Author: James/Snapcrackle

Translated by: Deep Tide TechFlow

Deep Tide Overview: Ethereum researcher Justin Drake has released the "Strawmap" - the first structured upgrade roadmap for Ethereum with clear timelines and performance goals in history, which Vitalik calls "very important" and describes the overall effect as a "Theseus's ship" style reconstruction. This article is currently the clearest popular science text explaining Strawmap, covering everything from working principles to five major goals to seven upgrades, comprehensible even for those without technical knowledge.

The full text is as follows:

Ethereum has just released its most detailed upgrade plan ever. Seven upgrades, five goals, a massive reconstruction.

If you’re wondering who this guide is for… it’s for me.

Ethereum researcher Justin Drake published what he calls the "Strawmap", a timeline of seven upgrade proposals extending to 2029. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin calls it "very important" and describes the cumulative effect as a "Theseus's ship" style reconstruction of Ethereum's core.

This metaphor is worth understanding.

The ship of Theseus is an ancient Greek thought experiment: If you replace every plank of a ship one by one, and ultimately every plank is changed, is it still the same ship?

This is the proposal of Strawmap for Ethereum.

By 2029, every major component of the system will be replaced. But there will be no planned "downtime overhaul." The goal is a backward-compatible upgrade, maintaining the operation of the chain while replacing the planks - although each upgrade still requires node operators to update software, edge cases may also change. This is a complete reconstruction disguised as incremental upgrades. Strictly speaking, although the logic of the consensus layer and execution layer is being rebuilt, the state (user balances, contract storage, and history) is retained across all forks. "The ship is being rebuilt while carrying cargo." Everyone, come aboard!

"Why not just start from scratch?" Because you cannot restart without losing what makes Ethereum valuable: applications already running on it, funds already in circulation, established trust. You must replace the planks while the ship is sailing.

The name "Strawmap" is a portmanteau of "strawman" and "roadmap." A strawman is a preliminary proposal known to be imperfect, specifically put forth to allow critiques. So this is not a commitment, but a starting point for debate. Yet this is the first time builders of Ethereum have laid out a structured, time-bound, and clearly defined performance-targeted upgrade path.

Participating in this work are some of the most talented cryptographers and computer scientists on Earth. And it’s all open source. No licensing fees, no vendor contracts, no corporate sales teams. Any company, any developer, any country can build on it. JPMorgan will benefit from these upgrades just as much as a three-person startup in São Paulo.

Imagine if a coalition of the world’s top engineers was rebuilding the financial pipelines of the internet from scratch, and you could plug in directly.

How Ethereum Works (60 Second Version)

Before discussing where it’s heading, let’s clarify what it is today.

Ethereum is essentially a shared global computer. It is not one company operating a single server, but thousands of independent operators running copies of the same software worldwide.

These operators independently verify transactions. Part of them are called validators, who also stake their ETH as collateral. If a validator attempts to cheat, their staked ETH will be forfeited. Every 12 seconds, validators reach consensus on which transactions occurred and in what order. This 12-second window is called a "slot." Every 32 slots (approximately 6.4 minutes) constitutes an "epoch."

The true finality—the moment a transaction becomes irreversible—takes about 13 to 15 minutes, depending on where your transaction falls within the cycle.

Ethereum processes about 15 to 30 transactions per second, depending on the complexity of each transaction. In contrast, the Visa network can handle over 65,000 transactions per second. This gap is why most Ethereum applications today operate on "Layer 2" networks—independent systems that package numerous transactions together before sending summaries back to the Ethereum main layer for security.

The system that allows all those operators to reach consensus is called the "consensus mechanism." Ethereum’s current consensus mechanism works reliably and has been field-tested, but it was designed for an earlier era, limiting the network’s capability ceiling.

The goal of Strawmap is to solve all these issues, one upgrade at a time.

Five Core Goals of Strawmap

The roadmap is organized around five goals. Ethereum is already operational, with billions of dollars flowing through it daily. But it has real limitations on what can be built. These five goals aim to eliminate those limitations.

1. Fast L1: Instant Finality

Today, when you send a transaction on Ethereum, you wait about 13 to 15 minutes for it to be truly confirmed—that is, irreversible, complete, and non-retractable.

