Woofun AI reports that Ethereum has entered its 11th year of operation, marked by the activation of the Fusaka upgrade and a significant restructuring of the Ethereum Foundation, as analyzed by KarenZ for Foresight News. Since its inception in 2015, when the concept of a "world computer" was first introduced to on-chain platforms, the network has evolved into a complex ecosystem that is now undergoing both organizational and technical transformations to sustain its trajectory through 2026 and beyond. The recent Fusaka upgrade has laid the groundwork for handling increased Layer 2 data, while the Ethereum Foundation has decentralized its operations by shifting research, institutional expansion, and privacy tasks to independent entities such as Ethlabs, Ethereum Institutional, and EthSystems.

Concurrently, the Lean Ethereum vision and the Strawmap roadmap have outlined ambitious plans for future protocol iterations, targeting consensus mechanisms, verification methods, cryptography, and state structures for comprehensive redesign in the coming years.

The historical trajectory of Ethereum can be condensed into a series of pivotal milestones that define its evolution from a theoretical concept to a robust public network. On July 30, 2015, the Frontier mainnet was launched, transforming the whitepaper’s ideas into a functional platform where anyone could deploy and execute smart contracts. In 2016, the attack on The DAO triggered a hard fork, resulting in the creation of Ethereum Classic by the faction that rejected the intervention. The Beacon Chain was launched in 2020, setting the stage for The Merge in 2022, which transitioned the mainnet from proof of work to proof of stake.

Shapella followed in 2023, enabling staking withdrawals, while Dencun in 2024 introduced Blobs via EIP-4844, offering cheaper data storage for rollups. In May 2025, the Pectra upgrade enhanced account functions through EIP-7702, raising the maximum valid balance per validator to 2048 ETH. This path has never adhered to a fixed blueprint; instead, Ethereum’s defining characteristic is its ability to evolve continuously while remaining operational, with the first decade laying the foundation and the past year redefining its future direction.

The Fusaka upgrade, activated on the mainnet on December 3, 2025, represents the second major mainnet update for Ethereum in 2025, following Pectra. Its most significant innovation is PeerDAS, which eliminates the need for each node to download all Blob data to verify availability. Instead, nodes sample only a portion of the data, collaborating through error-correction mechanisms to confirm the existence of the complete dataset, akin to inspectors randomly checking boxes in a large shipment to assess the whole. Following the upgrade, Ethereum adjusted Blob parameters twice via BPO, increasing the target value per block from 6 to 14 and the upper limit from 9 to 21.

Additionally, the default block Gas Limit was raised from 45 million to 60 million. While Fusaka primarily offers underlying structural improvements rather than immediate performance expansion, it establishes the necessary framework for future increases in Blob capacity and reductions in L2 costs, even if users do not perceive drastic changes immediately.

Parallel to these on-chain developments, the Ethereum Foundation underwent a rare-scale organizational reform over the past year. In March 2026, the foundation issued its Mandate, establishing user autonomy as its core goal and defining censorship resistance, openness, privacy, and security as non-negotiable CROPS principles. On June 23, it announced the completion of a months-long restructuring process, during which 54 people left the organization, representing approximately 20% of the original team. The restructured foundation is now organized into five key areas: protocol layer, access layer, user layer, community layer, and institutional layer, supported by operational clusters and management teams.

By focusing its limited resources on tasks it believes only it can undertake long-term, the foundation has ceased attempting to manage protocol development, product access, ecosystem communication, and institutional expansion within a single entity. This restructuring aligns with the foundation’s treasury policy, which plans to reduce annual operating expenses from around 15% of the treasury in 2025 to 5% over five years, concentrating resources on the core protocol, autonomous access, privacy, and security while delegating ecosystem-related tasks to independent organizations.

Several new entities founded by former foundation members have begun operating independently, expanding the ecosystem’s functional scope. Ethlabs, an independent nonprofit research organization comprising several former Ethereum Foundation researchers, focuses on protocol development, scalability, interoperability, and infrastructure improvements. Ethereum Institutional, originally incubated within the foundation, now serves as a neutral entry point for banks, asset management firms, and public institutions, handling education, demand analysis, and ecosystem coordination.

On July 29, Ethereum Institutional announced the completion of its first round of fundraising and the formation of a supporter alliance, receiving backing from over 100 ecosystem participants, including lead investors BitMine, SharpLink, and Ethereum co-founders Joseph Lubin and Mihai Alisie, though the investment amount was not disclosed. EthSystems, continuing the work of the foundation’s Institutional Privacy Task Force, operates as an independent for-profit company designing privacy, compliance, and confidential transaction systems for institutions.

These entities are not merely 'spin-offs' but represent a strategic shift where the Ethereum Foundation enables talent, funding, and specialized functions to move outside, forming organizations capable of independent financing and decision-making, thereby altering the organizational structure for R&D, institutional communication, and product development without changing the protocol’s governance model.

Woofun AI data shows that behind these organizational adjustments lies a longer-term technical roadmap articulated through the Lean Ethereum vision and the Strawmap. On July 31, 2025, just two days after Ethereum’s 10th anniversary, Justin Drake released the Lean Ethereum vision, proposing an aggressive technical path for the protocol’s next decade. At the consensus layer, Lean Ethereum aims to reduce final confirmation times to just a few seconds, while the data layer plans to increase Blob capacity through next-generation data availability sampling. The execution layer suggests using a simplified instruction set better suited for SNARK proofs, preserving EVM compatibility and existing network effects.

