Inside Ethereum’s ‘strawmap’ — hard forks to 10,000 TPS by 2029

For years, the party line was simple: let Layer-2s handle the chaos, keep the base layer slow but safe. That era is ending. Ethereum’s brain trust quietly released a rough, ambitious internal blueprint — nicknamed the “Strawmap” — that pulls resources from external networks back to the heart of the machine.

Between 2026 and 2029, seven major hard forks could hit the network roughly every six months. The goal isn’t just incremental improvement.

It’s a fundamental identity shift: from a sleepy settlement layer to a high-velocity engine capable of 10,000 transactions per second (TPS) on Layer-1 alone. If it succeeds, finality will shrink from a quarter-hour to the time it takes to blink.

What is this “Strawmap” exactly?

Early this year, Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake dropped a rough-cut development sketch. It pointed to roughly seven hard forks launching between 2026 and 2029.

These upgrades are expected to hit about every six months. They aim to turn Ethereum into a high-speed settlement layer where finality drops from a current ~16-minute wait down to just seconds. The target is 1 gigagas per second directly on Layer 1.

If you’re wondering, a gigagas is one billion units of gas per second. That’s an astronomical jump from today’s limits, translating into real-world transactions per second (TPS) that would blow current numbers out of the water.

Why push so hard right now?

Layer-2s were a band-aid, not a cure. They helped, sure, but for real financial flows — the kind that move billions — the base chain needs serious muscle. Vitalik Buterin himself has noted that rollups can only hit millions of TPS if the L1 doesn’t become a bottleneck.

Simply put: Ethereum wants to be the ultimate settlement hub where traffic jams don’t exist. The upcoming forks are designed to crank up transaction flow, slash confirmation windows, and make the whole engine run smoother.

The big number: 10,000 TPS and blink-and-you-miss-it finality

Hitting 10,000 TPS on Layer 1 used to be a pipe dream. Right now, you wait about 15 minutes for a transaction to truly finalize. According to the Strawmap, zkEVMs paired with real-time proving could unblock that 1 gigagas per second mark, shrinking finality to between 6 and 16 seconds.

Slot times (the gaps between blocks) could tighten from 12 seconds to 8, and eventually drop to single seconds. That changes the game for DeFi, dApps, and especially blockchain payment systems, making them feel as snappy as a credit card swipe.

All of this acceleration depends on these hard forks landing without a hitch. Miss a step, and Ethereum risks falling behind.

Balancing L1 muscle with L2 flexibility

Make no mistake: L2 scaling continues. But now, L1 is finally turning up the heat to eliminate its own bottlenecks. With near-instant finality, an agile Ethereum makes room for wild new use cases driven by AI.

Think about autonomous AI agents that need to execute complex, on-chain strategies in real time. They can’t wait 15 minutes. Faster finality and lower latency unlock entirely new categories like algorithmic trading, decentralized automation, and AI-powered financial rails.

Facing fierce rivals, Ethereum is drilling down on data propagation and raw network efficiency. This evolution will either cement it as a high-speed settlement giant — or hand the “fast chain” crown to more centralized competitors.

Looking ahead: Quantum defense

A recent paper from Google Quantum AI turned heads. It warned that large-scale quantum computers — capable of breaking Ethereum’s 256-bit elliptic curve cryptography — might arrive by 2029, using 20x fewer physical qubits than previously estimated.

To get ahead of that threat, Ethereum developers are digging into hash-based cryptography across four key areas:

• Consensus signatures (BLS)
• Data availability (KZG)
• Account signatures (ECDSA)
• ZK-proofs at the app layer

By early 2026, the Ethereum Foundation had already assembled a Post-Quantum Security Team, sharing open research at pq.ethereum.org. They’re collaborating with client teams and research groups to hammer out the transition strategy.

The standout here is EIP-8141, a proposal that introduces native account abstraction — likely landing in the Hegota fork (more on that later). This means everyday users will eventually choose their own signature verification method, without waiting for a clumsy network-wide migration.

Built-in privacy: No more app-level band-aids

Today, privacy is mostly a bolt-on feature. The new goal is to bake it directly into the protocol. That’s huge for enterprises, financial institutions, and decentralized identity systems.

Proposals for shielded ETH transfers are moving forward in 2026. Leading the pack is EIP-8182, drafted by developer Tom Lehman and backed by the Foundation’s Strawmap. It uses zero-knowledge proofs to hide sender, receiver, and amount.

