The Ethereum Foundation’s head of protocol tracking released a new “2026 Protocol Priority Update” on February 18, outlining how key R&D will be structured this year and what will be emphasized in the next upgrade cycle.
Ethereum’s priorities in 2026
This update looks back on 2025 as a year of high throughput for mainnet changes, with two network upgrades. Pectra launched in May and Fusaka launched PeerDAS on mainnet in December. Along with this upgrade, the community took its first major leap forward since 2021 by increasing the mainnet gas limit from 30 million to 60 million.
The major changes are organizational. “Now that this milestone has passed, we have the opportunity to think about how we might organize our work at a higher level,” the authors wrote. Protocol work in 2026 is grouped into three tracks: Extensions, UX Improvements, and L1 Enhancements, with each track having a named lead.
The Scale track, led by Ansgar Dietrichs, Marius van der Wijden and Raúl Kripalani, combines last year’s “Scale L1” and “Scale Blobs” initiatives into one effort. Because executable, networking, and consensus changes tend to belong to the same client code and affect each other, the Foundation organizes this as a practical integration.
The updates in the roadmap highlight block-level access lists via EIP-7928 and ongoing gas limit increases “toward 100M,” supported by ongoing client benchmarking. It also shows “extended components for Glamsterdam”, including protected PBS, price adjustments, and additional blob parameter increases via EIP-7732.
Additionally, the scale track includes pushing the zkEVM prover client from prototype to production-ready state and scaling the long-running state through short-term price adjustments and history expiration to binary trees and stateless.
The UX Improvement track, led by Barnabé Monnot and Matt Garnett, narrows down to two areas that the foundation calls the biggest leverage for usability in 2026: basic account abstraction and interoperability.
On account abstraction, the update positions EIP-7702 as a step toward endpoints where smart contract wallets default to bundlers, relayers, or without additional gas overhead. It points to proposals including EIP-7701 and EIP-8141, described as “framed transactions,” as work that moves smart account logic deeper into the protocol itself.
The UX roadmap is also linked to the security direction. The foundation argues that default account abstraction provides a cleaner migration path away from ECDSA-based authentication, and says the parallel proposal aims to make quantum-resistant signature verification within the EVM meaningfully cheaper.
The interoperability work builds on the Open Intents Framework with the stated goal of “seamless, trust-minimized L2-to-L2 interaction” enabled by faster L1 confirmation and shorter L2 settlement times.
Led by Fredrik Svantes, Parithosh Jayanthi, and Thomas Thiery, the new Harden the L1 track consists of working on an insurance policy that preserves Ethereum’s core properties while its expansion continues.
This update links security efforts with Svantes’ trillion-dollar security initiatives, including post-quantum preparation and execution layer protections such as post-execution transaction assertions and “untrusted RPC.”
Regarding censorship resistance, Thiery’s scope includes expansions to address censorship resistance for FOCIL and Blob via EIP-7805, stateless operations called VOPS, and development of measurable censorship resistance metrics. Jayanthi’s duties cover devnet, testnet, and client interoperability testing, which the foundation says will become even more important as Ethereum transitions to a faster fork flow.
The foundation is targeting Glamsterdam in the first half of 2026, with Hegota planned for later this year. Stated ambitions include parallel execution, much higher gas limits, enshrined PBS, ongoing blob expansion, censorship resistance, default account abstraction, and progress on post-quantum security, with more track-level updates promised as the year approaches.
At press time, Ethereum was trading at $1,968.
Featured image created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com
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