The solution: Replace the engine that enables all operators to reach consensus. The goal is to achieve finality within each slot through a single round of voting. Minimmit is a major candidate in research, a protocol designed for ultra-fast consensus, but the specific design is still being refined. The important thing is the goal: to achieve finality within a single slot. Then the slot time itself will also be compressed: the proposed timeline is 12 seconds → 8 → 6 → 4 → 3 → 2.

Finality is not just about speed, but about certainty. Think of a wire transfer; the time between "sent" and "settled" is the window where things can still go wrong. If you complete a million-dollar payment, bond trade settlement, or real estate transaction on the blockchain, this 13-minute uncertainty is a problem. Compressing to instant finality fundamentally changes what this network can do—not just for crypto-native applications, but for anything involving value transfer.

2. Gigagas L1: 300x Faster

Ethereum's mainnet processes about 15 to 30 transactions per second; this is the bottleneck.

The solution: Strawmap aims for an execution capacity of 1 gigagas per second, which translates to about 10,000 transactions per second for typical transactions (exact numbers depend on transaction complexity and different operations consuming different amounts of gas). The core technology is "zero-knowledge proofs" (ZK proofs).

The simplest way to understand it: currently, every operator on the network must independently recalculate every single operation to confirm its correctness. It's like requiring every employee in a company to redo every problem a colleague has solved. Safe? Yes. Extremely inefficient? Also yes. ZK proofs allow you to check a compact mathematical receipt to prove the calculation is correct, the same level of trust with far less workload.

Generating these proofs is currently still too slow. Current versions take minutes to hours for complex tasks. Compressing it down to seconds—speeding it up by about 1,000x—is an active research challenge, not just an engineering one. Teams like RISC Zero and Succinct are making rapid progress, but it's still on the frontier.

Mainnet processing at 10,000 TPS plus fast finality means fewer simpler moving parts and fewer places for errors to occur.

3. Teragas L2: Cross Fast Channels at 10 Million Transactions per Second

For truly massive transaction volumes (and customization needs), you still need Layer 2 networks. Currently, the upper limit for Layer 2 is constrained by the data capacity that the Ethereum mainnet can handle for them.

The solution: a technology called "Data Availability Sampling" (DAS). Instead of each operator downloading all the data to verify its existence, they check random samples and use mathematics to confirm the complete dataset is intact. It’s like checking if a 500-page book is really on a shelf—randomly flipping to 20 different pages, and if they’re all there, you can statistically determine that the rest is too.

PeerDAS has gone live in the Fusaka upgrade, laying the foundation for everything built on Strawmap. Expanding from there to full goals means iterative scaling: increasing data capacity with every fork while performing network stability stress tests at each step.

The L2 ecosystem handling 10 million transactions per second opens doors that are impossible on any blockchain today. Think of global supply chains where every product and every shipment has a digital token; or millions of connected devices generating verifiable data; or processing micropayment systems for fractions of a cent. These workloads are too large for any existing network, but they can all be accommodated comfortably at 10 million TPS.

4. Post-Quantum L1: Preparing for Quantum Computers

The security of Ethereum relies on mathematical problems that are extremely difficult for today's computers to crack. This applies to the entire system—including the signatures when users send transactions and the signatures validators use to reach consensus. Once quantum computers become powerful enough, they could crack both, potentially allowing someone to forge transactions or steal funds.

The solution: migrate to new cryptographic methods (hash-based schemes) that are considered resistant to quantum attacks. This is a later-stage upgrade because it touches nearly everything in the system, and the amount of data used by the new methods is significantly larger (kilobytes rather than bytes), changing the economics of block size, bandwidth, and storage across the entire network.

Quantum threats to today’s cryptography may take years or even decades to materialize. But if you are building infrastructure intended to last—potentially holding trillions of dollars in value—"we'll deal with it later" is not a real answer.

5. Private L1: Keeping Transactions Confidential

Everything on Ethereum is public by default. Unless you use privacy applications like Railgun, or privacy-focused Layer 2 solutions like ZKsync or Aztec, every transaction, every amount, every counterparty is visible to anyone.

The solution: build confidential transfers directly into the core of Ethereum. The technical goal is to enable the network to verify a transaction’s validity (the sender has enough funds, the mathematics is correct) while not exposing the actual details. You can prove "this is a legitimate $50,000 payment" without revealing who paid whom or the purpose of the payment.

