The coming year will be crucial for Ethereum’s scaling. In 2026, the Glamsterdam fork will provide excellent chain parallel processing and raise the gas limit to 200 million from the current 60 million.

A significant number of validators will shift from re-executing transactions to verifying zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs. This puts Ethereum’s Layer 1 on a path to scale to 10,000 transactions per second (TPS) and potentially beyond, although this goal will not be reached in 2026.

Meanwhile, the number of data blobs will grow (potentially to 72 or more per block), allowing Layer 2 (L2) to process hundreds of thousands of transactions per second. L2s are also becoming easier to employ; The recent update to the ZKsync Atlas allows funds to remain on the mainnet but trade in a swift on-chain execution environment on the elastic ZKsync network.

Ethereum’s planned interoperability layer will enable seamless cross-chain operation between L2, privacy will take center stage, and increased censorship resistance is planned for the Heze-Bogota fork at the end of the year.

Ethereum in 2026: Glamsterdam fork

Ethereum developers are currently finalizing what Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) should be included in the Glamsterdam tough fork, which we expect in mid-2026. Confirmed header changes include block lists and saved proposal creator separation. None of them sound particularly compelling, but they have the potential to supercharge the blockchain before moving to ZK technology.

At some point, the core developers will come up with cold names for things like “Firedancer”, but until then we’re stuck with whatever tedious, technical names they choose.

Glamsterdam: Blocklists (EIP-7928)

While “block access lists” sound like a censorship scheme, the update actually enables “perfect” parallel block processing.

Until now, Ethereum has operated in a single-lane mode, with a very long queue of transactions executed in sequence, one after the other. Blocklists allow you to scale bandwidth to a multi-lane highway while processing multiple transactions simultaneously.

This term refers to the map that comes with each block, developed by the block manufacturer, who first made everything on some fancy, high-end hardware. The map informs Ethereum customers which transactions affect other transactions, accounts and storage spaces, and what the state differences are after a transaction. This allows them to split transactions and run them simultaneously on multiple CPU cores without any conflicts.

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“With a block access list, we get all the state that changes from transaction to transaction, and you put that information into a block,” explained Gabriel Trintinalia, a senior blockchain engineer at Consensys who works on the Besu runtime client.

It also allows customers to preload all necessary data from disk into memory, rather than returning to it to read the disk sequentially, which Trintinalia calls “the biggest bottleneck we have.”

Superior parallel processing will enable Ethereum to operate with more transactions per second and have larger blocks without raising the gas limit.

Glamsterdam: Separation of applicants and builders approved

The process of separating block creators from proposers has already begun with MEV Boost, an off-protocol solution that uses centralized relays as intermediaries and handles about 90% of blocks. Enshrined Proposer Builder Separation (ePBS) integrates this process directly into Ethereum’s consensus layer to enable trustless operation.

The idea behind separating the two is that block creators compete with each other to select and arrange transactions in the best way possible to build a block, while bidders choose which block to propose. The goal is to alleviate maximum extractable value (MEV) centralization pressures and improve security, decentralization, and censorship resistance.

However, from a scalability perspective, the main advantage of ePBS is that it provides more time for generating and propagating ZK evidence across the network. Validators are currently penalized for being sluggish, which discourages waiting for ZK proofs to be checked. EPBS will allow more time for the receipt and approval of ZK evidence.

This may give testers more time to receive evidence (and argue that they have more time to generate evidence), explained Ethereum researcher Ladislaus von Daniels, adding that ePBS separates block verification from block execution and in this sense provides a different type of delayed execution.

“This makes the zkAttetesting opt-in much more compatible with validator incentives.”

Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake estimates that after this point, about 10% of validators will switch to ZK, which will allow for further increases in the gas limit.

Increasing Ethereum’s L1 gas and L2 blob target improvements

The gas limit (concerning capacity on L1) has already been increased to 60 million. It should rise significantly in 2026 – although there are a number of estimates as to how high it will reach.

“I think in 2026 I would expect to see 100 million soon. Anything beyond that is probably too speculative to consider,” said Gary Schulte, senior blockchain protocol engineer at the Besu client. He added that switching to deferred implementation could enable gas limits to be increased.

Related: Ethereum to triple its gas cap is “lower, we can go higher” – Sassano

Tomasz Stańczak, co-director of the Ethereum Foundation, told the recent Bankless Summit that the limit will raise to 100 million in the first half of 2026 and predicted that after ePBS it will double to 200 million. Further improvements could mean that it will be possible to deliver up to 300 million gas per unit before the end of the year.

Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin was more cautious. At the end of November he he said “expect continued growth, but more targeted/less uniform growth next year. E.g. one possible future is: a 5x increase in gas allowance along with a 5x increase in gas costs for operations that are relatively inefficient in processing.” Buterin mentioned data storage, precompilations, and gigantic contract calls.

Ethereum Fork 2026 #2: Heze-Bogota

Expect some EIPs to be moved away from Glamsterdam in this fork, but according to Forkast, the only EIP currently on the list under consideration for inclusion is the Fork-Choice Inclusion Lists (FOCIL). This was the case with Glamsterdam, but was pushed through after heated debate because it would have been too much work and made life too challenging.

The focus is not on scaling, but on the cypherpunk ideal of resisting censorship by empowering multiple validators to mandate that specific transactions be included in each block.

“It’s a censorship resistance mechanism that ensures that if at least part of the network is honest… then at some point your transaction will be included,” Trintinalia said.

Watch out for part 2 when we dive into L1 scaling with ZK evidence in 2026.

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