I just saw the Ethereum Foundation release the Strawmap, and honestly, it’s a really dense document. Basically, they’re saying they’re going to make about seven upgrades by 2029, with a fork every six months. No random announcements—this is a well-structured technical roadmap.

What stands out is that they’ve moved away from the old naming scheme (Merge, Surge, Scourge) and will focus on very specific technical milestones: throughput, privacy, and security. Justin Drake presented this, and you can see the idea is to make it clear to the community what’s coming next.

Now, what really matters: they want to reach 10,000 transactions per second on the mainnet. How? By integrating zkEVM directly into the protocol. For anyone who isn’t keeping up, the Ethereum Virtual Machine is today’s computational bottleneck—the Ethereum Virtual Machine has gas and processing limitations. By using zero-knowledge proofs in real time, they can verify calculations much faster. This changes the game because it doesn’t require specialized hardware, while still maintaining decentralization.

But the bigger focus is on Layer 2. They talk about Teragas—achieving 10 million TPS in rollups. With Data Availability Sampling, the L2s can verify data without downloading everything. For the end user, that means almost zero fees and dApps running like normal web services.

There’s more: post-quantum cryptography. As computers become more powerful, today’s blockchain security is at risk. They want to migrate to hash-based schemes that can withstand quantum computers. And native privacy—ETH transfers protected directly on L1, without needing third-party mixers.

The roadmap divides everything into three streams: scaling (more throughput), UX (less latency), and hardening (security). The first upgrades like Glamsterdam and Hegotá will prepare the ground for these bigger goals.

The important detail: the Ethereum Foundation calls it a living document, not prophecy. There’s room for feedback, for research to evolve. But you can see the focus is on turning Ethereum into a scalable world computer.

The Ethereum Virtual Machine will change a lot with these zkEVM integrations. Anyone following the ecosystem knows this is critical—if they can achieve this throughput without sacrificing decentralization, it changes the entire conversation about blockchain as global infrastructure. For now, ETH is at $2.32K, but it’s these technical developments that will shape the long term.