The clever twist: a single, unified pool for everyone. That solves the classic “anonymity set chicken-and-egg” problem — where small pools offer weak privacy. With one big pool, the anonymity set is massive from day one.

Users could eventually deposit ETH or ERC-20s, move them around privately, and withdraw them — all while keeping their existing wallet and ENS name. Native, protocol-level privacy might finally turn crypto from “internet money” into real global financial infrastructure.

Other key fixes on the table

High transaction costs

Rollups cut costs by batching transactions, but until Dencun (March 2024), Ethereum stored that rollup data permanently. That was expensive.

Dencun introduced temporary blobs via proto-danksharding, slashing fees. Now the team is prepping Danksharding, which ramps blobs from 6 to 64+ and introduces data availability sampling (DAS).

DAS is a game-changer: nodes no longer need to download a whole block just to confirm data is there. But it also demands new infrastructure — new ways to verify rollup data, split block building from proposal duties, and cryptographically prove tiny data subsets were checked.

Security boosts

Ethereum is already the most secure decentralized smart contract platform, but there’s always room to harden it. Planned upgrades include better handling of competing blocks and shorter times to “finality” (making blocks unchangeable without a fortune in penalties).

Also coming: stronger censorship resistance. New staking tech aims to balance decentralization with protection against hardware, software, and network failures.

Key technologies here:

• Distributed Validator Technology (DVT): Validators register multiple independent keys that act as a single group identity. That slashes the risk of one failure or hack taking a validator offline. A threshold of participants must sign off on any proposal or attestation.
• Proposer-Builder Separation (PBS): One validator creates a block, another broadcasts it. That makes censorship economically irrational — a rogue proposer would have to pick a less profitable block, which other validators would instantly spot.
• Secret Leader Election (SLE): Stops attackers from pre-targeting block proposers through denial-of-service attacks. Cryptographic commitments are constantly reshuffled, so only the validators themselves know the order in advance.

Plus, profits from professional block-building algorithms get split more fairly, preventing big institutional stakers from hoarding all the stake.

Easing complexity

For mass adoption, Ethereum needs to feel like a Web2 app. That means wallet and key management, transaction triggers, everything — drastically simplified.

Right now, private keys are like master passwords. Lose them, lose the account. Smart contract wallets (via account abstraction) offer safeguards, fraud defense, and recovery options — but Ethereum doesn’t fully support them yet. That extra support is what account abstraction delivers.

Running a node should be easy

Today, running your own node requires serious technical chops. Most people trust third parties instead. Upgrades coming down the pike:

• Verkle Trees for space-efficient storage.
• Statelessness to slash disk space needs.
• Light nodes that run on phones or browsers.

When those land, the barriers drop to near zero. Permissionless access without third-party trust becomes real. Smart contract wallets are already live (EIP-4337), and Verkle Tree testnets are running. Full statelessness? Still likely a few years away.

Confirmed hard forks (so far)

As of May 2026, only two upcoming forks have official names. The rest have working titles, locked in as R&D progresses.

Glamsterdam (a blend of Amsterdam and Gloas — an execution + consensus layer upgrade) This fork aims to “clear the path for next-gen scaling.” It builds on Fusaka’s foundation in three directions:

• Faster parallel processing
• Bigger capacity
• Preventing database bloat for long-term sustainability

Glamsterdam reshuffles how blocks are created and verified, locking in speed and affordability as activity rises. Gas becomes more predictable, costing users less for state-heavy apps.

Fusaka introduced blobs; Glamsterdam pushes them further and draws a harder line between block proposers and builders. The bar for home node operators stays reasonable.

The next fork, Hegota (named after two upgrades: Heze and Bogota — consensus and execution layers respectively), is planned for the second half of 2026. Proposals are still being hammered out.

The road ahead

Seven hard forks in three years is aggressive by any measure. But the stakes are huge: faster finality, native privacy, quantum resistance, and account abstraction will decide whether Ethereum remains the smart contract leader or slowly cedes ground to faster, flashier rivals.

Ethereum is done waiting for Layer-2s to fix its problems. The base layer is getting a serious upgrade. If this roadmap holds, by 2029, Ethereum will be faster, tougher, harder to censor, and ready for whatever comes next — whether that’s AI agents trading on-chain, global financial rails, or something nobody has even imagined yet.

Inside Ethereum’s ‘strawmap’ — hard forks to 10,000 TPS by 2029 was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.