On February 18, the Ethereum Foundation (EF) published Protocol Priorities Update for 2026. Compared with earlier, EIP-centered updates, this document is closer to a strategic schedule—spelling out the upgrade cadence, priority sequencing, and three protocol-level tracks for the year ahead: Scale, Improve UX, and Harden the L1.

This points to a deeper shift: after delivering two major hard forks in 2025 (Pectra and Fusaka), and with early planning for 2026 upgrades (Glamsterdam and Hegotá), Ethereum development appears to be moving toward more predictable, engineering-driven delivery—potentially one of the clearest protocol-level signals in recent years.

1. Ethereum in 2025: Turbulence, Alongside Institutionalization

If you’ve been following Ethereum, you’ll know 2025 was a year of contrasts. While ETH’s price hovered at relatively low levels, the protocol layer went through an unusually concentrated period of upgrades.

In early 2025, EF found itself at the center of intense public scrutiny. Criticism spread across the community, with some even calling for a so-called “wartime CEO” to drive change. Internal tensions became public, ultimately leading to EF’s most significant leadership reshuffle since its founding:

• Aya Miyaguchi, then Executive Director, was named President in February; Vitalik Buterin said he would help reshape the leadership structure.
• Hsiao-Wei Wang and Tomasz K. Stańczak were appointed co-Executive Directors.
• A new narrative and communications initiative, Etherealize, led by former researcher Danny Ryan, was launched.
• EF further reshuffled its board and clarified its cypherpunk value commitments.
• By mid-year, EF also reorganized its R&D function—consolidating teams and making personnel adjustments—to keep core protocol priorities in focus.

Taken together, these moves strengthened execution. Notably, just seven months after the May Pectra upgrade, the year-end Fusaka upgrade was delivered—showing EF could still push through major updates amid leadership change, and signaling a faster rhythm of two hard forks per year.

After the network transitioned to Proof of Stake via The Merge in September 2022, Ethereum generally aimed for one major upgrade per year: for example, Shapella in April 2023 (enabling staking withdrawals and completing a critical step in the PoS transition), and Dencun in March 2024 (shipping EIP-4844 and opening the Blob data channel, which materially reduced L2 costs).

In 2025, Ethereum delivered two major hard forks—Pectra and Fusaka—and, importantly, began planning the next two named upgrades: Glamsterdam and Hegotá.

There’s no formal rule, but late last year The Block cited a Consensys source saying researchers had aimed for one major upgrade per year since The Merge, and were now planning to speed up to one hard fork every six months—with Fusaka effectively marking the start of a twice-yearly cycle.

This institutional shift in cadence is meaningful for a simple reason: timelines previously depended heavily on research and implementation readiness. For developers and infrastructure teams, planning windows were less stable—and delays were not rare.

Two successful upgrades in 2025 helped validate a six-month cadence. Looking ahead, 2026’s planned two named upgrades (Glamsterdam and Hegotá)—with priorities organized across three tracks around those milestones—pushes that cadence closer to an institutionalized process.

This is similar to how Apple or Android schedules major releases: it narrows the planning gap for builders and brings three clear benefits. L2s gain predictability—rollups can schedule parameter changes and protocol upgrades in advance. Wallets and infrastructure get a clearer integration window, so product teams can plan compatibility work and feature rollouts on cadence. And for institutions, risk reviews become more regular, because upgrades shift from irregular events to routine engineering processes.

Overall, a structured cadence reflects stronger engineering discipline—and it suggests Ethereum is placing more emphasis on predictable delivery, not just research exploration.

2. Protocol Priorities in 2026: Three Strategic Pillars

A closer read of EF’s 2026 protocol priorities makes one thing clear: EF is no longer just listing scattered EIPs. Instead, protocol work is grouped into three strategic directions: Scale, Improve UX, and Harden the L1.

2.1 Scale: Treating Execution and Data Availability as Two Sides of One Coin

First is Scale. EF has effectively merged what used to be “Scale L1” and “Scale blobs,” recognizing that expanding L1 execution capacity and widening data availability are two sides of the same coin.

In the first-half Glamsterdam upgrade, one notable proposal is Block-level Access Lists, which aims to change how transactions are executed—more like moving from a sequential “single lane” to parallel “multiple lanes.”

Block producers would precompute which transactions can run concurrently without conflicts, enabling clients to spread execution across multiple CPU cores in parallel.

ePBS (enshrined Proposer-Builder Separation) is also expected to be included. It brings today’s MEV-Boost flow—currently reliant on external relays—into the protocol, reducing centralization risk and giving validators more time to verify ZK proofs.

