EL). Major, ambitious upgrades termed "headliners" are limited in number per fork; the current process typically highlights one consensus layer and one execution layer headliner for each scheduled fork.
