Ethereum Foundation — 2026 protocol priorities

Top-line: the foundation has refocused engineering priorities for 2026 around four core aims: materially increasing block processing capacity, improving account and wallet ergonomics, smoothing cross-chain and cross-L2 flows, and instituting a formal program to prepare the protocol for post-quantum threats. These aims are presented as a coordinated effort to improve everyday user experience while preserving long-term custody assurances for high-value assets.

Capacity first: maintainers plan further gas-limit increases with a target that pushes the protocol’s compute ceiling well beyond earlier values to remove immediate throughput ceilings for L2 activity. Community discussions have even floated a baseline of ~180,000,000 gas for some 2026 scenarios, though the foundation’s working target is to move past 100,000,000 to give node operators clear headroom.

Release rhythm: a named network upgrade, Glamsterdam, is slated for H1 2026 and will act as the coordination point for many interlocking changes. Work associated with Glamsterdam aims to trim L1 confirmation latency and shorten settlement windows for layer-2 rollups, so cross-L2 transfers and composable flows feel routine rather than exceptional.

Wallets and UX: native account abstraction and smart-wallet primitives are prioritized to enable richer recovery and governance patterns without forcing every dApp to change. That push includes social-recovery patterns and ergonomics that reduce reliance on fragile seed-phrase models and custodial recovery services.

Interoperability emphasis: faster L1 confirmations, paired with protocol and tooling changes, are expected to make trust-minimized cross-L2 interactions more seamless. Engineers will coordinate specification work so that L2 settlement rules and L1 incentives align with the higher block capacities being targeted.

Post-quantum program: the foundation has formalized a cross-disciplinary PQ migration program with a dedicated team running recurring core-developer calls and multi-client PQ devnets to exercise candidate schemes under realistic conditions. Progress is uneven by subsystem — the program estimates roughly 20% overall progress but notes variance across components — and engineers are evaluating mitigations such as precompiles, signature aggregation, account-abstraction patterns, and ZK-based compression to control gas, bandwidth and storage impacts for larger PQ signatures.

Migration tooling and emergency planning: pragmatic deliverables include published roadmaps, recorded PQ core-dev calls, live devnets and candidate precompiles under evaluation. A staged emergency migration plan is being prototyped as well: one option uses zero-knowledge proofs to enable users to prove ownership and move funds to upgraded addresses without exposing private keys during a coordinated transition.

Ecosystem and hardware readiness: hardware and wallet vendors have begun prototyping lattice- and hash-based PQ schemes and demonstrated early interoperability, but on-chain gas costs and verification expense remain limiting factors in EVM-equivalent environments. The PQ agenda intentionally avoids a single fast patch; instead it favors sequenced EIPs and community governance to align timing and uptake across execution, consensus and data-availability layers.

People, privacy and simplification: thought leadership from core contributors frames 2026 as a campaign to restore user control and simplify clients and upgrades. Initiatives highlighted include privacy tooling, privacy-preserving primitives, and lightweight client work (examples discussed by contributors include projects that let users verify RPC responses without running a full node). This governance and engineering reset also emphasizes removing or demoting rarely used legacy behavior and building migration incentives for wallets and dApps.

Operational context and risks: 2025’s gas-limit increases established a precedent for more aggressive scaling, but larger blocks increase node resource requirements and could concentrate validation if not accompanied by client optimizations and support for lightweight verification. Similarly, PQ migration entails trade-offs: uncoordinated or underperforming mitigations could force costly emergency transitions and concentrate custodial risk for long-lived assets.

What to watch: Glamsterdam specifications, account-abstraction proposals and PQ deliverables (devnet results, candidate precompiles, and recorded core-dev PQ calls). Developers and custodians should also track lightweight client progress and wallet vendors’ PQ prototypes to plan migrations and tooling changes.

• Glamsterdam — upgrade window and main coordination point for 2026 work.
• Gas limit increases — targeted to expand block compute capacity significantly (working target >100,000,000; community proposals cite ~180,000,000).
• Post-Quantum program — dedicated team, multi-client PQ devnets, recurring core-dev calls and a staged migration playbook (estimated ~20% progress overall).