There are currently workarounds. EY and StarkWare announced Nightfall on Starknet in February 2026, focusing on privacy-preserving transactions in the Layer 2 environment. But workarounds add complexity and costs. Building privacy into the foundational layer completely eliminates the need for middleware.

This is also where post-quantum work intersects: whatever privacy scheme is built must also be quantum-resistant. Two problems that must be solved simultaneously. Addressing this issue will eliminate a significant barrier to mass adoption.

The Seven Forks (Upgrades)

Strawmap proposes seven upgrades, roughly every six months, starting with Glamsterdam. Each upgrade is deliberately limited to changing one or two significant items at a time because if something goes wrong, you need to know exactly what caused it.

The first upgrade after Fusaka (which has gone live, laying the foundation with PeerDAS and data optimization) is Glamsterdam, restructuring how transaction blocks are assembled.

Hegotá then brings further structural improvements. The remaining forks (I to M) extend to 2029, gradually introducing faster consensus, ZK proofs, scalable data availability, quantum-resistant cryptography, and privacy features.

Why 2029?

Because some of these problems really aren’t solved yet.

Replacing the consensus mechanism is the most difficult. Imagine replacing an airplane engine in-flight while thousands of co-pilots must reach consensus on every change. Each change requires months of testing and formal verification. Compressing the cycle time down to less than 4 seconds will eventually hit physical issues: signals take about 200 milliseconds to circle the globe, at some point you’re racing against the speed of light.

Making ZK provers fast enough is another frontier challenge. The gap between current speeds (minute-level) and the target speeds (second-level) is about 1,000x, requiring mathematical breakthroughs and specialized hardware.

Scaling data availability is less difficult but also more operational. The mathematics is consistent; the challenge lies in operating prudently on a real-time network holding values in the hundreds of billions.

The post-quantum migration is a nightmare at the operational level due to the new signatures being significantly larger, changing the economics of everything.

Native privacy has political sensitivity on top of technical difficulty. Regulators worry that privacy tools exacerbate money laundering. Engineers must build something private enough to be useful while being sufficiently transparent to satisfy compliance requirements, and it also has to be quantum-resistant.

These cannot be advanced simultaneously. Some upgrades rely on others; you cannot scale to 10,000 TPS without mature ZK proofs, and you cannot scale Layer 2 without data availability worked out. These chains of dependency dictate the timeline.

Considering what is being attempted, three and a half years is already quite aggressive.

2029?

First, there is a variable. Strawmap clearly states: "This current draft assumes human-led development. AI-driven development and formal verification could significantly compress the timeline."

In February 2026, a developer named YQ bet Vitalik that a person could program the entire Ethereum system for the 2030+ roadmap using an AI agent. Within weeks, he released ETH2030: an experimental Go execution client that claims to have around 713,000 lines of code, implementing all 65 entries of Strawmap, and is labeled as running on both testnet and mainnet.

Is it production-ready? No. As Vitalik pointed out, it almost certainly has key vulnerabilities everywhere, and in some cases may have placeholder implementations; the AI didn’t even attempt a complete version. But Vitalik’s response is worth reading closely: "Six months ago, even something like this was far beyond the realm of possibility; the important thing is the direction of the trend… People should keep an open mind about this possibility (not certainty! Just possibility): the Ethereum roadmap will be completed much faster than people expect, and at security standards higher than people expect."

Vitalik's core insight is that the right way to use AI is not just to go faster, but to allocate half the gains to speed and the other half to security: more testing, more mathematical validation, more independent implementations of the same thing.

The Lean Ethereum project is doing formal verification for machine checks of parts of the cryptographic and proof stack. Code without vulnerabilities—long considered an idealistic fantasy—may indeed become a basic expectation.

Strawmap is a coordination document, not a commitment. Its goals are ambitious, the timeline is aspirational, and execution depends on hundreds of independent contributors.

But the real question is not whether each goal will be achieved on time. It’s whether you want to build on this trajectory’s platform or compete with it.

And all of this—research, breakthroughs, cryptographic migrations—is happening in an open environment, for free, and available to anyone… this is the part of the story that should be getting far more attention than it does.