Ethereum's most ambitious upgrade since The Merge is taking shape. Glamsterdam, targeted for June 2026, bundles two headliner Ethereum Improvement Proposals — EIP-7732 (enshrined Proposer-Builder Separation) and EIP-7928 (Block-Level Access Lists) — alongside EIP-7904's gas repricing to deliver a...
"In Glamsterdam, Ethereum is getting ePBS, which lets proposers outsource to a free permissionless market of block builders. This ensures that block builder centralization does not creep into staking centralization." — Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum Co-Founder, March 2, 2026
Ethereum's most ambitious upgrade since The Merge is taking shape. Glamsterdam, targeted for June 2026, bundles two headliner Ethereum Improvement Proposals — EIP-7732 (enshrined Proposer-Builder Separation) and EIP-7928 (Block-Level Access Lists) — alongside EIP-7904's gas repricing to deliver a threefold gas-limit expansion, a projected 78% fee reduction, and a theoretical throughput ceiling near 10,000 transactions per second. If it ships on schedule, Glamsterdam directly addresses the three structural criticisms that have dogged Ethereum throughout its 45% price decline from October 2025's $3,600 high: fees are too high, the base layer is too slow, and block production is dangerously centralized.
But the economic implications cut deeper than performance benchmarks. Today, two block builders — Titan and BuilderNet — construct 80% of Ethereum blocks. Five relays handle 90% of MEV-Boost payloads. Glamsterdam's ePBS moves this entire trust layer on-chain, replacing off-chain relay infrastructure with a protocol-native commit-reveal mechanism. Vitalik Buterin himself acknowledges this only solves half the problem: builder centralization may no longer infect the validator set, but it does not automatically disappear. What follows is a detailed examination of the upgrade's architecture, its economic consequences, and the unresolved risks it deliberately defers.
Ethereum enters Q2 2026 in an unusual position. Its security budget — over $70 billion in staked validator collateral across 1 million-plus validators — remains the largest of any blockchain. Yet its base-layer fee revenue has collapsed. Average gas prices fell from ~15.68 gwei to ~1.07 gwei year-over-year, a 93% decline. Daily gas fee revenue, which peaked at $23 million, sits near $6.3 million. The culprit is Ethereum's own success: the Dencun upgrade (EIP-4844) and the subsequent Pectra upgrade shifted Layer-2 data onto cheap blob transactions. L2 networks now process 1.9 million daily transactions, capturing the activity volume while the base layer captures only a fraction of the resulting fees.
ETH's supply tells the story. After the Merge promised "ultrasound money" through deflationary mechanics, Ethereum's annual inflation rate has settled at approximately 0.23%. With validator issuance running at ~1,700 ETH per day and burn rates structurally lower due to cheap blobs, the network no longer achieves automatic deflation except during activity spikes. Total ETH burned since EIP-1559's August 2021 launch stands at roughly 4.6 million ETH (~$9 billion), but the pace has decelerated markedly.
Glamsterdam is Ethereum's answer: make the base layer competitive enough to recapture activity from its own L2s, while simultaneously fixing the block production pipeline that has concentrated power in a handful of sophisticated builders.
This is the consensus-layer headliner, finalized during All Core Developers Consensus Call #162. Today, Ethereum validators outsource block construction to builders via MEV-Boost, an off-chain relay system originally developed by Flashbots. Five relay operators — Ultrasound, Titan, BloXroute (two relays), and Aestus — collectively route over 90% of block payloads. This infrastructure works, but it depends on trust assumptions that sit entirely outside the protocol.
EIP-7732 replaces this with an in-protocol commit-reveal mechanism. Proposers commit to a block header from a builder, and the builder subsequently reveals the execution payload. The process is trustless and permissionless by design. Builders gain seven additional seconds per slot for construction, and the relay layer — currently a single point of trust — becomes unnecessary.
Researchers estimate ePBS could reduce MEV extraction by up to 70%, translating to materially fairer execution for anyone trading, borrowing, or providing liquidity on the Ethereum base layer.
The execution-layer headliner tackles throughput. Block-Level Access Lists (BALs) place a comprehensive declaration of account and contract interactions in the block header, enabling parallel processing of non-conflicting transactions. The analogy developers use: moving Ethereum from a single-lane road to a multi-lane highway. This is Phase 1 of parallel execution, with further expansion planned in subsequent upgrades.
The capacity multiplier. EIP-7904 increases the gas limit from 60 million to 200 million per block — a 3.3x expansion — while realigning gas costs with actual modern hardware capabilities. The result is a projected 78.6% reduction in gas costs for both simple ETH transfers and complex smart contract interactions. A Uniswap trade that currently costs $3–8 in gas could drop below $1.
Combined, these three EIPs target approximately 10,000 TPS on the base layer, roughly 10x Ethereum's current effective throughput and competitive with Solana's sustained 3,000–5,000 TPS (despite Solana's higher theoretical ceiling).
