Ethereum’s new roadmap lands in a market more interested in proof than vision.
This is the central tension behind the Ethereum Foundation’s Protocol Priorities Update for 2026, which splits the next phase of the network into three tracks including scale, UX improvements, and L1 enhancements.
Roadmaps are technical, market issues are not. Investors want to know whether these priorities can help ETH recover in this bear market, and whether it can do so by changing not only developer sentiment but also risk and economics.
That’s why the foundation framework is so important. We don’t sell one upgrade. This presents a system-level argument that Ethereum can simultaneously increase capacity, reduce user friction, and strengthen the base layer.
If it works, the market may begin to allocate a lower risk premium to ETH and become more willing to pay for Ethereum’s long-term role as a payments layer.
The economic case is determined by scale.
The most market-relevant part of the 2026 roadmap is on the scale track.
According to the Ethereum Foundation, the community has already increased Ethereum’s gas limit from 30 million to 60 million, which is the first significant increase since 2021.
Our next goal is to more tightly organize our execution and data availability efforts to reach 100 million.
It’s more than just engineering housekeeping. This is a direct response to the competitive pressures that defined this cycle.
Ethereum needs to support more economic activity without pricing out users while maintaining the decentralization and neutrality that institutions were accustomed to on the chain in the first place.
Considering this, two parts within the scale track are most important to the market structure.
One is ePBS (Proponent-Builder Separation), which the Foundation recognizes as part of the scaling component of Gramsterdam, alongside repricing and additional increases in BLOB parameters.
Although ePBS is highly technical, its importance in the market is clearer than meets the eye. This addresses long-standing concerns about centralization pressures in MEV extraction and block construction.
With more predictable block generation and more reliable neutrality, Ethereum would reduce one of the structural risks that makes some investors cautious about its long-term security and governance profile.
The second is the zkEVM attestor client, which the foundation says is moving from prototype to production readiness.
This is an important signal because it suggests that Ethereum’s future scaling is not just about external rollups operating on the base chain. It also aims to make verification and proofing feel more native to Ethereum’s core stack and more robust in a way that institutions can undertake.
Simply put, Scale tracks aren’t just about throughput. It’s about preserving Ethereum’s economic relevance while reducing the perception that scaling requires too many tradeoffs.
It matters for price, but indirectly. Markets typically reward higher capacity only when they believe the added capacity can support durable and monetizable demand.
UX and L1 enhancements are about risk premium
The remaining two tracks, “Improve UX” and “Enhance L1,” may not make headlines right away, but could result in a larger discount for Ethereum over time.
The foundation said its 2026 usability efforts will focus on native account abstraction and interoperability, with the goal of eliminating the complexity of bundlers and relayers that held back early designs and making smart contract wallets the default.
We also mention EIP-7701 and EIP-8141 as steps toward incorporating smart account logic more directly into the protocol.
This sounds like a product design issue, but it’s also a market issue.
Wallet friction remains one of the biggest hidden obstacles to widespread adoption. Cheap transactions matter less if onboarding still feels complex and error-prone.
If Ethereum can reduce the number of signatures, simplify cross-chain behavior, and make wallets more secure by default, it increases the likelihood that consumer and business activity will actually take hold.
The foundation also links this effort to post-quantum readiness, asserting that native account abstraction creates a cleaner migration path from today’s ECDSA-based authentication, while efforts continue to make quantum-resistant signature verification gas-efficient.
This is not a short-term trigger, but it is exactly what long-term held capital tends to focus on, securing future prospects.
Enhancing the L1 track completes the message.
The Foundation aims to maintain its core properties through increased security, censorship-resistance research, and a more robust testing infrastructure to support faster folk rhythms.
This refers to the Trillion Dollar Security Initiative and efforts such as post-execution transaction assertions and trustless RPC. In addition to FOCIL (EIP-7805), we also highlight enhancements across BLOB and statelessness research, as well as efforts to develop measurable censorship resistance indicators.
For institutional investors, this is not an option. This is the basic case.
Ethereum is increasingly competing for roles that require high reliability, such as stablecoin payments, tokenized funds, and other real-world financial use cases.
These markets care less about the number of headline transactions and more about whether the base layer remains safe, neutral, and predictable under stress.
The Foundation seeks to prove that Ethereum can scale without weakening these properties.
If the market believes so, the benefits go beyond just increased usage. This is perceived as a lower risk premium for ETH.
Ethereum still has gravity, but the fee story looks weak
Despite all these great plans, the problem is that ETH is trading based not only on its future design but also on its current optics.
At the moment, Ethereum’s fundamentals describe a network that is functional, active, but optically cheap in terms of fees, which is still the metric that many investors use to determine ETH’s value capture.
On Etherscan’s tracker, the petrol price is around 0.038 Gwei, which is very cheap. According to YCharts, daily Ethereum network transaction fees are around 140.8 ETH, down around 40% year over year.
That’s good for users and good for builders. We support implementation. This makes more applications economically viable.
But it also undermines the cleanest version of the post-EIP-1559 story. If transactions are cheap and fee income remains low, increased usage will not automatically lead to stronger combustion or tighter supply.
In other words, even though Ethereum still looks weak on the initial scoreboard that many ETH investors look at, it may be winning in utility.
This is where Ethereum’s role is changing rather than shrinking.
While this network still powers much of the on-chain economy, much of that economic activity now resides throughout the Layer 2 network.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin recently acknowledged this problem, admitting that Ethereum needs a “new path” that reduces its dependence on Layer 2 networks.
According to him:
“The original vision for L2 and its role in Ethereum no longer makes sense and a new path is needed.”
But as these networks mature, an open question is how much of that growth will accrue to ETH, and how quickly investors can see it in numbers.
What impact does the roadmap have on ETH price?
So, will the Ethereum Foundation’s priorities help ETH recover from this bear market? Yes, but primarily by improving the quality of its setup.
This is in line with the position of asset management company 21Shares, which ties the appreciation of ETH to specific conditions.
This includes the need for L2 activity to accelerate the recovery of ETH burn or introduce structural mechanisms that better align L2 value generation with mainnet economics.
If Ethereum can aim for and exceed 100 million gas, advance blob scaling, make smart wallets feel native, and maintain censorship resistance and security at the base layer, the new roadmap will help achieve this.
This increases the likelihood that Ethereum will remain the preferred payment layer for on-chain dollars and tokenized assets. It also makes it easier to take on the next wave of adoption.
But what it cannot do on its own is force a reversal of ETF inflows or immediately reinstate high-fee regimes.