Ethereum Foundation Drafts Seven-Fork ‘Strawmap’ Through 2029

Ethereum’s core researchers have sketched out the next four years of the network’s evolution, including seven hard forks, faster blocks, near-instant finality, quantum-resistant cryptography, and native privacy, in a newly published “strawmap” that extends through 2029.

Researcher Justin Drake tweeted the details of the “strawmap,” a portmanteau of “strawman” and “roadmap,” which outlines a rough cadence of one fork every six months through the end of the decade.

The plan targets shorter slot times, finality measured in seconds instead of minutes, and features such as shielded ETH transfers, while mapping dependencies across consensus, data, and execution layers.

Drake described it as “an invitation to view L1 protocol upgrades through a holistic lens,” placing proposals on a single visual timeline to surface dependencies that the fork-by-fork focus of All Core Devs and forkcast.org typically obscures.

The “strawman” qualifier, he said, acknowledges both the limits of roadmapping in a decentralized ecosystem and the document’s status as a work-in-progress, one that originated as a discussion starter at an EF workshop in January and is now shared publicly “in a spirit of proactive transparency and accelerationism.”

The current draft assumes human-first development, though Drake noted that AI-driven development and formal verification “could significantly compress schedules.”

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin called the strawmap “A very important document,” tweeting that the network will likely reduce slot times incrementally—“12 -> 8 -> 6 -> 4 -> 3 -> 2”—while progressively cutting finality from today’s roughly 16 minutes to potentially single-digit seconds using a one-round Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT)  design.

The mechanism is a shift from the current Gasper consensus to a one-round BFT algorithm called Minimmit.

BFT protocols allow a distributed network to reach agreement even when some nodes act maliciously or fail, a property that underpins Ethereum’s finality guarantees and becomes more important as slot times shrink and timing margins tighten.

Buterin described the transition as complex despite the end state being “IMO simpler than status quo Gasper,” and said the plan is to bundle the biggest changes with a simultaneous switch to post-quantum hash-based signatures and a STARK-friendly hash function.

He noted that the incremental approach creates a useful side effect: slot-level quantum resistance could arrive well before finality-level quantum resistance, meaning that if quantum computers suddenly appear, “we lose the finality guarantee, but the chain keeps chugging along.”

The strawmap’s goal of “first-class privacy” on Ethereum’s layer-1 has long been an ambition of Buterin, who has previously described privacy as “hygiene.” The Ethereum co-founder last year published a lengthy essay expanding on his support for privacy in the Ethereum ecosystem, and outlined a “maximally simple L1 privacy roadmap” with the goal of making private sends “default in many cases.”

Kirill Fedoseev, Head of Research at Blockscout, told Decrypt that the shift toward shorter slots and one-round finality “tightens engineering constraints, but it is not inherently a decentralization tradeoff.

While faster slots “increase latency sensitivity,” he noted that research into erasure-coded peer-to-peer networking and smaller, randomly selected attester committees of roughly 256–1024 validators per slot keeps safety intact.

“The validator set does not shrink and participation remains permissionless. What changes is coordination speed, not validator access,” he added.

Buterin pointed to the same dynamic, citing work on an optimized p2p layer using erasure coding that his stats show “can greatly reduce 95th percentile block propagation time, making shorter slots viable with no security tradeoffs.”

He summarized the overall direction as a “ship of Theseus” style replacement, progressive, component-by-component, arriving at something “cleaner, simpler, quantum-resistant, prover-friendly, end-to-end formally-verified.”