Ethereum Foundation's Justin Drake introduces the "strawmap," detailing plans for seven hard forks by 2029 to enhance the network's performance.
Justin Drake, a researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, has unveiled a new development roadmap dubbed the "strawmap". This document aims to provide a comprehensive overview of the Ethereum protocol's future, showcasing plans for approximately seven hard forks by 2029, with updates anticipated every six months.
“Strawmap is an invitation to view protocol updates holistically... This is not a forecast, but a coordination tool for development,” Drake stated.
The roadmap is designed for technical audiences and presents a timeline of upgrades, with the consensus layer enhancements following a naming convention that includes titles like Altair and Bellatrix. Currently, the first two confirmed upgrades, Glamsterdam and Hegota, are set for release in 2026.
The proposed upgrades aim to achieve significant advancements, such as:
- L1 speed: Reducing finality to mere seconds;
- L1 throughput: Reaching 1 gigabyte of gas per second (around 10,000 transactions per second) using zkEVM technology;
- L2 throughput: Achieving up to 1 gigabyte per second (approximately 10 million TPS) through innovative data availability sampling;
- L1 post-quantum security: Implementing cryptographic measures based on hash functions;
- L1 privacy: Ensuring secure ETH transfers with built-in privacy features.
“Strawmap will evolve with community feedback and research progress,” Drake assured, committing to quarterly updates.
Further Insights
Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum's co-founder, endorsed the strawmap, emphasizing the importance of faster block production and transaction finalization. He outlined a strategy to incrementally reduce block creation time from the current 12 seconds down to 2 seconds, using a square root progression.
“A very important document. Let's walk through this one 'goal' at a time,” Buterin remarked.
He also highlighted the need to simplify the finalization process to cut confirmation time from 16 minutes down to a target of 6-16 seconds, ensuring that the network remains robust even in the face of potential quantum computing threats.
“An important advantage of the incremental approach is that it allows us to make slots quantum-resistant much earlier than finalization,” Buterin explained.
This roadmap represents a significant step in Ethereum's evolution, with the potential to enhance security, efficiency, and scalability across the network.
