Ethereum Protocol Team Targets Enhanced User Experience and Scalability with Key Upgrades

The Ethereum Foundation's protocol team has prioritized scaling the Layer 1 (L1) blockchain, optimizing blob storage, and significantly improving user experience (UX) in recent months, according to a recent social media post by joshrudolf.eth. These efforts are culminating in a series of advancements aimed at making the Ethereum ecosystem more accessible and efficient for users. The strategic shift emphasizes interoperability and a streamlined user journey across the network.

A core component of the UX improvements is the Open Intents Framework, which is now audited and production-ready, focusing on accelerating adoption and enabling more secure and trustless settlement. Complementing this, the Ethereum Interoperability Layer (EIL) offers a trustless cross-chain path, potentially serving as a backend for intents and other cross-chain functionalities. Further enhancing connectivity, an Interop SDK for wallets and dapps is under development, alongside interoperable addresses like alice.eth@linea or bob.eth@arbitrum, formalized through ERC-7828 and ERC-7930.

Additional standards are being pushed to refine the user experience, including ERC-7786 for cross-chain messaging, ERC-5792 for batch operations with a single user signature, and ERC-7811 to discover and consolidate cross-chain token balances. ERC-7683 aims to provide legible liquidity order for wider and deeper intent markets, abstracting away complexities for users. These initiatives are designed to simplify interactions and reduce the technical burden on end-users.

Efforts to scale L1 and blobs are directly contributing to a faster and smoother user experience. The protocol team is implementing a "Fast Confirmation Rule" for much quicker confirmations, achieving them in approximately one slot with lower guarantees than full economic finality. Simultaneously, the consensus team is working towards faster full economic finality, targeting under 10 seconds, which will significantly enhance transaction certainty.

Major network upgrades like Pectra, activated in May 2025, and Fusaka, launched in December 2025, are central to these scaling and UX goals. Pectra introduced EIP-7702 for next-gen wallet UX with smart accounts, while Fusaka's PeerDAS (EIP-7594) enhances blob capacity, reducing Layer 2 transaction costs and improving data availability. The team is also actively reducing the 7-day withdrawal window for optimistic rollups, targeting 1-2 days initially, with aspirations for under an hour, and exploring 6-second slot specifications and ZK message passing for cross-chain token standards.