Just from a sensory perspective, since 2025, the update frequency of the Ethereum core developer community has been unusually intensive.
From the Fusaka upgrade to Glamsterdam, and the long-term planning around kEVM, quantum-resistant cryptography, Gas Limit, and other topics for the next three years, Ethereum has released multiple roadmap documents covering three to five years in just a few months.
This pace itself is a signal.
If you read the latest roadmap carefully, you will find a clearer and bolder direction emerging: Ethereum is transforming itself into a verifiable computer, and the endpoint of this path is the L1 zkEVM.
1. Three Shifts in the Focus of Ethereum's Narrative
On February 26, Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake posted on social media, stating that the Ethereum Foundation proposed a draft roadmap called Strawmap, outlining the upgrade direction of the Ethereum L1 protocol for the coming years.
This roadmap presents five core objectives: faster L1 (instant finality in seconds), achieving 10,000 TPS "Gigagas" L1 via zkEVM, high-throughput L2 based on data availability sampling (DAS), quantum-resistant cryptography, and native privacy transfer capabilities; concurrently, the roadmap plans for seven protocol forks by 2029, averaging about one every six months.
It can be said that for the past decade, Ethereum's development has always been accompanied by the continuous evolution of its narrative and technical roadmap.
The first phase (2015-2020) was the programmable ledger.
This was the core narrative of Ethereum at its inception, namely "Turing-complete smart contracts." At that time, Ethereum's greatest advantage was that it could do more things compared to Bitcoin; for example, DeFi, NFT, and DAO are products of this narrative, with a plethora of decentralized financial protocols beginning to operate on-chain, from lending, DEX to stablecoins, Ethereum gradually became the main settlement network of the crypto economy.
The second phase (2021-2023) was the takeover of the L2 narrative.
As Ethereum's main chain gas fees soared, ordinary users found it difficult to bear transaction costs, and Rollups began to become the main character in scaling. Ethereum gradually repositioned itself as a settlement layer, aiming to provide a secure foundation for L2.
In simple terms, it involved migrating most of the computation from the execution layer to L2, scaling via Rollups, while L1 only handled data availability and final settlement. During this period, The Merge and EIP-4844 served this narrative, aiming to make using Ethereum's trust cheaper and safer for L2.
The third phase (2024-2025) focuses on the inward reflection and reconsideration of the narrative.
As we all know, the prosperity of L2 has brought an unexpected problem, namely that Ethereum L1 itself has become unimportant. Users have begun to operate more on Arbitrum, Base, and Optimism, seldom directly interacting with L1, and the price performance of Ethereum ETH also confirms this anxiety.
This has led the community to debate where the value capture of L1 lies if L2 is dividing all users and activities. Until the internal turmoil of Ethereum in 2025 and the latest series of roadmaps rolled out in 2026, this logic is undergoing profound evolution.
In fact, sorting out the core technical directions since 2025, Verkle Tree, Stateless Client, EVM formal verification, and native ZK support have repeatedly emerged; these technical directions point towards the same goal: to equip Ethereum L1 itself with verifiability. It should be noted that this is not only about enabling L2's proofs to be validated on L1, but also about ensuring that every state transition of L1 can be compressed and verified through zero-knowledge proofs.
This is precisely the ambition of L1 zkEVM. Unlike L2's zkEVM, L1 zkEVM (encapsulated zkEVM) means directly integrating zero-knowledge proof technology into the Ethereum consensus layer.
It is not a replica of L2 zkEVM (such as zkSync, Starknet, Scroll), but transforms Ethereum's execution layer itself into a ZK-friendly system. So if L2 zkEVM is to create a ZK world on top of Ethereum, then L1 zkEVM is to turn Ethereum itself into that ZK world.
Once this goal is achieved, Ethereum's narrative will upgrade from being an L2 settlement layer to "the root trust of verifiable computation."
This will be a qualitative change, not just a quantitative change like in recent years.
2. What is the Real L1 zkEVM?
As often repeated in the past, in a traditional model, validators need to "re-execute" each transaction to validate blocks, whereas in the zkEVM model, validators only need to verify a ZK proof, which allows Ethereum to raise the Gas Limit to 100 million or even higher without increasing the burden on nodes (see further reading "ZK Roadmap "Dawn": Is Ethereum's Endgame Roadmap Speeding Up?").
However, transforming Ethereum L1 into a zkEVM is not just a single-point breakthrough issue but requires simultaneous progress in eight directions, each representing years of engineering work.
Workstream One: EVM Formal Specification
The premise of all ZK proofs is that the object being proven has a precise mathematical definition. However, today's EVM's behavior is defined by client implementations (like Geth, Nethermind) rather than by a rigorous formal specification. Different clients may have inconsistent behaviors in edge cases, making it extremely difficult to write ZK circuits for the EVM, as you cannot write proofs for a vaguely defined system.
Therefore, the goal of this workstream is to express every instruction and state transition rule of the EVM in a machine-verifiable formal specification. This is the foundation of the entire L1 zkEVM project. Without it, everything that follows is building a tower on sand.
Workstream Two: Replacement with ZK-friendly Hash Functions
Ethereum currently uses Keccak-256 extensively as a hash function. Keccak is very unfriendly to ZK circuits, with significant computational overhead, which will dramatically increase the time and cost of proof generation.
The core task of this workstream is to gradually replace the internal use of Keccak in Ethereum with ZK-friendly hash functions (like Poseidon, Blake series), especially in the state tree and Merkle proof path. This is a tweak that affects the whole system, as hash functions permeate every corner of the Ethereum protocol.
