The Ethereum Foundation just dropped something the community has been begging for: a concrete, multi-year development roadmap. Dubbed the "Strawmap," this plan outlines seven consecutive hard forks stretching from 2026 through 2029, each targeting specific upgrades to Ethereum's execution layer, consensus mechanism, and data availability.
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It's the most structured long-term plan Ethereum has published in years — and predictably, everyone has an opinion.
What the Strawmap Actually Says
The “Strawmap” — deliberately labeled as a strawman proposal rather than a finalized roadmap — outlines a potential sequencing framework for Ethereum upgrades over the coming years. Presented by Ethereum Foundation researcher Tomasz Stańczak and discussed among core developers, the document is intended as a coordination tool, not a binding commitment.
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The idea behind the strawmap is structural: instead of bundling large sets of changes into monolithic forks that risk delay, Ethereum would pursue smaller, more focused upgrades on a regular cadence.
It’s important to clarify timing. Fusaka is not a future fork — it activated in December 2025. The upgrade included PeerDAS (EIP-7594), a major data availability improvement that expands blob throughput and strengthens Layer 2 scalability. PeerDAS allows nodes to sample data rather than download entire blobs, improving bandwidth efficiency while preserving security.
Following Fusaka, the next confirmed upgrade in discussion is Glamsterdam, expected in 2026. While scope may evolve, discussions around this fork include further scaling work, Verkle tree progress, and EVM Object Format (EOF) developments.
Beyond Glamsterdam, the strawmap outlines a conceptual sequence of upgrades stretching toward 2029. These include milestones related to:
Verkle tree migration
Account abstraction improvements
Statelessness
Execution layer optimizations
Potential long-term research areas such as single-slot finality
However, these later forks remain intentionally flexible. The Ethereum Foundation has not published a finalized seven-fork schedule with fixed scopes or dates through 2029. Research items like single-slot finality are still evolving and subject to ongoing technical validation.
The significance of the strawmap is not the exact timeline — it’s the structural shift. Ethereum is signaling a move toward clearer sequencing, tighter upgrade scopes, and more predictable development cycles.
Rather than promising everything at once, the network is laying out a framework for steady iteration.
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Industry Reaction: Relief Mixed With Skepticism
The crypto industry's response has been a fascinating mix of cautious optimism and pointed criticism. Many developers and analysts welcomed the transparency. For years, Ethereum's roadmap existed as a patchwork of blog posts, research papers, and Vitalik Buterin tweets. Having a single, sequenced plan — even a tentative one — gives L2 teams, dApp developers, and infrastructure providers something to actually plan around.
The Strawmap isn't a promise — it's a coordination tool. And Ethereum desperately needed one.
Ryan Sean Adams of Bankless called the Strawmap a sign that Ethereum's leadership is finally listening to community frustrations about unclear timelines. Several prominent developers noted that the focused, smaller-fork approach is a direct lesson learned from the delays that plagued The Merge and the Dencun upgrade. Shipping smaller, more frequent upgrades reduces risk and keeps momentum visible.
But the skeptics aren't staying quiet either. Solana advocates and competing L1 proponents were quick to point out that a multi-year roadmap to achieve features like statelessness and single-slot finality feels glacial compared to the pace of development on newer chains. Some critics argue that by 2029, the competitive landscape may have shifted so dramatically that these upgrades arrive too late to matter.
There's also a contingent within the Ethereum community itself that worries the Strawmap is too conservative. The argument goes: if Ethereum wants to remain the settlement layer for decentralized finance, it needs to move faster on execution speed and gas cost reduction — not just data availability for rollups. The rollup-centric roadmap is sound in theory, but it puts enormous pressure on L2s to deliver the user experience while the base layer evolves slowly.
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The L2 Dependency Question
This is where the numbers tell an interesting story. Since the Dencun upgrade in March 2024 introduced blobs, L2 transaction costs have plummeted — in some cases by over 90%. Networks like Base, Arbitrum, and Optimism have seen transaction volumes surge as a direct result. PeerDAS in Fusaka is expected to expand blob capacity further, potentially by 4-8x, which would make L2s even cheaper and faster.
But here's the tension: Ethereum's base layer revenue has dropped as more activity moves to L2s that pay minimal fees back to mainnet. The Strawmap doesn't directly address this economic question. If Ethereum becomes an incredibly efficient data availability layer but captures less and less value from actual transaction activity, the long-term economic model gets murky. $ETH holders are right to ask what the value accrual mechanism looks like in 2029.
Some insiders argue this concern is overblown — that as blob demand scales exponentially, even low per-unit fees will generate meaningful revenue at volume. Others think Ethereum needs to rethink its fee model entirely, and the Strawmap's silence on economic design is a notable gap.
What This Means for the Broader Ecosystem
From a decentralization standpoint, the Strawmap's emphasis on statelessness is arguably the most important long-term item. Full statelessness would allow nodes to validate blocks without storing the entire chain state, dramatically lowering the hardware requirements to run a node.
That's a direct win for decentralization — more nodes, more geographic distribution, more censorship resistance. If you believe in sound money and permissionless infrastructure, this is the upgrade that matters most.
Account abstraction improvements are another highlight. Making smart contract wallets first-class citizens on Ethereum would simplify the onchain user experience enormously — think gas sponsorship, social recovery, and session keys baked into the protocol rather than bolted on by third-party wallets. This is the kind of UX improvement that could bring the next wave of users onchain without them needing a PhD in key management.
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The Bottom Line
The Strawmap is exactly what its name implies: a starting point for debate, not a final blueprint. But the fact that Ethereum's core developers are willing to put a structured, multi-year plan on paper — with named forks, sequenced priorities, and rough timelines — represents a meaningful maturation in how the network communicates with its ecosystem.
Is the timeline too slow? Maybe. Is it better than the previous approach of "we'll ship it when it's ready, trust us"? Absolutely. The real test won't be whether the Strawmap survives contact with reality — it almost certainly won't in its exact form. The test is whether Ethereum can execute on the spirit of this plan: smaller forks, faster cadence, clear priorities. If it can, 2029 Ethereum looks like a fundamentally different beast. If it can't, the competitors circling won't wait around.
Either way, the Strawmap has already accomplished one thing: it's forced the entire industry to take Ethereum's long-term vision seriously again. And in a market obsessed with quarterly narratives, that's worth something.
