Ethereum 2029 Strawmap for Dummies

This article details Ethereum's future upgrade roadmap, known as "Strawmap," which plans to achieve five core goals through seven major upgrades by 2029: improving L1 finality speed, significantly increasing L1 throughput, achieving massive TPS through L2, implementing quantum resistance, and building-in privacy features. The article likens this process to the rebuilding of the "Ship of Theseus," aiming to fundamentally transform the Ethereum core system through incremental updates while maintaining its continuity.

Ethereum 2029 Strawmap for Dummies

Ethereum has just released its most detailed upgrade plan in history. Seven upgrades. Five goals. One massive refactoring.

If you're wondering which dumbass this guide is for… well, it's me.

If you're wondering which dumbass this guide is for… well, it's me.

1. Fast L1: Finalization in Seconds

When you send a transaction on Ethereum today, you need to wait about 13 to 15 minutes for it to be truly finalized, meaning it's irreversible, completed, and cannot be withdrawn.

Solution: Change the engine that gets all these operators in agreement. The goal is to achieve finality in one round of voting within each Slot. Minimmit is a leading candidate protocol under research, aiming to achieve ultra-fast consensus, but the specific design is still being refined. The important goal is: to achieve finality within a single Slot. Then the Slot time itself is compressed: the proposed path is 12 seconds → 8 → 6 → 4 → 3 → 2.

Finality isn't just about speed; it's about certainty. Think of wire transfers. The time between "sent" and "settled" is still a window where things can go wrong.

If you're making a million-dollar payment, settling a bond transaction, or completing a real estate transaction on the blockchain, that 13-minute uncertainty is a problem. Reduce that to a few seconds, and you fundamentally change what the network can do.

This applies not only to crypto-native applications but also to anything involving value transfer. Gigagas: 300x Scale Up! The Ethereum mainnet processes approximately 15-30 transactions per second. This is a bottleneck. Solution: Strawmap aims for an execution capacity of 1 Gigagas per second, which equates to approximately 10,000 TPS for typical transactions (the exact number depends on the complexity of each transaction, as different operations consume different amounts of gas). The key idea is a technique called "zero-knowledge proofs" (ZK proofs). The simplest way to understand this is: now, every operator on the network must re-execute every computation to check if it is correct. This is like every employee in a company independently recalculating every colleague's math. Is it secure? Yes. Is it extremely inefficient? Also. ZK proofs allow you to check a compact mathematical receipt that proves the calculation was performed correctly. The level of trust is the same, but the workload is far less. The software that generates these proofs is still too slow. Current versions take minutes to hours for complex tasks. Reducing that to seconds, an improvement of about 1000 times, is an active research question, not just an engineering challenge. Teams like RISC Zero and Succinct are making rapid progress, but this is still at the forefront. A 10,000 TPS mainnet with rapid finality means simpler, fewer moving parts. Fewer possibilities for errors.

1. Teragas L2: Achieving 10 Million TPS via High-Speed ​​Channels

For truly large-scale transaction volumes (and customization), you still need a second-layer network. Today, L2 is limited by the amount of data the Ethereum mainnet can handle for them.

For truly large-scale transaction volumes (and customization), you still need a second-layer network. Today, L2 is limited by the amount of data the Ethereum mainnet can handle for them.

The solution: a technique called "Data Availability Sampling" (DAS). Instead of each operator downloading all the data to verify its existence, each operator checks a random sample and uses mathematical methods to verify the completeness of the dataset. Think of it as checking if a 500-page book is actually on the shelf by randomly flipping through 20 pages; if they are, you can statistically be certain the rest are also there. PeerDAS was introduced in the Fusaka upgrade, laying the foundation for everything Strawmap has built. Scaling from there to the full target means iterative scaling: each fork adds more data capacity and tests network stability at every step. The L2 ecosystem enables 10 million transactions per second, opening the door to things currently impossible on any blockchain. Imagine every product and shipment in the global supply chain having a digital token. Or millions of connected devices generating verifiable data. Or a micropayment system processing less than a penny. These workloads are too large for any existing network. They have ample room to accommodate 10 million TPS.

1. Post-Quantum L1: Preparing for Quantum Computers

Ethereum's security relies on mathematical problems that are extremely difficult for today's computers to solve. This applies to the entire system, including the signatures generated when individual users send transactions and the signatures used by validators to reach consensus. If quantum computers become powerful enough, they could potentially break both of these signatures, potentially allowing someone to forge transactions or steal funds.

The solution: migrate to new cryptographic methods (hash-based schemes) that are believed to be resistant to quantum attacks. This is a late-stage upgrade because it touches almost everything in the system, and the new methods use much larger amounts of data (kilobytes instead of bytes), which changes the economics of block size, bandwidth, and storage across the entire network.

Quantum attacks against current cryptography may still be years or even decades away. However, if you're building a long-term infrastructure, one that could hold trillions of dollars in value, "we'll deal with it later" isn't a real answer. Private L1: Keeping Transactions Confidential Everything on Ethereum is public by default. Unless you use a privacy application like Railgun or a privacy-focused L2 like ZKsync or Aztec, every transaction, every amount, and every counterparty is visible to anyone. Solution: Build confidential transmissions directly into the Ethereum core. The technical goal is to allow the network to verify that a transaction is valid, the sender has the funds, and the calculation is correct, without revealing the actual details. You can prove "this is a legitimate $50,000 payment" without revealing who paid whom or what was paid. There are workarounds today. EY and StarkWare released Nightfall on Starknet in February 2026, bringing privacy-preserving transactions to a second-layer environment. But workarounds add complexity and cost. Building privacy into the foundation completely eliminates the need for middleware. This is also a crossroads in post-quantum work: whatever privacy scheme is built, it needs to be quantum resistant. Two problems that must be solved simultaneously. Solving this problem will remove a huge barrier to adoption.

Seven Forks (Upgrades)

Strawmap proposes seven upgrades at a pace of approximately six months, starting with Glamsterdam. Each upgrade is deliberately limited to changing only one or two major things, because if problems arise, you need to know exactly what caused them.

These things can't all happen at once. Some upgrades depend on others. Without a mature ZK proof, you can't scale to 10,000 TPS. Without data availability, you can't scale L2. These dependent chains determine the timeline.

Three and a half years is actually quite aggressive for something we're trying to achieve.

2029?

2029?

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

But the issue isn't whether every goal will be achieved as planned. It's whether you want to build on this platform with this kind of development trajectory, or compete with it.

The question isn't whether every goal will be achieved as planned. It's whether you want to build on this platform with this kind of development trajectory, or compete with it.

All of this—the research, the breakthroughs, the cryptographic migrations—is happening openly, freely, and available to anyone… This is the more noteworthy part of the story than the attention it has received.