Ethereum is preparing for its most ambitious infrastructure overhaul since The Merge. Codenamed Glamsterdam — a portmanteau of Gloås and Amsterdam — the upgrade targets mid-2026 deployment and introduces two structural changes that could fundamentally alter Ethereum's economic architecture: enshr...
"The goal is to make Ethereum faster and cheaper, mainly by addressing parallel processing, increasing gas limits, and ZK proof verification." — Ethereum Core Developers, All Core Developers Consensus Call #162
Ethereum is preparing for its most ambitious infrastructure overhaul since The Merge. Codenamed Glamsterdam — a portmanteau of Gloås and Amsterdam — the upgrade targets mid-2026 deployment and introduces two structural changes that could fundamentally alter Ethereum's economic architecture: enshrined Proposer-Builder Separation (ePBS) via EIP-7732, and Block-Level Access Lists (BALs) via EIP-7928 enabling parallel transaction execution.
The stakes are enormous. Today, three block builders control 75% of all Ethereum blocks. Off-chain MEV relays extract hundreds of millions annually from ordinary users. The network's gas limit has sat at roughly 60 million for years, throttling throughput to approximately 15-30 transactions per second while competing Layer 1s advertise thousands. Glamsterdam's combined upgrades propose to raise the gas limit to 200 million — a 233% increase — while simultaneously decentralizing the block production pipeline that currently concentrates power in a handful of infrastructure operators.
With devnets already live and public testnets scheduled through the first half of 2026, this is no longer theoretical. The engineering is underway, and the implications for validators, Layer 2 rollups, DeFi protocols, and institutional capital allocation are material.
Glamsterdam's architecture rests on two complementary pillars, each addressing a different dimension of Ethereum's scaling bottleneck.
EIP-7732: Enshrined Proposer-Builder Separation (ePBS) moves the block production marketplace from off-chain relays directly into the protocol's consensus layer. Under the current system, specialized block builders assemble transaction bundles and submit them to proposers through third-party relays like Flashbots, BloXroute, and UltraSound. Each relay applies its own censorship policies — Flashbots filters OFAC-sanctioned addresses, BloXroute takes a no-censorship stance — creating a fragmented and opaque trust layer beneath Ethereum's supposedly trustless settlement.
ePBS replaces this with an in-protocol commit-reveal mechanism. Builders assemble blocks and cryptographically seal their contents. Proposers select the highest-paying block without seeing or tampering with the transactions inside. The contents are only revealed after finalization, dramatically reducing opportunities for front-running and sandwich attacks. The design introduces explicit deadlines, payload commitments, and fallback behavior that allows the protocol to handle builder non-delivery without halting network liveness.
EIP-7928: Block-Level Access Lists (BALs) tackles the execution layer's serialization bottleneck. Today, Ethereum processes transactions sequentially — each one must complete before the next begins, even if they touch entirely independent parts of the state. BALs explicitly map the state accessed or modified by each transaction, allowing clients to safely identify and execute independent transactions in parallel.
The engineering elegance lies in the overhead: BALs add approximately 35 KiB per block at 36 million gas — well below calldata worst-case sizes. Multiple client teams are already prototyping implementations, and the second BALs devnet (bals-devnet-2) launched in early February 2026.
Together, these two EIPs define Glamsterdam's thesis: make Ethereum censorship-resistant and fast, rather than choosing one at the expense of the other.
Since late 2020, validators have received more than $247 million in MEV-related payments — revenue extracted largely from ordinary users through front-running, sandwich attacks, and other transaction ordering exploits. The current system, while functional, has produced a troubling centralization gradient: three builders control 75% of all blocks, and the relay infrastructure they depend on represents a single-point-of-failure layer that exists entirely outside Ethereum's consensus guarantees.
This centralization isn't merely theoretical. Different relays apply different censorship rules, meaning the "neutrality" of Ethereum's transaction inclusion depends on which relay a proposer happens to use. ESMA (the European Securities and Markets Authority) published a dedicated report on MEV implications for crypto markets in 2025, flagging the systemic risk of concentrated block building in their regulatory assessment of digital asset markets.
ePBS addresses this by eliminating the relay layer entirely. Under the new architecture, the protocol itself mediates the proposer-builder relationship. Builders commit to blocks they cannot later modify, proposers select based on bid price alone, and the consensus layer enforces delivery guarantees. This doesn't eliminate MEV — value extraction is inherent to any transaction ordering system — but it removes the trusted intermediary layer that currently captures outsized economic rent from the process.
For the 1.1 million active validators securing $112 billion in staked ETH, ePBS represents a meaningful improvement in revenue fairness. Solo stakers who currently lose MEV opportunities due to relay latency or builder relationships will compete on more equal footing with institutional staking operations.
