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Ethereum’s next major protocol upgrade just cleared its most important technical hurdle. Glamsterdam, the network’s follow-up to the Fusaka upgrade that shipped in December 2025, has activated its final development network with all planned Ethereum Improvement Proposals included.
The target: a new gas limit floor of 200 million, roughly 3.3 times the current ceiling of around 60 million.
What Glamsterdam actually changes
The 200 million gas target was formalized in May 2026 during the Soldøgn interoperability event held in Svalbard. Core developers used the event to align on the upgrade’s parameters and stress-test cross-client compatibility before spinning up the final devnet in June.
Two EIPs stand out in the Glamsterdam package. EIP-7732 introduces enshrined proposer-builder separation, or ePBS. Right now, the relationship between the validators who propose blocks and the specialized builders who construct them exists largely through external software like MEV-Boost. Enshrining that separation directly into the protocol is designed to reduce centralization risks tied to miner extractable value.
EIP-7928 brings block-level access lists, or BALs. These allow the network to know in advance which parts of the blockchain state a given block will touch, enabling parallel processing of transactions that don’t overlap. The result should be faster execution times and, in certain scenarios, meaningfully lower effective fees.
Beyond those headline features, the upgrade includes a broader gas repricing effort. The general direction: lower costs for high-level computations while increasing costs for state creation and storage.
The throughput math
Developers are targeting approximately 10,000 transactions per second post-upgrade.
Whether that number is achievable in practice depends heavily on how efficiently block-level access lists enable parallelism. In theory, if transactions within a block don’t compete for the same state, validators can process them simultaneously rather than sequentially. In practice, the degree of parallelism will vary block by block, depending on what users are actually doing on-chain.
Where Glamsterdam fits in the upgrade timeline
Ethereum has settled into a rhythm of roughly biannual hard forks. Fusaka landed in December 2025, and Glamsterdam is now tracking for the second half of 2026. After that, developers are already eyeing an upgrade tentatively called Hegotá.
The Glamsterdam upgrade is also notable for what it represents architecturally. Enshrined PBS has been discussed in Ethereum research circles for years. Moving it from theory to a devnet with all EIPs active is the kind of milestone that separates roadmap promises from shipping software.
What this means for investors
Higher throughput and lower fees tend to attract more on-chain activity. More on-chain activity means more ETH burned through EIP-1559’s fee mechanism, which directly affects ETH’s supply dynamics. If 10,000 TPS materializes even partially, the volume of transactions flowing through the base layer could increase substantially, creating more burn pressure.
Gas repricing that lowers costs for computation-heavy operations could unlock new protocol designs that were previously impractical at current fee levels. The risk, as always, is execution. The jump from final devnet to a production hard fork involves public testnet deployments, client audits, and coordination across multiple independent teams. Investors should also watch how validator economics shift under ePBS, since any disruption to the MEV supply chain could temporarily affect staking yields and validator profitability in ways that ripple through liquid staking protocols and their associated tokens.
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