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 in 2026: The Glamsterdam fork
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.
Glamsterdam: Block Access Lists (EIP-7928)
Although “block access lists” sound like a censorship scheme, the upgrade actually makes “perfect” parallel block processing possible.
To date, Ethereum has been running in single-lane mode, with a very long queue of transactions executed in order, one after the other. Block Access Lists enable throughput to scale up to a multi-lane highway, with multiple transactions processed at the same time.
The term refers to a map included in each block that was devised by the block producer, who executed everything first on some fancy high-end equipment. The map tells Ethereum clients which transactions affect which other transactions, accounts and storage slots and what the state differentials are after the transaction. This allows them to parcel up the transactions and run them on multiple CPU cores simultaneously without any conflicts.
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“With Block Access List, we are getting all the state that changes from transaction to transaction, and you are putting that information in the block,” explained Gabriel Trintinalia, senior blockchain engineer with Consensys, who is working on execution client Besu.
It also enables clients to preload all the necessary data from disk into memory first, rather than keep going back to read the disk sequentially, which Trintinalia calls “the biggest bottleneck we have.”
Perfect parallel processing will enable Ethereum to run at higher transactions per second and have bigger block sizes without raising the gas limit.
Glamsterdam: Enshrined Proposer Builder Separation
The process of separating block builders and proposers has already begun with MEV Boost, an out-of-protocol solution that uses centralized relays as intermediaries and handles approximately 90% of blocks. Enshrined Proposer Builder Separation (ePBS) integrates this process directly into Ethereum’s consensus layer for trustless operation.
The idea behind separating the two is that block builders compete with each other to select and order transactions in the best way possible to build a block, while proposers choose which block to propose. The aim is to mitigate maximal extractable value’s (MEV) centralizing pressure and to improve security, decentralization and censorship resistance.
But from a scalability standpoint, the major benefit of ePBS is that it provides more time for the generation and propagation of ZK-proofs throughout the network. Validators are currently penalized for being slow, which disincentivizes waiting around to validate ZK-proofs. EPBS will provide more time to receive and validate ZK-proofs.
This can give attesters more time to receive proofs (and provers more time to generate proofs), explained Ethereum researcher Ladislaus von Daniels, adding that ePBS decouples block validation from block execution and, in that sense, ships another flavor of delayed execution.
“This makes opt-in zkAttesting much more incentive compatible for validators.”
Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake estimates that around 10% of validators will switch to ZK after this point, which will enable further gas limit increases.
cointelegraph.com