Ethereum's Glamsterdam hard fork entered its final devnet phase on June 16, 2026, bundling ten Ethereum Improvement Proposals under meta EIP-7773. The upgrade targets a 200 million gas limit per block — more than triple the current 60 million — and aims to raise effective Layer 1 throughput to ap...
"This is probably the largest fork we've had since the Merge." — Parithosh Jayanthi, Ethereum Foundation DevOps Engineer
Ethereum's Glamsterdam hard fork entered its final devnet phase on June 16, 2026, bundling ten Ethereum Improvement Proposals under meta EIP-7773. The upgrade targets a 200 million gas limit per block — more than triple the current 60 million — and aims to raise effective Layer 1 throughput to approximately 10,000 transactions per second from roughly 1,000 TPS today. Mainnet activation is projected between September and December 2026, pending public testnet stability on Holesky and Hoodi.
Two structural EIPs carry the weight: EIP-7732, which enshrines Proposer-Builder Separation (ePBS) directly in the consensus layer, and EIP-7928, which introduces Block-Level Access Lists (BALs) enabling parallel transaction execution. Both address long-standing criticisms of Ethereum's economic architecture — specifically, the centralization of block construction and the sequential processing bottleneck that caps throughput.
The timing matters. ETH trades near $1,750, down more than 50% from its October 2025 high above $3,600. Layer 2 networks now process 5-8x Ethereum mainnet's daily transaction volume, and Coinbase's Base chain alone logs over 12.8 million daily transactions. Glamsterdam represents Ethereum's attempt to reclaim economic relevance at the base layer while the value-capture argument has shifted decisively toward L2 operators.
Glamsterdam ships ten EIPs tracked under meta EIP-7773. The upgrade targets two axes: block construction and transaction execution.
On block construction, ePBS (EIP-7732) moves the proposer-builder pipeline from off-chain relays into the protocol itself. On execution, Block-Level Access Lists (EIP-7928) enable validators to process non-conflicting transactions simultaneously rather than sequentially. A supporting package of gas-repricing EIPs adjusts fee calculations to reflect actual computational resource consumption.
The gas limit increase from 60 million to 200 million represents a 3.3x expansion of per-block capacity. According to developer estimates cited across multiple sources, this could reduce simple ETH transfer costs by 71-79%, depending on network congestion. Smart contract interactions would see proportional reductions.
Ethereum Foundation developer Parithosh Jayanthi confirmed the milestone on June 16: "We're working on devnets with all the EIPs in them right now. This is the last phase before we work on hardening and then shipping the testnets."
The block-building problem is quantifiable. Approximately 90% of Ethereum blocks are currently built via MEV-Boost, an external relay system. Two entities — Beaverbuild and Titan — construct over 90% of those blocks. Ultra Sound relay handles 32.3% of MEV-Boost payloads, Titan Relay 24.75%, the two bloXroute relays a combined 26%, and Flashbots' own relay just 3.44%, according to late-2025 relay market data.
This concentration means the protocol depends on trusted third-party infrastructure for its core function: ordering transactions. ePBS eliminates that dependency by encoding the proposer-builder split directly into the consensus layer.
Under the new architecture, EIP-7732 introduces a commit-reveal flow with explicit deadlines. The proposer commits to a block header provided by a builder, and the builder then reveals the full block body. This expands the data propagation window from approximately 2 seconds to roughly 9 seconds, which is the structural change that unblocks higher gas limits.
The MEV impact is significant. Developer estimates project up to 70% reduction in MEV extraction at the base layer. On some Layer 2 networks, Flashbots has documented that MEV-related "search spam" consumes more than 50% of gas while paying a disproportionately small share of fees. ePBS addresses this at L1 by making the block production pipeline transparent and contestable on-chain.
EIP-7805, a companion proposal for Fork-Choice Enforced Inclusion Lists, adds censorship resistance by allowing validators to force-include transactions that builders might otherwise exclude.
Sequential transaction processing is Ethereum's other structural constraint. Every transaction in a block currently executes one after another, regardless of whether the transactions touch the same state.
BALs change this by recording all accounts and storage keys accessed per block, enabling the execution client to identify transactions with no state overlap and run them in parallel. This is described as Phase 1 of a broader parallel processing expansion.
The throughput target is approximately 10,000 TPS — a 10x increase from the current effective rate. However, Ethereum developers have been explicit that actual gains depend on "client performance, validator hardware, gas repricing, and how much parallelism real blocks can actually support," according to statements in the Crypto Briefing devnet coverage.
