The Ethereum Foundation’s protocol track leaders announced a new 2026 Protocol Priorities Update on February 18, outlining how core research and development will be organized this year and what they will focus on in the next upgrade cycle.
Ethereum priorities in 2026
In this update, we look back at 2025 as a year of high-throughput mainnet changes, supported by two network upgrades. Pectra shipped in May, and Fusaka released PeerDAS on mainnet in December. In addition to these upgrades, the community increased the mainnet gas limit from 30 million to 60 million, calling this the first significant increase since 2021.
The main changes are organizational. “Now that we have passed these milestones, we have an opportunity to think about how we organize our work at a slightly higher level,” the authors write. Protocol work in 2026 will be grouped into three tracks, each with a named lead: Scale, Improve UX, and Enhance L1.
The Scale track, led by Ansgar Dietrichs, Marius van der Wijden, and Raúl Kripalani, combines last year’s “Scale L1” and “Scale Blobs” efforts into one effort. The Foundation frames this as a pragmatic integration, as changes in execution capabilities, networking, and consensus tend to be reflected in the same client code and impact each other.
The roadmap highlights that this update will continue to increase gas limits “toward and beyond 100M” supported by block-level access lists and continuous client benchmarking via EIP-7928. It also warns of “scaling components of Gramsterdam” such as EIP-7732’s enshrinement of PBS, price revisions, and further increases in blob parameters.
In addition, the scale track includes moving the zkEVM attestor client from prototype to production-ready, and scaling the long-term state from short-term price changes and historical expiration to binary trees and stateless.
The UX Improvement Track, led by Barnabé Monnot and Matt Garnett, focuses on two areas the foundation says will have the most leverage for usability in 2026: native account abstraction and interoperability.
Regarding account abstraction, this update positions EIP-7702 as a step towards endpoints where smart contract wallets are the default without bundlers, relayers, or additional gas overhead. The report points to proposals such as EIP-7701 and EIP-8141, called “frame transactions,” as efforts to embed smart account logic deep within the protocols themselves.
Its UX roadmap is also tied to its security direction. The foundation claims that native account abstraction provides a cleaner migration path from ECDSA-based authentication, and says the parallel proposal aims to make quantum-proof signature verification within EVM significantly cheaper.
The interoperability effort is built on the Open Intents Framework, with the 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 an insurance policy that preserves Ethereum’s core assets while continuing to scale.
This update connects security efforts to Svantes’ Trillion Dollar Security Initiative, including post-quantum readiness and execution layer safeguards such as post-execution transaction assertions and “trustless RPC.”
Regarding censorship resistance, Mr. Thiery’s scope includes censorship resistance enhancements for FOCIL and BLOB with EIP-7805, stateless work labeled VOPS, and the development of measurable censorship resistance indicators. Jayanthi’s remit covers developmentnet, testnet, and client interoperability testing, which the foundation says will become more important as Ethereum moves to a faster folk rhythm.
Looking ahead, the Foundation is targeting Gramsterdam in the first half of 2026, with Hegota planned for the second half of the same year. Stated ambitions include parallel execution, significantly higher gas limits, the introduction of PBS, continued blob scaling, censorship resistance, native account abstraction, and post-quantum security advances, with more track-level updates promised as the year progresses.
At the time of writing, Ethereum was trading at $1,968.
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