Ethereum Published Its Priority Ladder. Everything Below P1 Is Now Research.

Crypto Eyes · 17 September 2026 · 5 min read · Technology

Diagram of Ethereum protocol priorities showing the P0 to P3 ladder and five research arcs

The Ethereum protocol priorities published on 7 September rank all work on a P0 to P3 ladder, placing scaling, privacy and fast finality behind post-quantum cryptography until 2029.

The five arcs

The Foundation grouped protocol work into five interconnected initiatives.

Fast finality. Decoupled consensus targeting seconds-level finality. Ethereum currently finalises in roughly 13 minutes, which is a genuine obstacle for exchanges, bridges and any application that needs settlement certainty quickly.

Post-quantum. Cryptographic updates across execution, consensus and data, with a December 2029 deadline.

Privacy. Protocol-level private transactions without trusting a third party. Today privacy on Ethereum means a mixer, a rollup with its own trust assumptions, or a separate chain.

State. Managing growth and access constraints. Ethereum's state has grown continuously since genesis, and it determines the hardware floor for running a node — which determines how decentralised the validator set can be.

zkEVM. Progressing execution proofs toward mandatory verification. The endpoint is a network where every block carries a proof of correct execution, so verifying does not require re-executing.

Which of these you will actually see

Post-quantum sits at P1 and P2. The other four sit at P3.

That does not mean nothing happens on them. It means the Foundation is protecting research capability instead of committing delivery capacity. Work continues; ship dates do not get promised.

For anyone modelling Ethereum's next three years, that is the single most important sentence in the document. Fast finality, protocol-level privacy and mandatory zkEVM verification are not on a schedule.

Why publish the Ethereum protocol priorities at all

Because the alternative is what Ethereum did for years: maintain a long list of desirable improvements with no explicit ranking, and let each upgrade's contents emerge from whichever working group had momentum.

That produced good engineering and unpredictable delivery. Sharding was on the roadmap for years before being replaced by a rollup-centric approach. Proposer-builder separation was discussed for four years before being enshrined. Censorship resistance via inclusion lists has been deferred at least once.

A published ladder makes the trade-offs legible. It also makes them contestable, which is the point of publishing.

The formal verification detail

Formal verification is listed as cross-cutting tooling, not as an arc of its own.

That placement is deliberate. Formal verification proves that code matches a specification mathematically, rather than testing that it behaves correctly on the inputs someone thought to try. For a post-quantum migration touching every layer of the protocol, it is the difference between believing the new cryptography is correctly implemented and demonstrating it.

It is also the discipline most conspicuously absent from the incidents defining this year. The Liquid Network lost roughly 4,000 BTC to a range proof caching flaw — precisely the kind of optimisation that testing passes and formal verification catches.

The pipeline

Work moves through Research → EIP → Prototype → Devnet → PFI → CFI → SFI → Mainnet. The Foundation is explicit that this requires collaboration well beyond its own staff: cryptographers, client development teams, academics and security reviewers.

That is a reasonable statement of fact and also a hedge. A December 2029 deadline dependent on a distributed set of independent contributors is a deadline with a lot of coordination risk in it.

What to watch

Whether any P3 arc gets promoted. Movement of fast finality or privacy up the ladder would signal the post-quantum work is ahead of schedule.

Formal verification coverage. How much of the post-quantum implementation is formally verified is measurable and will be published.

Client team capacity. Ethereum has multiple independent client implementations, and every fork must be implemented by all of them. That is the real constraint on a seven-to-twelve-month cadence.

Whether the ladder gets revised. A published priority list that never changes is a document nobody is using.

What the ranking forecloses

A published ranking is useful precisely because it forecloses things, and it is worth naming what has been foreclosed.

Fast finality at P3 means Ethereum will finalise in roughly 13 minutes for the foreseeable future, while Solana works toward sub-second finality through its Alpenglow consensus replacement. For applications where settlement speed decides the architecture, that gap persists for years.

Protocol-level privacy at P3 means privacy on Ethereum continues to mean a mixer, a rollup with its own trust assumptions, or a separate chain.

Neither is a criticism of the ranking. A chain that loses its cryptography has no properties left to optimise, and post-quantum work is genuinely existential in a way finality speed is not.

But the trade-off is real, it lasts three years, and competitors are not making it.

What a competitor would read into it

Published priorities are also published constraints, and other chains can plan against them.

Solana is replacing its consensus mechanism to target sub-second finality while Ethereum has fast finality at its lowest priority tier for three years. That is not a coincidence of timing; it is a window Solana can now count on being open.

The same applies to protocol-level privacy, where Ethereum's P3 placement leaves the field to purpose-built chains and to Layer 2 networks willing to make their own trust trade-offs.

The Foundation presumably understands this and made the trade anyway, which is the strongest evidence available that it considers the quantum deadline genuinely binding instead of precautionary. A team hedging would not have published a ladder that hands competitors a three-year map.

About this report. The priority ladder, five arcs, development pipeline and the formal verification designation are from the Ethereum Foundation's protocol priorities post published 7 September 2026. Finality timing is a widely reported network characteristic. The Liquid Network comparison is this desk's observation, drawn from TRM Labs' analysis of that incident.

Not investment advice. Research priorities are not delivery commitments.

Frequently asked questions

What are Ethereum's five research arcs?

Fast finality, targeting seconds-level settlement; post-quantum cryptography across all three layers; protocol-level privacy without third-party trust; state growth and access management; and zkEVM progressing toward mandatory execution proofs.

What does the P0 to P3 ladder mean?

P0 is mainnet safety. P1 is delivering Hegotá and the critical components of forks I* and J* toward Minimum Viable Post-Quantum. P2 reserves capacity for the remaining post-quantum items. P3 is research capability for everything else, with formal verification as cross-cutting tooling.

Sources

ethereum