ETH: The Return of the L1

The old roadmap made rollups cheap. The new roadmap must make the whole system work together.

Ethereum spent the last cycle moving execution away from one expensive base layer. Blobs reduced the cost of publishing rollup data. Rollups then became the main place where users transact.

That strategy worked well enough to create a new problem. Activity, users, liquidity, and business control now sit across many chains. The L1 is more secure and more valuable as shared infrastructure, but the relationship between Ethereum and its L2s is less automatic than it once looked.

The 2026 roadmap addresses both sides. It keeps scaling rollups while raising L1 capacity, improving account UX, hardening the base layer, and pushing interoperability. The aim is not to pull every transaction back to mainnet. The aim is to make the L1 a stronger hub for a much larger network.

Pectra improved accounts. Fusaka scaled data. Glamsterdam rebuilds execution.

Pectra activated in May 2025 and shipped EIP-7702, higher blob capacity, validator changes, and a better foundation for smart-account UX. Fusaka followed in December with PeerDAS and the base-layer changes needed to raise both gas and blob limits.

PeerDAS is important because validators no longer need to download every blob in full. They can sample enough of the data to verify availability. That makes additional blob capacity possible without turning every validator into a data center.

The roadmap now shifts toward execution. Glamsterdam is planned for the second half of 2026. By May, the Foundation's Protocol cluster said Glamsterdam devnets were live, Hegotá scoping was underway, and FOCIL was scheduled as a consensus-layer headliner. Hegotá's final scope and activation date are still not fixed. Native account abstraction, inclusion-list work, native rollups, and a longer-term zkEVM path remain active areas of discussion or research.

The L1 has already doubled. The 200 million figure is a target, not live capacity.

The live gas limit rose from 30 million to 60 million. Ethereum's protocol team also described a near-term direction toward 100 million and a post-Glamsterdam alignment floor of at least 200 million.

Those numbers must be separated. Sixty million is observed protocol state. One hundred million is a direction. Two hundred million is a floor target for the work after Glamsterdam. It is not a guaranteed switch that turns on with the fork.

Blob limits have a cleaner shipped record. Pectra moved the target and maximum to 6 and 9. Fusaka's blob parameter upgrades later raised them to 10 and 15, then 14 and 21. More blob capacity helps rollups. More L1 gas helps mainnet applications. Ethereum is now scaling both.

What Glamsterdam actually changes

Enshrined proposer-builder separation moves builder payments and execution-payload commitments into the protocol. It also expands the payload propagation window from roughly two seconds to roughly nine seconds, giving larger blocks more time to move through the network.

Block-level access lists tell nodes which accounts and storage slots a block will touch before the block is replayed. That makes parallel reads, faster sync, and more predictable execution work possible. State repricing makes expensive state growth pay more of its true cost.

These upgrades create the conditions for larger blocks. They do not mean Ethereum instantly gains fully parallel execution or a 200 million gas limit on day one.

Rollups still scale Ethereum. They are also becoming independent distribution businesses.

The Ethereum Foundation's March 2026 position is more explicit than the old rollup slogan. L2s still add capacity, but their larger role is differentiation. They can control features, products, services, compliance choices, and go-to-market.

The L1 has a different job. It remains the permissionless and resilient settlement layer, the shared-state and liquidity hub, and the center of Ethereum DeFi. The relationship is strongest when L2s bring users and applications into that system while continuing to depend on Ethereum data, security, liquidity, and ETH.

This is not a retreat from L2s. It is a clearer division of labor. It also creates tension. An L2 can be strategically valuable to Ethereum while keeping the user relationship, sequencer economics, and most application fees for itself.

Execution moved outward. Capital remains concentrated in a few large rollups.

L2Beat measured 1.27 thousand past-day rollup user operations per second at the cutoff, compared with 20.42 on Ethereum. Its rollup activity factor was 41.55 times.

Robinhood Chain recorded 95.08 past-day user operations per second. Base recorded 93.49. Both were more than four times Ethereum's mainnet figure. This shows where execution lives, but it does not show unique users, revenue, fees, or economic value. A chain can generate many low-value operations.

