Ethereum's Glamsterdam upgrade is currently planned for Q4 2026, representing the network's most ambitious scaling effort to date. The upgrade targets a post-upgrade gas limit around 200 million, significantly higher than the current 60 million gas limit. This represents a substantial increase from Ethereum's previous doubling from roughly 30 million gas limit in early 2025 to the current 60 million following successive protocol improvements. The upgrade aims to boost Layer 1 speed without sacrificing decentralization, addressing Ethereum's longstanding challenge of maintaining high performance while preserving its developer ecosystem.
Ethereum developers issued a warning on August 24 that planned gas changes in the Glamsterdam upgrade could disrupt a small group of Layer 1 smart contracts. According to the Ethereum Foundation, the warning concerns EIP-8037 and EIP-8038, which are scheduled for inclusion in Glamsterdam. Developers said most contracts remained unaffected during transaction replays, while many flagged cases could be corrected by raising their gas limits. The Foundation urged developers to test contracts and update fixed gas assumptions before mainnet activation, with the warning identifying fixed gas stipends, hardcoded call limits, logic based on gasleft() and presigned transactions with fixed limits as recurring risk factors.
The upgrade addresses scaling challenges through multiple technical improvements designed to make execution more efficient. Block-Level Access Lists (EIP-7928) provide clients advance information about which accounts and storage locations a block will touch, allowing more disk reads, transaction processing and state calculations to happen in parallel. Enshrined proposer-builder separation (ePBS) reorganizes block construction and validation, combined with Block-Level Access Lists to help Ethereum process more data on L1 without increasing validator workloads sharply. State-growth controls (EIP-8037) change the economics of creating permanent state, with developers targeting roughly 120 GiB of annual state growth even if the gas limit rises toward 200 million, helping keep node operation within reach of ordinary hardware. Longer-term zkEVM verification could allow validators to verify cryptographic proofs instead of re-executing every transaction, reducing computational burden of higher throughput.
Increasing Ethereum's gas limit creates an obvious engineering hurdle as bigger blocks require more computing power for validators to process within Ethereum's fixed slot times. Ethereum itself identifies validator hardware as one of the constraints on L1 throughput, with increasing block work potentially pricing smaller operators out of running nodes and concentrating validation among professional operators with more powerful machines. The Glamsterdam approach addresses this through multiple technical solutions, including the efficiency measures mentioned above and longer-term zkEVM verification that could reduce computational burden. The upgrade aims to turn higher capacity into consistently faster and cheaper execution while keeping validator requirements accessible to maintain decentralization.
According to Fernando Lillo Aranda, CMO at Zoomex, stronger Layer 1 performance would reduce pressure that originally drove rollup adoption, with some applications potentially deciding to deploy directly on L1 for simpler user experience. However, rollups continue to provide capabilities that raw throughput alone cannot replace, including customization, dedicated execution environments, lower latency, and greater control over fees, governance and application design. Federico Variola, CEO of Phemex, emphasizes that decentralized exchanges could become particularly important as regulators engage with these instruments, requiring Ethereum to remain decentralized while offering reasonable speed and avoiding high costs. Despite growing competition, Electric Capital's live developer tracker currently records roughly 7,600 monthly active developers in the Ethereum ecosystem, compared with around 2,300 on Solana, with the wider EVM ecosystem reaching approximately 10,000 developers.
