Ethereum has spent years promising it would eventually become fast, cheap, and scalable. Now there’s a document with actual deadlines. A draft roadmap published by Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake lays out a plan for roughly seven hard forks by 2029, each arriving about every six months, with targets that would fundamentally reshape how the network operates.
The plan, nicknamed the “Strawmap,” aims to slash transaction finality from approximately 16 minutes down to as little as 6 seconds. It also targets around 10,000 transactions per second on Layer 1, with Layer 2 capacity potentially reaching 10 million TPS through data availability sampling. For context, Visa processes roughly 1,700 TPS on average.
What the Strawmap actually proposes
The cornerstone of the finality improvement is something called “Minimmit,” a single-slot finality mechanism. Right now, Ethereum transactions technically reach finality after about 16 minutes, which is the time it takes for the network to fully confirm a block is irreversible. Reducing that to 6 to 16 seconds would put Ethereum in the same ballpark as centralized payment networks, at least in terms of speed.
The throughput ambitions are equally aggressive. Hitting 10,000 TPS on the base layer would represent an enormous leap from Ethereum’s current capacity of roughly 15 to 30 TPS. The path to 10 million TPS on Layer 2 runs through data availability sampling, a technique that lets validators verify large amounts of data without downloading all of it.
