Most cryptocurrency investors are still obsessed with price charts. However, in 2026, an increasing part of the focus will shift back to improving the fundamentals of the protocols.

Ethereum, Solana and Avalanche are preparing some of the biggest protocol updates in years, while the Base Coinbase network implemented a demanding fork of Beryl last Friday in an effort to streamline the network, with a native token standard and shorter payout windows.

However, Bitcoin’s development remains frozen, and developers are still arguing over controversial proposals for agreements and improvements in post-quantum computing.

Tim Sun, senior researcher at Hong Kong-based asset manager HashKey Group, told Cointelegraph that protocol updates in the past have focused on adding features, speed and bandwidth.

However, he said that in 2026, the focus will shift to reliability, predictable management and institutional-level infrastructure that can support large-scale financial exploit cases.

Here are the top five blockchain improvements worth watching in the second half of 2026.

Ethereum: Glamsterdam

Glamsterdam is probably the most consistent update this year and is already being tested with developers. According to Ethereum’s public roadmap, Glamsterdam is expected to improve scalability, strengthen Layer 1, and make the network easier to exploit, with mainnet launch expected in the second half of 2026.

Sun said the update should improve processing speeds by allowing more transactions to be processed simultaneously, escalate capacity so Ethereum can handle more data with greater bandwidth, and reduce database bloat. These changes should make the network better suited to stablecoin settlements and real-world asset exploit cases, he said.

Related: The hated Ethereum staking “tax” may already be obsolete

Holly Atkinson, chief product and technology officer at 1inch, told Cointelegraph that Glamsterdam is seen by many as the most significant upgrade to Ethereum since The Merge in September 2022, when the blockchain transitioned from proof of work to proof of stake.

Glamsterdam. Source: Ethereum.org

She said a key change is enshrined proposer-builder separation (ePBS), as most validators still depend on a tiny set of specialized builders and relayers who concentrate control over ordering transactions.

This setup increases maximum extractable value (MEV), the risk of censorship and centralization, she said. ePBS is designed to re-incorporate block building and proposal submission into the protocol, making the process more clear and accountable.

Pavan Kaur is a Solana Foundation judge and founder of RuleSpark, a compliance mechanism for digital asset marketing. She told Cointelegraph that ePBS is better understood as one step in a broader Ethereum roadmap and does not eliminate MEV or fully address builder centralization. “Practices such as sandwich attacks may therefore be migrating rather than disappearing,” she said.

Solana: Alpenglow

Solana’s biggest change this year is Alpenglow, a consensus-based update that changes the underlying network protocol. Alpenglow was charged by many, including Solana ecosystem leader David Liang, as “the most significant improvement to network consensus to date.”

After being dominant approved as part of the governance process in September 2025. Alpenglow remains in development, but it is what it is expected will ship with the Agave 4.1 validator client release later in 2026.

Arun Krishnakumar, vice president of institutional capital at enterprise software firm R3, told Cointelegraph that Alpenglow will be a major tailwind that will further strengthen the “internet capital markets” thesis.

Solana network updates. source: Solana

At its core is Alpenglow designed dramatically accelerate the speed at which the network reaches its end state. Instead of relying on Solana’s existing TowerBFT-based consensus mechanism, it introduces a redesigned system built around a novel voting component called Votor.

Related: Solana Treasury Companies Oppose Forward Industries’ Consolidation Push

The practical effect is a significant reduction in confirmation times, with the final result expected to be around 100–150 milliseconds under optimal conditions, compared to the current around 12.8 seconds.

In addition to speed, the update also removes on-chain voting transactions, which currently account for a significant portion of network activity. By streamlining the way validators communicate and agree on the state of the chain, Alpenglow aims to make Solana lighter and more capable under load.

Hadley Stern, board director of DeFi Development Corp, told Cointelegraph that the removal of supply chain voting transactions is a “real story” for institutional allocators because it “cleans up the economics of the validator and provides reliable telemetry, which matters when you underwrite SOL as a treasury asset.”