Capital is concentrated differently. Base secured $11.67 billion and Arbitrum One secured $10.32 billion at the cutoff. OP Mainnet held $1.46 billion. L2Beat classed all three as Stage 1, which means they have meaningful decentralization but still retain additional trust assumptions.

That concentration gives a few L2 operators large strategic weight. If Base or Arbitrum changes its stack, economics, interoperability, or product priorities, the decision affects a meaningful share of Ethereum-aligned capital.

The Foundation is giving up scope. That is not the same as giving up the protocol.

The Ethereum Foundation's June 2026 reorganization reduced staff by 54 people, roughly 20%. The remaining work is organized around five clusters: protocol, access, user, community, and institutional.

The sharper mandate is described as CROPS: censorship resistance, open source, privacy, and security. The Foundation's stated rule is to focus on work that has no reliable natural home elsewhere. Its treasury policy also aims to protect a multiyear operating buffer and reduce annual spending over time.

At the same time, former contributors and adjacent teams are building independent organizations. Ethereum Institutional provides a neutral front door for financial institutions. Ethlabs describes itself as an independent nonprofit research and development lab. Etherealize builds institutional tokenization, settlement, and privacy products. The Ethereum Community Foundation funds ETH-aligned tools and experiments such as BlobKit and BETH grants.

These groups can compete for influence, talent, funding, and institutional relationships. The available evidence does not show one verified successor taking control from the Foundation. The better description is a redistribution of roles with overlapping mandates and more centers of soft power.

The Foundation also added pcaversaccio, a SEAL 911 co-founder and security contributor, to its board on July 29. That does not reverse the narrower operating model. It reinforces the remaining board's role as a values and security backstop rather than a centralized product organization.

Base and Robinhood show why the new L2 model is both powerful and complicated.

Base is moving away from the OP Stack toward a Base-operated unified stack. It also targets six smaller hard forks each year. That gives Base more control over performance and product velocity while it continues to inherit Ethereum settlement.

The move is already producing differentiated chain features. Base's June Beryl upgrade introduced the native B20 asset standard, shortened the common withdrawal delay from seven days to five, and moved the chain onto Reth V2. Cobalt is targeted for September with native account abstraction, gas sponsorship, batching, and a unified node binary. These are product choices, not just cheaper blockspace.

For Ethereum, Base is a major distribution engine and a major source of capital. For the Superchain thesis, its stack move is a warning that large L2s may value independence more than shared software governance. Base can remain Ethereum-aligned while becoming less dependent on Optimism's technical roadmap.

Robinhood Chain represents a different kind of independence. It is a permissionless Ethereum L2 built with Arbitrum technology, uses ETH for gas, and posts blob data to Ethereum. Its product is finance distribution: tokenized assets, brokerage-linked users, and applications built around regulated markets.

Robinhood can bring a large new audience into Ethereum's settlement system. It can also keep the customer interface, product economics, sequencer control, and brand relationship inside Robinhood. That is the central L2 tradeoff in one company.

A better roadmap does not create an immediate ETH trade.

ETH traded near $1,918 at the cutoff after rebounding roughly 22% over 30 days. It was still below the January range and remained down about 16% over 90 days in the reviewed market series.

The near-term catalyst path is clear. Traders will watch Glamsterdam scheduling, further gas-limit increases, interoperability progress, institutional distribution through organizations and L2s, and signs that more activity produces more ETH demand.

The failure path is equally clear. The roadmap can improve while ETH underperforms if execution growth stays on L2s, fees remain low, liquidity fragments, and institutions use Ethereum-compatible infrastructure without holding or settling meaningful value in ETH.

The system can win while ETH undercaptures. The next year should reveal whether it does.

Ethereum now has several ways to win. Mainnet can process more valuable activity. L2s can bring in more users and institutions. Independent organizations can move faster in research, products, policy, and market access.

The risk is that these wins do not connect. A larger L1 without safe node operation is not durable. Faster L2s without shared liquidity and interoperability are a fragmented multichain system. More institutional chains without ETH demand can expand the brand while weakening the token thesis.

The next six to eighteen months should be judged by measurable bridges, not slogans.

The roadmap is public. The economic outcome is not.

This report combines Ethereum Foundation and ethereum.org roadmap material, organization self-descriptions, first-party L2 documentation, L2Beat measurements, and Binance ETH market bars.

Methodology and limitations