The data is stark. As of March 19, 2026, relay telemetry from relayscan.io shows:
Relay market share (24h): | Relay | Payloads | Share | |-------|----------|-------| | Ultrasound | 4,075 | 36.9% | | Titan | 2,172 | 19.7% | | BloXroute Max Profit | 1,847 | 16.7% | | BloXroute Regulated | 961 | 8.7% | | Aestus | 916 | 8.3% |
Builder market share (24h): | Builder | Blocks | Share | |---------|--------|-------| | Titan | 3,259 | 49.3% | | BuilderNet | 2,028 | 30.7% | | Quasar | 1,006 | 15.2% |
Two builders construct 80% of Ethereum blocks. One builder — Titan — produces nearly half of all blocks and extracted 51.83 ETH in profit over the trailing 24 hours, dwarfing BuilderNet's 9.67 ETH. Several smaller builders operated at a loss.
ePBS addresses the trust layer: validators no longer need to trust relay operators to honestly convey builder commitments. But Vitalik Buterin has explicitly acknowledged the limitation. In a March 2, 2026 post, he stated that ePBS "ensures that block builder centralization does not creep into staking centralization" but emphasized that builder centralization itself "remains" unresolved.
The proposed supplementary mechanism is FOCIL — Fork-Choice Obligatory Commitment to Inclusion Lists. At launch, 16 randomly selected attesters would each nominate transactions that must be included in a block; failure to include them triggers block rejection. Buterin has gone further, proposing "Big FOCIL," which would handle all non-MEV transactions, reducing the builder's role to purely MEV-relevant ordering and state computation — effectively commoditizing block building.
However, core developers have flagged the FOCIL-plus-ePBS combination as a potential timeline risk. If both are included in Glamsterdam, the June 2026 target becomes aspirational rather than firm. Devnet-4 testing is complete, with Devnet-5 and dual audit phases remaining before public testnet deployment in spring 2026.
The 78% fee reduction creates a paradox familiar to anyone who has studied EIP-4844's aftermath. Lower per-transaction fees can stimulate higher transaction volume, potentially generating greater total EIP-1559 burns despite the per-unit cost reduction. Whether this materializes depends on demand elasticity — specifically, whether cheap L1 transactions pull activity back from L2s.
Current economics: Ethereum's base-layer fee revenue has compressed dramatically. The average gas price of ~1.07 gwei translates to basic ETH transfers costing approximately $0.67. The daily burn rate averages $32.54 per minute. With validator issuance at ~1,700 ETH/day, Ethereum needs a sustained increase in on-chain activity to return to deflationary dynamics.
If Glamsterdam's throughput expansion and fee reduction trigger a meaningful activity reflow — moving even 10–20% of current L2 transaction volume back to L1 — the burn math improves substantially. An L1 processing 10x more transactions at one-fifth the cost per transaction still doubles aggregate fee revenue. This is the bull case.
The bear case: activity stays on L2s, which now offer near-zero fees and fast confirmations. L1 becomes a pure settlement and security layer, and Ethereum's economic model increasingly resembles a tollbooth for rollup batches rather than a general-purpose execution environment.
This is where the economic-value analysis becomes critical. Today's Layer-2 ecosystem exists largely because Ethereum's base layer was too expensive and too slow for retail-scale activity. Glamsterdam narrows that gap substantially. Sub-$1 Uniswap trades and 10,000 TPS on L1 undercut the primary value proposition of many L2s.
For rollup operators — particularly those running general-purpose EVM chains like Arbitrum, Optimism, and Base — this creates strategic tension. Their fee revenue depends on L1 being expensive enough to justify L2 usage. Coinbase's Base, for example, extracts all sequencer revenue and is one of the few profitable L2 operations. A dramatically cheaper L1 could erode this moat.
The counterargument is that L2s offer more than just cheaper transactions: specialized execution environments, application-specific chains, and distinct developer ecosystems. But the economic incentive to migrate back to L1 — where security is highest and composability is native — should not be underestimated.
Glamsterdam is designed as the first half of a paired upgrade. Hegotá, targeted for H2 2026, introduces Verkle Trees to replace Ethereum's current Merkle Patricia Trie data structure, reducing node storage requirements by approximately 90%. This enables stateless clients, dramatically lowering the hardware barrier for running a full node and strengthening decentralization at the infrastructure level.
Together, Glamsterdam (execution and consensus reform) and Hegotá (storage reform) represent Ethereum's most concentrated year of protocol development since 2022.
Glamsterdam is Ethereum's most consequential bet in four years: that a base layer can be simultaneously decentralized, fast, and cheap without sacrificing security. The technical architecture is sound — ePBS is a genuine advancement in protocol design, and 10,000 TPS at 78% lower fees would make Ethereum competitive with chains that have long claimed the performance crown. But the economic questions are harder. Ethereum's fee revenue has already collapsed under the weight of its own L2 success. Glamsterdam either reverses that trend by making L1 the rational execution venue again, or it accelerates the compression by removing the last remaining friction that pushed users to L2s in the first place.
The builder centralization problem remains the elephant in the room. Two entities constructing 80% of blocks is an existential risk for a network whose entire value proposition rests on credible neutrality. ePBS is necessary but insufficient. Whether FOCIL makes it into Glamsterdam — or gets deferred to Hegotá — may determine whether Ethereum's block production pipeline decentralizes before it ossifies.
For institutional allocators, the signal is clear: Ethereum is not standing still. But the gap between technical ambition and economic sustainability — the same gap identified in webthreepedia's foundational economic value analysis — remains the defining tension of the ecosystem. Glamsterdam doesn't close that gap. It raises the stakes.