BALs also support what the specification calls "executionless" state reconstruction — the ability to validate block state transitions without re-executing every transaction from scratch. This has implications for light clients and state sync, reducing the barrier for new nodes to join the network.
Five additional EIPs form the gas repricing component:
The net effect is a recalibration of Ethereum's internal pricing mechanism. Operations that are computationally cheap but currently overpriced (basic transfers, simple reads) get cheaper. Operations that impose long-term costs on the network (state creation, large contract deployments) get more expensive.
Under current fee structures, a simple ETH transfer costs $0.10-$0.25 on mainnet. Post-Glamsterdam estimates project this dropping to $0.02-$0.07, according to fee reduction analysis in Phemex's upgrade coverage. Layer 2 transactions on Base and Arbitrum already cost $0.01-$0.05, meaning Glamsterdam would narrow — though not close — the L1-L2 fee gap.
The economic value distribution question is central to Glamsterdam's significance. Ethereum mainnet has been losing transaction volume to its own Layer 2 ecosystem since EIP-4844 (proto-danksharding) compressed L2 data costs by 90-99% in 2024.
The numbers illustrate the shift. Base processes 12.89 million daily transactions. Arbitrum and OP Mainnet add hundreds of thousands more. Combined L2 throughput routinely exceeds Ethereum mainnet's 1.1-1.3 million daily transactions by a factor of 5-8x. Base earned over $94 million in profit but returned only $4.9 million to Ethereum in blob fees — a 5.2% value-return ratio that underscores the economic leakage from L1 to L2 operators.
Glamsterdam's ePBS and BALs attempt to make mainnet competitive again for certain transaction types by lowering fees and increasing throughput. But this creates a tension: cheaper L1 transactions could cannibalize L2 usage, reducing blob fee revenue that has been projected to contribute 30-50% of total ETH burn by late 2026.
The staking economy adds another dimension. As of June 15, 2026, 39.67 million ETH was staked across 1,239,795 validators — approximately 32.6% of circulating supply. Growth has been steady: 96,462 new validators joined in the first five and a half months of 2026, and 4.05 million ETH was added to staking contracts over the same period. BitMine Immersion Technologies alone holds 5.62 million ETH (4.59% of circulating supply) in its treasury, with 85% deployed into staking via its Made-in-America Validator Network, projecting $230 million in annual staking revenue.
Glamsterdam's ePBS directly affects validator economics. By enshrining PBS, the upgrade changes how block rewards flow. Proposers no longer need to outsource block building to external relays; instead, the protocol mediates the builder-proposer relationship. This could redistribute MEV revenue more evenly across the validator set rather than concentrating it in a handful of sophisticated builders.
The path to mainnet follows a standard Ethereum upgrade cadence:
Historical precedent suggests execution risk is real but manageable. Pectra and Fusaka delivered on schedule in 2025. However, Glamsterdam's scope is larger: ten EIPs with two structural changes to consensus and execution. The inclusion of FOCIL (EIP-7805) alongside ePBS adds complexity that some developers have flagged as a potential delay factor.
The upgrade also carries economic risk in the form of a "buy the rumor, sell the news" pattern documented around previous forks. The Merge saw a 100% rally pre-fork followed by a 15% drop post-activation. Dencun generated 60% pre-fork gains. With ETH already trading near $1,750 — well below its all-time high — the market's response will test whether the upgrade represents genuine value creation or merely a technical milestone.
A future upgrade, codenamed Hegotá, is planned for H2 2026 and targets Verkle Trees with a projected 90% reduction in node storage requirements. Glamsterdam and Hegotá together represent Ethereum's most ambitious upgrade year since 2022.
Glamsterdam is a structural overhaul, not an incremental upgrade. It addresses Ethereum's two most persistent bottlenecks — centralized block construction and sequential execution — in a single hard fork. The 200 million gas limit target and parallel processing via BALs represent the largest capacity expansion since EIP-4844 compressed L2 costs in 2024.
Whether this translates into economic value depends on execution. The upgrade must ship without delays, the gas limit must be raised without compromising network stability, and the ePBS transition must avoid disrupting the existing MEV ecosystem in ways that create new centralization vectors. The broader question — whether making L1 cheaper helps or hurts Ethereum's fee revenue when L2s are already dominant — remains an open trade-off that the market will adjudicate over the quarters following activation.