L1 Strawmap - Ethereum draft roadmap

By Justin Drake

Ethereum’s L1 Strawmap is a newly published draft roadmap for the Ethereum base-layer protocol, authored by Justin Drake and maintained by the Ethereum Foundation’s EF Protocol/Architecture team as a long-range planning tool for researchers, core developers, and governance participants. It originated as an internal workshop document in January 2026 and has now been made public at strawmap.org as a “strawman” proposal: a dense, technical, and explicitly non-final view of how Ethereum’s Layer 1 could evolve over the rest of the decade. The Strawmap complements, but is distinct from, the higher-level public roadmap on ethereum.org, and is intended to be updated at least quarterly as research, implementation progress, and community feedback evolve. Substantively, the Strawmap organizes Ethereum’s long-term protocol ambitions around five core “north star” goals: a fast L1 with transaction inclusion and finality in seconds; a gigagas L1 supporting roughly 10,000 transactions per second on Layer 1 via embedded zkEVMs and real-time proving; a teragas L2 with around 10 million TPS across rollups enabled by much higher data availability; a post‑quantum L1 that migrates to hash-based and STARK‑style cryptography for centuries-long security; and a private L1 with shielded ETH transfers as a first-class protocol feature. To reach these targets, the roadmap sketches a sequence of roughly seven protocol forks through 2029 (about one every six months), including changes such as shorter slot times and new consensus mechanisms (e.g., Minimmit for faster finality), mandatory zk-proof-based validity at L1, large increases in data availability bandwidth, migration away from ECDSA to quantum-safe signatures, and native privacy features. While timelines are explicitly tentative and “human-first,” the document is significant because it consolidates disparate protocol proposals into a single, visual, dependency-aware view of Ethereum’s possible technical trajectory, helping the ecosystem debate trade-offs between performance, security, privacy, and validator requirements over a multi-year horizon.

✨ AI-generated background, compiled from web sources — not editorial content.

More coverage

• L1 Strawmap — Ethereum Draft Roadmap (strawmap.org)
• Ethereum Foundation Unveils New 'Strawmap' Roadmap ... - Bankless (bankless.com)
• Ethereum Strawmap: The Five North Stars Explained - Everstake (everstake.one)
• Ethereum Strawmap — Draft Roadmap - GitHub (github.com)
• Ethereum roadmap | ⁦ethereum.org⁩ (ethereum.org)

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