Ethereum's gas limit has been the subject of incremental community-driven increases over the past year, rising from the long-standing 30 million to approximately 60 million. Glamsterdam proposes a far more aggressive step: raising the ceiling to 200 million once parallel execution proves stable.
The numbers tell a compelling story. At current limits, Ethereum processes roughly 15-30 TPS depending on transaction complexity. Developer projections suggest that the combination of parallel processing and expanded gas limits could push L1 throughput toward 10,000 TPS — a figure that, if achieved, would make Ethereum competitive with chains that were specifically designed for high throughput.
However, this isn't simply a parameter change. Increasing the gas limit requires that nodes can process larger blocks without compromising the decentralization properties that justify Ethereum's $241 billion market capitalization. This is precisely where BALs become critical: by enabling multi-core transaction execution, they allow nodes to validate larger blocks within the same time constraints. Disk I/O, EVM execution, and post-state root calculations become fully parallelizable, cutting worst-case block validation latency.
The phased approach is deliberate. Developers plan to increase the gas limit to 100 million in the first phase, monitor network health, then push toward 200 million following ePBS stabilization. Some researchers have suggested that 300 million gas per block may be achievable before year-end, though this remains aspirational.
Ethereum's Layer 2 ecosystem — led by Arbitrum, Optimism, Base, and zkSync — currently accounts for the majority of Ethereum's effective transaction volume. The relationship between L1 capacity and L2 economics is direct: higher L1 throughput means lower data availability costs for rollups, which translates to cheaper transactions for end users.
Glamsterdam's gas limit expansion opens substantial headroom for rollups that already push enormous volumes. More critically, it gives high-value applications — institutional DeFi, tokenized real-world assets, on-chain derivatives — more room to operate directly on mainnet without driving fees into unsustainable territory. This dual benefit is significant: rollups get cheaper settlement while mainnet becomes viable for use cases that currently can't justify L1 gas costs.
With DeFi TVL holding at approximately $140 billion as of February 2026 and Ethereum commanding roughly 68% of all DeFi infrastructure, the throughput improvements have immediate economic implications. Protocols like Aave ($27 billion TVL), Lido ($27.5 billion TVL), and EigenLayer ($13 billion TVL) all operate under gas constraints that Glamsterdam aims to relieve.
The recent collapse of ZeroLend — a multi-chain lending protocol that saw 98% TVL evaporation and announced shutdown on February 17, 2026 — underscores why L1 reliability matters. ZeroLend cited inactive chains, oracle discontinuation, and unsustainable margins across fragmented Layer 2 deployments as primary failure causes. A more capable L1 reduces the pressure to fragment liquidity across marginal chains.
The Glamsterdam development schedule is the most aggressive Ethereum has attempted since The Merge:
Community documentation references a June 2026 target, though developers stress this remains contingent on validation of critical components. The deliberate use of "aspirational" in core developer communications reflects lessons learned from previous Ethereum upgrades that consistently shipped behind schedule.
Key risks include:
Ethereum developers are pursuing an accelerated release cadence for 2026, with Hegota (Heze + Bogota) targeted for the second half of the year. The Hegota EIP proposal deadline was February 4, 2026, with headlining features expected to be finalized by February 26.
Early discussions center on Verkle Trees — a data structure that would dramatically reduce the storage requirements for Ethereum nodes, enabling "stateless" clients that can validate blocks without storing the entire chain state. This directly addresses the long-term sustainability concern that parallel execution and higher gas limits will accelerate state growth.
The two-fork-per-year approach represents a philosophical shift for Ethereum development. Rather than bundling massive changes into annual releases that become politically fraught and technically risky, core contributors are attempting smaller, more frequent upgrades. Whether this cadence proves sustainable remains to be seen, but the intent signals confidence in the protocol's governance maturity.
Glamsterdam represents Ethereum's answer to the existential question that has haunted the network since the L2-centric roadmap was first articulated: Can the base layer remain both decentralized and performant as the ecosystem scales?
The upgrade's combined approach — decentralizing block production through ePBS while simultaneously expanding throughput through parallel execution — avoids the false choice between neutrality and speed. At a time when Ethereum's share price sits near $1,995 (down from highs above $4,000) and competing L1s continue to court developers and liquidity with raw performance metrics, Glamsterdam is a statement of architectural intent: Ethereum will scale on its own terms.
The economic implications are substantial. A 233% gas limit increase doesn't just mean more transactions — it means a larger addressable market for on-chain applications, lower costs for the $140 billion in DeFi TVL that depends on Ethereum's infrastructure, and a more equitable revenue distribution among the 1.1 million validators securing the network. For institutional allocators evaluating Ethereum's long-term value accrual, Glamsterdam is the most concrete evidence yet that the protocol's roadmap can deliver meaningful performance improvements without sacrificing the decentralization properties that justify its premium valuation.
The question is no longer whether Ethereum can scale. It's whether Glamsterdam can ship on time.