Ethereum was the world's first smart contract-enabled blockchain, which essentially gave birth to 'Web3' as we know it today.
While Ethereum’s roadmap and focus has changed a lot since its inception, strides have been made in both research and development that have helped ossify and clarify the direction Ethereum is headed. A previously heavy focus on sharding the execution layer has since shifted towards other scaling solutions, like Danksharding, for example. Today, researchers have bucketed Ethereum's roadmap into five major upgrades, each individually prioritizing one facet of the chain's mechanics to ensure future-proof sustainability:
