Ethereum’s new roadmap lands in a market less interested in vision than evidence.
This is the central tension behind the Ethereum Foundation’s updated protocol priorities for 2026, which divides the next phase of the network into three prongs, including scale, improving UX, and strengthening L1.
The roadmap is technical, but the market question is not. Investors want to know if these priorities can help ETH recover in this bear market, and if they can do so by changing risk and economics rather than just developer sentiment.
This is why the Foundation framework is important. It’s not about selling a single upgrade. It presents a system-level argument that Ethereum can simultaneously increase capacity, reduce user friction, and strengthen the base layer.
If this works, the market could assign a lower risk premium to ETH and become more willing to pay for Ethereum’s long-term role as a settlement layer.
It is on the scale that economic arguments are judged
The most market-relevant part of the 2026 roadmap is in the Scale track.
The Ethereum Foundation says the community has already increased Ethereum’s gas limit from 30 million to 60 million, the first significant increase since 2021.
The next goal is to progress towards and beyond 100 million, with tighter organization of work execution and data availability.
It’s not just about engineering tasks. This is a direct response to the competitive pressure that has defined this cycle.
Ethereum must support more economic activity without excluding users, while preserving the decentralization and neutrality that made institutions comfortable with the chain in the first place.
In light of this, two elements of the Scale track are most important to market structure.
One of these is ePBS (embedded proponent-builder separation), which the Foundation identifies as part of the scaling components of Glamsterdam, alongside repricing and additional blob parameter increases.
ePBS is deeply technical, but its importance in the marketplace is clearer than it seems. It addresses a long-standing concern about the extraction of MEVs and the pressure for centralization in block construction.
If block production becomes more predictable and more credibly neutral, Ethereum reduces one of the structural risks that have made some investors cautious about its long-term security and governance profile.
The second is the zkEVM attestation client, which the Foundation says is moving from prototype to production.
This is an important signal because it suggests that Ethereum’s future scaling is not just about external rollups operating on the base chain. It’s also about making verification and proof more native to the Ethereum core stack and more robust in ways that institutions can subscribe to.
Simply put, the Scale track isn’t just about throughput. This is about preserving Ethereum’s economic relevance while reducing the perception that scaling requires too many trade-offs.
This matters for the price, but indirectly. Markets generally only reward increased capacity when they believe that additional capacity can support sustainable, monetizable demand.
Hardening UX and L1 is the story of risk premium
The other two tracks, Improving UX and Strengthening L1, make headlines less immediately, but they could pay more to Ethereum’s refresh rate over time.
The Foundation says usability work in 2026 will focus on native account abstraction and interoperability, with the goal of making smart contract wallets the default without the complexity of aggregators and relayers that slowed previous designs.
It also points to EIP-7701 and EIP-8141 as steps toward integrating smart account logic more directly into the protocol.
This sounds like product design, but it’s also about the market.
Wallet friction remains one of the biggest hidden barriers to broader adoption. Cheaper transactions don’t matter much if the integration still seems complex and error-prone.
If Ethereum can reduce the number of signatures, simplify cross-chain behavior, and make wallets more secure by default, it increases the chance that consumer and business activity will actually persist.
The Foundation also links this work to post-quantum readiness, arguing that native account abstraction creates a cleaner migration path compared to current ECDSA-based authentication, while work continues to make quantum-resistant signature verification more gas efficient.
This isn’t a short-term catalyst, but it’s exactly the type of sustainability that long-term capital tends to notice.
The track Harden the L1 completes the message.
The Foundation touts it as preserving core properties through increased security, censorship resistance research, and stronger testing infrastructure to support a faster fork cadence.
He points to the Trillion Dollar Security Initiative and work such as post-execution transaction assertions and trustless RPCs. It also highlights FOCIL (EIP-7805), as well as expansions covering research on blobs and statelessness, as well as an effort to develop measurable measures of censorship resistance.
For institutional dispatchers, this is not optional. This is the basic case.
Ethereum is increasingly competing for roles that require high trust, including stablecoin settlement, tokenized funds, and other real-world financial use cases.
These markets care less about the number of overall transactions than whether the base layer remains secure, neutral, and predictable under stress.
The Foundation is trying to show that Ethereum can scale without weakening these properties.
If markets believe this, the reward isn’t just increased usage. This is a lower perceived risk premium for ETH.
Ethereum still has gravity, but fees seem low
Despite all these grand plans, the problem is that ETH relies as much on current thinking as on future design.
Right now, Ethereum fundamentals describe a functional and active network, but optically cheap by the metric that many investors still use to judge ETH’s value capture and fees.
Gas prices are around 0.038 gwei on Etherscan’s tracker, which is extremely low. YCharts estimates Ethereum network transaction fees per day at around 140.8 ETH, down around 40% year over year.
This is good for users and manufacturers. He supports adoption. This makes more applications economically viable.
However, it also weakens the clearest version of the post-EIP-1559 narrative. If transactions are cheap and fee revenue remains low, increased usage does not automatically translate into higher consumption and tighter supply.
In other words, Ethereum can gain in utility while still looking weak on the dashboard that many ETH investors watch first.
This is where Ethereum’s role has changed rather than diminished.
The network still anchors much of the on-chain economy, but more of that economic activity is now on its Layer 2 networks.
Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum, recently recognized this problem and admitted that Ethereum needs a “new path” that relies less on layer 2 networks.
According to him:
“The original vision of L2s and their role in Ethereum no longer makes sense, and we need a new path.”
However, as these networks mature, the open question is how much of this growth comes to ETH and how quickly investors can see it in the numbers.
What would influence the ETH price roadmap?
So, can the Ethereum Foundation’s priorities help ETH recover from this bear market? Yes, but above all by improving the quality of the installation.
This is consistent with the position of asset manager 21Shares, which ties the rise in ETH to specific conditions.
This includes the need for L2 activity to either cause a rebound in ETH consumption or introduce structural mechanisms that better align L2 value accumulation with mainnet economics.
The new roadmap can help achieve this if Ethereum scales towards and beyond 100 million gas, advances blob scaling, makes smart wallets look native, and preserves censorship resistance and security at the base layer.
This would improve the chances of Ethereum remaining the preferred settlement layer for on-chain dollars and tokenized assets. It can also make it easier to underwrite the next wave of adoption.
However, what it cannot do alone is force ETF inflows to instantly reverse or reestablish a high fee regime.
