Ethereum’s development community has been building toward a significant protocol upgrade scheduled for the first half of 2026 under the working name Glamsterdam. The upgrade represents the next step in the Ethereum Foundation’s recently adopted biannual release cadence — a move away from the more sporadic, often delayed upgrade schedule of previous years toward a more predictable rhythm of continuous improvement. Glamsterdam’s primary focus is scalability at the base layer: pushing Ethereum’s transaction throughput meaningfully higher without sacrificing the decentralisation and security properties that define the network’s value proposition.
The centrepiece of Glamsterdam is a significant increase in the gas limit — the cap on how much computational work can be packed into each block. Developers have discussed targeting a gas limit well above one hundred million, compared to the current level of approximately sixty million. Raising the gas limit is not a free lunch: higher limits mean larger blocks, which require more bandwidth and storage from the nodes that maintain and propagate the blockchain. But Ethereum’s developer community has spent years improving node efficiency, and the current consensus among core developers is that the network can safely absorb a meaningful gas limit increase without compromising decentralisation to an unacceptable degree.
Alongside the gas limit increase, Glamsterdam is expected to introduce block-level access lists, a technical mechanism that enables parallel processing of transactions within a single block. Currently, Ethereum executes transactions sequentially — one after another — which means that the full capacity of modern multi-core processors goes largely unused during block production. By pre-specifying which parts of the state a transaction will read or write, the access list approach allows non-conflicting transactions to be processed simultaneously, unlocking substantial efficiency gains without changing the logical structure of how Ethereum’s execution environment works.
The upgrade also continues a series of improvements to blob scaling that support Ethereum’s layer-two ecosystem. Blobs are specialised data packets introduced in the previous Dencun upgrade that allow layer-two rollup networks to post their transaction data to Ethereum at dramatically lower cost. Glamsterdam is expected to increase the number of blobs that can be included per block, further reducing the cost of layer-two operation and, by extension, the fees paid by end users on networks including Arbitrum, Optimism, and Base.
For the Ethereum ecosystem, the practical significance of Glamsterdam extends beyond the raw performance numbers. The upgrade continues the narrative of Ethereum as a network under active, confident improvement — a counter to critics who have argued that the protocol’s development process is too slow and too prone to delay. The biannual cadence adopted by the Ethereum Foundation is a direct response to that criticism, and Glamsterdam’s successful deployment would be a validation of the new approach.
The second major upgrade planned for 2026, provisionally named Hegotá, is expected to build on Glamsterdam’s foundation with a focus on decentralisation and long-term security. Its headline feature is the integration of Verkle Trees — a new data structure that dramatically reduces the amount of information a node needs to store to participate in the network — alongside continued work on censorship resistance and post-quantum security hardening. Together, Glamsterdam and Hegotá represent the most ambitious single-year upgrade programme in Ethereum’s history.