I noticed an interesting development in the Ethereum ecosystem. The foundation just published a long-term technical roadmap called Strawmap — essentially, a roadmap outlining seven major protocol upgrades planned through the end of the decade. The document is positioned as a tentative guide, not final, honestly acknowledging that specific implementations and timelines will be refined as testing progresses.

What’s inside? An Ethereum researcher published descriptions of these seven forks plus five main technical development directions. Regarding performance, they mention a target level of ten million transactions per second, but this is under optimistic scenarios — not to be taken as a guarantee.

In practice, this involves built-in privacy for ETH transactions, protection against quantum computers, faster block finalization, the integration of zk-proofs at the L1 level, and scaling data availability for rollups up to the Teragas level. Plus, they are working on improvements like FOCIL and account abstraction — all aimed at increasing censorship resistance and simplifying the user experience.

It’s especially interesting how this could reshape the roles of Layer 1 and Layer 2. If L1 truly becomes faster, more private, and more reliable, the distribution logic might change. Instead of relying solely on rollups for scaling, some critical operations could return to the base layer.

But there are pitfalls. Faster finality and complex cryptography will require more computational resources from validators. If hardware and bandwidth requirements grow significantly, this could pressure decentralization — only large operators might be able to handle it. Plus, mandatory inclusion of transactions in blocks could create new legal and operational challenges.

The price of ETH is currently around $2,310. Strawmap is an ambitious plan, but its implementation will require synchronization among all clients, thorough testing, and gradual rollout. If successful, it could truly redefine Ethereum’s architecture for the coming years.