Ethereum’s next big upgrade is Glamsterdam, currently planned for Q4 2026. It includes protocol changes designed to make larger blocks easier to process and prepare Ethereum for substantially higher L1 throughput. Ethereum developers have identified a post-upgrade gas limit around 200 million as a target, compared with 60 million today.

What makes this upgrade so important? Ethereum by far has the largest developer base in the blockchain space, but its speed and cost still lag.

With on-chain activities exploding across every vertical, high-performance chains have become serious destinations for trading, payments and consumer applications.

More Usable L1 Capacity

Federico Variola, CEO of Phemex, sees decentralized trading as one of the areas where Ethereum’s next steps could prove particularly important.

“As regulators are increasingly forced to engage with decentralized exchanges such as Hyperliquid, it will be very important for Ethereum to remain decentralized while also offering a reasonable level of speed and avoiding high costs.”

Applications such as decentralized exchanges place unusually heavy demands on blockchains because users expect fast execution, deep liquidity and costs low enough to support frequent transactions.

Ethereum has addressed much of this demand through Layer 2 networks. Variola describes the results as mixed.

“There has been meaningful progress, but there have also been many failures over the past few years, and these have drained a significant amount of capital and activity from the Ethereum ecosystem.”

Ethereum already doubled its gas limit from roughly 30 million in early 2025 to 60 million following successive protocol improvements. Developers are now preparing the network for another much larger increase.

Variola believes decentralized exchanges could become an important measure of whether this effort succeeds.

“For ETH, I think the next major battle will be creating the conditions for decentralized exchanges to flourish, especially as regulators begin engaging more seriously with these instruments.”

The challenge is therefore to turn higher capacity into consistently faster and cheaper execution while keeping validator requirements accessible. 

The Hardware Problem of Higher Throughput

Increasing Ethereum’s gas limit creates an obvious engineering hurdle. Bigger blocks give applications more execution capacity, while validators need enough computing power to process those blocks within Ethereum’s fixed slot times.

Ethereum itself identifies validator hardware as one of the constraints on L1 throughput. Increasing the amount of work contained in each block can eventually price smaller operators out of running nodes, concentrating validation among professional operators with more powerful machines.

Glamsterdam attacks the problem from several directions: 

• Block-Level Access Lists (EIP-7928) give 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 how blocks are constructed and validated. Combined with Block-Level Access Lists, it is intended to help Ethereum process more data on L1 without increasing validator workloads as sharply;
• State-growth controls (EIP-8037) change the economics of creating a permanent state. Developers are 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 the computational burden of higher throughput.

In short, Ethereum’s L1 scaling effort depends on making execution more efficient. 

The Role of Rollups on a Faster Ethereum

A stronger base chain also changes the calculation facing applications that currently launch on rollups or their own chains.

Fernando Lillo Aranda, CMO at Zoomex, expects some applications to reconsider where they deploy as L1 economics improve.

“Stronger Layer 1 performance would certainly reduce some of the pressure that originally drove the adoption of rollups and app-specific chains. If the base layer becomes faster, cheaper, and more scalable, some applications may decide that deploying directly on the L1 offers a simpler and more efficient user experience.”

Direct L1 deployment removes several complications associated with operating across separate execution environments. Applications can access Ethereum liquidity and composability without asking users to move assets between networks or manage different chains.

Yet rollups provide capabilities that raw throughput alone cannot replace.

“Rollups and app-specific chains were not built solely to solve scalability – they also provide customization, dedicated execution environments, lower latency, and greater control over fees, governance, and application design,” Aranda said.

Ethereum’s roadmap still invests heavily in rollup capacity. PeerDAS and continued blob expansion increase the amount of data Ethereum can make available to L2 networks, allowing the base chain and rollups to expand together.

The likely result is a wider choice of deployment models. Applications that value maximum Ethereum composability may find L1 increasingly attractive, while high-frequency products and applications requiring custom execution can continue using rollups or dedicated chains.

Aranda sees those systems as complementary.

“A faster and more efficient base layer strengthens the entire ecosystem, while rollups and app-specific chains continue to deliver the flexibility and specialization that many applications and users require.”

Competition Has Grown

Ethereum’s competition for developer attention is sometimes described more dramatically than the data supports.

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. Across the wider EVM ecosystem, the figure reaches approximately 10,000.

Ethereum therefore retains a substantial lead.

The competitive environment around those developers has changed considerably. Builders now have several established destinations offering inexpensive execution, high throughput and sizable user bases. Choosing Ethereum increasingly involves weighing its liquidity, security and developer ecosystem against execution characteristics available elsewhere.

Glamsterdam addresses this competition. Ethereum already has capital, applications, tooling and one of crypto’s deepest developer communities. Increasing L1 capacity gives those advantages a faster execution environment underneath them.

Source: BeInCrypto