Ethereum is preparing for a landmark upgrade in 2026, when the network is expected to implement two major Hard Fork in quick succession, potentially pushing Ethereum's gas ceiling to very high levels, possibly even reaching 200 million. According to information gathered from researchers and the Ethereum development community, these two significant upgrades include the Glamsterdam Hard Fork , expected to take place in mid-2026, and the Heze–Bogota Hard Fork, planned for later in the year.
The Glamsterdam Hard Fork is XEM a cornerstone for the long-term scaling of Ethereum Layer 1 performance. One of the core changes is the implementation of Block Access Lists as proposed in EIP-7928, allowing blocks to be processed in parallel. Instead of transactions waiting sequentially, multiple transactions can be executed concurrently if they do not conflict in state. This significantly increases network throughput without requiring complex hardware upgrades for nodes or validators, thus maintaining decentralization – a core value of Ethereum.
In addition, Glamsterdam also plans to introduce a native proposer-builder separation (ePBS) model, a significant step towards separating the Vai of block proposal and block building at the protocol level. This mechanism will not only improve the efficiency of the MEV market but also reduce the risk of concentrating power in a small group of large builders, an issue that has been widely discussed within the Ethereum community in recent years.
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Thanks to these improvements, by 2026, Ethereum's Layer 1 gas ceiling is expected to increase from the current level of around 60 million to 100 million, and in an optimistic scenario, it could even reach 200 million. Simultaneously, the number of data blobs in each Block could increase to 72 or more, enabling Layer 2 solutions to process hundreds of thousands of transactions per second. This is a crucial Shard in Ethereum's "rollup-centric roadmap" strategy, which has been pursued since The Merge and upgrades like Dencun, aiming to transform Layer 1 into a security and data layer, while pushing the majority of transactions down to Layer 2.
Another noteworthy point is that by 2026, approximately 10% of Ethereum validators are projected to be involved in validating zero-knowledge proofs, reflecting the trend of ZK becoming increasingly ingrained in the network's core infrastructure. This not only enhances scalability but also paves the way for more advanced validation and security models in the future.
