Where Ethereum is headed through 2029

A guide to the Ethereum Foundation protocol team's Strawmap (source updated 2026-11-02). It is a discussion draft, not an official plan.

Five goals

Glamsterdam (Early 2027)

Hegotá (2027)

I* (2028)

J* (2028~29)

K* (2029)

L* (2029~30)

Beyond that (Long term)

How the roadmap got here

  1. 2021-12-02 Five-branch roadmap diagram: On the Beacon Chain's first anniversary, he drew the five branches Merge, Surge, Verge, Purge, and Splurge on one page. Surge was the path of growing rollups by increasing the number of shards, and Verge was the path of nodes not holding state via Verkle trees. Proposer-builder separation (PBS) and MEV countermeasures were still in the Splurge slot, "other improvements," at this point.
  2. 2022-07-21 EthCC Paris talk: Two months before The Merge, he explained the five branches himself. The message that the Merge is a beginning, not an end, spread widely.
  3. 2022-09-15 The Merge: The transition to proof of stake, the first goal of the Merge branch, was completed.
  4. 2022-11-04 Sixth branch Scourge added: The problem of MEV centralizing block production was split out into the Scourge, and PBS and MEV countermeasures were moved there from Splurge. Goals were written for each branch. Surge's became 100,000 transactions per second on rollups, and Verge's became "verify a single SNARK and you're done." A quantum resistance slot appeared for the first time.
  5. 2023-12-30 2023 roadmap diagram: The Scourge widened beyond MEV to cover liquid staking and the staking economy. ePBS, execution tickets, and inclusion lists became candidates, and raising the validator maximum balance was added. PeerDAS was added to Surge.
  6. 2024-03-13 Dencun: Blobs (EIP-4844), Surge's first piece, shipped, and L2 fees dropped sharply.
  7. 2024-10-14 The six-part "Possible futures of the Ethereum protocol" series: From October 14 to 29, one post per branch laid out goals and remaining research problems. The 2023 version was used as the baseline instead of a new diagram. The Scourge post treats ePBS as a "previously proposed solution" and covers FOCIL and attester-proposer separation (APS) alongside it. The Verge post notes that Verkle trees are weak against quantum computers, and also leaves open a direct path to binary hash trees and STARKs.
  8. 2024-11-12 Beam Chain proposal (Devcon Bangkok): A proposal to build the consensus layer anew instead of patching the Beacon Chain. It aims at shorter slots, fast finality, a lower staking threshold, SNARKification of the whole chain, and quantum resistance all at once. Vitalik described it as a long-term branch running alongside short-term work such as blob scaling.
  9. 2025-05-03 "Simplifying the L1": He proposed simplification: for the consensus layer, 3-slot finality and new consensus layer work; for the execution layer, replacing the EVM with a simple instruction set such as RISC-V.
  10. 2025-05-07 Pectra: Raising the validator maximum balance (EIP-7251) from the 2023 version, and EIP-7702, which leads to Splurge's account abstraction, were included.
  11. 2025-06-02 EF Protocol launch: The Ethereum Foundation reorganized its protocol group and set three goals: Scale L1, Scale blobs, and Improve UX.
  12. 2025-07-31 Lean Ethereum: Beam Chain (renamed because of a trademark issue) was widened into three layers. Consensus is Beacon Chain 2.0, data is quantum-resistant blobs, and execution is a minimal instruction set tuned for SNARKs. Numeric targets were set for the first time. L1 at 1 gigagas per second (10,000 TPS), L2 at 1 teragas per second (10 million TPS). It said Ethereum must survive attacks from nation-states and quantum computers, putting security and simplicity on par with performance.
  13. 2025-12-03 Fusaka: PeerDAS, which was in the 2023 version's Surge, was included.
  14. 2026-02-18 EF 2026 priorities: Merges L1 and blob scaling into a single Scale branch, and sets up Harden the L1, which strengthens L1 security, as a new branch.
  15. 2026-02-25 Strawmap released: It began as a discussion starting point at the EF workshop in January 2026. The aim is to weave Lean Ethereum together with current fork work. It maps what goes into seven forks at roughly six-month intervals through 2029, and sets five goals: fast L1, gigagas L1, teragas L2, quantum resistance, and privacy. It describes itself as "a coordination tool for speed, not a prediction." The large lean consensus layer replacement sits in the L* fork slot.
  16. 2026-09-27 "The cryptographic world computer": Vitalik calls the future Ethereum "lean Ethereum, which we are building along the Strawmap." This means the roadmap that started from the branch diagram has converged on the Strawmap.

Vitalik's six tracks

The Merge

Simple, robust, decentralized proof of stake. Finality within one slot, staking that anyone can do, recovery from a 51% attack, and quantum resistance. In 2021 it was "complete the transition to proof of stake." After the Merge finished in 2022, it became the branch for refining that proof of stake into its ideal form.

Fast confirmation, Quick slots, Post-quantum key registration, Consensus separation, leanXMSS post-quantum voting, One-round finality, Return to 1 million attesters, Automatic recovery from 51% attack, Secret proposers

The Surge

Over 100,000 transactions per second across L1 and L2 combined. While preserving L1 decentralization, it covers data availability sampling, interoperability between L2s, and scaling L1 execution. In 2021 it was sharding by increasing the number of shards. From 2022 it shifted to blobs and rollups. From the 2024 series, scaling L1 execution also falls under this branch.

Sparse blobpool, Cell-level deltas, Distributed blob reconstruction, leanDA post-quantum sampling, Remove blob transactions, Blob streaming, Proof of custody, Short-term blob futures, BAL, Glamsterdam repricing, Fast payload propagation, Data repricing, Payload sampling, Native rollups, Sharded mempool

The Scourge

Reduces the risk of block production and staked capital concentrating in one place, and prevents excessive value extraction from users. It was created in November 2022 as a MEV countermeasure, and the 2023 version widened it to liquid staking and issuance. ePBS is afterward discussed alongside FOCIL and APS.

ePBS, FOCIL, Declining issuance burn, Attester-proposer separation, Distributed block building, Encrypted mempool

The Verge

Verify the entire chain even on a smartwatch. Nodes do not need to hold state, and in the end verifying a single proof is enough. In 2021 it was the path to statelessness through Verkle trees. From 2022 SNARK verification became the goal, and in 2024 a path opened to go with binary trees and STARKs instead of Verkle.

Real-time CL proving, leanVM post-quantum proofs, evm-asm standard guest, Optional proofs, state-asm, Sharded binary tree, Validity-only partial state, Mandatory 1-of-1 proofs, Decentralized state

The Purge

Reduces the need for every node to store old history and state forever, and simplifies the protocol by clearing out unused features. This is a branch whose meaning has stayed nearly the same from the start. In the 2023 version, state expiry was pushed back to a distant long-term task.

Technical debt cleanup, pureth cleanup, EVM-ification of long-tail precompiles

The Splurge

Collects the remaining improvements: polishing the EVM into its final form, building account abstraction into the protocol, and fixing the fee structure. In 2021 it was the "everything else" slot that also held PBS and MEV. In 2022 MEV moved out to the Scourge and account abstraction became the focus.

Frame transactions, Transaction assertions, Multidimensional pricing