Ethereum Foundation's long-term roadmap revealed! Planned 7 hard forks within 4 years, focusing on 5 major goals

The Ethereum Foundation has announced the Strawmap roadmap, planning to complete 7 hard forks by 2029 to promote second-level finality and 10,000 TPS scalability.

The Ethereum Foundation recently unveiled a long-term development plan called “Strawmap,” aiming to complete at least 7 hard fork upgrades by the end of 2029. The goal is to achieve “5 major long-term objectives” within 4 years, thereby increasing transaction speed and network throughput.

If this ambitious development blueprint is completed as scheduled, it will become the largest systemic evolution of Ethereum since the “Merge” in 2022.

“Strawmap” includes multiple potential adjustments to the Ethereum mainnet, focusing on incremental technical improvements to enhance network security and stability, preparing for a future with a larger user base and more applications.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin described it on social platform X as “an extremely important document,” symbolizing the development team’s overall plan for network scaling and technological evolution in the coming years.

According to on-chain data platform DefiLlama, Ethereum remains the world’s largest smart contract blockchain, with total value locked (TVL) in decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystems exceeding $56 billion. After the announcement, ETH prices initially rose, currently around $1,992, down about 3.4% for the day.

Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake stated that “Strawmap” will revolve around five “North Star” visions:

1. Improve Layer 1 transaction confirmation speed to achieve second-level finality;
2. Increase Layer 1 throughput to 10,000 TPS;
3. Achieve about 10 million TPS on Layer 2;
4. Introduce post-quantum cryptography;
5. Support native privacy protection.

For users, the most noticeable change will be a significant leap in “finality.” In Ethereum’s terms, when a transaction is marked as “finalized,” it means the entire network has reached consensus, and the transaction is officially effective and irreversible.

Currently, this confirmation process takes about 16 minutes. To address this, “Strawmap” proposes optimizing with a consensus mechanism called “Minimmit,” reducing the wait time to 8 seconds. The core advantage of “Minimmit” is that it can reach consensus through a single round of voting, completely eliminating the time-consuming multi-round voting process.

Justin Drake said that the significance of this development blueprint lies in integrating multiple proposals into a unified vision, helping the community understand the future direction of Ethereum Layer 1 development from a more holistic perspective.

Vitalik Buterin added that future upgrades will adopt a “gradual overhaul” strategy, gradually replacing slot times (block time units), consensus mechanism details, and cryptographic architecture, rather than a one-time major overhaul, to ensure the mainnet remains stable during upgrades.

• This article is reprinted with permission from: 《BlockBeats》
• Original title: “Ethereum Foundation Announces ‘Long-term Development Blueprint’: 7 Hard Forks in 4 Years, Focused on 5 Major Goals”
• Original author: Block Sister MEL