With these base-layer optimizations, the push to raise the gas limit is likely to intensify in 2026. EF has stated a target of 100 million gas and beyond, and some expect that ePBS could enable 200 million or more.

For L2s, higher blob capacity is equally important: blobs per block could rise to 72+, potentially supporting hundreds of thousands of transactions per second across L2 networks.

2.2 Improve UX: Removing Cross-L2 Friction with Interop and Native Account Abstraction

Second is Improve UX—focused on reducing cross-L2 friction, advancing interoperability, and pushing native account abstraction forward.

As noted earlier, EF sees intent-based architectures as a key building block for making Ethereum “feel like one chain again.”

For example, the Open Intents Framework (OIF)—developed by EF and multiple teams—is emerging as a general standard. It lets users express the outcome they want when moving assets across L2s, while solver networks handle routing and execution behind the scenes. (Further reading: Intents Standardized: How OIF Ends Cross-Chain Fragmentation.)

Going one step further, the Ethereum Interoperability Layer (EIL) aims to build a trust-minimized transport layer, so that cross-L2 transactions can feel no different from single-chain transactions. (Further reading: Ethereum Interop Roadmap: Solving the Last Mile to Mass Adoption.)

At the wallet layer, native account abstraction remains a key focus. After EIP-7702 took an initial step in Pectra (2025), EF plans to advance proposals such as EIP-7701 or EIP-8141 in 2026. The long-term goal is for wallets to default to smart-contract accounts—reducing reliance on EOAs and on separate gas-sponsorship infrastructure.

In addition, faster L1 confirmations could reduce confirmation latency from roughly 13–19 minutes to 15–30 seconds. That would directly benefit cross-chain applications that rely on L1 confirmations/finality—especially bridges, stablecoin settlement, and RWA trading.

2.3 Harden the L1: A Trillion-Dollar Security Posture

Third is Harden the L1—building a security posture suitable for the trillion-dollar scale. As more value is secured across the ecosystem, L1 resilience is becoming a strategic priority.

On censorship resistance, FOCIL (Fork-Choice Enforced Inclusion Lists, EIP-7805) is emerging as a core solution. It grants multiple validators the power to require certain transactions to be included in blocks. Even if block producers attempt censorship, as long as some portion of the network remains honest, user transactions can still be included on-chain.

Facing the long-term threat of quantum computing, EF formed a new post-quantum (PQ) research team earlier this year. Work in 2026 will focus on studying quantum-resistant signature schemes—and begin considering how to migrate them seamlessly onto Ethereum mainnet, ensuring future assets aren’t vulnerable to advances in quantum attacks.

3. Ethereum in 2026: More Coordination Across Priorities

If you had to summarize Ethereum in 2026 with a single word, it might be coordination.

Upgrades are no longer organized around a single standout innovation. Instead, progress is framed as coordination across three tracks:

• Scale determines throughput and cost.
• Improve UX determines usability and adoption.
• Harden the L1 determines security and neutrality.

Together, these three decide whether Ethereum can support the next decade of on-chain economic activity.

Beyond the technical details, this three-track structure also signals a shift in how Ethereum plans and communicates protocol work.

As noted above, once Fusaka shipped smoothly in late 2025 and a twice-yearly cadence took shape, Ethereum effectively made an institutional leap in its development model. This 2026 priorities update extends that approach into planning: earlier eras often centered on a single flagship proposal (e.g., EIP-1559, The Merge, EIP-4844), while today the roadmap is framed as coordinated progress across three tracks.

From a broader view, 2026 is also a pivotal year in reshaping Ethereum’s value narrative. In recent years, the market often priced Ethereum around “fee growth driven by L2 scaling.” But as mainnet performance improves and L2s shift from “shards” to a “trust spectrum,” Ethereum’s core value is being re-anchored to an irreplaceable role: a globally trusted settlement layer.

In practical terms, the narrative shifts from “fee revenue” toward a security premium: when stablecoin issuers, RWA tokenization firms, or sovereign wealth funds choose a settlement layer, the deciding factor may increasingly be security—not the lowest cost.

Ethereum is increasingly moving from a technical testbed toward an engineering delivery platform—and protocol governance may become more institutionalized and mature through 2026.

We may be reaching an inflection point: while the protocol grows more complex (parallel execution, post-quantum cryptography), the user experience can become simpler. As account abstraction and intent frameworks mature, they push Ethereum toward an end state where Web3 better matches user intuition.

If that vision holds, Ethereum in 2026 could move closer to a global financial base layer—capable of securing trillions in value—without requiring users to understand the protocol beneath it.