Ethereum Unveils 5-Year Roadmap to Achieve 1 Billion Gas Per Second
Ethereum has been evolving since its launch in 2015, and now it's entering its eleventh year. The Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake proposed the vision of Lean Ethereum on July 6, 2025, which integrates various decentralized research directions into a unified development blueprint. This roadmap is crucial for investors and developers who want to build applications on Ethereum.
The five North Star goals outlined in the Strawmap plan aim to make Ethereum faster, more decentralized, and more scalable. The first goal is to achieve fast L1 by streamlining the consensus mechanism using zero-knowledge proofs (ZK proofs). This will eliminate the bottleneck of collecting and processing massive signatures at once, allowing all validators to participate in voting for each block with results aggregated instantly.
The plan is to reduce block time from 12 seconds to 6 seconds between 2027 and 2028, and then implement a new generation of peer-to-peer communication protocols. This will further reduce block time to 4 seconds by 2030. The average waiting time from initiating a transaction to execution completion will be about 2 seconds. Another goal is to lower the minimum staking threshold for validators from 32 ETH to 1 ETH, making it easier for users to participate in network governance.
The second North Star goal targets Layer 2 networks (L2), aiming to increase throughput capacity by a factor of 200 times. The biggest obstacle is the repeated execution mechanism, which creates a challenge between decentralization and high performance. Zero-knowledge proofs can break this deadlock by allowing nodes to verify only part of the data, reducing the computational requirements.
The third North Star goal targets L2 networks, aiming for a trillion Gas scale ecosystem with a bandwidth of 1GB per second. This will support large-scale expansion of Layer 2 networks and make Ethereum's throughput capacity more scalable.