According to reports, Ethereum is planning two major ones difficult forks in 2026, which aim to change the way the network operates. Glamsterdam will be modernized in mid-2026, and Heze-Bogota will end in 2026. These steps aim to speed up transaction processing, add recent validation tools, and make on-chain censorship more complex.

Ethereum Trading, Options Pressure

Ether currently above $2,900 as the market awaits gigantic options expiration. Reports put the expiring par value at $6 billion and include more call options than put options. Many contracts may prove worthless if ETH does not rise above $3,100, the so-called maximum pain level.

Analysts are predicting a consolidation range of $2,700 to $3,100 by the end of the year, and some experts are giving a bearish forecast for 2026, pointing to possible declines toward $1,800 to $2,000 if broader market conditions deteriorate.

Parallel execution

Glamsterdam aims to parallelize processing, allowing multiple transactions to run simultaneously rather than one after the other. Blocklists tell nodes what data each transaction needs, which makes parallelization more secure and productive.

Ethereum will undergo key updates in 2026, with the Glamsterdam fork enabling parallel processing and increasing the gas limit to 200 million from 60 million. Validators will move to ZK proof verification, paving the way for Ethereum L1 to reach 10,000 transactions per…

— Wu Blockchain (@WuBlockchain) December 25, 2025

It is also planned to separate the proposer and builder at the protocol level, i.e. ePBS. This move is expected to reduce some centralization risk and make it easier for validators to apply zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs without incurring penalties for additional computational time.

Gas limits are expected to raise in stages, with key changes expected to reach 200 million per block. Based on current projections, approximately 10% of validators could begin verifying ZK evidence rather than re-validating all transactions by the end of the year.

Aiming for parallel execution could reduce slowdowns that occur when demand spikes. However, higher gas limits come with trade-offs. Running larger blocks or faster workloads can raise hardware demand, which can make it harder for smaller validators to stay on the network. This balance between speed and decentralization will be closely watched.

Layer 2 bandwidth can skyrocket

A major part of this story is scaling at Layer 2. Increasing the number of data blobs per block to 72 or more would give L2 systems much more space to store transactional data, which could enable them to process a total of hundreds of thousands of transactions per second.

Projects like ZKsync’s Elastic Network aim to allow users to store money in Ethereum while taking advantage of faster L2s. An interoperability layer that would make it easier to transfer activity between different L2 layers is also being discussed. Still, user experience, liquidity sharing and coordination across networks remain open issues requiring work.

Heze-Bogota: Resisting censorship

Heze-Bogotá will add tools to support groups of validators ensure that specific transactions are included. Fork inclusion lists are designed to reduce the risk of transactions being blocked if only part of the network remains truthful. This change is more about value and permissionless access than pure speed.

Featured image from Firi, chart from TradingView