Ethereum 2029 Strawmap Guide: Ultra-Fast Consensus, Native Privacy, and the "Acceleration Variables" Brought by AI

Original Title: The Idiot's Guide to Ethereum's 2029 Strawmap

Original Author: James | Snapcrackle

Compiled by: Ken, Chaincatcher

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

Sketch: https://strawmap.org/

This metaphor is worth delving into.

The Ship of Theseus is a thought experiment from ancient Greece: If you replace every plank of a ship one by one until every plank has been replaced, is it still the same ship?

This is precisely the plan that Strawmap proposes for Ethereum.

By 2029, every major part of the system will be replaced. But there will never be any "downtime rewrite" plans. The goal is to achieve backward-compatible upgrades while keeping the blockchain running in real-time as the "planks" are replaced, although each upgrade will still require node operators to update their software, and certain edge cases may change. This is essentially a complete reconstruction disguised as incremental upgrades.

Strictly speaking, while the consensus and execution logic are being rebuilt, the state (user balances, contract storage, and history) will be preserved at all fork points. This "ship" is being reconstructed while still carrying its cargo. All aboard!

"Why not start from scratch?" Because you cannot restart it without losing the core values of Ethereum: the applications already running on it, the funds already flowing, and the trust already established. You have to replace the planks while the ship is sailing.

The name "Strawmap" is a combination of "strawman" and "roadmap." "Strawman" refers to a preliminary proposal that is known to be imperfect upon presentation, intended to invite critique. So, this is not a commitment, but a starting point for discussion. However, this is the first time the builders of Ethereum have detailed a structured, time-bound upgrade path with clear performance goals.

This work involves the world's top cryptographers and computer scientists. And it is all open source. No licensing fees, no vendor contracts, and no corporate sales teams. Any company, any developer, any country can build on it. The upgrades available to JPMorgan are exactly the same as those available to a three-person startup in São Paulo.

Imagine if a global alliance of world-class engineers rebuilt the financial pipeline of the internet from scratch, and all you had to do was... plug in directly.

How Ethereum Works in Practice (60-Second Version)

Before we discuss its future direction, let’s take a look at what it looks like today.

Ethereum is essentially a shared global computer. It is not run by a single company operating servers, but by thousands of independent operators around the world, each running their own copy of the same software.

These operators independently validate transactions. Some of them are called validators, who also stake their own funds (ETH) as collateral. If a validator tries to cheat, they will lose that stake. Every 12 seconds, validators reach consensus on which transactions occurred and their order. This 12-second time window is called a "slot." Every 32 slots (about 6.4 minutes) constitutes an "epoch."

True finality, the moment when a transaction becomes irreversible, takes about 13 to 15 minutes, depending on where your transaction falls in the validation 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. Because of this gap, most Ethereum applications today run on "Layer 2 networks." Layer 2 networks are independent systems that batch process large numbers of transactions and then send summary information back to the Ethereum base layer for security.

The system that allows all operators to reach consensus is called the "consensus mechanism." Ethereum's current consensus mechanism is working well and has been tested over time, but it was designed for an earlier era, limiting the network's capabilities.

Strawmap aims to address all these issues. One upgrade at a time.

The Five Core Goals of Strawmap

This roadmap revolves around five goals. Ethereum is currently operational, with billions of dollars flowing through it daily. But it has practical limitations on what can be built on it. These five goals are designed to eliminate those limitations.

1. Fast L1: Second-Level Finality

Today, after sending a transaction on Ethereum, you have to wait about 13 to 15 minutes to achieve true finality, meaning the transaction is irreversible, completed, and cannot be undone.

Solution: Replace the engine that allows all operators to reach consensus. The goal is to achieve finality within each slot through a single round of voting. Minimmit is currently one of the leading candidates in research, a protocol designed for ultra-fast consensus, but the specific design is still being refined. The important goal is to achieve finality within a single slot. Next, the time of the slot itself will also be compressed: the proposed path is 12 seconds → 8 seconds → 6 seconds → 4 seconds → 3 seconds → 2 seconds.

