Development of the long-awaited “Glamsterdam” upgrade on the Ethereum network is accelerating, with the goal of rolling out the update to the mainnet in the first half of 2026.
The latest technical brief shared by the Ethereum Foundation reveals that the core objectives of the upgrade have been largely achieved.
According to the developers, critical steps such as increasing the minimum consensus limit to 200 million gases, ensuring the ePBS (external builder) process operates stably, and defining EIP-8037 parameters were successfully completed as part of the update. Furthermore, the vast majority of network clients continue to operate stably on the testnet.
According to the plan, the Glamsterdam upgrade could become active on the mainnet around June 2026. This update is considered the biggest performance increase since the Ethereum Merge event. With the upgrade, the block gas limit will be increased from the current 60 million to 200 million. This increase is theoretically expected to boost the network’s transaction capacity to 10,000 TPS.
To balance the data growth and load on the nodes that will accompany the increased capacity, significant architectural changes will also be implemented in the system. These include the deployment of the Verkle Trees structure and a “state expunging” mechanism. This will remove data older than one year from the nodes and have this data stored by decentralized storage solutions and archive nodes. The aim is to keep the hardware requirements of the validator nodes under control. Furthermore, a fundamental cost balancing mechanism will be added to the system to reduce sudden fluctuations in gas charges.
This scaling step is expected to have significant effects on the Layer 2 ecosystem as well. With the reduction in data settlement costs on the mainnet, rollup fees are projected to decrease by approximately 70%. This is expected to increase fee competition among major L2 solutions, particularly Arbitrum, Optimism, and Base. Analysts state that this development will further strengthen Ethereum’s position as a highly secure consensus layer (L1), while reinforcing a two-tiered architecture where high-frequency and low-cost transactions take place on the L2 layer.
*This is not investment advice.