The reorganization replaced the former Protocol Research and Development (PR&D) division with three focused workstreams operating under unified leadership. The move followed public criticism of the Foundation's governance transparency and delivery pace. Former Executive Director Aya Miyaguchi acknowledged around the time of the restructure that the organization had relied too heavily on informal culture, stating: "It is clear that relying on culture and individual judgment has not been sufficient."

The restructure came alongside staff departures. Some members of the former PR&D division did not continue with the Foundation, and the organization encouraged the broader ecosystem to hire those who moved on. The circumstances surrounding those departures were not fully detailed in Foundation communications.

The three workstreams are Scale L1, led by Tim Beiko and Ansgar Dietrichs; Scale Blobs, led by Alex Stokes and Francesco D'Amato; and Improve UX, led by Barnabé Monnot and Josh Rudolf. Researcher Dankrad Feist serves as a strategic advisor across all three. The Foundation had also opened searches for a UX Lead and a Performance Engineering Lead at the time of the June 2025 announcement.

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Gas Limits and the Path to zkEVM

The Scale L1 team is targeting a mainnet gas limit of at least 100 million per block. The current limit sits at 60 million, up from 45 million before the Fusaka upgrade activated in December 2025. Alongside Fusaka, two Blob Parameter Only (BPO) forks shipped, beginning the incremental ramp toward the 100 million target. Fusaka also introduced PeerDAS, a technology that lets validators confirm blob data availability by sampling small portions rather than downloading full copies, which reduces bandwidth requirements for node operators.

Central to the multi-year roadmap is a zkEVM attester client being developed by Kevaundray Wedderburn. A zkEVM (zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine) allows a validator to verify a block's correctness through a cryptographic proof rather than re-running all the transactions itself. Rollout is designed as a gradual opt-in over roughly one year before participation becomes mandatory. The Ethereum Foundation published its real-time proving north-star standard in July 2025, and by early 2026, roughly nine months later, the ecosystem had effectively met those benchmarks: 99 percent of Ethereum mainnet blocks can now be proven in under 10 seconds.

Proving latency fell from about 16 minutes to roughly 16 seconds, and costs dropped by a factor of 45.

Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin described the broader intent: "The next two years will give us time to refine the PeerDAS mechanism[…] and then when ZK-EVMs are mature, turn it inwards to scale Ethereum L1 gas as well."

The next major upgrade, Glamsterdam, is targeted for the first half of 2026, a window that begins within weeks of this writing. Block Access Lists are the leading candidate for enabling parallel transaction execution within that release. A subsequent upgrade called Hegotá is planned for later in 2026.

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Market Context: L2 Volume and Fee Divergence

The Protocol restructure occurs against a backdrop of accelerating Layer 2 (L2) adoption. L2 networks, which process transactions off the main Ethereum chain and settle them back to it in batches, handled roughly 5.2 times the transaction volume of Ethereum's mainnet as of late 2025, according to Arkham Research.

Total value locked across L2s reached approximately $38 to $43 billion by late 2025, representing about 55 percent of the total Ethereum ecosystem's locked value, according to DefiLlama and L2Beat data. Arbitrum holds around $16.7 billion of that total; Base holds around $12.5 billion.

The fee gap between L1 and L2 has widened into a practical divide. According to CoinLaw Research, average fees on Ethereum's mainnet ran around $3.78 per transaction, while the average on L2s was approximately $0.08. That cost difference is directly relevant to how useful Ethereum's ecosystem is for everyday payments and remittances.

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Why Emerging Markets Are Watching Closely

For users in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, the practical stakes of this roadmap are concrete. The broader Asia-Pacific region recorded 69 percent year-over-year growth in on-chain transaction volume in the year through June 2025, rising from $1.4 trillion to $2.36 trillion. Within that regional surge, India ranked first in the Chainalysis 2025 Global Crypto Adoption Index for the third year running, and the South Asia region saw roughly 80 percent growth in crypto transaction volume, reaching approximately $300 billion in the same period. India's large Web3 developer community stands to benefit directly from the Foundation's open hiring posture and the clearer research-to-production pipeline that the restructure establishes.

Nigeria ranked sixth globally and first in Sub-Saharan Africa, processing over $92 billion in crypto transactions in 2025. Sub-Saharan Africa as a whole received more than $205 billion in on-chain value, a 52 percent year-over-year increase.

In both regions, crypto functions primarily as a remittance tool and a hedge against currency devaluation rather than as speculative investment. The majority of African on-chain volume flows through stablecoins such as USDC and USDT, which often settle on L2 networks, though other chains including Tron also carry significant stablecoin volume in the region. Beyond cost reduction, the Foundation has identified censorship-resistance as a co-equal goal of the Protocol restructure alongside scalability; features such as ePBS and zkEVM-based verification carry particular relevance for users in markets subject to capital controls.

Lower blob costs translate directly to cheaper transfers. On the infrastructure side, History Expiry, a feature that strips pre-Merge data from full nodes, has already freed 300 to 500 gigabytes of disk space per node, making comfortable operation on a standard 2TB drive feasible. Combined with PeerDAS reducing bandwidth demands, running Ethereum infrastructure is becoming more viable in markets where cloud costs are high relative to local incomes.

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What Comes Next

Hsiao-Wei Wang, an Ethereum Foundation researcher, captured the dual character of the transition: "We're hopeful that this new structure will empower our internal teams to focus more clearly and drive key initiatives forward[…] Saying goodbye to talented and dedicated colleagues is heartbreaking."

The Foundation's ability to deliver on the Glamsterdam timeline and ship a functioning zkEVM attester client will be the first real test of whether a leaner structure translates to faster execution. Developers building on Ethereum L2s now have a multi-year technical roadmap with defined upgrade sequences, which reduces architectural uncertainty for teams making long-term platform decisions. With Glamsterdam expected before mid-2026 and the zkEVM proving benchmarks already reached as of early 2026, the pace of delivery over the next several months will be the clearest measure of the restructure's success.