Finality is not just about speed; it’s about certainty. Think of wire transfers, the time between "sent" and "settled" is the window where problems can arise.

If you are transferring a million-dollar payment, settling bond trades, or completing real estate transactions on the blockchain, that 13 minutes of uncertainty is a big problem. If it can be shortened to a few seconds, it fundamentally changes the capabilities of the network. This applies not only to crypto-native applications but also to anything involving value transfer.

2. Gigagas: 300x Expansion

The Ethereum mainnet currently processes about 15-30 transactions per second. This is a bottleneck.

Solution: Strawmap aims to achieve an execution capacity of 1 gigagas (one billion gas) per second, which is roughly equivalent to 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 core idea is a technology called "zero-knowledge proofs."

The simplest way to understand it is: currently, every operator on the network must re-execute every computation to verify its correctness. It’s like every employee in a company independently recalculating every other colleague's math problems. Is it safe? Yes. Is it extremely inefficient? Yes.

ZK proofs allow you to verify a compact mathematical "receipt" that proves the computation was correct. The same level of trust, but with far less work.

The software to generate these proofs is still too slow. Existing versions take minutes to hours to handle complex tasks.

Reducing that time to seconds (achieving about a 1000x improvement) is an active research challenge, not just an engineering challenge. Teams like RISC Zero and Succinct are making rapid progress, but this is still at the cutting edge.

A mainnet with fast finality and up to 10,000 TPS means a simpler system with fewer moving parts. The chances of something going wrong decrease.

3. Teragas L2: Millions of TPS Across the "Fast Lane"

For truly massive transactions (and customization), you still need Layer 2 networks. Currently, L2 is limited by the amount of data the Ethereum mainnet can process for it.

Solution: A technology called "data availability sampling" (DAS). It no longer requires every operator to download all data to verify its existence; instead, they check random samples and use mathematical methods to verify that the complete dataset is intact. Imagine this as checking a 500-page book by randomly flipping through 20 pages; if those 20 pages are there, statistically, you can be confident that the rest of the pages are also there.

PeerDAS has been delivered in the Fusaka upgrade, laying the groundwork for the infrastructure that Strawmap relies on. Expanding from here to the ultimate goal means iterative scaling: increasing data capacity with each fork and stress-testing network stability at every step.

A processing capacity of 10 million TPS across the L2 ecosystem will open doors that no current blockchain can achieve.

Imagine a global supply chain where every product and good has a digital token; or millions of connected devices generating verifiable data; or processing micro-payment systems of fractions of a cent. These workloads are too large for any existing network. But with a capacity of 10 million TPS, they can not only be easily accommodated but handled with ease.

4. 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 used when users send transactions and the signatures used by validators to reach consensus. Once quantum computers become powerful enough, they could break both types of signatures, potentially allowing attackers to forge transactions or steal funds.

Solution: Transition to new cryptographic methods (hash-based schemes) that are believed to be resistant to quantum attacks. This is a later-stage upgrade because it touches nearly every aspect of the system, and the new methods use larger data sizes (kilobytes instead of bytes), which will change the economic models of block size, bandwidth, and storage across the entire network.

Quantum attacks on today's cryptography may still be years or even decades away. But if you are building infrastructure intended to last—an infrastructure that could carry trillions of dollars in value—"we'll figure it out later" is not a real answer.

5. Privacy L1: Achieving Transaction Confidentiality

All information on Ethereum is public by default. Unless you use privacy applications like Railgun or privacy-focused L2s like ZKsync or Aztec, every transaction, every amount, and every counterparty is visible to anyone.

Solution: Build confidential transfer capabilities directly into the core of Ethereum. The technical goal is to allow the network to verify whether a transaction is valid, whether the sender has sufficient funds, and whether the mathematical calculations are correct, without revealing the actual details. You can prove "this is a legitimate $50,000 payment" without disclosing who the sender is, who the recipient is, or what the payment is for.

There are currently some workarounds. EY and StarkWare announced in February 2026 the launch of Nightfall on Starknet, bringing privacy-protecting transactions into the Layer 2 environment. But workarounds add complexity and cost. Building privacy into the infrastructure can eliminate the need for middleware.

