Ethereum Foundation Announces 2026 Roadmap

The Ethereum Foundation announced its protocol priorities for 2026 on February 18, outlining a restructured development roadmap centered on three core tracks: scaling the network, improving user experience, and hardening the Layer 1 foundation. This update, published by the foundation's protocol team, aims to guide Ethereum's evolution following a year of significant advancements, with key network upgrades planned for the first and second halves of the year.

The Scale track consolidates previous efforts on Layer 1 execution and blob data availability into a unified initiative, led by developers Ansgar Dietrichs, Marius van der Wijden, and Raúl Kripalani. It prioritizes raising the mainnet gas limit, which determines the computational capacity per block, from its current 60 million toward and beyond 100 million. This follows a doubling of the limit from 30 million in 2025, the first major increase since 2021. Supporting measures include block-level access lists via EIP-7928, ongoing client benchmarking to ensure reliability, and refinements to gas pricing. The track also advances blob scaling to reduce costs for Layer 2 rollups, alongside progress on a zkEVM attester client for...