Ethereum’s upcoming Glamsterdam fork will introduce some of the most aggressive base‑layer upgrades the network has attempted, aiming to deliver major gains in throughput, decentralization, and long‑term sustainability in 2026.
The fork aims to be the capstone of Ethereum’s “Surge” era, shifting the focus from pure data capacity to big architectural changes in how blocks are built and executed.
Scaling With Parallel Processing and Higher Gas Limits
At the heart of Glamsterdam sits a bid to push Ethereum’s mainnet toward near‑parallel transaction processing. The fork aims to overhaul execution so nodes can handle multiple independent chunks of state simultaneously, cutting bottlenecks that currently force transactions through a mostly linear pipeline.
Core teams plan to ratchet the gas limit from around 60 million to roughly 200 million once the new execution model proves stable, opening space for far more complex and frequent activity at layer 1. That headroom supports rollups that already push huge volumes on L2 and gives high‑value applications more room to operate directly on mainnet without driving fees into unsustainable territory.
Glamsterdam also carries a political and economic edge through enshrined proposer‑builder separation (ePBS), codified in EIP‑7732 as one of the fork’s “headliner” upgrades. By moving the proposer‑builder split into the protocol itself, Ethereum reduces dependence on external MEV relays and private marketplaces that concentrate power in a few infrastructure players.
Along with ePBS, the fork makes the network ready to use zero-knowledge proofs more often, with more validators likely to check ZK proofs instead of rechecking every transaction. Plans for Glamsterdam also suggest using Verkle trees and reducing gas and storage costs to reduce state bloat, helping regular operators continue running full nodes as on-chain activity increases.
What the Glamsterdam Upgrades Mean for Ethereum
For developers, Glamsterdam’s changes promise more predictable execution, better parallelization, and a base layer tuned for rollup‑centric designs, rather than a chain that merely stores data blobs. Protocol researchers see the fork as the bridge between today’s scaling gains and a future where stateless clients, ZK‑verified blocks, and high‑frequency applications can coexist on a credibly neutral L1.
Users may not notice the upgrade immediately in interface terms, but the combined effects, higher effective throughput, less reliance on opaque MEV infrastructure, and healthier node economics, aim to surface as lower fees and more consistent performance during peak demand.
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