He said a network that can migrate its consensus layer as cleanly as planned would demonstrate what kind of “legacy financial infrastructure with regulated adaptability cannot match.”

Base: beryllium

The Beryl demanding fork of Base launched on Friday after a brief sequencer-related outage when block production stopped for about two hours as a result of a bad block that caused a short-lived consensus error.

Co-founder of the database Jesse Pollak he said The incident had no impact on user funds. He stressed that “all funds are safe”, added that “the detention is not okay” and said the lessons learned from the episode will be used to further strengthen Base as a “24/7 global finance” platform.

Jesse Pollak talks about stopping the chain. Source: Jesse Pollak

According to Base documentation, Beryl to introduce a number of changes aimed at tightening network performance and reducing friction at the edges. These include a native B20 token standard, a reduction in the payout period from seven to five days, and integration with Reth V2, which is expected to reduce storage requirements on nodes while improving execution efficiency.

Related: Coinbase resumes block production after a 2-hour break

Sun said Base is moving toward a more unified “stack” approach, providing greater control over how the network is built and modernized and enabling changes to be made more quickly than the earlier Optimism Superchain model.

The trade-off is that liquidity that once flowed more freely within the broader Superchain ecosystem may become more fragmented, even as Base deepens its integration with Coinbase’s broader user base.

Avalanche: octane

Avalanche’s next chapter is not about a single-brand demanding fork, but a broader effort to improve performance while courting institutions and issuers of tokenized assets.

Sun told Cointelegraph that Avalanche’s recent Etna demanding fork replaced the elderly subnet model with Avalanche L1 sovereign ones, reducing the cost of launching a dedicated blockchain by over 99% and making the network more attractive to institutional players.

In this respect it has already been successful. Sun pointed to Progmat, which he believes accounts for about 63% of Japan’s national security token market emigrated over $2 billion in tokenized assets to the dedicated Avalanche L1, as well as the Avalanche Payments Collective backed by companies such as Franklin Templeton, VanEck and WisdomTree.

Progmat is moving over $2 billion of its tokenized securities to Avalanche. source: avalanche

Atkinson said Avalanche is also rolling out two updates aimed at making its C-Chain one of the fastest Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) environments.

Related: Avalanche Treasury Falls 16% After Nasdaq Debut

She described asynchronous streaming execution as a way to decouple transaction execution from consensus, allowing the chain to run more continuously and capacity closer to normal demand. For users, she said, the practical effect should be more bandwidth and lower, more stable fees during periods of high activity.

Bitcoin: OP_CAT

Bitcoin is an exception here, as its biggest changes in 2026 are not planned updates, but the continuation of passionate debates about whether the protocol should become more programmable and how urgently it needs to be secured against quantum threats.

Bitcoin has not activated any major cushioned fork since Taproot in 2020, which improved Bitcoin scripts to make transactions more pliant and improve privacy.

Since then, discussion of contract-related proposals such as OP_CAT, CheckTemplateVerify (CTV), and lightning-related ideas such as LNHANCE, intensified. None of these changes have an established activation pathway.

Scientists were there too debate BIP-360 and related proposals as ways to facilitate the migration of coins to quantum-resistant spending paths if and when the threat of quantum computing becomes real.

Atkinson described Bitcoin as a group wildcard. She said the proposed agreements could unlock safer storage and richer scripts, but the topic remains divisive and the subject of much debate.

Sun said these proposals could improve self-care security, fee management and protocols such as Lightning and Ark, while providing institutions with more programmable care logic directly on L1.

Bitcoin’s development is notoriously sluggish, and any changes to the protocol are analyzed from every angle. There is a general agreement that no operational code of the agreement will be activated this year, and reaching a consensus on proposals such as OP_CAT or CTV is still a long way off.

On the post-quantum side, the authors of BIP-360 estimate that full migration to quantization-resistant addresses and signatures would take years, even under hopeful assumptions. At this point, it seems unlikely that quantum immunity modernization will be implemented before the end of 2026.

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