Ethereum in 2026: Glamsterdam and Hegota forks, L1 scaling and more
The coming year will see perfect parallel processing, big increases in the gas limit and number of data blobs, and 10% of Ethereum’s network switching to ZK.
The coming year is set to be crucial for Ethereum scaling. In 2026, the Glamsterdam fork will bring perfect parallel processing to the chain and ratchet up the gas limit to 200 million, up from 60 million today.
A significant number of validators will switch over from reexecuting transactions to verifying zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs instead. This sets the Ethereum layer 1 on a path to scale up to 10,000 transactions per second (TPS) and potentially beyond, though that target won’t be hit in 2026.
Meanwhile, data blobs will increase (potentially up to 72 or more per block), enabling the layer 2s (L2s) to process hundreds of thousands of transactions per second. L2s are becoming easier to use as well; ZKsync’s recent Atlas upgrade allows funds to stay on mainnet but trade in the fast execution environment of chains in ZKsync’s Elastic Network.
The planned Ethereum Interoperability Layer will enable seamless cross-chain operation among L2s, privacy will take center stage, and improved censorship resistance is targeted for the Heze-Bogota fork at the end of the year.
Ethereum developers are currently finalizing what Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) should be included in the Glamsterdam hard fork, expected in mid-2026. The confirmed headliner changes are Block Access Lists and Enshrined Proposer Builder Separation. Neither sounds particularly interesting, but they have the potential to supercharge the blockchain ahead of the switch to ZK tech.
At some point, the core devs will come up with cool names for stuff like “Firedancer,” but until then, we’re stuck with whatever boring technical names they choose.
Although “block access lists” sound like a censorship scheme, the upgrade actually makes “perfect” parallel block processing possible.
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