Furthermore, the protocol will need to gradually replace signing and cryptographic components vulnerable to quantum computing to ensure long-term security. The long-term goals include achieving around 1 gigagas/s for L1 and 1 teragas/s for L2, corresponding to estimated transaction rates of approximately 10,000 TPS for L1 and 10 million TPS for L2. It is crucial to note that this document was explicitly labeled as Justin Drake’s personal vision to spark community discussion, not as a governance-approved commitment to upgrade.

In February 2026, Strawmap, maintained by EF Architecture, was launched as a draft roadmap awaiting community modifications, with contributions from Justin Drake, Vitalik Buterin, and others. On July 4, following a researcher conference in Berlin, Vitalik Buterin released an update estimating that implementing the key aspects of Lean Ethereum would take three to four years through multiple upgrades. The roadmap considers Recursive STARK, post-quantum cryptography, reforms to consensus and finality, multi-dimensional gas, new state types, and client architectures, referring to this phase as the "third major iteration" after early Ethereum and The Merge, with privacy as a top priority.

Strawmap identifies five "directional goals": Fast L1, Gigagas L1, Teragas L2, Post-Quantum L1, and Private L1, which translate to faster confirmation times, higher mainnet throughput, larger L2 data capacity, post-quantum cryptography, and built-in protocol privacy. These are research directions and engineering goals, requiring significant design, implementation, testing, and community coordination before full deployment can be achieved.

Market data provides further insight into Ethereum’s position in its 11th year, particularly regarding stablecoins and real-world assets. As of July 31, 2026, RWA.xyz reported that the scale of stablecoins on Ethereum’s mainnet was approximately $155.9 billion, accounting for about 52.5% of the global total of around $296.9 billion. DeFiLlama, using different methodologies for asset coverage and network classification, estimated the scale of stablecoins on Ethereum at around $146.9 billion, representing about 49.0% of the total global scale of around $300.1 billion. The discrepancies between these datasets stem from variations in token coverage, cross-chain assets, and statistical methods, yet both confirm that Ethereum’s mainnet hosts nearly half of the world’s total stablecoin supply. This dominance underscores the network’s critical role in the global digital asset landscape, despite differing analytical approaches.

The second set of data pertains to tokenized real-world assets, highlighting Ethereum’s leadership in this emerging sector. According to RWA.xyz, as of July 31, 2026, there were 1,552 RWA tokens on Ethereum’s mainnet, with the total value of on-chain distributed assets at around $17.15 billion. This figure is approximately 3.3 times that of BNB Chain, which ranked second, and is the highest among the 38 networks tracked.

On-chain distributed assets refer to tokens that can leave the issuance platform and be transferred between wallets meeting whitelist or investor eligibility requirements. Ethereum Institutional, citing RWA.xyz’s figures, stated that Ethereum and its L2s host over 60% of stablecoin supply and over 75% of tokenized RWA. This broader figure includes L2s and a wider range of asset categories, making it incomparable to RWA.xyz’s data for only L1 networks, but it reinforces Ethereum’s central role in institutional adoption and asset tokenization.

DeFi TVL and L2 activity further illustrate the network’s dynamics. According to DeFiLlama, the DeFi TVL on Ethereum’s L1 was around $41.2 billion, accounting for nearly 55% of the total TVL across all networks, with BSC and Tron following closely behind at around $4.9 billion each, making Ethereum’s TVL about eight times that of its closest competitor. Growthepie’s data showed that as of July 31, 2026, Ethereum L2 networks processed approximately 24.61 million transactions per day, which was 13.9 times higher than the 1.77 million transactions on the mainnet. Weekly transactions reached around 159.9 million, 9.76 times those on the mainnet, and monthly transactions hit around 661.46 million, 10.4 times that of the mainnet. These figures demonstrate that a significant portion of transaction activity has shifted to scaling layers, while stablecoins, RWA, and DeFi TVL remain highly concentrated on L1.

Additionally, on July 1, 2026, Robinhood Chain launched its public mainnet, an L2 using the Arbitrum technology stack, compatible with EVM, using ETH for gas, and settling transactions back to Ethereum, primarily targeting stock tokens and other financial assets. This move by a securities brokerage platform with a large retail user base signals the beginning of traditional financial platforms deploying on-chain infrastructure within the Ethereum ecosystem. These data points do not prove that Ethereum has become the "global financial settlement layer," but they indicate its significant presence in stablecoins, DeFi, tokenized assets, and L2 activities, attracting traditional financial platforms to build on-chain infrastructure for real users.

The next mainnet upgrade, Glamsterdam, combines the execution layer upgrade Amsterdam and the consensus layer upgrade Gloas. As of July 30, 2026, the official planned timeline is the second half of 2026, though the exact activation date remains unannounced. Glamsterdam features two core innovations: ePBS, which incorporates the division of roles between proposers and block builders into the protocol, reducing reliance on external relay services and allowing more time for block propagation, and BAL, which enables nodes to know in advance which accounts and storage locations a block will read and modify, facilitating parallel execution and faster synchronization.

Developers believe that combined with EIP-8037 repricing, ePBS, BAL, and other elements can provide a technical foundation for an upgraded Gas Limit of 200 million. The subsequent upgrade, Hegotá, may occur in 2027, depending on Glamsterdam’s progress. Hegotá features FOCIL (EIP-7805) as its core consensus layer function, using transaction inclusion lists to involve more validators in deciding which transactions to include, thereby reducing censorship risks. Frame Transaction (EIP-8141) is currently under consideration, aiming to split transaction verification, execution, and gas payment into separate frames to support native account abstraction and future post-quantum account migration.