This is also where the post-quantum work intersects: any privacy solution built must be resistant to quantum attacks. These are two challenges that must be solved simultaneously. Once resolved, a significant barrier to the widespread adoption of the technology will disappear.

Seven Forks (Upgrades)

Strawmap proposes seven upgrade plans, occurring at approximately six-month intervals, starting with Glamsterdam. Each upgrade is intentionally scoped to change only one or two major aspects at a time, because if something goes wrong, you need to know exactly what caused it.

The first upgrade after Fusaka (which has already been released and laid the groundwork through PeerDAS and data tuning) is Glamsterdam, which restructured the way transaction blocks are assembled.

Next is Hegotá, which brings further structural improvements. The remaining forks (from I* to M*) will continue until 2029, gradually introducing faster consensus mechanisms, zero-knowledge proofs, expanded data availability, post-quantum cryptography, and privacy features.

Why Wait Until 2029?

Because some of these issues have indeed not yet been resolved.

Replacing the consensus mechanism is the hardest. Imagine changing the engines of an airplane mid-flight, while thousands of co-pilots must agree on every change. Each change requires months of testing and formal verification. And efforts to shorten the cycle time to below 4 seconds will ultimately encounter a physical challenge: signals take about 200 milliseconds to travel round trip across the Earth. To some extent, you are fighting against the speed of light.

Making ZK provers fast enough is another cutting-edge challenge. The current speed (in minutes) is about 1000 times slower than the target speed (in seconds). This requires both mathematical breakthroughs and specially designed hardware.

Scaling data availability, while difficult, is relatively easier to handle. The mathematical logic is feasible. The challenge lies in how to operate cautiously on a real-time network carrying hundreds of billions of dollars in value.

Post-quantum migration is an operational nightmare because the new signature characteristics are so large that they change the economic models of all aspects.

Native privacy is not only technically challenging but also politically sensitive. Regulators worry that privacy tools will facilitate money laundering. Engineers must build systems that are private enough to ensure usability while being transparent enough to meet compliance requirements, and it must also be resistant to quantum attacks.

And these upgrades cannot happen simultaneously. Some upgrades depend on others. Without mature ZK proofs, you cannot scale to 10,000 TPS. Without working on data availability, you cannot scale L2. These dependency chains dictate the timeline.

For everything attempted, three and a half years is actually quite an aggressive timeline.

2029?

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

In February 2026, a developer named YQ bet Vitalik that a person could use an AI agent to write a complete Ethereum system targeting the 2030+ roadmap. Within weeks, he delivered ETH2030: an experimental Go language execution client claiming about 713,000 lines of code, implementing all 65 projects on Strawmap, and marked as runnable on testnets and mainnets.

Is it ready for production? No. As Vitalik pointed out, there are almost certainly fatal flaws throughout the code, and in some cases, it may just be a stub implementation, with AI not even attempting to complete a full version.

But Vitalik's response is worth reading closely: "Six months ago, this was completely a pipe dream, and the important thing is the trend... People should remain open to the possibility (just a possibility, not certainty!) that the speed of completion for the Ethereum roadmap could be much faster than expected, and the security standards could exceed expectations."

Vitalik's core insight is that the correct way to leverage AI should not just be about speed. It should allocate half of the benefits brought by AI to increase speed and the other half to enhance security: more testing, more mathematical verification, and more independent implementations of the same functionality.

The Lean Ethereum project is working on formal verification of parts of the cryptography and proof stack through machine checking. The long-idealized fantasy of "bug-free code" may actually become a fundamental expectation.

Strawmap is a coordinating document, not a commitment. Its goals are ambitious, its timeline visionary, and its execution relies on the participation of hundreds of independent contributors.

But the real question is not whether each goal can be achieved on time. It is whether you want to build on a platform with this trajectory of development or compete against it.

And all of this—including all the research, breakthroughs, and cryptographic migrations—is happening in an open environment, free and accessible to everyone... that is the part of this story that truly deserves much more attention than it currently receives.