The first few months of 2026 have forced the Ethereum community into an introspection of sorts — one that goes beyond price, beyond technical upgrades, and into the question of what the network is really trying to be.
Even before this year, there has been a sense among developers and leaders that Ethereum was on the verge of another growth phase – this time driven not by crypto-native users, but by institutions and technology. Neobanks, some argued, would onboard millions by abstracting the complexity of wallets and gas fees. Ethereum, in this framing, does not need to win users directly. It would sit beneath the interface and power a new financial stack that, on the surface, looked nothing like crypto.
It was a continuation of a long-standing thesis: that Ethereum’s success would come from invisibility.
This vision is shaped in part by years of previous upgrades aimed at improving the user experience and reducing costs. Changes such as “proto-danksharding”, introduced in the Dencun upgrade, significantly lowered fees for layer 2 networks by increasing data transfers for transactions, while ongoing improvements to the base layer have made transactions more efficient.
While the price of the network’s ether token (ETH) has been determined by market forces, these upgrades have collectively helped move Ethereum closer to a model where users interact with applications without having to understand the underlying infrastructure.
But that narrative began to change a few weeks into the year, refocusing on the core roadmap.
The L2 debate
Earlier this year, the co-founder of the network, Vitalik Buterin, delivered a stark reality check to the wider ecosystem: “You don’t scale Ethereum.”
The comment cut through what up until then had been a largely celebratory conversation about rollups. These types of networks, also known as layer-2 (L2) networks, process transactions from Ethereum and then aggregate them back to the main chain to make it faster and cheaper. Layer-2 networks have exploded over the past few years, transaction fees have fallen and activity has spread – but the deeper question was whether any of this equated to coherent scaling.
Buterin’s argument went further than a general critique of progress. In his opinion, many of today’s layer 2 designs are drifting away from Ethereum’s core model: relying on centralized components and siled environments that do not fully inherit the guarantees of the base chain. The concern was not that L2s exist, but that in their current form they may not deliver the kind of scaling Ethereum was intended to achieve.
His criticism highlighted a growing unease.
Fragmentation across L2s, inconsistent security assumptions, and reliance on centralized components began to look less like temporary trade-offs and more like structural risks. Ethereum, in trying to scale outward, risked losing the very attributes that made it valuable in the first place – its strong security, decentralization, and role as a shared, neutral settlement layer where applications and liquidity can seamlessly work together.
The L2 teams, for their part, didn’t push back so much as recalibrate. Some acknowledged the criticism and leaned into a future where rollups differentiate themselves through specialization: privacy, consumer apps or unique execution environments, rather than simply acting like cheaper Ethereum. Others defended their role more forcefully, arguing that high-throughput environments are still essential.
Ethereum’s base layer, meanwhile, has made incremental progress on its own. Recent upgrades, such as December’s Fusaka hard fork, increased the data capacity and efficiency of the mainnet, allowing more transactions to be processed while lowering costs. Although this increase in transactions came under scrutiny recently, with some calling them ‘address poisoning’ scams.
What this tense episode established for Ethereum is that the way forward needs a delicate balance between base layer structural upgrades and a new breed of specialized rollups that can grow the ecosystem without breaking its basic security.
This could also lead to consolidation among the layer 2 networks, according to 21shares. “The coming year is likely to mark Ethereum’s L2 consolidation: a leaner, more resilient layer anchored by ETH-aligned, exchange-supported and high-performance networks,” the firm said in a research report.
The quantum threat
At the same time, another issue – long discussed, but rarely urgent – suddenly moved up the priority list: Quantum Computing.
The Ethereum Foundation signaled a shift in posture, elevating efforts such as ‘LeanVM’ and post-quantum signature schemes. What had once been treated as a distant, almost academic concern was now folded into short-term planning.
The implication was hard to ignore: the network is no longer building just for the next cycle, but for threats that can fundamentally break its cryptographic assumptions. The foundation has signaled that it takes this risk seriously, establishing a dedicated research effort focused specifically on post-quantum security.
Vitalik Buterin also outlined a roadmap to protect blockchain from the long-term risks of quantum computing
The internal shuffle
If scaling exposed cracks in Ethereum’s present, quantum risk casts a shadow over its future, and it seemed the network took the threat seriously.
Then came changes from within.
Tomasz Stańczak’s departure as co-executive director of the Ethereum Foundation marked more than a change in leadership. At a moment when the network faces technical, strategic and philosophical reappraisals all at once, even subtle shifts at the top can signal a broader recalibration.
The move also came as something of a surprise.
The foundation is not known for abrupt changes, and Stańczak had only stepped into the role about a year earlier, after Aya Miyaguchi’s long tenure. In an ecosystem that tends to favor continuity, the rapid turnover hinted at a deeper internal recalibration underway as the fund reevaluates its priorities amid increasing demands for scaling, security and Ethereum’s potential role in new frontiers such as artificial intelligence (AI).
“Lay of Trust”
And AI, a topic that has become impossible to ignore, not just for crypto, but for any industry, began to shape a separate mindset for the network.
Buterin outlined how Ethereum could play a fundamental role in the future of artificial intelligence. The vision extends beyond payments or DeFi – into a world where Ethereum acts as a coordination layer for decentralized AI systems, enabling verifiable outputs, trust-minimized data sharing and machine-to-machine economic activity.
That push didn’t appear overnight.
Early last year, the foundation created a dedicated decentralized AI (dAI) research unit that explored how the network could support autonomous agents and machine-to-machine economies. What felt experimental at the time has since accelerated into something more deliberate in 2026, with the foundation increasingly framing Ethereum as a potential “trust layer” for AI: a system to verify output, coordinate agents, and anchor a rapidly evolving ecosystem that until now has been largely governed by centralized actors.
All of this is an ambitious expansion of scale that places Ethereum at the intersection of two of the most consistent technologies today.
But overall, the first three months of the year suggest that Ethereum no longer has the luxury of tackling these issues in isolation; rather, they converge.
What emerges is a network pulled in multiple directions, each with its own sense of urgency, and a balancing act becomes harder to ignore. And unlike previous cycles, when narratives could shift as quickly as prices, the issues now feel deeper, less about momentum and more about structure.
These tensions are unlikely to be resolved anytime soon and will continue to shape Ethereum’s trajectory in the coming months.
In the immediate term, however, the focus remains on scaling the base layer, with the upcoming Glamsterdam upgrade planned for this year expected to accelerate this effort. The upgrade is likely to be a litmus test for the network’s ability to solve problems that can successfully move Ethereum to a robust, quantum-safe “trust layer” capable of anchoring the global AI economy.
Read more: Ethereum’s ‘Glamsterdam’ upgrade aims to fix MEV fairness