Workstream Three: Replacing Merkle Patricia Tree with Verkle Tree
This is one of the most anticipated changes in the 2025-2027 roadmap. Ethereum currently uses Merkle Patricia Tree (MPT) to store global state; Verkle Tree, by using vector commitment, can replace the hash links and compress the witness size by dozens of times.
For L1 zkEVM, this means that the amount of data required to prove each block decreases significantly, the speed of proof generation is greatly improved, and the introduction of Verkle Tree is a critical infrastructure prerequisite for the feasibility of L1 zkEVM.
Workstream Four: Stateless Clients
Stateless clients refer to nodes that can validate blocks without needing to store a complete Ethereum state database locally; they only need the witness data attached to the block for verification.
This workstream is deeply linked to Verkle Tree, as only when the witness is sufficiently small can the stateless client be practically feasible. Therefore, the significance of stateless clients for L1 zkEVM is dual: on one hand, it greatly lowers the hardware threshold for running nodes, aiding decentralization; on the other hand, it provides clear input boundaries for ZK proofs, so that provers only need to handle the data contained in the witness, rather than the entire world state.
Workstream Five: Standardization and Integration of ZK Proof Systems
L1 zkEVM requires a mature ZK proof system to generate proofs for block execution, but the current technical landscape in the ZK field is highly fragmented, with no universally recognized optimal solution. The goal of this workstream is to define a standardized proof interface at the Ethereum protocol level, so that different proof systems can be connected through competition, rather than designating a specific one.
This maintains openness in technology and leaves room for the continuous evolution of proof systems; the Ethereum Foundation's PSE (Privacy and Scaling Explorations) team has already achieved substantial early accumulation in this direction.
Workstream Six: Decoupling the Execution Layer and Consensus Layer (Advancement of Engine API)
Currently, Ethereum's execution layer (EL) and consensus layer (CL) communicate through the Engine API. In the architecture of L1 zkEVM, every state transition of the execution layer requires generating a ZK proof, the generation time of which may far exceed the block interval time.
The core issue that need to be solved in this workstream is how to decouple execution and proof generation without disrupting the consensus mechanism - execution can be completed quickly, while proof generation can be asynchronously generated later, and then confirmed by validators at an appropriate time. This involves a deep reconstruction of the block finality model.
Workstream Seven: Recursive Proofs and Proof Aggregation
The generation cost of a single block's ZK proof is very high, but if multiple block proofs can be recursively aggregated into one proof, the verification cost will be significantly reduced. The progress of this workstream will directly determine at what low cost L1 zkEVM can operate.
Workstream Eight: Developer Toolchain and EVM Compatibility Assurance
All underlying technical changes must ultimately be transparent to smart contract developers on Ethereum; existing tens of thousands of contracts should not become ineffective due to the introduction of zkEVM, and developers' toolchains cannot be forcibly rewritten.
This workstream is often the most underestimated but usually the most time-consuming. Historically, every EVM upgrade has required substantial backward compatibility testing and toolchain adaptation work. The scope of changes for L1 zkEVM is much greater than past upgrades, and the workload for toolchains and compatibility will be an order of magnitude increase.
3. Why is Now the Right Time to Understand This?
The release of Strawmap coincides with a time when the market has doubts about ETH's price performance, from this perspective, the most important value of this roadmap lies in redefining Ethereum as "infrastructure."
For builders represented by developers, Strawmap provides directional certainty; for users, these technological upgrades will eventually translate into perceptible experiences: transactions get final confirmation in seconds, assets flow seamlessly between L1 and L2, and privacy protection becomes a built-in feature rather than a plugin.
Of course, objectively, L1 zkEVM will not be a product that lands soon; its complete realization may take until 2028-2029 or even later.
But at the very least, it redefines Ethereum's value proposition. If L1 zkEVM is successful, Ethereum will no longer just be an L2 settlement layer, but the verifiable trust root of the entire Web3 world, allowing the state on any chain to ultimately be mathematically traced back to Ethereum's ZK proof chain, which is decisive for the long-term value capture of Ethereum.
Secondly, it also affects the long-term positioning of L2; after all, when L1 itself possesses ZK capabilities, L2's role will change—from a "secure scaling solution" to a "dedicated execution environment." Which L2s can find their place in this new paradigm will be the most significant ecological evolution to observe in the coming years.
Most importantly, I think it is also an excellent window to observe Ethereum's developer culture—being able to simultaneously advance eight interdependent technical workstreams, each being a multi-year project, while maintaining decentralized coordination is, in itself, a unique ability of Ethereum as a protocol.
Understanding this helps to more accurately assess Ethereum's true position in various competitive narratives.
Overall, from the "Rollup-centric" model of 2020 to the Strawmap of 2026, the evolution of Ethereum's narrative reflects a clear trajectory that scaling cannot rely solely on L2; L1 and L2 must co-evolve.
Therefore, the eight workstreams of L1 zkEVM are the technical mapping of this cognitive shift, collectively pointing towards a goal of allowing the Ethereum mainnet to achieve orders of magnitude in performance improvement without sacrificing decentralization. This is not a denial of the L2 route but rather an enhancement and complement to it.
In the next three years, this "Ship of Theseus" will undergo seven forks and replace countless "planks." When it arrives at its next station in 2029, we may see a truly "global settlement layer"—fast, secure, private, and always open.
Let's wait and see.
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