Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has laid out a clearer, more structured path to scaling the network — one that aims to boost transaction capacity without sacrificing decentralization. In a technical post expanding on the “Strawmap” roadmap, Buterin framed scaling around two complementary timelines: near-term execution improvements to squeeze more throughput from today’s protocol, and longer-term architectural shifts that lean on cryptographic proofs to keep validator costs manageable as usage grows.
What’s coming soon
Buterin and Ethereum developers are targeting a set of practical upgrades to raise safe throughput in the near term, many of which are tied to the planned “Glamsterdam” upgrade. Key changes include:
- Block-level access lists: These let parts of a block be verified in parallel, unblocking validation bottlenecks and improving block-time efficiency.
- Enshrined proposer-builder separation (ePBS): By formalizing separation between proposers and builders, ePBS makes it safer to use a larger portion of each slot for verification rather than the current narrow window.
- Gas repricing and other tweaks: Paired with the above, these adjustments aim to let Ethereum increase per-block gas limits without exposing validators to unexpected worst-case costs.
A crucial near-term shift is the introduction of multidimensional gas accounting. Today’s single gas model lumps execution, calldata, and state growth together, which can force a trade-off: either limit execution or allow unchecked state growth that raises long-term costs. Buterin proposes separating state-creation costs from regular execution gas. Under this design, creating new state becomes more expensive (discouraging bloat) but those state-creation charges wouldn’t count toward the per-block transaction gas cap. That lets execution capacity scale more aggressively while economically constraining how fast the global state expands.
Longer-term: blobs, ZK-EVMs and cryptographic proofs
Beyond execution-layer tweaks, Buterin reiterated that sustained scaling will depend on data-availability techniques and greater reliance on zero-knowledge proofs:
- Blobs: Originally introduced to speed layer-2 rollups, blobs let validators verify data availability without downloading and re-executing every transaction. They’re expected to play a bigger role in offloading data verification work from full execution.
- ZK-EVMs: Buterin outlined a staged adoption path for zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machines. By 2026, ZK-EVM clients could be viable for a small slice of the network, enabling some validators to attest to blocks using proofs instead of full re-execution. By 2027, broader adoption could allow higher gas limits because solo stakers would have an affordable verification path. Over time, Ethereum may move toward requiring multiple independent proofs per block, further reducing the need for most nodes to re-execute every transaction.
Bigger picture: scaling without centralizing
Taken together, the Strawmap roadmap signals a shift away from seeing scaling as a hard trade-off between throughput and decentralization. Instead, Ethereum’s strategy is incremental and layered: separate execution pressures from state growth, apply targeted protocol-level improvements to raise safe throughput today, and rely on cryptographic proofs and data-availability primitives to hold validator costs down as capacity ramps up. That contrasts with some rival networks’ monolithic scaling approaches and aims to preserve Ethereum’s existing validator base even as demand increases.
Bottom line
Ethereum’s roadmap is increasingly explicit: practical near-term engineering changes will buy the network headroom now, while blobs and ZK proofs offer a credible path to much higher throughput later — all without forcing validators into prohibitively expensive hardware or sacrificing decentralization.
Disclaimer: This article is informational and not investment advice. Cryptocurrency trading carries high risk; readers should do their own research before making financial decisions. © 2026 AMBCrypto
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